She said, "No. I’m not ready."

Yann looked alarmed, but only for a moment. Casssuspected that he’d just conferred privately with someone better ableto guess what she had in mind. Though the Mimosans didn’t think anymore rapidly than she did — running on Qusps themselves, they faced thesame computing bottlenecks — they could communicate with each otheraboutfive times faster than her own form of speech allowed. That onlyannoyed her when they used it to talk about her behind her back.

She added dryly, "Tell Rainzi I’ve changed my mind."

Yann smiled, clearly delighted, and then his icon wasinstantly replaced by Rainzi’s. Fair enough: with the countdownproceeding, the Mimosans had better things to do than fake inertia forits own sake.

Rainzi’s response was more cautious than Yann’s. "Are youcertain you want to do this? After everything you told me?"

"I’m the quintessential singleton," Cass replied. "Iweigh up all my choices very carefully."

There was no time to spell out in glacial wordseverything she was feeling, everything that had swayed her. Part of itwas the same sense of ownership that had brought her all this distancein the first place: justifiably or not, she didn’t want the Mimosans tohave a better view than she did of the thing they were about to createtogether. There was the same longing for immediacy, too: she wouldnever see, or touch, any graph as it really was, but to remain lockedin a body that could only perceive a fraction of the data, millisecondsafter the fact, would leave her feeling almost as detached from theevent, now, as if she’d stayed on Earth, waiting for the centuries-oldnews of an experiment conducted light-years away. Every viewpoint was acompromise, but she had to be as close as she could get.