that same look on the faces of war refugees, or the foreign-speaking parents of native-speaking children. Older people were immigrants in their own country. They had not been born to the idea of rapid change, not like us.
I needed a thirty-second feature—but the real punch had to be in the first eight of those seconds. I needed to know what was going on in the world of commercial net entertainment.
I took breakfast into the living room and ate while I flipped through the offerings: a two-hour docudrama about a woman and her child fending off urban predators in a burned-out Sydney tenement; a lot of breathy pseudonews; an interactive version of The Thirty-Nine Steps. I watched that one for a while, fascinated at how the original film was utterly destroyed by turning it into a game, then finally settled down to a modern version of Shakespeare’s Othello. I only needed to watch about twenty minutes to see how visual fashions had changed in the months since I had left Spanner.
What seemed to be in favor was a kind of neomodernism, a fascination for details and emphasis on texture. What I had in my library would not be good enough. Oh, there were some tricks I could play: I could redigitize chunks of it, in effect reshooting frames to give the footage a “live” feel, enabling me to make the pans slower than the original, the focuses more lingering. But I would need to do some recording of my own. For that I would need a model.
I sipped at my tea. Maybe Tom would be interested.
I turned the screen off and stared out of the window. The sky looked the same today as it might have done a hundred years ago, or a thousand, or fifty thousand. I wondered what it must have been like to grow up in a community that stayed more or less the same, from birth to death. To be able to reach ten, or twenty-five, or fifty, and think, There, I’m not going to learn any more. I know enough to live my life.
Magyar stayed out of my way for the next few days, but I caught her eyeing me speculatively once or twice and knew that this was merely an undeclared truce; she had not given up. With the systems back up and the two extra bodies, it was almost relaxing.
I whistled as I transferred the figures on the board to a slate.
Paolo came into the readout station. “What does that readout there mean?”
“I thought you were trimming back the rushes on forty.”
“All done.” I looked. They were. He pointed to the green numbers again. “What does that measure?”
His limbs were still stiff, still carefully nowhere near touching me, but the expressionless mask that usually curtained his face had parted, just a little. It was like watching an anemone uncurl and expose its mouth, delicate and beautiful. “Nitrogen. In various forms.”
“What’s the difference between the kinds?”
It would have been so easy to shrug, profess ignorance, and just go about our work routine, anonymous and safe, but he was leaning forward, peering, reaching out to touch. He might never ask for something so simple, so hard to give, again. And if those tentacles tightened once more they might never loosen. So I pointed. “Nitrites, free nitrogen, ammonia. Then various subdivisions. But they’re not as important.”
“Show me again. More slowly.” I did. He nodded after each one. His lips moved as he repeated the names to himself.
“Paolo, do you want to learn?”
He shrugged guardedly. “Sure.”
I had thought his eyes were soft, but they weren’t. They were hard, like the thick brown ice that collects over muddy puddles, the kind you think you can see through until you really look. I don’t trust you, those eyes said. I’ve been played with before.
I shrugged back. “The more you know, the easier life is. I can teach you, if you like.” I hoped I could, anyway. I had been the youngest child, smallest sibling; always the student, never the teacher.
I think he knew I didn’t feel as casual as I looked; he wasn’t stupid. But maybe it was the fact that I was willing to pretend that made him decide to take the risk. He nodded.
“After the break, then.” When Magyar took her own rest.
After the break I took him into the concrete bunker. I pointed to the red button Magyar had used a few weeks ago, feeling a little self-conscious. “I can’t slide back the floor to show you