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Wilson—?”
    “Braemar. A nom de guerre, Johnny, same as your Seimwa. Do you know, by the way, why she adopted one? Is she a feminist?”
    “I hardly think so. She does tend to split the world the way they do, into human and subhuman. But not along the gender line.”
    No hit, Ms. Wilson. I don’t mind in the least bad-mouthing my ex-boss, on the record.
    He felt her smile.
    “Braemar, what d’you really think’s going to happen tonight?”
    “You’re going to meet your friend. And if it’s possible, we’re going to follow her home. Are you game for that?”
    Even her absurd Brit jungle kit was sexified, cinched waist and breeches like second skin. He would save her up and use her for imagery. It wasn’t true about Izzy. Fo was full of gorgeous women with whose ephemerides he’d shared intense, sticky fisted experiences: slick clefts between supple thighs he’d penetrated, mulberry nipples sucked and bitten. There was a special savor to this one. She talked to him and looked at him and smelled of the lost world. He didn’t know what he’d been complaining about.
    “I’m game.”
    “What about you? What do you expect?”
    Johnny hunkered over the ache in his groin and picked at moonlit pebbles.
    “For a long time it’s been part of my calculations that the visitors would turn up one day. Some people buy lottery tickets, some believe in God, I’ve been waiting for the aliens. I’ve imagined them as humanoid and more or less intelligible. Not because I think it’s likely but because otherwise it’s not such a fun game. I’ve made a study of the field and found nothing but nonsense. That didn’t bother me. Weirdly, it had the effect of making me feel, something like: so many fakes, statistically, the real one has to be coming along soon. Maybe that doesn’t make sense, but I’m still rational. If you hooked me up to a lie detector it’d certainly tell you that even here tonight I don’t believe…. This hobby long predates my run in with the NIH, by the way. But then lately—which doesn’t predate my problem but doesn’t seem to me to be connected—lately I’ve begun to prefer one popular scenario above the others.”
    “The one where they touch down quietly, and mingle for a while—”
    “Yeah. That one.”
    “And this preference would be because, over the past year—”
    “Not that long,” corrected Johnny.
    “Why did you come to Fo?”
    “Well, I started getting these dreams.” Johnny laughed “No, seriously. No dreams. There was a UFO report from the Asa warzone, some months ago. I presume you know about that. It was probably a robot fighter blowing itself to quarks, the way the poor critters are trained to do nowadays so they won’t rat on the bastards who supply them. However, the obscure ones are the ones I prefer, and besides I can’t get to Arizona anymore. So I came here.”
    “And found you had a funny-looking friend. More?”
    He looked at her quizzically. “I think you’ve heard this story before, Braemar.”
    “Brae. My friends call me Brae. Is there more?”
    “Only that I have a plan. You see….” He had a heap of stones by now, and was trying patiently to build a little tower.” I did not fuck with any machine, as you so crudely and ludicrously put it. It’s true I’ve been to space. I saw the Quarantine Zone. But no one who was up there with me, including the monitoring systems, can think of or demonstrate how I could have got near to being infected. And I was not propositioned by so much as an electric can opener. I swear. I have never been in contact with contaminated organic nanotechnology.”
    “Have you had a European test?”
    The tower was six pebbles high. It wavered. Johnny corrected the second level with precise fingertips. “I’ve had a whole lot of NIH excluded tests. Inconclusive: verdict, I should refer to the system with the greatest expertise, which is the NIH. Unhelpfully circular advice.”
    “A Catch 22.”
    “What?”
    “It’s