“Here it is,” he says. “I remembered right. I ran across the poem in the Quartet. Listen, this is Durrell’s translation:

“You tell yourself: ‘I’ll be gone

To some other land, some other sea,

To a city lovelier far than this

Could ever have been or hoped to be—

Where every step now tightens the noose:

A heart in a body, buried and out of use…’

“See, he rhymes it.”

“I’m not sure I like that,” Aram says.

“No, but the meaning is the same, and the payoff is here at the end:

“There’s no new land, my friend, no

New sea, no other places, always this

Your earthly landfall, and no ship exists

To take you from yourself. Ah! Don’t you see

Just as you’ve ruined your life in this

One plot of ground you’ve ruined its worth

Everywhere now—over the whole Earth?”

Aram nods. “Ah yes, that’s good.”

They tap around for a while longer, reading silently. Then Aram says, “Look, I’ve found another version, a Martian one it seems, listen to this end:

“Ah! Don’t you see

Since your mind is the prison

You’ll live behind bars

Everywhere now—over all of Mars?”

“Very nice,” Badim says. “That’s us, all right. We are trapped in a prison of our own devise.”

“Horrible!” Freya protests. “What do you mean nice? It’s horrible! And we didn’t trap ourselves! We were born in prison.”

“But we’re not there now,” Badim says, eyeing her closely. She is sitting at his feet, as she has so often before. “And we are always ourselves, no matter where we go. That’s what the poem is saying, I think. We have to recognize it, and make what we can here. This world, great as it is, is only just another biome we have to live in.”

“I know that,” Freya says. “I’m fine with that. No problem at all. Just don’t be blaming us. Devi was right. We lived our lives in a fucking closet. It’s like we were kidnapped as children and locked away by some madman. Now that we’re out, I plan to enjoy it!”

Badim nods, eyes shining as he regards her. “Good girl! You do that. You’ll teach us again.”

“I will.”

Although her stomach knots as she says it. The unbearable sun, the vertigo sky, reeling around sick with fear, how to face it? How to walk at all in such a sky, with such bad legs, such a fearful heart? Badim puts an arm around her shoulders as he sees her face, she presses her face against his knees and weeps, he is so old, he is aging fast, oxidizing before her eyes, she can’t bear to lose him, she fears she will lose him, she has lost so much; she fears her huge uncontrollable fear.

The Chinese get her fitted with new knee-high boots that act according to her wishes, taking signals from her nervous system and translating them into walking that is not unlike what she would have done if she could feel her feet. It’s almost as if her own sensations have been transferred out into her shoes, while her actual feet remain as numb as shoes used to be. It’s a switch that takes some getting used to, but is much preferable to staggering around and falling, or pushing a walker, or swinging over crutches. She strides around in these new boots, trying to get used to them. Already she’s become accustomed to the strangely lighter 1 g of Terran gravity, almost.

They get invited to send a delegation to some kind of conference about starships, and Aram and Badim ask Freya if she would like to join them; they look concerned, they don’t seem to be sure she can handle it, but here, as so often in the ship, she sees that they want to use her as some kind of Devi surrogate or ceremonial figurehead, some kind of public face for their group. And she also understands suddenly that Badim feels he has to ask her, whether or not he thinks it’s a good idea for her to join them. “Yes,” she says, annoyed, and soon they are flying to North America, a group of twenty-two of them, chosen awkwardly, in a subdued, distracted manner, not their usual town hall style, they’re confused, it isn’t obvious how to decide things anymore, they’re not in their world, they don’t know what to do. Possibly the ship used to run their meetings more than they realized, who knows, but now they are in disarray.

Looking down occasionally from the rocket plane’s little window, she sees the great blue world rolling below them, in this case the Arctic Ocean, they are told. Earth is a water world, no doubt about it; not unlike Aurora in that respect. Perhaps it’s that which adds to the feeling of dread welling up in her; perhaps it’s dread of the topic of the meeting they are headed toward, given what the faces on the screens keep saying about them, given everything that has happened. Their Chinese hosts have promised to fly them back to their fellow starfarers anytime they want to go, promised that no one will ever keep them apart, assuming they want to stay together. They are world citizens now, the Chinese say, thus Chinese citizens, among all their other citizenships, and they have carte blanche to go where they want, do what they want. The Chinese offer a permanent home, and whatever work the starfarers care to do. The Chinese are hard to understand, it isn’t clear why they are doing what they are for the starfarers, but given the vituperation on the screens, the people of the ship can’t help but feel relieved. Even if they are somehow pawns in a game they don’t understand, or even see, it’s better than the dripping scorn, the spray of contempt.

Badim looks tired, Freya wishes he had stayed in Beijing, but he refused, he wants to be there for this, to help her. The cobalt sheen of the Arctic winkles with a curving pattern of white lines, waves extending horizon to horizon under them. They seem to be flying very slowly, though they are informed the plane is moving at least six times faster than the train from Hong Kong to Beijing; of course now they’re twenty kilometers above the Earth instead of twenty meters. They can see so far that the horizon is faintly curved, they can see again that this world is a sphere. Coming south they can see the real Greenland on their left, not at all green, just as they had heard, but rather a waste of black mountains, with a central sea of white ice largely covered by melt pools of sky blue, a mélange hard to grasp as a landscape. South again over the drowned coastline of eastern North America, deeply embayed by long blue arms of ocean, looking empty until just before they land, when buildings reappear under them in a profusion, in a doll city bright and geometrical, and they land on a point next to another forest of silver skyscrapers.

Rooms and vehicles, vehicles and rooms. Crowded narrow streets and canals, buildings tall on both sides. Faces in the street staring at their cars, some of them shouting things. Nothing like Beijing, more like the screens. Here people speak English, and despite the accents it’s easy to understand what is being said. It’s the starfarers’ own language, seems like it should be their world too, but obviously not. Here the sky seems taller than ever. Badim and Aram discuss this phenomenon, consulting their old book and its equations as they stare up between the buildings, ignoring the clear fact that the sky is shocking not for its height as a dome but precisely because it is not a dome, this is what is so frightening about it, but they persist in their conversation, perhaps to hold off that fact. Now as they tram through the city the sky overhead is a ceiling of patterned clouds that Aram says is to be called a herringbone sky, beautiful in the slant of afternoon light, low over them, although not as low as the rain clouds that amazed them in Hong Kong.