GREG BEAR

Lanier rubbed his shoulder as he stood with Karen, his wife of almost four decades. Her eyes darted around the faces of their distant neighbors, searching for something to ease her own sense of displacement. Lanier Page 5

tried to look at the mourners with her eyes and found only sadness and a nervous humility. He touched her elbow but she was having none of his reassurances. Karen felt as if she didn't belong. She loved Lenore Carrol-son like a mother, and yet they hadn't talked in two years.

Up there, in the sky, among the orbiting precincts, the Hexamon conducted its business, yet had sent no representative from those august heavenly bodies; and indeed, considering how Larry had come to feel about the Hexamon, that gesture would have been inappropriate.

How things had changed . . .

Divisions. Separations. Disasters. Not all the work they had done in the Recovery could wipe away these differences. They had had such expectations for the Recovery. Karen still had high hopes, still worked on her various projects. Those around her did not share many of her hopes.

She was still of the Faith, believing in the future, in the Hexamon's efforts.

Lanier had lost the Faith twenty years ago.

Now they laid a significant part of their past in the damp Earth, with no hope of a second resurrection. Hcineman had not expected to die by accident but he had chosen this death nonetheless. Lanier had made a similar choice. Someday, he knew, the earth would absorb him, too, and that still seemed proper, though not without its terror. He would die. No second chances. He and Heineman, and Lenore had accepted the opportunities offered by the Hexamon up to a certain point, and then had demurred.

Karen had not demurred. If it had been her under the rock slide, rather than Larry, she would not be dead now; stored in her implant, she Page 6

would await her due resurrection, in a body newly grown for her on one of the precincts, and brought to Earth. She would soon be as young or younger than she was now. And as the years passed, she would not grow any older than she wished, nor would her body change in any but accepted ways. That set her apart from these people. It set her apart from

her husband.

Like Karen, their daughter Andia had carried an implant, and Lanier had not protested, something that had shamed him a little at the time; but watching her grow and change had been an extraordinary enough experience, and he realized he was far readier to accept his death than this beautiful child's. He had not overruled Karen's plans, and the Hex