Mindscan

The moonbus's normal run was from LS One, on the Lunar Nearside, to High Eden, then on to Chernyshov Crater, both on Farside. Chernyshov was the site of a SETI facility, where big telescopes scanned the heavens for the radio chatter of alien lifeforms. Immortex leased space at High Eden to the SETI group, and had allowed an auxiliary radio telescope to be built there, giving the SETI researchers an eleven-hundred-kilometer baseline for interferometry. There were always a few SETI researchers at High Eden, and, indeed, two of the moonbus's other passengers today were radio astronomers.

We were getting close to High Eden, according to the status display shown on the monitors that hung from the ceiling. The gray, pockmarked lunar surface continued to streak by beneath us while a song I'd never heard before was playing through the moonbus's speakers. It was rather nice.

Karen, the old lady next to me, looked up and smiled. "What a perfect choice."

"What?" I asked.

"The music. It's from Cats."

"What's that?"

"A musical — from before you were born. Based on T. S. Eliot's Book of Practical Cats."

"Yes?"

"You know where we're going, no?"

"High Eden," I said.

"Yes. But where is it?"

"The far side of the moon."

"True," said Karen. "But more specifically, it's in a crater called Heaviside."

"Yes?" I said.

She sang along: "Up up up past the Russell Hotel/Up up up to the Heaviside layer…"

"What's the Heaviside layer?"

Karen smiled. "Don't feel bad, my dear boy. I imagine most people who saw the musical didn't know what it was, either. In the musical, it was the cat version of heaven. But 'Heaviside layer' is actually an old term for the ionosphere."

I was surprised to hear a little old lady talking about the ionosphere — but, then again, as I had to keep reminding myself, this was the author of DinoWorld. "See," she continued, "when it was discovered that radio transmissions worked over large distances, even over the curve of the Earth's horizon, people were baffled; after all, electromagnetic radiation travels in a straight line. Well, a British physicist named Oliver Heaviside figured there must be a charged layer in the atmosphere that radio signals were bouncing off. And he was right."

"So he got a crater named after him?"

"Two, actually. One here on the moon, and another on Mars. But, see, in a way we're not just going to Heaviside crater. We're going to the best place ever — the ideal retirement community. The perfect heaven for old cats."

"Heaven," I repeated. I felt my spine tingle.

Toronto. August. A warm breeze off the lake.

The play had been terrific — perhaps Widdicombe's best — and the evening was pleasantly warm.

And Karen looked — well, not lovely; that would be going too far. She was a plain thirty-year old woman, but she'd dressed up very nicely. Of course, some people had stared at us, but Karen had just stared right back. In fact, she'd told one gawking man that if he didn't look away, she'd turn on her heat vision.

In any event, I could hardly complain about Karen's appearance. I hadn't been any bargain to look at when I'd been flesh — too skinny, I knew, eyes too close together, ears too large, and…

And…

Funny, that. I only remembered those things because Trista, that cruel girl, had enumerated them in high school, ticking off my faults when I'd asked her out on a date — another of the great moments in Jake's love life. I could remember her words, but…

But I was having a hard time conjuring up a mental picture of my current self. The psychologists at Immortex had advised us to get rid of any photos of our old selves we had on display in our homes, but I hadn't had any. Still, it was days since I'd seen myself in a mirror, and even then — now that I no longer had to shave — they'd only been cursory glances. Could I really be forgetting what I used to look like?

Regardless of appearances, though, it was doubtless easier for an eighty-five-year-old woman to put her hand on the knee of a forty-four-year man than the other way around.

And, to my shock, Karen did just that, back in her hotel suite, after the play, the two of us sitting side by side on the lush, silk-upholstered couch in the living room. She unfolded her hand in her lap, lifting it, moving it slowly, giving me plenty of time to signal with body language or facial expression or words that I didn't want it to complete its obvious trajectory — and she let it come to rest on my right thigh, just above the knee.

I felt the warmth of her touch — not quite 37 degrees Celsius, but certainly more than room temperature.

And I felt the pressure, too: the gentle constricting of her fingers on the shifting plastic over the mechanics and hydraulics of my knee.

The hand of the biological Karen would have-been liver-spotted, with translucent, loose skin, and swollen, arthritic joints.

But this hand…