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distracted by his own thoughts. He was just barely there, she saw. The cubes on his desk contained representations of proteins, the bright false colors tangled beyond all hope of untangling. He had been trying to work.
    “It must be hard to work,” she said.
    “Yes, well.”
    After a blank silence, she said, “Do you know what happened to her?”
    He shook his head quickly, as if this was an irrelevance. “She was a hundred and ninety-one.”
    “I know, but still…”
    “Still what? We break, Swan. Sooner or later, at some point we break.”
    “I just wondered why.”
    “No. There is no why.”
    “Or how, then…”
    He shook his head again. “It can be anything. In this case, an aneurysm in a crucial part of the brain. But there are so many ways. The amazing thing is that we stay alive in the first place.”
    Swan sat on the edge of the desk. “I know. But, so… what will you do now?”
    “Work.”
    “But you just said…”
    He glanced at her from out of his cave. “I didn’t say it wasn’t any use. That wouldn’t be right. First of all, Alex and I had seventy years together. And we met when I was a hundred and thirty. So there’s that. And then also, the work is interesting to me, just as a puzzle. It’s a very big puzzle. Too big, in fact.” And then he stopped and couldn’t go on for a while. Swan put a hand to his shoulder. He put his face in his hands. Swan sat there beside him and kept her mouth shut. He rubbed his eyes hard, held her hand.
    “There’ll be no conquering death,” he said at last. “It’s too big. Too much the natural course of things. The second law of thermodynamics, basically. We can only hope to forestall it. Push it back. That should be enough. I don’t know why it isn’t.”
    “Because it only makes it worse!” Swan complained. “The longer you live, the worse it gets!”
    He shook his head, wiped his eyes again. “I don’t think that’s right.” He blew out a long breath. “It’s always bad. It’s the people still alive who feel it, though, and so…” He shrugged. “I think what you’re saying is that now it seems like some kind of mistake. Someone dies, we say why. Shouldn’t there have been a way to stop it. And sometimes there is. But…”
    “It
is
some kind of mistake!” Swan declared. “Reality made amistake, and now you’re fixing it!” She gestured at the screens and cubes. “Right?”
    He laughed and cried at the same time. “Right!” he said, sniffing and wiping his face. “It’s stupid. What hubris. I mean, fixing reality.”
    “But it’s good,” Swan said. “You know it is. It got you seventy years with Alex. And it passes the time.”
    “It’s true.” He heaved a big sigh, looked up at her. “But—things won’t be the same without her.”
    Swan felt the desolation of this truth wash through her. Alex had been her friend, protector, teacher, step-grandmother, surrogate mother, all that—but also, a way to laugh. A source of joy. Now her absence created a cold feeling, a killer of emotions, leaving only the blankness that was desolation. Sheer dumb sentience. Here I am. This is reality. No one escapes it. Can’t go on, must go on; they never got past that moment.
    So on they went.
    T here was a knock at the lab’s outer door. “Come in,” Mqaret called a little sharply.
    The door opened, and in the entry stood a small—very attractive in the way smalls often were—aged, slender, with a neat blond ponytail and a casual blue jacket—about waist high to Swan or Mqaret, and looking up at them like a langur or marmoset.
    “Hello, Jean,” Mqaret said. “Swan, this is Jean Genette, from the asteroids, who was here as part of the conference. Jean was a close friend of Alex’s, and is an investigator for the league out there, and as such has some questions for us. I said you might be dropping by.”
    The small nodded to Swan, hand on heart. “My most sincere condolences on your loss. I’ve come not only to say that,