"This is it!" Rainzi said cheerfully. "Barring untimelysupernovae, we’ll finally get to see your graph complete." The softwareportrayed him with a jet pack, to rationalize his ability to follow heruneven progress up the wall without touching anything.

Cass replied stoically, "I’ll believe it when ithappens." In fact, from the moment Ilene had scheduled the run, twelvehours before, Cass had felt insanely confident that no more hurdlesremained. Eight of the fourteen previous targets had been achieved atthe first attempt, making the prospect of one more tantalizinglyplausible. But she was reluctant to admit to taking anything forgranted, and if something did go wrong it would be easier to swallowher disappointment if she’d been pretending from the start that herexpectations had always been suitably modest.

Rainzi didn’t argue, but he ignored her feignedpessimism. He said, "I have a proposition for you. A new experience youmight like to try, to celebrate the occasion. I suspect it will beagainst all your high-minded principles, but I honestly believe you’denjoy it. Will you hear me out?"

He wore a look of such deadpan innocence that Cass feltsure he knew exactly how this sounded in translation. If that washis meaning, the idea wasn’t entirely absurd, or unwelcome. She’d grownfond of Rainzi, and if he’d never been quite as solicitous or as eagerto understand her as Darsono, the truth was, that made him moreintriguing. If they could find enough common ground to become lovers,it might be a fitting way to bid Mimosa farewell: sweeping away themutually distorted views they had of each other. To remain loyal to theideals of embodiment, here, she’d been forced to adopt a kind ofasceticism, but that was definitely not a quality to which she’d everaspired, let alone one for which she hoped to be remembered.