input jacks and a round neck-circling collar. She looked at the
floor. "Margaret," she said. "Your feet."
Juliano looked absently at the dried mud flaking from her boots.
"Oh, dear. Sorry."
The sudden juxtaposition of the two women filled Lindsay with
vertigo. A confused wash of tainted deja vu bubbled up from some
drugged cerebral recess, and for a moment he thought he would
pass out. When he revived he could feel that he had improved, as if
some paralyzing sludge had trickled out of his head, leaving light
and space. "Alexandrina," he said, feeling feebler yet somehow
more real. "You've been time? All this here?"
"Abelard," she said, surprised. "You're talking."
"Trying to."
"I heard you were better," she said. "So I brought you clothes.
From the Museum wardrobe." She showed him a plastic-wrapped
suit, an antique. "You see? This is actually one of your own suits
from seventy-five years ago. One of the looters saved it when the
Lindsay Mansion was sacked. Try it on, dear."
Lindsay touched the suit's stiff, age-worn fabric. "A museum
piece," he said.
"Well, of course."
Margaret Juliano Looked at Alexandrina. "Maybe he'd be more
comfortable dressed as an orderly. He could fade into the back-
ground. Take on local color."
"No," Lindsay said. "All right. I'll wear it."
"Alexandrina's been looking forward to this," Juliano confided as he struggled into the suit's trousers, ramming his bare feet past the wire-stiffened accordioned knees. "Every day she's come to feed
you Tyler apples."
"I brought you here after the duel," Alexandrina said. "Our
marriage expired, but I run the Museum now. I have a post here."
She smiled. "They sacked the mansions, but the family orchards are
still standing. Your Grandaunt Marietta always swore by the family's apples."
A seam gave way in the shoulder as Lindsay pulled on the shirt.
"You wolfed clown those apples, seeds, stems, and all," Juliano told him. "It was a wonder."
"You're home, Alexa," Lindsay said. It was what she had wanted.
He was glad for her.
"This was the Tyler house," Alexandrina said. "The left wing and the grounds are for the clinic; that's Margaret's work. I'm the
Curator. I run the rest. I've gathered up all the mementos of our old
way of life-all that was spared by Constantine's reeducation
squads." She helped him pull the spacesuit-collared formal jacket
over his head. "Come on, I'll show you."
Juliano kicked off her boots and stood in her rumpled socks. "I'llcome along. I want to judge his reactions."
The main ballroom had become an exhibit hall, with glass-fronted displays and portraits of early clan founders. An antique pedal-driven ultralight aircraft hung from the ceiling. Five Shapers
marveled over a case full of crude assembly tools from the
circumlunar's construction. The Shapers' chic low-gravity clothing
sagged grotesquely in the Republic's centrifugal spin. Alexandrina
took his arm and whispered, "The floor looks nice, doesn't it? I
refinished it myself. We don't allow robots here."
Lindsay glanced at one wall and was paralyzed at the sight of his own clan's founder, Malcolm Lindsay. As a child, the dead pioneer's face, leering in ancestral wisdom from the tops of dressers
and bookshelves, had filled him with dread. Now he realized with a
painful leap of insight how young the man had been. Dead at
seventy. The whole habitat had been slammed up in frantic haste by
people scarcely more than children. He began laughing hysterically. "It's a joke!" he shouted. The laughter was melting his head, breaking up a logjam of thought in little stabbing pangs.
Alexandrina glanced anxiously at the bemused Shapers.
"Maybe this was too early for him, Margaret."
Juliano laughed. "He's right. It is a joke. Ask the Cataclysts." She took Lindsay's arm. "Come on, Abelard. We'll go outside."
"It's a joke," Lindsay said. His tongue was loose now and the
words gushed free. "This is unbelievable. These poor fools had no
idea. I low could they? They were dead before they had a chance to
see! What's five years to us, what's ten, a hundred - "
"You're babbling, dear." Juliano walked him down the hall and
through the mortared stone archway into dappled sunlight and
grass. "Watch where you step," she said. "We have other patients
Not housebroken." Reside the high moss-crusted walls a nude
young woman was tearing single-mindedly at the grass, pausing to
suck grime from her fingers.
Lindsay was horrified. He seemed to taste the grit on his own
tongue. "We'll go outside the grounds," Margaret said.
"Pongpianskul won't mind."
"He's letting you stay here, is he? That woman's a Shaper. A
Cataclyst? He owed a debt to the Cataclysts. You're taking care of
them for him."
"Try not to talk too much, dear. You might hurt something." She opened the iron gateway. "They like it here, the Cataclysts. Something about the view."
"Oh, my God," Lindsay said.
The Republic had run wild. The overarching trees on the Museum grounds had hid the lull panorama from him. Now it loomed over and around him in its full five-kilometer range, a stunning expanse of ridged and tangled green, three long panels glowing in triple-crossed shafts of mirror-reflected sunlight. He'd forgotten how
bright the sun was in circumlunar space.
"The trees," he gasped. "My God, look at them!"
"They've been growing ever since you left," Juliano said.
"Come with me. I want to show you another project."
Lindsay looked up through reflex toward his own former home.
Seen from above, the sprawling mansion grounds bordered what
had once been a lively tangle of cheap low-class restaurants. Those
were in decline, and the Lindsay home was in ruin. He could see
yawning holes in the red-tiled roofs of fused lunar slate. The private
landing pad atop the mansion's four-story tower was swamped in
ivy.
At the northern end of the world, up its sloping walls, a crew of ant-sized workmen lore languidly at the skeletal remains of one of
the wirehead hospitals. Shoals of clouds hid the old power grid and
the area that had once been the Sours. "It smells different," Lindsay
realized. He stumbled on the bicycle path beside the Museum's
walls and was forced to watch his feet. They were filthy. "I need a
bath," he said.
"Either you crawl or you don't, right? If you've got skin bacteria, what's a little dirt? I like it. "She smiled. "It's big here, isn't it? Sure, Goldreich-Tremaine's ten times this size, but nothing this open. A big risky world."
"I'm glad Alexandrina found her way back," Lindsay said. Their
marriage had been a success, because it had gotten her what she
wanted most. At last he had made amends. It had always been a
strain. Now he was free.
The Republic had changed so much that it filled him with weird
exaltation. Yes, big, he thought, but nowhere near big enough. He
felt a sense of impatience with it, a fierce longing to grab hold of
something, something huge and basic. He had slept for five years.
Now he felt every hour of that long rest pressing in on him with
uncontainable reviving energy. His knees buckled, and Juliano
caught him with her Shaper-strengthened arms.
"Easy," she said.
"I'm all right." They crossed the openwork bridge over the blazing expanse of metaglass that separated two land panels. Lindsay saw the former site of the Sours beneath a raft of clouds. The once-foul morass had become an oasis of vegetation so blindingly green that it seemed to shine even in the clouds' shadow. A tall gangling boy in baggy clothing was running headlong beside the woven-wire fence surrounding the Sours, tugging a large box kite into flight.