“That sounds redundant.”
“No, it’s a real term, for animals that steal food from their young during exceptionally hard winters.”
“Very apt.”
“We should probably kill you all when you turn a hundred.”
“Or as soon as we have children.”
She grinned. He was so imperturbable! “Whichever comes first.”
He nodded as if this were a sensible suggestion. She laughed, although it was vexing too: “Of course it will never happen.”
“No. But it won’t be necessary.”
“No? You’re going to act like lemmings and run off cliffs?”
“No. Treatment-resistant diseases are appearing. Older people are dying. It’s bound to happen.”
“Is it?”
“I think so.”
“You don’t think they’ll figure out ways to cure these new diseases, keep stringing things along?”
“In some cases. But senescence is complex, and sooner or later. . . .” He shrugged.
“That’s a bad thought,” Zo said.
She stood, pulled the dried fabric of her singlet up her legs. He stood and dressed too.
“Have you ever met Bao Shuyo?” he asked.
“No, who’s she?”
“A mathematician, living in Da Vinci.”
“No. Why do you ask?”
“Just curious.”
They hiked uphill through the forest, from time to time stopping to look after the quick blur of an animal. A big jungle chicken, what looked like a lone hyena, standing looking down a wash at them. . . . Zo found she was enjoying herself. This issei was unteasable, unshockable; and his opinions were unpredictable, which was an unusual trait in the old, indeed in anyone. Most of the ancient ones Zo had met seemed especially bound in the tightly warped space-time of their values; and as the way people lived their values was in inverse proportion to how tightly they were bound in them, the old had ended up Tartuffes to a man, or so she had thought, hypocrites for whom she had no patience at all. She despised the old and their precious values. But this one didn’t seem to have any. It made her want to talk more with him.
When they got back to the village she patted him on the head. “That was fun. I’ll talk to your friend.”
“Thanks.”
• • •
A few days later she gave Ann Clayborne a call. The face that appeared on the screen was as forbidding as a skull.
“Hi, I’m Zoya Boone.”
“Yes?”
“It’s my name,” Zo said. “That’s how I introduce myself to strangers.”
“Boone?”
“Jackie’s daughter.”
“Ah.”
Clearly she didn’t like Jackie. A common reaction; Jackie was so wonderful that a lot of people hated her.
“I’m also a friend of Sax Russell’s.”
“Ah.”
Impossible to read what she meant by that one.
“I was telling him that I’m on my way out to the Uranian system, and he said you might be interested in joining me.”
“He did?”
“He did. So I called. I’m going to Jupiter and then Uranus, with two weeks on Miranda.”
“Miranda!” she said. “Who are you again?”
“I’m Zo Boone! What are you, senile?”
“Miranda, you said?”
“Yes. Two weeks, maybe more if I like it.”
“If you like it?”
“Yes. I don’t stay places I don’t like.”
Clayborne nodded as if that were only sensible, and so Zo added mock solemnly, as if to a child, “There’s a lot of rock there.”
“Yes yes.”
A long pause. Zo studied the face on the screen. Gaunt and wrinkled, like Russell, only in her case almost all the wrinkles were vertical. A face hacked out of wood. Finally she said, “I’ll think about it.”
“You’re supposed to be trying new things,” Zo reminded her.
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“Sax told you that?”
“No— I asked Jackie about you.”
“I’ll think about it,” she said again, and cut the connection.
So much for that, Zo thought. Still she had tried, and therefore felt virtuous, a disagreeable sensation. These issei had a way of pulling one into their realities; and they were all mad.
And unpredictable as well; the next day Clayborne called back, and said she would go.
In person Ann Clayborne proved to be indeed as withered and sun-dried as Russell, but even more silent and strange— waspish, laconic, prone to brief ill-tempered outbursts. She showed up at the last minute with a single backpack and a slim black wristpad, one of the latest models. Her skin was a nut brown, and marked by wens and warts and scars where skin disorders had been removed. A long life spent outdoors, and in the early days too, when UV bombardment had been intense; in short, she was fried. A bakehead, as they said in Echus. Her eyes were gray, her mouth a lizard slash, the lines from the corners of her mouth to her nostrils like deep hatchet chops. Nothing could be more severe than that face.During the week of the voyage to Jupiter she spent her time in the little ship park, walking through the trees. Zo preferred the dining hall, or the big viewing bubble where a small group gathered in the evening watch, to eat tabs of pandorph and play go, or smoke opium and look at the stars. So she seldom saw Ann on the trip out.