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"As what is not? In its way." We came to the first building ruins and stopped. "Not all of this is weathering. Even in four hundred years." If you studied the rubble you could reconstruct part of the design. Primitive but sturdy, concrete reinforced with composite rods. "Somebody came in here with heavy equipment or explosives. They never actually fought on Earth, I thought."
"They say not." She picked up an irregular brick with a rod through it. "Rage, I suppose. Once people knew that no one was going to live."
"It's hard to imagine." The records are chaotic. Evidently the first people died two or three days after the nanophages were introduced, and no one on Earth was alive a week later. "Not hard to understand, though. The need to break something." I remembered the inchoate anger I felt as I squirmed there helpless, dying from sculpture, of all things. Anger at the rock, the fates. Not at my own inattention and clumsiness.
"They had a poem about that," she said. " 'Rage, rage against the dying of the light.' "
"Somebody actually wrote something during the nanoplague?"
"Oh, no. A thousand years before. Twelve hundred." She squatted suddenly and brushed at a fragment that had two letters on it. "I wonder if this was some sort of official building. Or a shrine or church." She pointed along the curved row of shattered bricks that spilled into the street. "That looks like it was some kind of decoration, a gable over the entrance." She tiptoes through the rubble toward the far end of the arc, studying what was written on the face-up pieces. The posture, standing on the balls of her feet, made her slim body even more attractive, as she must have known. My own body began to respond in a way inappropriate for a man more than three times her age. Foolish, even though that particular part is not so old. I willed it down before she could see.
"It's a language I don't know," she said: "Not Portuguese; looks like Latin. A Christian church, probably, Catholic."
"They used water in their religion," I remembered. "Is that why it's close to the sea?"
"They were everywhere; sea, mountains, orbit. They got to Petros?"
"We still have some. I've never met one, but they have a church in New Haven."
"As who doesn't?" She pointed up a road. "Come on. The beach is just over the rise here."
I could smelts it before I saw it. It wasn't an ocean smell; it was dry, slightly choking.
We turned a corner and I stood staring. "It's a deep blue farther out," she said, "and so clear you can see hundreds of metras down." Here the water was thick and brown, the surf foaming heavily like a giant's chocolate drink, mud piled in baked windrows along the beach. "This used to be soil?"
She nodded. "There's a huge river that cuts this continent in half, the Amazon. When the plants died, there was nothing to hold the soil in place." She tugged me forward. "Do you swim? Come on."
"Swim in that?It's filthy."
"No, it's perfectly sterile. Besides, I have to pee." Well, I couldn't argue with that. I left the box on a high fragment of fallen wall and followed her. When we got to the beach, she broke into a run. I walked slowly and watched her gracile body, instead, and waded into the slippery heavy surf. When it was deep enough to swim, I plowed my way out to where she was bobbing. The water was too hot to be pleasant, and breathing was somewhat difficult. Carbon dioxide, I supposed, with a tang of halogen.
We floated together for a while, comparing this soup to bodies of water on our planets and ThetaKent. It was tiring, more from the water's heat and bad air than exertion, so we swam back in.
2
We dried in the blistering sun for a few minutes and then took the food box and moved to the shade of a beachside ruin. Two walls had fallen in together, to make a sort of concrete tent.
We could have been a couple of precivilization aboriginals, painted with dirt, our hair baked into stringy mats. She looked odd but still had a kind of formal beauty, the dusty mud residue turning her into a primitive sculpture, impossibly accurate and mobile. Dark rivulets of sweat drew painterly accent lines along her face and body. If only she were a model, rather than an artist. Hold that pose while I go back for my brushes.
We shared the small bottles of cold wine and water and ate bread and cheese and fruit. I put a piece on the ground for the nanophages. We watched it in silence for some minutes, while nothing happened. "It probably takes hours or days," she finally said.
"I suppose we should hope so," I said. "Let us digest the food before the creatures get to it."
"Oh, that's not a problem. They just attack the bonds between amino acids that make up proteins. For you and me, they're nothing more than an aid to digestion."
How reassuring. "But a source of some discomfort when we go back in, I was told."
She grimaced. "The purging. I did it once, and decided my next outing would be a long one. The treatment's the same for a day or a year."
"So how long has it been this time?"
"Just a day and a half. I came out to be your welcoming committee."
"I'm flattered."
She laughed. "It was their idea, actually. They wanted someone out here to 'temper' the experience for you. They weren't sure how well traveled you were, how easily affected by... strangeness." She shrugged. "Earthlings. I told them I knew of four planets you'd been to."
"They weren't impressed?"
"They said well, you know, he's famous and wealthy. His experiences on these planets might have been very comfortable." We could both laugh at that. "I told them how comfortable ThetaKent is."
"Well, it doesn't have nanophages."
"Or anything else. That was a long year for me. You didn't even stay a year."
"No. I suppose we would have met, if I had."
"Your agent said you were going to be there two years."
I poured us both some wine. "She should have told me you were coming. Maybe I could have endured it until the next ship out."
"How gallant." She looked into the wine without drinking. "You famous and wealthy people don't have to endure ThetaKent. I had to agree to one year's indentureship to help pay for my triangle ticket."
"You were an actual slave?"
"More like a wife, actually. The head of a township, a widower, financed me in exchange for giving his children some culture. Language, art, music. Every now and then he asked me to his chambers. For his own kind of culture."
"My word. You had to... liewith him? That was in the contract?"
"Oh, I didn't have to, but it kept him friendly." She held up a thumb and forefinger. "It was hardly noticeable."
I covered my smile with a hand, and probably blushed under the mud.
"I'm not embarrassing you?" she said. "From your work, I'd think that was impossible."
I had to laugh. "That work is in reaction to my culture's values. I can't take a pill and stop being a Petrosian."
White Hill smiled, tolerantly. "A Petrosian woman wouldn't put up with an arrangement like that?"
"Our women are still women. Some actually would like it, secretly. Most would claim they'd rather die, or kill the man."
"But they wouldn't actually doit. Trade their body for a ticket?" She sat down in a single smooth dancer's motion, her legs open, facing me. The clay between her legs parted, sudden pink.