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She had two inches of fur now, creeping up on a presentable cut, but not quite there. The grounds were trying to cheer her up with their ambitious topiaries, laughing fountains, a beach below so white it ached to be trampled. They got a table and she remembered that this was one of those newfangled home-style restaurants, with a few of the Unnoticeables passing appetizers among the tables. She and Benjamin had lived here long enough to see the old Hawaiian informality give way to Advanced Tourism, so that one looked through the help and visitors never thought about who changed the sheets of the Rulers.
    “Glass of wine?” Benjamin nudged her.
    “Really shouldn’t.”
    “I know, which is another reason to do it.”
    “Hey, that’s my kind of line.”
    “I always steal from the best.”
    “I look like I need it pretty bad?”
    “Let’s say I need for you to.”
    She laughed and ordered a glass of fumé blanc, a thumb to the nose for Death, and even in her rickety state not enough to risk a hangover, the Wrath of Grapes.
    “Okay, fill me in on the medical.” Benjamin said this in his clear, official voice, a mannerism from work he used sometimes when the uncomfortable side of life came up. He was completely unaware of this habit, she knew. Rather than feeling affronted, she found it endearing, though she could not say why. When she was through, hesaid, “Damn,” his voice tightening further. “Going to operate?”
    “No, they want to let this new regime of drugs work on it awhile.”
    “How long?”
    “Didn’t say. I got the impression that they wouldn’t give a solid answer.”
    “Well, it is experimental.” He tried to put a little lilt in his tone to freight some optimism into the conversation, but it did not work because they both knew it.
    “And I’m not up to more cutting anyway.”
    “True,” he said miserably. “Damn, I feel so powerless .”
    An absolutely typical and endearing male trait. They wanted to do , and women supposedly more wanted to be . Well, her astronaut-self wanted to do something, too, but they were both far out of their depth here. Both technically and emotionally.
    She watched him clench his fists for a long moment. They exchanged thin smiles, a long look. Time to move on , her intuition told her.
    She opened her valise. They had always done paperwork at dinner, one of those odd habits couples acquire that seem, in retrospect, defining: workaholics in love. She shuffled the medical printouts to the side; best to get his mind off the subject. “Here, this looks like work.”
    He reached for it almost eagerly. “From Amy, relayed from the VLA.”
    She recognized the Very Large Array standard display, a gridded map made in the microwave spectrum. After tiring of the astronaut horse race, she had thrown herself into becoming a respectable astrophysicist. Mostly a data magician and skeptic, which fit her character fine. She had gotten her job here on her merits, not on glory inherited from being a space jockey; she had made sure of that.
    Benjamin traced a finger along a ridge of dark lines. “Ummm, a linear feature. Must be a mistake.”
    “Why?” He told her quickly about Amy’s supposedly repeating burster. He slid out a cover sheet and scrawled across the top was: I CHECKED—COORDINATES ARE RIGHT. THIS IS REAL. AMY
    “She’s found something?” Channing sipped her wine, liking its bite.
    “Ummm. She wrote that note because she knew I’d doubt this like hell. This long filament is far larger than any burster could be. Must be a chance overlap with something ordinary. Looks like a galactic jet to me.”
    She nodded. In their early eras, galaxies often ejected jets of radiating electrons from their core regions. Channing had never studied galaxies very much—astronauts specialized in solar system objects, or studying the Earth from space—but she recalled that such jets were fairly common, and so one could easily turn up in the box that bounded the burster’s