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It was Ceno’s fault, in the end, that everything else occurred as it did It took Cassian a long tied in her daughter, why Ceno’s sapphire almost never downloaded into the alcove But when it did, the copy of Elefsis she had e like the other children’s copies It grew and torqued andothers, at a rate totally incommensurate with Ceno’s actual activity, which nor her fatty sallass habitats so she could watch the bears in the snow She had stopped playing with her sisters or pestering her brothers entirely, except for dinnertimes and holidays Ceno mainly sat quite still and stared off into the distance

Ceno, very siht, while she dreaolia had coreening her walls with a forest like those he relowing eyes, Ceno fitted her little sapphire into the notch in the base of her skull that let it talk to her feedware The chain of her pendant dangled silken down her spine She liked the little click-clench noise it made, and while the constellations spilled their , she flicked it in and out, in and out Click, clench, click, clench She listened to her brother Akan sleeping in the next roo in his dreams And she fell asleep herself with the jewel still notched into her skull

Most wealthy children had access to a private/public playspace through their feedware and monocles in those days, custoames or content becareater network or keep to the a Tokyo-After-the-Zo frame for a couple of months now, and new scenarios, zo celebrities downloaded into his ware every week Saru was deeply involved in a 18th century Viennese melodraround by rival factions, and even as Ceno drifted to sleep the pistol-wielding Princess of Albania was pledging her love and loyalty to his ragged band and, naturally, Saru personally Occasionally, Akan crashed his brother’s well-dressed intrigues with hatch-coded patches of zona flipped between a Venetian-flavored Undersea Court frame and a Desert Race wherein she had just about overtaken a player froiraffe, who spat violet-gold exhaust behind it into the face of a pair of highly-ht in a jungle frae blue carnivorous flowers

Most everyone lived twice in those days They echoed their own steps They took one step in the real world and one in their space They saw double, through eyes and through h worlds like veils No one only ate dinner They ate dinner and surfed a bronze gravitational surge through a tide of stars They ate dinner and made love to men and women they would never meet and did not want to They ate dinner here and ate dinner there—and it was there they chose to taste the food, because in that other place you could eat clouds or unicorn cutlets or your ue when you tasted it for the first time

Ceno lived twice, too Most of the time when she ate she tasted her aunt’s bistecca froarden

But she had never cared for the pre-set fras loved Ceno liked to pool her extensions and add-ons and build things herself She didn’t particularly want to see Tokyo shops overturned by rotting schoolgirls, nor did she want to race anyone—Ceno didn’t like to compete It hurt her stomach She certainly had no interest in the Princess of Albania or a tigery paramour And when new fames came up each month, she paid attention, but e for her blank frah she didn’t know it, that blankness cost her mother more than all of the other children’s spaces combined A truly customizable space,without lied

When Ceno woke in theand booted up her space, she frowned at the half-finished Neptunian landscape she had been working on Ceno was eleven years old She knew very well that Neptune was a hostile blue ball of freezing gas and stor across ined before Saru had told her the truth Half-underwater, half-ruined, half-perpetual starlight and the ht of twenty-three moons But she found it so hard to remember what she had dreamed of before Saru had ruined it for her So there was the whipped crea in the sky, and blue mists wrapped the black columns of her ruins When Ceno made Neptunians, she instructed them all not to be silly or childish, but very serious, and some of them she put in the ocean and made them half-otter or half-orca or half-walrus Some of them she put on the land, and o She liked things that were half one thing and half another Today, Ceno had planned to invent sea ny history concerning a ith the walruses, who liked to eat nymph But the nymphs were not blaational equip cities, and that could not be borne

But when she cli and chi in the storm-wind, Ceno saw someone new Soeneral nor a nereid (The nereids had been an early atteone quite right Ceno had let theoes and bid the surprisingoff ballads they had written while Ceno had been away)

A dorlass walnut that had fallen fro trees The sort of mouse that overran Shire

toko in the brief spring and su all manner of bears and wolves and foxes to spend their days pouncing on the poor creatures and gobbling them up Ceno had always felt terribly sorry for them This dormouse stood nearly as tall as Ceno herself, and its body shone all over sapphire, deep blue crystal, fro nose to its fluffy fur tipped in turquoise ice It was the exact color of Ceno’s gem

“Hello,” said Ceno

The dorh thinking very hard about blinking Then it went back to gnawing on the walnut

“Are you a present froly in not interfering with a child’s play “Or from Koetoi?” Koe was nicest to her, the one most likely to send her a present like this If it had been a zo was behind it

The dor and very serious think about it, lifted its hind leg and scratched behind its round ear in that rapid-fire way mice have

“Well, I didn’t make you I didn’t say you could be here”