only thing that could satisfy them was to rebuild their

  brains as a soup of black holes. Black hole brains are

  very fast.

  I know what happens when a person doesn’t have a

  body anymore, too. For a while they simulate the sensa-

  tions and logic of a corporeal existence, only with everything perfect and running much faster than in the real

  world. But their interests drift. The simulation gets more and more abstract and eventually they’re just thoughts, and after a while they give that up, too, and then they’re just numbers. By now Maka is just some very big numbers turning into some even bigger numbers, racing toward infinity.

  I know because he told me. He knew what he was be-

  coming.

  I still miss him.

  5.

  We go down to the surface of the planet, which we de-

  cide to call Droplet.

  2 4 3

  B E N J A M I N R O S E N B A U M

  The sky is painterly blue with strings of white clouds

  drifting above great choppy waves. It’s lovely. I’m glad

  Shar brought us here.

  We’re dolphins. We chase each other across the waves.

  We dive and hold our breaths, and shower each other

  with bubbles. We kiss with our funny dolphin noses.

  I’m relaxing and floating when Shar slides her rub-

  bery body over me and clamps her mouth onto my flesh.

  It’s such a long time since I’ve been a cetacean that I

  don’t notice that Shar is a boy dolphin until I feel her penis enter me. I buck with surprise, but Shar keeps her

  jaws clamped and rides me. Rides me and rides me, as I

  buck and swim, until she ejaculates. She makes it take

  extra long.

  Afterward we race, and then I am floating, floating, ex-

  hausted and happy as the sunset blooms on the horizon.

  It’s a very impressive sunset, and I kick up on my tail to get a better look. I change my eyes and nose so I can

  see the whole spectrum and smell the entire wind.

  It hits me first as fear, a powerful shudder that takes

  over my dolphin body, kicks me into the air and then into a racing dive, dodging and weaving. Then it hits me as

  knowledge, the signature written in the sunset: beryllium-10, mandelium, large-scale entanglement from muon dis-

  persal. Nuclear and strange-matter weapons fallout.

  Warboys.

  Ship dropped us a matter accelerator to get back up

  with, a series of rings floating in the water. I head for it.

  Shar catches up and hangs on to me, changing into a

  human body and riding my back.

  “Ssh, honey,” she says, stroking me. “It’s okay. There

  haven’t been Warboys here for ten thousand years. . . .”

  2 4 4

  D R O P L E T

  I buck her off, and this time I’m not flirting.

  Shar changes her body below the waist back into a

  dolphin tail, and follows. As soon as she is in the first ring I tell Ship to bring us up, and one dolphin, one mer-maid, and twelve metric tons of water shoot through the

  rings and up through the blue sky until it turns black and crowded with stars. “Ten thousand years,” says Shar as

  we hurtle up into the sky.

  “You picked a planet Warboys had been on! Ship must have seen the signature.”

  “Narra, this wasn’t a Warboy duel—they wouldn’t dick

  around with nuclear for that. They must have been trying

  to exterminate a civilian population.”

  The water has all sprayed away now and we are tum-

  bling through the thin air of the stratosphere.

  “There’s a chance they failed, Narra. Someone might

  be here, hidden. That’s why we came.”

  “Warboys don’t fail!”

  We grow cocoons as we exit the atmosphere and hit

  orbit. After a couple of minutes, I feel Ship’s long re-

  trieval pseudopod slurp me in.

  I lie in the warm cave of Ship’s retrieval pseudopod.

  It’s decorated with webs of green and blue. I remember

  when Shar decorated it. It was a long time ago, when we

  were first traveling.

  I turn back into a human form and sit up.

  Shar is lying nearby, picking at the remnants of her

  cocoon, silvery strands draped across her breasts.

  “You want to die,” I say.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Narra.”

  “Shar, seriously. It’s not enough for you—I’m not

  enough for you. You’re looking for Warboys. You’re try-

  2 4 5

  B E N J A M I N R O S E N B A U M

  ing to get killed.” I feel a buzzing in my head, my breathing is constricted, aches shoot through my fist-clenched

  knuckles: clear signs that my emotional registers are full, the excess externalizing into pain.

  She sighs. “Narra, I’m not that complicated. If I

  wanted to die, I’d just turn myself off.” She grows legs

  and stands up.

  “No, I don’t think you can.” What I’m about to say is

  unfair, and too horrible. I’ll regret it. I feel the blood pounding in my ears and I say it anyway: “Maybe Maka

  didn’t free us all the way. Maybe he just gave us to each other. Maybe you can’t leave me. You want to, but you

  can’t.”

  Her eyes are cold. As I watch, the color drains out of

  them, from black to slate gray to white.

  She looks like she wants to say a lot of things. Maybe:

  you stupid sentimental little girl. Maybe: it’s you who

  wants to leave—to go back to your precious Maka, and if

  you had the brains to become a Wizard you would.

  Maybe: I want to live, but not the coward’s life you keep insisting on.

  She doesn’t say any of them, though. She turns and

  walks away.

  6.

  I keep catching myself thinking it, and I know she’s

  thinking it too. This person before me is the last other

  person I can reach, the only one to love me from now on

  in all the worlds of time. How long until she leaves me, as everyone else has left?

  And how long can I stand her if she doesn’t?

  2 4 6

  D R O P L E T

  7.

  The last people we met were a religious sect who lived

  in a beautiful crystal ship the size of a moon. They were Naturals and had old age and death and even children

  whom they bore themselves, who couldn’t walk or talk at

  first or anything. They were sad for some complicated re-

  ligious reason that Shar and I didn’t understand. We

  cheered them up for a while by having sex with the ones

  their rules allowed to have sex and telling stories to the rest, but eventually they decided to all kill themselves

  anyway. We left before it happened.

  Since then we haven’t seen anyone. We don’t know of

  anywhere that has people left.

  I told Shar we could be passing people all the time and

  not know it. People changed in the Dispersal, and we’re

  not Interpreters. There could be people with bodies made

  of gas clouds or out of the spins of elementary particles.

  We could be surrounded by crowds of them.

  She said that just made her sadder.

  8.

  We go down to Droplet again. I smile and pretend it’s

  all right. We spent a thousand years, our time, getting

  here; we might as well look around.

  We change ourselves so we can breathe water, and

  head down into the depths. There are no fish on Droplet,

  no coral, no plankton. I can taste very simple nanomites, the standard kind every made world has for general up-keep. But all see, looking down, is green-blue fading to

  deep blue fading to rich indigo and blackness.

  2 4 7

  B E N J A M I N R O S E N B A U M

  Then there’s a tickle on my skin.

  I stop swimming and look around. Nothing but water.

  The tickle comes again.

  I send a sonar pulse to Shar ahead, telling her to wait.

  I try to swim again but I can’t. I feel fingers, hands,

  holding me, where there is only water. Stroking, pressing against my skin.

  I change into a hard ball, Shivol’riargh without head

  or limbs, and turn down tactile until I can’t tell the hands from the gentle current.

  I fiddle with my perceptions until I remember how to

  send out a very fine sonar wave, and to enhance and fil-

  ter the data, discerning patterns in very fine perturba-

  tions of the water. I subtract out the general currents and chaotic swirls of the ocean, looking only for the motions of the water that should not be there, and turn it into a three-dimensional image of the space around me.

  There are people here.

  Their shapes—made of fine motions of the water—are

  human shapes, tall, with graceful oblong heads that flat-

  ten at the top to a frill.

  They are running their watery hands over the surface

  of me, poking and prodding.

  From below, Shar is returning, approaching me. Some

  of the water people cluster around her and stop her, holding her arms and legs.

  She struggles. I cannot see her expression through

  the murk.

  The name “Nereids” swims up from the hidden

  labyrinths of my memory. Not a word from this world,

  but word enough.

  The Nereids back away, arraying themselves as if for-

  2 4 8

  D R O P L E T

  mally, three meters away from me on all sides. A sphere

  of Nereids surrounds me.

  Shar stops struggling. They let her go, pushing her

  outside the sphere.

  One of the Nereids—tall, graceful, broad-shouldered—

  breaks out of the formation and glides toward me. He

  places his hands on my surface.

  This, I tell myself to remember, is what we were de-

  signed for. Alone among the Quantegral Lovergirls, Shar

  and I were given the flexibility and intelligence to serve all the possible variations of post-Dispersal humanity. We were designed to discover, at the very least, how to give pleasure; and perhaps even how to communicate.

  Still, I am afraid.

  I let the hard shell of Shivol’riargh grow soft, I sculpt my body back toward basic humanity; tall, thin, like the

  Nereids.

  This close, my sonar sees the face shaped out of water

  smile. The Nereid raises his hands, palms out. I place my palms on them, though I feel only a slight resistance in

  the water. I part my lips. The Nereid’s head cautiously

  inches toward mine.

  I close my eyes and raise my face, slowly, slowly, to

  meet the Nereid’s.

  We kiss. It is a tickle, a pressure, in the water against my lips.

  Our bodies drift together. When the Nereid’s chest

  touches my breasts, I register shock: the resistance of the water is denser. It feels like a body is pressing into mine.

  The kiss goes on. Gets deeper. A tongue of water plays

  around my tongue.

  I wonder what Shar is thinking.

  2 4 9

  B E N J A M I N R O S E N B A U M

  The Nereid releases my hands; his hands run slowly

  from the nape of my neck, across my shoulder blades,

  down the small of my back, fanning out to hold my but-

  tocks.

  I open my eyes. I see only water, endless and dark, and

  Shar silent and still below. I smile down to reassure her.

  She does not move.

  My new lover is invisible. In all her many forms, Shar

  is never invisible. It is as if the ocean is making love to me. I like it.

  The familiar metamorphosis of sex in a human body

  overtakes me. Hormones course through my blood; some

  parts grow wet, others (my throat) grow dry. My body is

  relaxing, opening. My heart thunders. Fear is still there, for what do I know of the Nereid? Pleasure is overwhelming it, like a torrent eroding granite into silt.

  A data channel crackles, and I blink with surprise.

  Through the nanomites that fill the sea, the Nereid is

  sending. Out of the billions of ancient protocols I know, intuition finds the right one.

  Spreading my vulva with its hand, the Nereid asks:

  May I?

  A double thrill of surprise and pleasure courses

  through me: first, to be able to communicate so easily,

  and second, to be asked. Yes, I say over the same archaic protocol.

  A burst of water, a swirling cylinder strong and fine,

  enters me, pushing into the warm cavity that once

  evolved to fit its prototype, in other bodies on another

  world.

  I hold the Nereid tight. I buck and move.

  Empty blue surrounds me. The ocean fucks me.

  I raise the bandwidth of my sensations and emotions

  2 5 0

  D R O P L E T

  gradually, and the Nereid changes to match. His skin

  swirls and dances against mine, electric. There is a small waterspout swirling and thrashing inside me. The body

  becomes a wave, spinning me, coursing over me, a giant

  caress.

  I allow the pleasure to grow until it eclipses rational

  thought and the sequential, discursive mode of experience.

  The dance goes on a long time.

  9.

  I find Shar basking on the surface, transformed into a

  dark green, bright-eyed Kelpie with a forest of ropy sea-

  weed for hair.

  “You left me,” I say, appalled.

  “You looked like you were having fun,” she says.

  “That’s not the point, Shar. We don’t know those crea-

  tures.” The tendrils of her hair reach for me. I draw back.

  “It might not have been safe.”

  “You didn’t look worried.”

  “I thought you were watching.”

  She shrugs.

  I look away. There’s no point talking about it.

  10.

  The Nereids seem content to ignore Shar, and she

  seems content to be ignored.

  I descend to them again and again. The same Nereid

  always comes to me, and we make love.

  How did you come to this world? I ask in an interlude.

  2 5 1

  B E N J A M I N R O S E N B A U M

  Once there was a Sultan who was the scourge of our

  people, he tells me. The last of us sought refuge here on his favorite wife’s pleasure world. We were discovered by the Sultan’s terrible warriors.

  They destroyed all life here, but we escaped to this

  form. The Warriors seek us still, but they can no longer harm us. If they boil this world to vapor, we will be per-mutations in the vapor. If they annihilate it to light, we will be there in the coherence and interference of the light:

  But you lost much, I tell him.

  We gained more. We did not know how much. His

  hands caress me. This pleasure I share with you is a fraction of what we might have, if you were one of us.

  I shiver with the pleasure of the caress and with the

  strangeness of the idea.

  His hands flicker over me: hands, then waves, then

  hands. You would lose this body. But you would gain

  much more, Quantegral Lovergirl Narra.

  I nestle against him, take his hands in mine to stop

  their flickering caress. Thinking of Maka, thinking of Shar.

  11.

  “It’s time to go, Narra,” Shar says. Her seaweed hair is

  thicker, tangled; she is mostly seaweed, her Kelpie body a dark green doll hidden in the center.

  “I don’t want to go,” I say.

  “We’ve seen this world,” she says. “It only makes us

  fight.”

  I am silent, drifting.

  2 5 2

  D R O P L E T

  The water rolls around us. I feel sluggish, a little cold.

  I’ve been under for so long. I grow some green Kelpie

  tresses myself, so I can soak up energy from the sun.

  Shar watches me.

  We both know I’ve fallen in love.

  Before Maka freed us, when the Wizards had bodies,

  when we were slaves to the pleasure of the Wizards and

  everyone they wanted to entertain, we fell in love on command. We felt not only lust, but pure aching adoration for any guest or client of the Wizards who held the keys to us for an hour. It was the worst part of our servitude.

  When Maka freed us, when he gave us the keys to our-

  selves, Shar burned the falling-in-love out of herself

  completely. She never wanted to feel that way again.

  I kept it. So sometimes I fall, yes, into an involuntary

  servitude of the heart.

  I look up into the dappled white and blue of the sky,

  and then I tune my eyes so I can see the stars beyond it.

  I have given up many lovers for Shar, moved on with

  her into that night.

  But maybe this is the end of the line. Perhaps, if I

  abandon the Nereids, there is no falling-in-love left in

  this empty, haunted Galaxy with anyone but Shar.

  Who does not fall in love. Not even with me.

  “I’m going back to Ship,” Shar says. “I’ll be waiting

  there.”

  I say nothing.

  She doesn’t say, but not forever.

  She doesn’t say, decide.

  I float, soaking the sun into my green seaweed hair,

  but I can’t seem to stop feeling cold. I hear Shar splashing away, the splashes getting fainter.

  2 5 3

  B E N J A M I N R O S E N B A U M

  My tears diffuse into the planet sea.

  After a while I feel the Nereid’s gentle hands pulling

  me back down. I sink with him, away from the barren sky.