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she was certainly in her seventies, at least. She had made far more use of somatic engineering to modify her appearance than he had, but she had been equally wise in not attempting to preserve the visual illusion that she might be in her twenties. She was not interested in seeming venerable, but she was even less interested in seeming youthful. She wanted to appear mature in her distinctive beauty, not because maturity implied wisdom, but because it implied power—real power, not the ineffectual sham manifested by such historical lightweights as Elizabeth I. The cast of her features was not masculine, but it was not feminine either, unless one assumed—as some sycophantic commentators had been willing and eager to do—that it was the type-specimen of a new femininity, which would eventually redefine the notion.
    She seemed capable of redefining such terms as “beautiful” and “regal,” and I mean no insult in saying that the funeral brought out the best in her. She was clad in black, but she was no mute butterfly. She was a human Queen Bee from top to toe, in her sober and somber mourning-dress. Lesser mortals still hired minister-substitutes to act as masters-of-ceremonies in humanist funerals, but not Rosalind. Rosalind took the podium herself, and it was obvious that she would be in charge from beginning to end, no matter who else she might invite to eulogize or sing.
    There were eulogies, of which Rosalind’s was the most elegant, if not the longest; there was also music, some of it accompanied by voices. There was no mention, by anyone, of the cause of Magdalen’s death. There was no mention either, by anyone, of Rowland. How Rosalind improvised a eulogy without mentioning that Magdalen had a twin of sorts, I’m not entirely sure, but she did. She spoke about her love for her first-born daughter, and her other daughters’ love for their eldest sister, and she said something about Magdalen’s significant contributions to the work of the Hive of Industry, but she never mentioned that Magdalen had ever visited Venezuela. I noticed those absences far more than the words that were actually pronounced, perhaps because I was numb with the shock of Rowland’s absence.
    As soon as the disbelief wore off, I resumed thinking, with all the force that mentality could muster: I shouldn’t have come . I should have had the courage to stay away. If he could do it, why couldn’t I? I actually felt resentful. I felt as if I had somehow been tricked—as if the possibility of seeing Rowland had been dangled as a lure, but that, on taking the bait, I had found nothing but a cruelly-barbed steel hook.
    It was nonsense, of course. I hadn’t even been invited to the funeral, let alone lured. I had merely been given permission to attend, if I wished, not because I had once known Rowland, but because I had once known Magdalen. I had been given permission to attend because I had once loved Magdalen, very dearly, and because Rosalind had known that Magdalen—however she had died—would have wanted the people who had loved her dearly to be at her funeral. Rowland didn’t come into it…except that what had sprung first and foremost to the minds of ingrates like myself and Professor J. V. Crowthorne, who had known and loved Magdalen as a component in a dedicated symbiotic relationship, had been the possibility of seeing the living remainder of that relationship, not the corpse of its extinct fraction.
    Not that we actually got to see a corpse. There was a container, in the geometrical center of the circle mapped out by the dome’s circumference, but it wasn’t even a coffin. The legally-required cremation had already taken place, in private; all that was offered to the contemplation of the mourners was a casket the size of a tea-caddy, which presumably contained her ashes. I say presumably not because I doubted that she was really dead, or because I doubted