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worlds.
    “Can we get down to the farmland?”
    “Possibly. But it wouldn’t be wise.”
    “Why—are the farmers dangerous?”
    “Without the Network, they might be. It’s difficult to explain, but the Network also functions as a social control mechanism. Until it’s restored we should avoid untutored mobs.”
    “The farm folk get rowdy when they’re off their leash?”
    She gave me a disdainful look. “Please don’t make facile judgments about things you don’t understand.” She adjusted her pack and walked a few paces ahead of me, cutting short the conversation. I followed her down the hillside, back into the shadow of the forest. I tried to gauge our progress by marking the relative positions of the black towers whenever we crossed an open ridge. I calculated that we might reach the windward shore in a day or two.
    The weather turned sour that afternoon. Heavy clouds rolled in, followed by erratic winds and bursts of rain. We marched on grimly until we began to lose daylight; then we found a sheltering grove and stretched a sheet of waterproof cloth between the closely woven branches to serve as a shelter. I succeeded in getting a small fire going.
    As night fell we huddled under the tarp. The air reeked of woodsmoke and wet earth. Treya hummed to herself while I heated rations. It was the same song she had been humming in the aircraft before it was destroyed. I asked her again how she had come to know a ten-thousand-year-old popular song.
    “It was part of my training. I’m sorry, I didn’t realize it was bothering you.”
    “It’s not. I know that song. First time I heard it I was in Venezuela, waiting for a tanker assignment. Little bar there that played American tunes. Where’d you hear it?”
    She looked past the fire, out into the dark of the forest. “On a file server in my bedroom. My parents were out, so I cranked it up and danced.” Her voice was faint.
    “Where was this?”
    “Champlain,” she said.
    “Champlain?”
    “New York State. Up by the Canadian border.”
    “Champlain on Earth ?”
    She looked at me strangely. Then her eyes widened. She put her hand to her mouth.
    “Treya? Are you all right?”
    Apparently not. She grabbed her rucksack, fumbled through it, then pulled out the pharmaceutical dispenser and pressed it against her arm.
    As soon as she was breathing normally she said, “I’m sorry. That was a mistake. Please don’t ask me about these things.”
    “Maybe I can help, if you tell me what’s going on.”
    “Not now.”
    She curled closer to the fire and closed her eyes.
    *   *   *

    By morning the rain had turned to mist and fog. The wind had calmed, but during the night it had blown down a bounty of ripe fruit, an easy breakfast.
    The column of smoke from Vox Core was invisible in the overcast, but two of the dark towers were close enough to serve as landmarks. By mid-morning the fog had thinned and by noon the clouds had lifted and we could hear the sound of the sea.
    Treya was talkative by daylight, probably because she was fairly heavily medicated. (She had applied the ampoule to her arm twice already.) Obviously she was leaning on the drug as a way of compensating for the loss of “the Network,” whatever that meant to her. And just as obviously, her problem was getting worse. She started talking almost as soon as we broke camp, and it wasn’t a conversation but a nervy, absentminded monologue—a cocaine monologue, I would have thought in another time and place. I listened closely and didn’t interrupt, though half of what she said made no sense. In the odd moments when she paused, the wind in the trees seemed suddenly loud.
    She told me she had been born to a family of workers in the far leeward quarter of Vox Core. Both her father and her mother had been equipped with neural interfaces that allowed them to perform any of dozens of skilled jobs, “overseeing infrastructure or implementing novel instrumentalities.” They were a lower caste than