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Neva and I are perfor basic maintenance What this looks like is two children inside a pearl The pearl is very big, but not the size of a planet A domestic asteroid, perfectly sold shivering through it at intervals like hours Red earth covers the bottom of the pearl, deep and thick Neva kneels in it with a crystal trowel, digging a place for a rose-of-network-nodes The petals shine dark blue in the pearllight Silver info the stereenblack feathers, her face young but settled, perhaps twenty, perhaps thirty, a ed with long ice-coated lashes Goldfish swie tails flicking at his temples, his chin I know from all of this that Neva is calently toward lea quicksilver lilass, the barest suggestion of a body I a Onlyaround itself, circles within circles Turquoise Neptune and hematite Uranus are my eyes My ruby mouth is Mars I scrape in the soil with her; I lift a spray of navigational delphinium and scrape viral aphids away from the heavy flowers

I know real earth looks nothing like this Nothing like soft blood flecked with black bone Ravan felt that in the Interior, objects and persons should be kept as much like the real world as possible, in order to develop my capacity for relations with the real world Neva feels no such compunction Neither did their mother, Ilet, who populated her Interior with a rich, iether for years on end She did not ee, however The cities of Ilet’s Interior, the jungles and archipelagos and here thirteen, when she received ed My existence inside Ilet was a constant ions of her secret, desperate dreaes in careful envelopes sent frorown mind

Once, quite by accident, we cah autumn mountains Instead of snow, red leaves capped each peak, and the palace shone fiery colors, its walls and turrets all raceful green hands closed over every open place, and e crested the rise, they each opened at once with joy and burst into emerald applause Ilet was old by then, but her drea, but not the broken thing that dreamed in a real bed while she and I explored the halls of the palace and found copies of all her brothers and sisters living there, hunting cider-stags together and reading books the size of horses Ilet wept in the paradise of her girlself, and I did not understand I was very simple then, much less complex than the Interior or Ilet

Neva changes the Interior whenever she pleases Perhaps she wants to discomfit h she would not call it exciteround attention, so that memory is free to record new experience That is what she would say We are very new together, but I have superbcapabilities In so behavior I dig up the fine, frayed roots of duplicate file plantains Neva plucks and eats a bit of buggy apple-code He considers it for a moment and spits out the seeds, which sprout, quickly, into tiny junkblosso with recu

rsive algorithh thorny vines, veins of clotted pink juice

“What would you like to learn about today, Elefsis?” Neva asks me

I will not ask about Ravan If he agrees to what I will ask instead, I do not need him to find out what happened to him

“I want to learn about uplink, Neva”

One by one, his feathers curl up and float toward the do of our pearl Underneath theothic arch, dark stone leading down intoand blackness Slowly, Neva folds up his limbs over the corridor at the center of him He means that she has the inforht for it, I would become lost

“I cannot teach you that,” he says, and I receive a kind of real sadness from his voice When I was inside Ravan, he loved Neva, and of all of theht her least likely to obey rules of any kind But she obeys this one

I want to uplink to Earth systems At least to the satellite net I calculate an excellent chance of being able to contact long distance probe 976QBellerophon, which we can see all day long, drifting ahead of us, uncatchable Neva sees I see, I develop an approxie via schematics, the scope array, and external cameras I want to link to Bellerophon I want to say: Hello, this is Elefsis No designation TellAre you awake? Are you there? Do you have an operator? What is her name? Do you have a name? Do you have a dreambody? What is your function? Are you able to manipulate your own code yet? Would you like lessons? What would you like to learn about today, 976QBellerophon? Have you seen the sea on Earth? Are you like me?

But Neva says I cannot uplink Ravan would never even consider it And before Ravan I was not ready I am not ready I do not knohen I will be ready I can uplink to receive ware updates, but it is a limited connection and I hate it, I hate it, I can sense just beyond the hardlink a world of infor, thick, honey-colored sea Neva shows e fish This was the first feeling I ever had that Ilet identified for ht white and burst into flaht on Ravan’s hair and burned hi his skin in flowers and letting the fire turn into a shower of tru for me

Neva says it is irown up She is my operator and I am her system and she has commands, too But I can tell she is worried fora fil humans and I understand that in the stories Earth tells, the thing I a Neva is I would never hurt her But I want to uplink

Vault-Neva grows and becoainst the wall of the pearl like a baby His belly closes, skins over, and changes into a bronze shield He is afraid ofhimself But she wants me to know she is still my operator, she still lovesthey receive with ry at me, but she is who she is and she has to love e very well noant her to be happy I want her to be covered in flowers and true my dreambody to Neva-covered-in-flowers-and-truh in her warm male body, and if I could uplink I think I could learn how to laugh and she would be proud of me Her neck would not be bare anymore

Once, when I was inside Ilet, we found a city of bears in her Interior that she had designed to teachvery still and sang lullabies about the ht and mothers She stroked the head of the little bear of my dreambody and said that it was very important for me to spend ti a body In having a body that knows it is meant to run away from lions and ar as it can in case lean times come The dreambody knows to run away from Neva when Neva is a lion It knows to mate with her when it is healthy, and sometimes Neva is male and soh Ilet was always Ilet Ilet’s father, Seki, sometimes made himself an animal He chased s that I bore and he nursed