“That’s all right. I thought I’d stay here.”

“Don’t be a dink. You can’t stay here, and if you did, you wouldn’t have any peace, anyway. Everybody goes who’s not actually dying. If you stay away, they’ll think you’ve got leprosy. Paulo, put those in to boil, gallito. Oh, and slice those peppers into rings for me, please.”

“She’s right,” Josh called, from somewhere beyond the screen door. “You want them to think I did my best, and failed?” He pulled the screen door open and let it bang behind him. His head and shoulders were wet from the pump, and he carried a tub of butter. “As long as you don’t polka, you’ll be fine.”

Their cheerfulness was oppressive. Their assumption that there was nothing that made me different from anyone else in the place except, possibly, my injuries, was alarming. “Nobody will mind,” I said. “I’m not really part of the community.”

Josh turned his head to one side and looked at me, as if he were trying to read me like a thermometer. Then he set the tub down, pulled a stack of flat-bottomed bowls from a shelf, and began to fill them with butter. “If you say you’re not,” he said, “then you’re not. And no one will insist otherwise. But there’s a difference, you know, between being a member of the community and acknowledging that you’re part of that community’s shared experience.

“I know this will sound crazy to you, but showing up tonight — even for a little while — and eating our food and sharing our fire will be taken as an expression of gratitude. No one insists that you be grateful, either, but it would be a nice gesture.”

“I am grateful,” I said, feeling a stirring of distress. “You saved my life.”

Josh’s hands paused over the butter. He raised his eyebrows and opened his mouth, closed it again, then said, “No, never mind. The wrong lecture at the wrong time. Will you come tonight?”

I tried to imagine what I was committing myself to. Would it be more like lunch at China Black’s house, or like the Night Fair? Either one seemed, suddenly, equally frightening. “I’ll come,” I said, because I knew I had to.

“Good,” Mags said. “Then put these in the oven for me, will you? Put a tray under them or they’ll dribble all over. Josh, you better bring those clothes in off the line.”

I took Mags’s advice and lay down in the back bedroom that had changed from the sickroom to Sparrow’s room in the household language. I wondered what would happen if another invalid turned up.

The shadows were long and the sunlight deep gold when someone knocked on my door. I opened it to Mags, who pushed a folded pile of clothes into my arms.

“I just remembered, you don’t have much variety in your wardrobe. You can wear these tonight. Actually, you can keep ’em. Large Bob said the only way he was ever gonna fit in those pants again was if he stopped eating entirely.”

“I can’t—”

“Yes, you can. Say thank you and close the door.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Very much.”

I set the stack on the bed and looked at it. I didn’t mean to keep them, but I didn’t see how I could avoid wearing them tonight. It was a pity; the things I had on were Josh’s, which meant they were huge and had been washed and worn until they were soft as flannel. I didn’t look forward to clothes that hurt. I shook out the first thing on the pile.

It was a pair of black trousers with a stretchy drawstring waist and pleats at the top, made of brushed cotton twill. Underneath them was a cotton shirt, in a style I’d seen the interesting Indians wear in movies. It had an open collar and a low yoke, and wide sleeves gathered into cuffs. The shirt was wine-red, and the buttons on the cuffs and down the front were silver. It looked festive but restrained, and the whole business, once I put them on, felt as if I were proposing to go out in pajamas. Mags had understood about clothes that hurt.

I wish these people would stop understanding everything, I thought irritably. Something in my throat hurt, but I swallowed, and it went away.

The village square — excuse, the circle — was illuminated with lanterns hanging from all the lower tree branches, clusters of torch candles around the plank tables, and the bonfire. It sent almost enough light through the front windows to read by. I went to the kitchen and out the back door, and stood leaning on a porch pillar in the dark half of the night.

“Scared?” said Josh. I hadn’t seen him sitting on the steps.

“I… Yes, actually.”

“Sher said you weren’t a social animal.”

My hands opened and closed on nothing. Words pushed their way out of my mouth, unbidden and unwelcome. “Maybe I am, and there just aren’t any other animals like me.”

“What kind of animal do you think you are?” Josh asked, sounding mildly surprised.

I inhaled with my teeth closed. It made a hiss. “You know,” I whispered.

“What you think you are? Nope. I know what I think you are.”

“And what’s that?”

“A customized human being.”

“Well,” I said. “That was easy.”

Josh stood. I was on the porch and he was on the ground; he had to look up to meet my eyes. “It is easy,” he said. “Identity magic is the oldest and easiest kind there is. It’s what language is for.”

“Anybody gonna help carry this stuff?” Mags yelled from the kitchen, with volume enough to be heard inside and out.

“Damn,” said Josh; then, loudly, “You betcha!” He thumped up the porch stairs, past me, and into the kitchen.

Paulo and I each had charge of a pie. Josh got the beanpot, swathed in toweling. We tramped across the lawn to the sawhorse tables, and put our contributions down next to everything else.

People smiled at me, and waved, and introduced themselves. It was like China Black’s and the Night Fair both. I couldn’t decide if it was the worst of both or not. The people who introduced themselves often told me how long they’d known Sherrea, or how they came to know her, or asked me how I had. Sher, it seemed, was universally acquainted around here. It was the first time I’d thought to wonder how she came to know about this place, and what it was to her. I was very polite to everyone.

I wandered toward the bonfire, wishing I knew how long I ought to stay. Then a flash of light on a face at the corner of my vision startled me, and I turned to look.

Theo was walking next to me, and the light had been glancing off his glasses. “Hey,” he said.

I stopped walking. I’d been talking to strangers all evening; I could do this. I had only to gather my much-tried manners and put them to work again. “Hello. How are they treating you?”

“Great. I think. Only there’s nothing to do. I keep thinking about whether Robby’s surviving without us.”

Ignore the strange feeling in the stomach; rely on the manners. “I expect so. And you’ll be able to go back soon, won’t you?”

“To what?” Theo asked. “Occupation under Tom Worecski?”

I frowned. “But that’s what it was before you came here.”

“It’s not — never mind. Look, I’m gonna ask somebody tomorrow if there’s anything electronic they want done around here. D’you want me to volunteer you, too?”

“No.” I almost turned and left, but I remembered: manners. “No, thank you. I’m not doing that anymore.” Then I left.

Tom Worecski had had the archives burned. That had damaged that part of me, but it hadn’t killed it. Something else had done that, something I couldn’t name, that had seared away the connection between who I was and what I knew. I still knew electronics, I still had languages and language, all the things I’d woken with out of that parody of birth fifteen years ago. But they didn’t belong to me. Nothing, I’d said to Sher. I owned nothing. My body was on lease from the past, a machine I’d rented and lost the paperwork for, and I had no idea where my mind had come from. All the things I knew might have been stolen from someone else.