"Thank you," he said. "I'd like it very much if we had dinner together. But make sure you keep radio contact with me on your way over here – so I'll know you're okay. Promise?"

"Well, sure," she said. "Otherwise" – she smiled – "they'd find me a century from now, frozen with pots, pans, and food, as well as synthetic spices. You do have portable air, don't you?

"No, I really don't," he said.

And knew that his lie was palpable to her.

The meal smelled good and tasted good, but halfway through Rybus excused herself and made her way unsteadily from the matrix of the dome – his dome – into the bathroom. He tried not to listen; he arranged it with his percept system not to hear and with his cognition not to know. In the bathroom the girl, violently sick, cried out and he gritted his teeth and pushed his plate away and then all at once he got up and set in motion his in-dome audio system; he played an early album of the Fox.

"Come again!

Sweet love doth now invite

Thy graces, that refrain

To do me due delight…"

"Do you by any chance have some milk?" Rybus asked, standing at the bathroom door, her face pale.

Silently, he got her a glass of milk, or what passed for milk on their planet.

"I have antiemetics," Rybus said as she held the glass of milk, "but I didn't remember to bring any with me. They're back at my dome."

"I could get them for you," he said.

"You know what M.E.D. told me?" Her voice was heavy with indignation. "They said that this chemotherapy won't make my hair fall out, but already it's coming out in -"

"Okay," he interrupted.

"Okay?"

"I'm sorry," he said.

"This is upsetting you," Rybus said. "The meal is spoiled and you're – I don't know what. If I'd remembered to bring my antiemetics, I'd be able to keep from -" She became silent. "Next time I'll bring them. I promise. This is one of the few albums of Fox that I like. She was really good then, don't you think?"

"Yes," he said tightly.

"Linda Box," Rybus said.

"What?" he said.

"Linda the box. That's what my sister and I used to call her." She tried to smile.

"Please go back to your dome."

"Oh," she said. "Well -" She smoothed her hair, her hand shaking. "Will you come with me? I don't think I can make it by myself right now. I'm really weak. I really am sick."

He thought, You are taking me with you. That's what this is. That is what is happening. You will not go alone; you will take my spirit with you. And you know. You know it as well as you know the name of the medication you are taking, and you hate me as you hate the medication, as you hate M.E.D. and your illness; it is all hate, for each and every thing under these two suns. I know you. I understand you. I see what is coming. In fact, it has begun.

And, he thought, I don't blame you. But I will hang onto the Fox; the Fox will outlast you. And so will I. You are not going to shoot down the luminiferous aether which animates our souls. I will hang onto the Fox and the Fox will hold me in her arms and hang onto me. The two of us – we can't be pried apart. I have dozens of hours of the Fox on audio- and videotape, and the tapes are not just for me but for everybody. You think you can kill that? he said to himself. It's been tried before. The power of the weak, he thought, is an imperfect power; it loses in the end. Hence its name. We call it weak for a reason.

"Sentimentality," Rybus said.

"Right," he said sardonically.

"Recycled at that."

"And mixed metaphors."

"Her lyrics?"

"What I'm thinking. When I get really angry, I mix -"

"Let me tell you something. One thing. If I am going to survive, I can't be sentimental. I have to be very harsh. If I've made you angry, I'm sorry, but that is how it is. It is my life. Someday you may be in the spot I am in and then you'll know. Wait for that and then judge me. If it ever happens. Meanwhile this stuff you're playing on your in-dome audio system is crap. It has to be crap, for me. Do you see? You can forget about me; you can send me back to my dome, where I probably really belong, but if you have anything to do with me -"

"Okay," he said, "I understand."

"Thank you. May I have some more milk? Turn down the audio and we'll finish eating. Okay?"

Amazed, he said, "You're going to keep on trying to -"

"All those creatures – and species – who gave up trying to eat aren't with us anymore." She seated herself unsteadily, holding onto the table.

"I admire you."

"No," she said. "I admire you. It's harder on you. I know."

"Death -" he began.

"This isn't death. You know what this is? In contrast to what's coming out of your audio system? This is life. The milk, please; I really need it."

As he got her more milk, he said, "I guess you can't shoot down aether. Luminiferous or otherwise."

"No," she agreed, "since it doesn't exist."

Commodity Central provided Rybus with two wigs, since, due to the chemo, her hair had been systematically killed. He preferred the light-colored one.

When she wore her wig, she did not look too bad, but she had become weakened and a certain querulousness had crept into her discourse. Because she was not physically strong any longer – due more, he suspected, to the chemotherapy than to her illness – she could no longer manage to maintain her dome adequately. Making his way over there one day, he was shocked at what he found. Dishes, pots and pans and even glasses of spoiled food, dirty clothes strewn everywhere, litter and debris… troubled, he cleaned up for her and, to his vast dismay, realized that there was an odor pervading her dome, a sweet mixture of the smell of illness, of complex medications, the soiled clothing, and, worst of all, the rotting food itself.

Until he cleaned an area, there was not even a place for him to sit. Rybus lay in bed, wearing a plastic robe open at the back. Apparently, however, she still managed to operate her electronic equipment; he noted that the meters indicated full activity. But she used the remote programmer normally reserved for emergency conditions; she lay propped up in bed with the programmer beside her, along with a magazine and a bowl of cereal and several bottles of medication.

As before, he discussed the possibility of getting her transferred. She refused to be taken off her job; she had not budged.

"I'm not going into a hospital," she told him, and that, for her, ended the conversation.

Later, back at his own dome, gratefully back, he put a plan into operation. The large AI System – Artificial Intelligence Plasma – which handled the major problem-solving for star systems in their area of the galaxy had some available time which could be bought for private use. Accordingly, he punched in an application and posted the total sum of financial credits he had saved up during the last few months.

From Fomalhaut, where the Plasma drifted, he received back a positive response. The team which handled traffic for the Plasma was agreeing to sell him fifteen minutes of the Plasma's time.

At the rate at which he was being metered, he was motivated to feed the Plasma his data very skillfully and very rapidly. He told the Plasma who Rybus was – which gave the AI System access to her complete files, including her psychological profile – and he told it that his dome was the closest dome to her, and he told it of her fierce determination to live and her refusal to accept a medical discharge or even transfer from her station. He cupped his head into the shell for psychotronic output so that the Plasma at Fomalhaut could draw directly from his thoughts, thus making available to it all his unconscious, marginal impressions, realizations, doubts, ideas, anxieties, needs.

"There will be a five-day delay in response," the team signaled him. "Because of the distance involved. Your payment has been received and recorded. Over."