I pulled back and looked at her. I wondered if she knew George was dead. “How are you feeling now?”

“I just came back from the dead,” she said. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel.”

I was scared to ask it, but I had to. “Do you remember dying?”

“No. I remember the table, the anesthetic, the pain. I remember a feeling that things were going wrong. It was like losing control, like a car going off the road.” That wasn’t a metaphor that anybody would use nowadays. She pulled back a bit and looked at her own hand, flexing her fingers. “I feel as if I’ve had a close shave. As if I nearly got caught by the ocean current, or nearly fell off the cliff. My heart is thumping. You know? I feel as if I nearly died.” She stared at me, helpless, looking for guidance. “But I did die, didn’t I?”

And we were both weeping again.

But there was doubt in my heart. At first none of this had seemed real at all. Then, as we floated into the hospital here through the equally unreal experience of a Chinook flight, I guess I had just accepted the whole thing as a happy miracle. Now, though, as my head started to work again, the glow seemed to be fading, and questions began to press me.

The fact was, whatever mechanism had brought her back and whatever reason it had for doing so, since her death seventeen years of life had gone by for me, a life I had lived without her, which she had never shared. So there was a barrier between us, seventeen years deep. That thought made me cry even more.

We stayed that way, crying and hugging, until the FBI agent came to ask us hard questions about the events at Prudhoe Bay.

Drea came to Earth, to offer Alia some support. They met in a small hut near the center of the Transcendents’ community beneath the cathedral. The cabin’s walls were translucent, and if Alia looked up she could see the monumental tetrahedral arching scraping at the sky.

Leropa sat with them, a chill, motionless presence.

They had to sit on pallets; there were no chairs in this little room, and its floor was just a woven carpet scattered over the dirt. Somehow this was typical of the Transcendence, Alia thought, its ambition soaring out of this external shabbiness. She wondered now if the drabness of the worlds she had seen, the Rustball and the Dirtball, even Earth itself, had something to do with the stupendous distraction of the Transcendence: unhealthily introverted, obsessed with the past, it was not sufficiently engaged with the present — and it neglected the impoverished worlds of its human subjects.

Through the hut walls she could see others of the community, other Transcendents. They were just a bunch of very old people, making their slow and cautious way through the ancient rubble of the cathedral, trailed by their serving bots and a few human attendants. But there were patterns in the way they moved, subtle interactions. It was a kind of flocking that was a shadow of the sparkling constellations of thought she had glimpsed within the Transcendence itself. But it was a grotesquely diminished shadow.

And today the Transcendents’ movements were disturbed, edgy, as if something was troubling them.

It is doubt, Alia thought uneasily. A vast doubt embedded in the cosmic mind, folding down into the fragile bodies of these Transcendents. That is why they seem so disturbed. And perhaps I am the source of that doubt.

Drea was watching the undying, too. Boldly she asked Leropa, “Why aren’t you like them?”

Leropa looked out of the hut at her peers. She sat with her legs crossed, in no apparent discomfort. “One thing, perhaps. I never had children.”

Alia sat forward. It was the first time Leropa had told her anything of her own past. “You didn’t? Why not?”

“Because I am undying, of course. If I had had children, I would likely have outlived some of them. Even if they bred true and were undying themselves, accident statistics dictate that some would have gone before me. We humans haven’t evolved to outlive our children. Can I not be spared that?”

Drea said, “But they would have had children of their own.”

“Yes, and then what? You feel a bond with your great-grandchildren, I’m told, or even a generation or two later. But after that the genes are diluted by a muddy tide of the semen and estrus of strangers. Occasionally in the great crowd of your descendants a chance gathering of features will remind you of you, or your children, of what once was. But mostly, whatever there was that defined you is simply washed away, like everything else in this transient universe of ours.

“And still they breed, your descendants, on and on. Soon they are so remote they don’t feel as if they have anything to do with you at all. After a thousand years their belief systems will have changed utterly. Chances are they may not even speak the same language. Your genetic contribution dilutes further, diffusing through the population like a disease. Given enough time, nothing is preserved, Alia, nothing you build, nothing you pass on, not even your genetic legacy, save only in a cold biochemical sense. How crushing that is, how desolating, how isolating! And of course, it’s all quite irrelevant.”

“Irrelevant to what?”

“To the great project of immortality — of personal survival. Alia, if you choose not to die then you are doing it for you, not your descendants — because you are choosing not to clear the stage for them. ”

“So you compete with your own children.”

“You must. That is why only individuals muddled by sentimentality and doubt would choose to have children; it is contradictory to the basic goal of longevity.”

And even the impulses of the genes were served, in a sense, Alia thought. The genes strove for their own biochemical survival. If they could not be passed on to the young, then their only means of survival was in the body of their undying host. This was the final logic of immortality: an immortal must displace her own children.

If we were animals, Alia thought, we would eat our young. She said, “And you have no regret?”

Leropa looked at her scornfully. “Have you not listened? There is nothing to regret. Better to be alone than to be abandoned. No wonder all those out there are flattened by time! This is a choice you will soon have to make for yourself, Alia. To have a child is to open the door to death, for it means the dissolution of self.”

How cold, Alia thought, how selfish. So much for the love of the Transcendence.

They sat in the shabby tent, displaced in time and space, while the undying shuffled in the dirt.

We were all held for a week, in the secure but smothering confines of the hospital at Fairbanks. We weren’t even allowed out to attend the funerals of Makaay and the others — not even the state funeral of Edith Barnette, a vice president assassinated like the president she had once served.

Morag was an unresolvable problem for the authorities.

As far as they were concerned she had just appeared out of nowhere. In their endless stocktaking of orderly births and deaths her sudden appearance was as jarring an event as a disappearance would have been, the mirror-image of a murder or an abduction. Immigration also needed an explanation for her presence on American soil. And they needed to understand how it could be that she had the DNA of an American citizen seventeen years in the grave.

Shelley muttered darkly about the limitations of the bureaucratic mind. “They’re bothered about a few anomalies in records of births and deaths. But Morag appeared out of nowhere. What about the conservation of mass? Shouldn’t we all be arrested for breaking that little law?”

There was certainly nothing Morag herself could tell them. She seemed to have a reasonably complete set of memories up to the moment of her death, seventeen years before. Past that point she seemed to have some partial information — impressions, not memories. On some deep level of her mind she seemed to know that seventeen years had worn away, but it wasn’t something she could articulate. The doctors hypothesized about parallels with amnesiac cases. I doubted that was going to lead them anywhere.