Or so it felt, strolling in the nip of an evening under the pastel neons of a canalside town. In one, called Anteus, Maya was strolling the canalside promenade, looking down into boats large and small, onto beautiful big young people drinking and chatting lazily, sometimes cooking meat on braziers clamped to the railings and hung out over the water. On a wide dock extending into the canal, there was an open-air café, from which came the plaintive singing of a gypsy violin; she turned into the café instinctively, and only at the last minute saw Jackie and Athos, sitting at a canalside table alone, leaning over until their foreheads almost touched. Maya certainly did not want to interrupt such a promising scene, but the very abruptness of her halt caught Jackie’s eye, so that she looked up, then started. Maya turned to leave, but saw Jackie was getting up to come over.
Another scene, Maya thought, only partly unhappy at the prospect. But Jackie was smiling, and Athos was coming with her, at her side, watching it all with wide-eyed innocence; either he had no idea of their history, or else he had a good control of his expressions. Maya guessed the latter, simply because of the look in his eye, just that bit too innocent to be real. An actor.
“It’s beautiful this canal, don’t you think?” Jackie was saying.
“A tourist trap,” Maya said. “But a pretty one. And it keeps the tourists nicely bunched.”
“Oh come now,” Jackie said, laughing. She took Athos’s arm. “Where’s your sense of romance?”
“What sense of romance,” Maya said, pleased at this public display of affection. The old Jackie would not have done it. Indeed it was a shock to see that she was no longer young; stupid of Maya not to have thought of that, but her sense of time was such a mishmash that her own face in the mirror was a perpetual shock to her— every morning she woke up in the wrong century, so seeing Jackie looking matronly with Athos on her arm was only more of the same— an impossibility— this was the fresh dangerous girl of Zygote, the young goddess of Dorsa Brevia!
“Everyone has a sense of romance,” Jackie said. The years were not making her any wiser. Another chronological discontinuity. Perhaps taking the longevity treatment so often had clogged her brain. Curious that after such assiduous use of the treatments there should be any signs of aging left at all; in the absence of cell-division error, where exactly was it coming from? There were no wrinkles on Jackie’s face, in some ways she could be mistaken for twenty-five; and the look of happy Boonean confidence was as entrenched as ever, the only way really she resembled John— glowing like the neon scrim of the café overhead. But despite all that she looked her years, somehow— in her eyes, or in some gestalt at work despite all the medical manipulation.
And then one of Jackie’s many assistants was there among them, panting, gasping, pulling Jackie’s arm away from Athos, crying “Jackie, I’m so sorry, so sorry, she’s killed, she’s killed—”— shivering—
“Who?” Jackie said sharply, like a slap.
The young woman (but she was aging) said miserably, “Zo.”
“Zo?”
“A flying accident. She fell into the sea.”
This ought to slow her down, Maya thought.
“Of course,” Jackie said.
“But the birdsuits,” Athos protested. He was aging too. “Didn’t they. . . .”
“I don’t know about that.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Jackie said, shutting them up. Later Maya heard an eyewitness account of the accident, and the image stayed etched in her mind forever— the two fliers struggling in the waves like wet dragonflies, staying afloat so that they would have been okay, until one of the North Sea’s big swells picked them up and slammed them into the base of a seastack. After which they had drifted in the foam.
Now Jackie was withdrawn, remote, thinking things over. She and Zo had not been close, Maya had heard; some said they hated each other. But one’s child. You were not supposed to survive your children, that was something even childless Maya felt instinctively. But they had abrogated all the laws, biology meant nothing to them anymore; and here they were. If Ann had lost Peter on the falling cable; if Nadia and Art ever lost Nikki . . . even Jackie, as foolish as she was, had to feel it.
And she did. She was thinking hard, trying to find the way out. But she wasn’t going to; and then she would be a different person. Aging— it had nothing to do with time, nothing. “Oh Jackie,” Maya said, and put a hand forward. Jackie flinched, and Maya pulled the hand back. “I’m sorry.”