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that?” Renie watched the beetle hunch across the uneven stones of the beach with the mindless forward drive of one of those drone robots working to tame the surfaces of Mars and the moon. “That song you’re singing.”
    â€œMy uncle used to sing it. It helped him be patient while waiting for fish to pass over the rock dam so we could catch them.” !Xabbu scratched at his baboon pelt in a fastidious manner far more human than simian.
    â€œAh.” Renie frowned. She was having trouble concentrating, and for once even !Xabbu’s stories about his childhood in the Okavango Delta did not interest her.
    If someone had told her that she would be transported to what was for all purposes a magical land, where history could be rewritten at a whim, or people could suddenly be shrunk to the size of poppy seeds, but that at least for this moment, her most pressing concern would have been the absence of cigarettes, she would have thought them mad. But it had been two harrowing days since she had smoked her last, and the momentary leisure of floating in midstream on a huge leaf that had once been a boat had finally given her a chance to notice what she was missing.
    She pushed away from the leaf’s curling edge. Better to do something, anything, than stand around obsessing like a chargehead with a fused ‘can. And it was not as though everything was under control, she reflected. In fact, from the moment they had reached Atasco’s virtual golden city, things had gone pretty damn poorly.
    Across the expanse of water, the beetle had clambered up from the beach and was disappearing into a sea of grass stems, each as tall as the palm trees back home. She walked carefully toward the center of the leaf, leaving !Xabbu to sing his quiet fish-catching song and watch the now empty beach.
    Sweet William’s stage-vampire silhouette stood at the leaf’s farthest edge, watching the opposite and more distant shoreline, but the others sat in the center with their backs against the huge center vein, a makeshift shelter of skin torn from the leaf’s outer edge draped over their heads to protect them from the strong sun.
    â€œHow is he?” Renie asked Fredericks. The young man in quasi-medieval garb was still nursing his sick friend Orlando. Even limp in slumber, Orlando’s muscular sim body was a poor indicator of the frail child who animated it.
    â€œHe’s breathing better, I think.” Fredericks said it with real emphasis, enough so that Renie instantly doubted him. She looked down at the curled figure, then squatted so she could touch his forehead. “That doesn’t really work,” Fredericks added, almost apologetically. “I mean, some things show up on these sims, some don’t. Body temperatures don’t seem to change much.”
    â€œI know. It’s just . . . reflex, I guess.” Renie sat back on her heels. “I’m sorry, but he doesn’t look good at all.” She had only so much strength, and she could not support any more hopeful untruths, even though the things Fredericks had told her about the real Orlando Gardiner tore at her heart. She made herself turn away. “And how are you, Martine. Any better?”
    The French researcher, who wore the dark-skinned, dark-haired sim of a Temilúni peasant woman, mustered a very faint smile. “It is . . . it is easier to think, perhaps. A little. The pain of all this new imput is not quite so bad for me now. But . . .” She shook her head. “I have been blind in the world for a long time, Renie. I am not used to being blind here.”
    â€œWhat you mean, ‘here’?” The warrior-robot sim belonged to a Goggleboy-type who called himself “T4b.” Renie thought he was younger than he let on, maybe even as young as Orlando and Fredericks, and his sullen tone now only deepened her suspicions. “Thought nobody come here before.