She still believed that she could come to terms with thatloss, so long as she had something to weigh against it. Being asingleton meant accepting that every decision had its cost, but onceyou understood that this state of affairs was a hard-won prize, not aplight to rail against, it gave some dignity to all but the mostfoolish choices.

If the Mimosans turned her down, though? Maybe there wassomething daring and romantic in the mere act of traveling hundreds oflight-years, inhabiting the body of a vacuum-dwelling insect, andalienating herself from the world where she belonged, all in the hopeof seeing her ideas tested as rapidly as possible. But for how longwould she be able to take comfort from the sheer audacity of what she’ddone, once that hope had come to nothing?

She curled into a ball and tried to weep. She could notshed tears, and the sobs rebounding against her membrance-sealed mouthwere like the drone of a mosquito. But the shuddering as she worked hervestigial lungs still provided some sense of release. She had notentirely erased the map of her Earthly body from her mind; too much ofthe way she experienced emotions was bound up in its specific form. Soeverything she’d amputated lingered as a kind of phantom — nowhere nearas convincing as a true simulation, but still compelling enough to makea difference.

When she was spent, Cass stretched out her limbs anddrifted over the meadow like a dandelion seed, as calm and lucid asshe’d been at any time since her arrival.

She knew what she knew about Quantum Graph Theory,backward. Whatever insights she was capable of extracting from thatbody of knowledge, she’d extracted long ago. But if the Mimosans hadfound a question she couldn’t answer, a doubt she couldn’t assuage,that in itself would be a chance to learn something more.