“I don’t know. ” She smiled faintly. “Maybe the answer is in the download itself, and I’m too dumb to see it. Do you think that’s possible?”

“I really have no idea.”

She faced me. She held out her hands, and I took them; she was relaxed, but I could feel the strength in her fingers, the strange density of her warm flesh. “But the trouble we have has nothing to do with my dream-talking. Has it, Michael? Or even me keeping you awake.”

“It doesn’t help,” I said sincerely.

“I know.” She rubbed the backs of my hands with her thumbs. “There’s a barrier between us. Something that’s stopping us from connecting the way we used to.”

“Of course there is,” I said. “You were dead. I saw you die. You were dead for seventeen years. That can’t just be erased.” I was speaking more harshly than we had spoken before. But at that moment, under the cold hospital-like light of that dismal room, I felt too tired to care.

“We’ll get there,” she said now, unfazed. “We’ll talk through this. We have to confront the truth, that’s all. We just need time.” But as she spoke she seemed distracted again. She lifted her face to the ceiling, her eyes half-closed. And her lips began to work, her tongue to flicker like a tiny pink snake in her mouth, as she started up her strange speaking-in-tongues once more.

I felt excluded, even repelled. “Christ.” I tried to snatch my hands back. But I startled her, and she clenched her fingers. I heard the bones in my hands snap, and was screaming before the pain began.

The Deadhorse clinic was basic, but the work they needed to do on me was simple. The doctor numbed me, set the broken bones in the back of my hands, injected nanomachines to help promote the bones’ knitting together, treated the bruising, and then shoved my hands into blow-up casts, like inflatable gloves.

After that I sat in the out-patient area, waiting for Tom to come pick me up and take me back to the hotel. A clock on the wall told me it was still only five in the morning. “Shit,” I said.

“Indeed,” said Rosa. Her voice appeared before she did. Her compact body gathered out of the air, her robes so black they seemed to suck in the light. In the bright antiseptic light of the hospital she looked totally out of place. She eyed the bench beside me. “If you don’t mind I’ll stand,” she said. “The VR facilities at this hospital are limited. I wouldn’t want to alarm anybody by slipping through the chair to the floor.”

“You didn’t bring any grapes,” I said sourly.

She bent to inspect my boxing-glove hands. “Oh, dear. You have been in the wars.”

“It was fucking painful.”

“I’m sure it was.”

“She didn’t mean to do it,” I said. “Morag. It’s just she’s so strong. Her new body, whatever. She hasn’t got used to it yet. I’ve taken a few bruises before. We’re learning together, I guess. This is the first time she’s broken a bone, though.”

Rosa nodded. “The simplest test shows her strength is off the scale, for a person of her height and size. Like her mass, there is, umm, more of her than there should be.”

I looked at her reluctantly. “Do you think she’s even human?”

“I don’t know,” Rosa said. “I believe that inside she thinks she’s human, and perhaps that’s what’s most important in the end. But her body is something more than human.”

Gea’s and Rosa’s studies were bearing fruit, she said.

“Gea will give you the physics. When we draw Morag’s blood, we find human DNA. Her molecules are made of atoms, of protons and neutrons and electrons every bit as mundane as yours and mine. And yet there is the mystery of this extra mass. Her weight is measurable, so the mass responsive to gravity, yet it is invisible to our eyes, all our senses. Gea tells me that there are many forms of invisible matter in the universe. Perhaps Morag’s visible body is like the bright swirl of a galaxy, cradled in a wider pool of dark matter.”

“And what do you think?”

She folded her hands neatly in her sleeves. “There are older ideas which may help. Theologians have a long history of distinguishing between the form of an object and its substance, its true nature. It’s an analysis that goes back to Aristotle, of course. The Church subsumed his philosophy to find a way to think about the Eucharist.”

“The Holy Communion.”

“Yes, the host that is at once a piece of bread, and at the same time the flesh of Christ. Morag’s remarkable new body may have something of the qualities of Christ’s resurrected body — indeed, the bodies promised to us all on resurrection. It is a body, but something more. The resurrected body is impassible, beyond pain, agile, so that you move as you like, and it has subtility, so it is totally subject to the desires of the soul. And in its glory, it shines like the sun.”

All this was so much ancient bullshit to me. But I thought of Morag’s body in the dark of the hotel room, shining with a warm light of its own. “Oh, hell, Rosa. Do you believe any of this stuff?”

“Not everybody who lived before the age of enlightenment was a fool, you know. Whatever is going on here, whatever her origin — what if Morag is not the first manifestation of her kind? If there have been earlier Morags in history, the thinkers of the day will have tried to explain her away in the language of the time, in concepts alien to us. But their analysis may record some imperfectly understood aspect of the truth.”

This was overwhelming me. Exhausted, still in pain, I shook my head.

Rosa was watching me. “I don’t think it’s the nature of Morag’s transmogrified body that is troubling you, though. Is it, Michael? You have her back,” she said gently. “And it isn’t as you imagined.”

It was hard for me to answer this, for I hadn’t yet admitted it to myself, and Morag and I had come nowhere near talking it through. But she was right. “We can’t talk,” I said. “Not really. Oh, we can talk about our old lives, what happened to us, what we shared before she, well, died. But even that is odd. For her it’s recent; for me it’s seventeen years ago. Even the memories don’t feel the same anymore. Then there are the trivial things, the little things. We trip up all the time. The world has moved on while she was away, and I lived through it all. But I have to explain everything, like she’s a tourist from some other place.”

Rosa said, “She was taken out of the world, but the world kept turning. And the more the years have passed, the more has happened that she simply did not see, did not share with you.”

“The dead get deader,” I said somberly. “I feel ashamed that I can’t—”

“That you can’t love her? Don’t be ashamed, Michael. You didn’t ask for this situation; you may be in a situation nobody has ever had to face before. No wonder your emotions are all over the place. But you’re doing your best, for everybody, including Morag. Just as you always do. I have faith in you, you know.”

“Thank you.”

Rosa watched me carefully. “What about your work, Michael? Is all this getting in the way?”

Of course it was. I glanced at the clock. Not yet five-thirty, but I knew I had a breakfast appointment at seven A.M.

I was working hard, because I believed in it all. Since the bombing, as I had immersed myself in the hydrate project, I had thought harder than I had ever before about the context of my life, the meaning of my work. I had discovered conviction in myself, for the first time since I was a kid, before cynicism knocked it all out of me. We had to do this; it was as simple as that. And I was central to it all.

“Gea keeps telling me she believes I am a fulcrum of history,” I said. “Me. And you’ve said the same might be true. Even George said it. Now I’ve started to believe it, to believe my own myth. Is that crazy?”

“Not necessarily. But Morag is getting in your way.”