“That’s all right. How are you doing?”

“Not so well. How about you?”

“Terrible,” Swan confessed, feeling guilty; the last thing she wanted was to add to Mqaret’s load somehow. But there was no point in lying at a time like this. And he merely nodded anyway, distracted by his own thoughts. He was just barely there, she saw. The cubes on his desk contained representations of proteins, the bright false colors tangled beyond all hope of untangling. He had been trying to work.

“It must be hard to work,” she said.

“Yes, well.”

After a blank silence, she said, “Do you know what happened to her?”

He shook his head quickly, as if this was an irrelevance. “She was a hundred and ninety-one.”

“I know, but still…”

“Still what? We break, Swan. Sooner or later, at some point we break.”

“I just wondered why.”

“No. There is no why.”

“Or how, then…”

He shook his head again. “It can be anything. In this case, an aneurysm in a crucial part of the brain. But there are so many ways. The amazing thing is that we stay alive in the first place.”

Swan sat on the edge of the desk. “I know. But, so… what will you do now?”

“Work.”

“But you just said…”

He glanced at her from out of his cave. “I didn’t say it wasn’t any use. That wouldn’t be right. First of all, Alex and I had seventy years together. And we met when I was a hundred and thirty. So there’s that. And then also, the work is interesting to me, just as a puzzle. It’s a very big puzzle. Too big, in fact.” And then he stopped and couldn’t go on for a while. Swan put a hand to his shoulder. He put his face in his hands. Swan sat there beside him and kept her mouth shut. He rubbed his eyes hard, held her hand.

“There’ll be no conquering death,” he said at last. “It’s too big. Too much the natural course of things. The second law of thermodynamics, basically. We can only hope to forestall it. Push it back. That should be enough. I don’t know why it isn’t.”