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tumor, and too small to kill it. Maybe six months earlier. Maybe if I’d been quicker. Maybe if I’d insisted she go to the doctor months earlier.
    Maybe.
    A man can torture himself to madness with maybes.

FIVE
    I had Birgid’s mother come to take care of her and the kids.
    I ran away. I flew to a beach in Mexico and drank tequila. I drank until I passed out. When I woke, I was back in my hotel. Someone had taken my clothes away, and almost the first thing I remembered, just as the blinding pain hit my head, was that I had soiled myself.
    A nurse appeared and mutely handed me a pair of vitamin pills and two ibuprofen. I gulped them down with two bottles of water.
    Then I fell back onto the bed.
    “Who are you?” I slurred.
    “Consuela,” she answered. She spoke good but heavily accented English, for which I was grateful. My head was in no shape to form Spanish words.
    “Who … Where did … Who sent you here?”
    She shrugged. “It was only an e-mail, through our Web site.”
    “But someone paid. Someone …”
    She shrugged. “I only know one name. Lear.”
    I tried to focus on her face, to see whether she was joking or hidingsomething, but her features would not come into focus. “Mr. Lear?”
    She shrugged again. “Mr. or Mrs., I do not know.”
    I slept then, and when I woke she was gone. The headache was somewhat less savage, though it lingered like a distant storm that might at any moment blow in my direction.
    There were fruit and water on the bedside table. And a typed note.
We should talk. Lear
.
    Even now I won’t speak of that meeting.
    But the next day I flew back to New York. In the meantime Birgid had taken a turn for the worse. She was sinking fast.
    “Where have you been?” Stone demanded. “You didn’t even answer your phone or anything.”
    “I had a last-minute, uh, I had a chance to meet this engineer whom I thought of hiring. For, you know, what I’m trying to do for Mom.”
    I don’t know if Stone bought it. Maybe. He’s a trusting kid. But Sadie’s eyes just blazed with contempt. And then, worse by far, she began to look at me with pity.
    Birgid was in our bed, gasping for air through the oxygen mask. She saw me and reached out her hand to take mine.
    And I couldn’t.
    I couldn’t see my wife, my love. I could see only the tumor.
    I pretended to believe she wanted a glass of water and fetched it for her.
    I could have stroked her forehead. I could have pressed my cheek against hers. I could have put my arms around her. But Birgid was no longer Birgid, she had become the monster that filled my mind and dreams.
    Back in New York I realized I had come back within range and could once again see through my biot’s eyes. There was nothing to see, just the crèche where it lay.
    But I couldn’t turn off the pictures. I decided then and there to destroy the little beast. I wanted nothing more to do with the nano world.
    I would go on developing the technology, Lear had convinced me of that much at least. Lear had torn the mask off Armstrong Fancy Gifts and shown me clearly what my old friend Burnofsky was up to. But I never wanted to use that biot again. Not even to save Birgid.
    I couldn’t. As I said: I am not a brave man. The idea of it filled me with bone-rattling fear.
    I couldn’t.
    I called Donna at the lab to tell her to incinerate the thing.
    She picked up and all I heard was a long, awful moan of grief.
    “Mom isn’t breathing,” Sadie said.
    I hung up on Donna, shutting off her eerie keening, and called 911.
    Birgid died that night at the hospital.
    We were all with her at the end. Stone kissed her forehead andspilled his tears on her cheeks. Sadie, my tough little girl, sobbed and covered her face with her hands and kept saying, “Mommy, Mommy. I love you, Mommy.”
    I looked at the now lifeless body of my wife, my true love, the mother of my children, and all I could see was the tumor. I could imagine now in awful detail the blood cells motionless in suddenly