She smiled back. "So how do you do it? All those optimized frontal lobes and refits—I mean, if they're incomprehensible, how do you comprehend them?"

"It helps to find pretty much everyone else incomprehensible too. Provides experience." There. That should force a bit of distance.

It didn't. She thought I was joking. I could see her lining up to push for more details, to ask questions about what I did, which would lead to questions about me, which would lead—

"Tell me what it's like," I said smoothly, "rewiring people's heads for a living."

Chelsea grimaced; the butterfly on her cheek fluttered nervously at the motion, wings brightening. "God, you make it sound like we turn them into zombies or something. They're just tweaks, mainly. Changing taste in music or cuisine, you know, optimizing mate compatibility. It's all completely reversible."

"There aren't drugs for that?"

"Nah. Too much developmental variation between brains; our targeting is really fine-scale. But it's not all microsurgery and fried synapses, you know. You'd be surprised how much rewiring can be done noninvasively. You can start all sorts of cascades just by playing certain sounds in the right order, or showing images with the right balance of geometry and emotion."

"I assume those are new techniques."

"Not really. Rhythm and music hang their hats on the same basic principle. We just turned art into science."

"Yeah, but when?" The recent past, certainly. Sometime within the past twenty years or so—

Her voice grew suddenly quiet. "Robert told me about your operation. Some kind of viral epilepsy, right? Back when you were just a tyke."

I'd never explicitly asked him to keep it a secret. What was the difference anyway? I'd made a full recovery.

Besides, Pag still thought that had happened to someone else.

"I don't know your specifics," Chelsea continued gently. "But from the sound of it, noninvasive techniques wouldn't have helped. I'm sure they only did what they had to."

I tried to suppress the thought, and couldn't: I like this woman.

I felt something then, a strange, unfamiliar sensation that somehow loosened my vertebrae. The chair felt subtly, indefinably more comfortable at my back.

"Anyway." My silence had thrown her off-stride. "Haven't done it much since the bottom dropped out of the market. But it did leave me with a fondness for face-to-face encounters, if you know what I mean."

"Yeah. Pag said you took your sex in the first-person."

She nodded. "I'm very old-school. You okay with that?"

I wasn't certain. I was a virgin in the real world, one of the few things I still had in common with the rest of civilized society. "In principle, I guess. It just seems—a lot of effort for not as much payoff, you know?"

"Don't I." She smiled. "Real fuckbuddies aren't airbrushed. Got all these needs and demands that you can't edit out. How can you blame anyone for saying no thanks to all that, now there's a choice? You gotta wonder how our parents ever stayed together sometimes."

You gotta wonder whythey did. I felt myself sinking deeper into the chair, wondered again at this strange new sensation. Chelsea had said the dopamine was tweaked. That was probably it.

She leaned forward, not coy, not coquettish, not breaking eye contact for an instant in the longwave gloom. I could smell the lemony tang of pheromones and synthetics mingling on her skin. "But there are advantages too, once you learn the moves," she said. "The body's got a long memory. And you do realize that there's no trickler under your left finger there, don't you, Siri?"

I looked. My left arm was slightly extended, index finger touching one of the trickle pads; and my right had mirrored the motion while I wasn't watching, its own finger tapping uselessly on blank tabletop.

I pulled it back. "Bit of a bilateral twitch," I admitted. "The body creeps into symmetrical poses when I'm not looking."

I waited for a joke, or at least a raised eyebrow. Chelsea just nodded and resumed her thread. "So if you're game for this, so am I. I've never been entangled with a synthesist before."

"Jargonaut's fine. I'm not proud."

"Don't you just always know just exactly what to say." She cocked her head at me. "So, your name. What's it mean?"

Relaxed. That was it. I felt relaxed.

"I don't know. It's just a name."

"Well, it's not good enough. If we're gonna to be swapping spit for any length of time you've gotta get a name that means something."

And we were, I realized. Chelsea had decided while I wasn't looking. I could have stopped her right there, told her what a bad idea this was, apologized for any misunderstanding. But then there'd be wounded looks and hurt feelings and guilt because after all, if I wasn't interested why the hell had I even shown up?

She seemed nice. I didn't want to hurt her.

Just for a while, I told myself. It'll be an experience.

"I think I'll call you Cygnus," Chelsea said.

"The swan?" I said. A bit precious, but it could have been worse.

She shook her head. "Black hole. Cygnus X-1."

I furrowed my brow at her, but I knew exactly what she meant: a dark, dense object that sucks up the light and destroys everything in its path.

"Thanks a whole fucking lot. Why?"

"I'm not sure. Something dark about you." She shrugged, and gave me a great toothy grin. "But it's not unattractive. And let me give you a tweak or two, I bet you'd grow right out of it."

Pag admitted afterward, a bit sheepishly, that maybe I should have read that as a warning sign. Live and learn.

Our scout fell towards orbit, watching Ben. We fell days behind, watching the scout. And that was all we did: sit in Theseus belly while the system streamed telemetry to our inlays. Essential, irreplaceable, mission-critical—we might as well have been ballast during that first approach.

We passed Ben's Rayleigh limit. Theseus squinted at a meager emission spectrum and saw a rogue halo element from Canis Major—a dismembered remnant of some long-lost galaxy that had drifted into ours and ended up as road kill, uncounted billions of years ago. We were closing on something from outside the Milky Way.

The probe arced down and in, drew close enough for false-color enhance. Ben's surface brightened to a seething parfait of high-contrast bands against a diamond-hard starscape. Something twinkled there, faint sparkles on endless overcast.

"Lightning?" James wondered.

Szpindel shook his head. "Meteorites. Must be a lot of rock in the neighborhood."

"Wrong color," Sarasti said. He was not physically among us—he was back in his tent, hardlined into the Captain—but ConSensus put him anywhere on board he wanted to be.

Morphometrics scrolled across my inlays: mass, diameter, mean density. Ben's day lasted seven hours twelve minutes. Diffuse but massive accretion belt circling the equator, more torus than ring, extending almost a half-million kilometers from the cloud-tops: the pulverized corpses of moons perhaps, ground down to leftovers.

"Meteorites." Szpindel grinned. "Told ya."

He seemed to be right; increasing proximity smeared many of those pinpoint sparkles into bright ephemeral hyphens, scratching the atmosphere. Closer to the poles, cloud bands flickered with dim, intermittent flashes of electricity.

Weak radio emission peaks at 31 and 400m. Outer atmosphere heavy with methane and ammonia; lithium, water, carbon monoxide in abundance. Ammonia hydrogen sulfide, alkali halide mixing locally in those torn swirling clouds. Neutral alkalis in the upper layers. By now even Theseus could pick those things out from a distance, but our scout was close enough to see filigree. It no longer saw a disk. It gazed down at a dark convex wall in seething layers of red and brown, saw faint stains of anthracene and pyrene.