Badim looks at her for a long time. He is really looking ancient now. She can't remember how he looked when she was a child.

He pats her shoulder, and several times he almost speaks, then stops himself.

"Well," he says finally, "your mother would be proud of you."

After that he can't speak for a while.

Then: "You-you are reminding me of her. It's almost nice to see. But not. Because I don't want you to die too, from trying to do the impossible. Because look-you can't stop other people from pursuing their projects, their dreams. Even if they are crazy dreams, even if they won't work. If people want to do it, they will. Then later their children will suffer, sure. We can point that out, and we will. But it's everyone who has to stop these people, all of us together. It has to be an idea that fails, that no one will act on because no one believes it anymore. That may take a while. And meanwhile, listen to me: kick the world, break your foot. And your feet, my girl, are already broken."

They have to get out of town. Aram arranges that somehow, a flight back to Beijing, where the Chinese are apparently not interested in extraditing Freya and Badim for a crime of this sort. Some are calling it free speech, decrying the sort of state that would prosecute free speech. Let people defend themselves from unarmed assaults, please. Why is it anyone else's business?

Badim shakes his head at this line of reasoning, but says nothing.

Then there begins to appear on the screens, and in the messages coming to them, support for Freya's rash act. Not just one or two messages, but many. A little flood of them in fact. There are a lot of people on Earth who call themselves Earthfirsters, apparently. The emigration of people, often rich people, off Earth and out into the solar system, and then even out of the solar system, has left behind a great deal of resentment, it seems. Only now are these people paying any attention to a crew of lost starfarers.

"So now I'm popular?" Freya says. "They hate me, and I hit someone, and now they like me?"

"Not the same people," Badim points out, frowning. "Or maybe so. I can't tell. But yes. That's Earth for you. That's what I've been trying to tell you. That's how it works here."

"I don't like this place."

Badim shakes his head. "You don't like these people. It's not the same thing. And it's not everybody, either."

Aram, listening to them, says to Freya, "'Ah don't you see, since your mind is the prison, you'll live behind bars everywhere now?'"

"So fuck it, let's move to Mars then," Freya grumbles, remembering the poem, which had pierced her like a sliver.

"Definitely not," Badim says, waving a finger. "They're stuck in their rooms up there almost as much as we were on the ship. That place is not much different from Aurora. The problem is chemical rather than biological, and they may amend the soil there over time, but not soon. Centuries at the least! No. We're just going to have to get used to it here."

But during the brief disaster of their trip away, six more of them have died. One, a youth, Raul, was killed in a fight with some person who did not like the idea of them coming back to Earth. After the memorial services for these six truly sad affairs, Aram tells Badim a story about Shackleton, who got his entire crew safely home from one of his Antarctic misadventures, only to see several get sent to the trenches of the First World War, where they were promptly killed.

Freya is already feeling like she wants to hit someone again, and something in this dismal story makes her furious. "What are we going to do?" she shouts at them. "I can't stand this! Just hanging around, getting picked off one by one-no! No! No! No! We have to do something. I don't know what, but something. Something to change this place-something! So-what are we going to do?"

Badim nods uneasily. His ancient face is creased with an ancient look, a look Freya recognizes from her childhood: the pursed-lipped frown that always came over his face when he was trying to figure out what to do about Devi. This look had always held tucked within it several things: amusement, love, worry, annoyance, pride that he had such a problem to solve. His wife the warrior, on a rampage. Now maybe it's a bit the same, maybe not. And anyway Freya is too angry to feel reassured by this. Now it's her he is looking at, and to her there's nothing amusing about the idea of having in your life a crazy idealistic person you love and must help. Not when she's the person. Anyway it's everybody, lots of the starfarers are like her, it's nothing special. No, fuck it: they need a way to live, something to do, or else they'll never be anything but freaks from space, dying one by one from earthshock. The people from the stations out around Jupiter and Saturn have made up that name for it: they come back from space to Earth to get a dose of bacteria or whatnot, their sabbatical they call it, come back to get sick in order to stay well, but it's a tough thing for them, and they often come down with what they call earthshock, and sometimes die of it. Actually some Saturnine people are offering to help them adjust to their new situation. Along with the Earthfirsters. There's a combination for you, Aram remarks. No, they're freaks! And so only freaks want to help them!

Aram begins to study this sabbatical that the space people take. Everyone living out there in the solar system comes back to Earth for a bit of time every several years, if they are concerned to live a full life span, which of course almost everyone is. This association between returning to Earth and living longer in space is an unexplained correlation, a statistical phenomenon that no one can test out in their own body, as no one can live both ways, and it isn't necessarily true for every individual that staying in space all the time makes them sick. It's just that on average, space people who don't return to Earth every five to ten years, for several months to a couple of years, tend to die quite a bit younger than those who do return. The numbers are contested, but the studies, which Aram thinks are mostly pretty well designed, generally agree that the added life span for off-planet residents taking Earth sabbaticals is something like twenty years, or thirty years. Even now that they are sometimes living up to two centuries, that is a long time. It's such a huge discrepancy that most people adhere to what the data suggest, and go home to Earth on a personal schedule of some kind. Best to pay attention to the data, and not take chances.

Studying all this, Aram points out that the true artificial intelligence is the actuarial long-term study; no human could ever see these things. This particular AI has made a compelling case. Suggestive, plausible, persuasive, probable, compelling: scientists' linguistic scale for evaluating evidence is still the same, Aram says, and it tops out with quite a strong word, really: to compel. People do it because they are compelled to. Reality makes them do it. The urge to live makes them do it.

But there is another effect, almost the opposite of the sabbatical, and just as strong, if not stronger: earthshock. People come back to Earth, perfectly healthy on arrival, and die of something without warning. Sometimes it can be very difficult to figure out what exactly did it, which adds to the fear of the syndrome, of course. Quick decline, earthshock, terrallergenic; these names contain within themselves the terrible news that the phenomenon they refer to is not well understood, an effect with unknown causes. Names like this reveal the ignorance in the name itself: the Big Bang. Cancer. Quick decline. Any disease ending with the suffix -itis or -penia. Et cetera. So many ignorant names.

So, the returned starfarers, having missed their own sabbaticals by some two hundred and fifty years, are now dying of earthshock, it seems. Even when causes can be found for any individual case, it's suspicious that the causes have cropped up so soon after their return. Hard to believe they would have happened in the ship, in hibernation or not. No, something is going on. Something they will either survive or they won't.

Meanwhile, living on this big crazy planet that still scares Freya out of her wits, what to do? What to do? At this point she could not be more miserable.

A week or more of this misery drags on before Badim comes to her and answers her question So what are we going to do? as if only a second has passed since it burst out of her.

"We go to the beach!" he announces cheerily.

"What do you mean?" Freya demands.

For of course there are no beaches. Sea level rose twenty-four meters in the twenty-second and twenty-third centuries of the common era, because of processes they began in the twenty-first century that they couldn't later reverse; and in that rise, all of Earth's beaches drowned. Nothing they have done since to chill Earth's climate has done much to bring sea level back down; that will take a few thousand more years. Yes, they are terraforming Earth now. There's no avoiding it, given the damage that's been done. In this the common era year 2910, they are calling it a five-thousand-year project. Some say longer. It'll be a bit of a race with the Martians, they joke.

But for now it's good-bye to the beaches, and indeed many a celebrated island of yore now lies deep under the waves. An entire world and way of life has disappeared with these fabled places, a lifeway that went right back to the beginning of the species in south and east Africa, where the earliest humans were often intimately involved with the sea. That wet, sandy, tidal, salty, sun-flecked, beautiful beach life: all gone, along with so much else, of course; animals, plants, fish. It's part of the mass extinction event they are still struggling to end, to escape. So much has been lost that will never come back again, that the loss of the joy of the relatively few humans who were lucky enough to live on the strand, who combed the beaches, and fished, and rode the waves, and lay in the sun-that's nothing much to grieve for, given everything else that has been lost, all the suffering, all the hunger, all the death, all the extinctions. Most of the mammal species are gone.

Still, it was a way of life much beloved, and still remembered in art and song, image and story-still legendary, still a lost golden age, vibrating at some level below thought, there in their salty blood and tears, in the long, curled waves of DNA that still break inside them all.

So there are people bringing that back. They are bringing the beaches back.

These people are one wing or element of the Earthfirsters. Tree huggers, space haters, they're a mixed bag. Many of them renounce not just space, but also the many virtual, simulated, and indoor spaces that so many Terrans seem happy to inhabit. To the Earthfirsters these people are in effect occupying spaceships on the land, or have moved inside their screens or their heads. So many people stay indoors all the time, it seems crazy to Freya, even though she herself still cowers in the shelter of built spaces every waking moment. But she has an excuse, she thinks, having been locked in all her life, while the Terrans have no excuse: this place is their home. Their disregard for their natural inheritance, their waste of the gift given them, is part of what causes her to gnash her teeth, and drive herself to windows, even into open doorways, there to stand trembling on the threshold, terrified, willing her body to stop clenching, to step out. Willing herself to change. Finding in that moment of liminal panic that sometimes you can't make yourself do even the things you most want to do, when fear seizes you by the throat.

So, but these beach lovers are apparently like her in this opinion or belief about how to regard Earth. They are kindred souls, perhaps. And they are expressing their love of that lost world of the seashore, by rebuilding it.

Freya listens amazed as Badim and Aram bring into their compound a short old woman, brown-skinned, silver-haired, who describes her people and their project.

"We do a form of landscape restoration called beach return. It's a kind of landscape art, a game, a religion-" She grins and shrugs. "It's whatever. To do it, we've adapted or developed several technologies and practices, starting with mines, rock grinders, barges, pumps, tubing, scoops, bulldozers, earthmovers, all that kind of thing. It's heavy industry at first. A lot of landscape restoration is. We've used this technology all over the world. It involves making arrangements with governments or other landholders, to get the rights to do it. It works best in certain stretches of the new coastlines. They're mostly wastelands now, intertidal zones without being suited for that. Being amphibious"-she grins-"is weird."

They nod. Freya says, "So what do you do, exactly?"

In these new tidal zones, the woman explains, they proceed to make beaches that are as similar to those that went away as can be arranged. "We bring them back, that's all. And we love it. We devote our lives to it. It takes a couple of decades to get a new beach started, so any given beach person usually works on only three or four in a lifetime, depending on how things go. But it's work you can believe in."

"Ah," Freya says.

It's labor intensive, the woman continues. There is more work to do than there are workers. And now, even though the starfarers are controversial and in trouble-or rather, precisely because they are controversial and in trouble-the beach makers are offering to take them on. Meaning the entire complement of them.

"We can all go?" Freya says. "We can stay together?"

"Of course," the woman says. "There are about a hundred thousand of us, and we send out working teams to various stretches of coastline. Each project needs about three or four thousand people during the most intensive phases. Some people move on when their part of a project is done, so the life can be a bit nomadic. Although some of them stick to the beaches they've made."

"So you would take us in," Badim says.

"Yes. I'm here to make that offer. We keep our whole thing a bit under the radar, you have to understand. It's best to avoid political complications as much as possible. So we don't go out of our way to publicize our projects. Our deals are discreet. We try to stay out of the news. I bet you can see why!"

She laughs as Aram and Badim and Freya all nod.

"Look," she says, "there's a political element to all this, which you need to understand. We don't like the space cadets. In fact a lot of us hate them. This idea of theirs that Earth is humanity's cradle is part of what trashed the Earth in the first place. Now there are many people on Earth who feel like it's our job to make that right. It'll be our job for generations to come. And now we've seen that you're part of the damage they've done. It took us a while to get that, but when you punched that guy it became very obvious." She laughs at the look on Freya's face. "But look, it's all right! We've taken in quite a few people who got in trouble by resisting that kind of shit one way or another. So, adding five hundred lost souls to one of our teams won't be any big deal. You'll blend in, and you can keep your heads down, do your work, and make your contribution. We can use the help, and you'll have a way to go forward."

Freya tries to take all this in and comprehend it. Beach building? Landscape restoration? Can it be? Would they like it?

Freya says, "Badim, will I like this?"

Badim smiles his little smile. "Yes, I think you will."

The others are not so sure. After the woman leaves, there is a long discussion, and at a certain point Freya is asked to go out with an exploratory group and take a look at one of these projects and see what she thinks.

This will of course mean going outdoors.

Freya gulps.

"Yes," she says. "Of course."

Again they fly. This time it seems their Chinese hosts might be happy to see them go. More rooms and tunnels, planes and trams, trains and cars. Travel on Earth is not dissimilar to moving around in the spokes, although the g stays constant. They keep a low profile. Herded from one room to the next. Somewhere on Earth you go indoors, and move around in differently shaped rooms, which either move or don't, and the next time you go outdoors (if you do!) you are on the other side of the planet. This is so strange. Looking out of a plane window at the ocean planet below, under its layer of clouds, Freya resolves to master her fear, to make her body obey her will. She is tired of being afraid. Sometimes, you get sick of yourself, you change.

A west-facing coast somewhere. They tell her where and she promptly forgets. She hasn't heard of it before. Temperate latitude, Mediterranean climate. Yellow sandstone bluffs jump right out of the white-edged sea. Used to be beaches at the foot of these bluffs, they are told, beaches so wide they held car races on the flat wet sand, back when cars were first invented. It was a morning's walk from bluff to water, their guide says, and all flat sand. Laying it on a bit thick. Point of stories however being that there is a lot of sand still out there in the shallows. Some of it has been swept south by currents into a giant underwater canyon that runs from just offshore to the edge of the continental shelf, but even that canyon bottom is a now a kind of underwater river of sand flowing down toward the abyssal plain, a river of sand that can be vacuumed up in tubes onto barges, barged over to the land, brought into the estuaries of the little rivers that break the long curving line of bluffs, and put there. Old sand for new beaches, located right at the new tideline, up in the estuaries. They're also trucking in giant granite boulders from inland, some to drop offshore and make reefs, others to drop at the foot of the bluffs to establish a new strand on, others to grind down into new sand, gravel, shingle, cobble-whatever type of rock that used to be there on the shore. It takes certain mixes of minerals to make a beach that will last, to make it nice. Also certain kinds of reefs offshore. Millions of tons of sand and rock have to be moved and installed. There is so much their guides want to tell them, these guides all sun-browned, hair crisped by sun and salt, eyes aglow.

The starfarers are tired by their journey-jet-lagged, they have been taught to call it-out of synch with the planet's rotation, diurnal rhythm, circadian rhythm-an odd malady that they are learning to recognize. After a first tour of this coastline, driven around in a car on roads along the top of the bluff, then around the shores of the estuary, with many stops to get out and look (but Freya does not get out), they are taken to an inn on the bluff's edge. The inn seems to be a modest little conference center, with bungalows around a main building. Freya gets out when the car is parked inside a garage, and makes her way up to the lobby, then, in a controlled dash under a walkway, hustles to her assigned bungalow, next to the one occupied by Badim and Aram. Once she is settled, she looks out her open doorway to see the two old men stretched out on reclining chairs, in the shade of an overhang extending from their bungalow, looking out at the ocean. The overhang is called a ramada, they have been told.

Badim notices her and says, "Freya my dear, come on out and join us! Give it a try!"

"I will in a bit," she replies irritably. "I'm unpacking."

From the bluff they can see out over the ocean for a long way. A flat blue plate of stunning size, wrinkled with white light. Badim and Aram talk again about optical phenomena. They are aficionados at this point, and are hoping to see the green flash at sunset. Apparently Earth's gravity, or atmosphere, they argue about which, bends the light from the sun in such a way that just before it dips under the horizon and disappears, the Earth is actually physically between the observer and the sun, but the sunlight is curving around the globe because of the atmosphere, or gravity, and as blue light curves more than red light, this curve around the Earth splits the light as if passing it through a prism, and this means that the last visible point of sunlight turns, not blue, which would be too much of a bend and too much like the sky's color, but green, said to be a pure brilliant emerald green. "This we have to see!" Aram declares.

Badim agrees. "Strange to be as old as we are, and see it for the first time." He turns and calls to Freya. "Girl, come see this green flash that may occur!"

"You're not that old," she says to him. "You're like the hundredth-oldest person in the ship."

"Well, even that would be old, but in fact I think I'm down to about fifteenth now. But let's stay focused on the sunset. I'm told when the sun is three-quarters gone, you can look at it without damaging your eyes. Not for long, mind you, but long enough to see the green flash when it comes."

She stands just inside her big ocean-facing double doorway and looks out, clenching her fists at her sides. The estuary is just visible beyond the point of the bluff to the left, a wave-creased bay. Where there used to be a beach at the river mouth, stretching between two points of bluff, there is now a white line of broken surf. They are building their beach out from the bluffs on each side, on top of the drowned one.

Waves slide in inexorably from the west, out of the slant sun mirrorflaking the ocean's steely surface. Low but distinct lines of waves, visible as changes in the blue of the water, always approaching land. A strange thing to see. Out on the horizon is the faint gray bump of an island, poking over the clean line where sky meets ocean: light blue over dark blue, everything steely and dark in the late afternoon. Mild salty onshore breeze pouring in her doorway, seagulls planing by at eye level, their heads tilted down and off to the side. A line of pelicans below them passes north to south, a sudden vision out of the Jurassic, black silhouettes against the sun's glare, slow flap of wings, though mostly they glide. The panic rises in Freya again, like a tide following its own mysterious pulls. She wants so badly to walk out into the open air, under the sky, but a clutch squeezes her heart, there's nothing she can do about it, she can't move. Even joining Badim and Aram under their ramada is too much for her. Nothing for it but go inside and try again later.

Even though it's late, her hosts call her room, they want to show her more of how their project works, and as they will stay in the cab of a big earthmover of some kind, she figures she can just handle it. Jet lag has her quivering.

Out they go, room to room to cab. The earthmover moves sand from the giant piles of it in their receiving area, out onto the strand itself. In the horizontal light of late day they rumble and bounce down a long ramp to the new beach, now covered with vehicle tracks. Past smaller vehicles of various kinds, some plowing smaller and smaller piles of sand into flat surfaces, or pushing up dunes at the back of the beach. The important thing is to accept the new sea level and work with it, the people operating the earthmover tell her; it won't go back down for centuries at best, and may never recede at all. But they are confident it won't go any higher either; all the ice in the world that is likely to melt has already melted. There's still a considerable ice cap in eastern Antarctica, but with temperatures stabilized at last, that one is likely to stay there. If not, well, too bad! More beaches to build!

For now, this is sea level. Tides here slosh up and down a vertical distance that averages three meters, more in the neap tides when the moon is closest to Earth. Tides really are a matter of tidal attraction between Earth and Luna. Tug of gravity, spooky action at a distance. Source of a great deal of life on this planet, possibly even the appearance of life, some say.

They are making sure the high-tide mark is well below most of their new strand, which will be one hundred meters wide at least. Behind the strand they are building dunes, and planting and introducing all the dune life. And during low tides, the wet strand that is temporarily exposed is made mostly of sand, with only some rocky areas under points in the bluff, for tide pools and the like. All these parameters and elements are designed, engineered, built, monitored. Freya sees it: this beach is their artwork. These people are artists. They have an art they love. They might kill her with talking about it, they love it so much.

Often in the river mouths that break the line of bluffs along this coastline, they tell her, the risen ocean has crashed right into houses, streets, lawns, parks, and all the rest of the previous civilization, tearing them away, carrying them off. So one of the first beach-building tasks has been to demolish and remove what was drowned, and this has had to be done offshore to quite a depth, or else the whole coastline would remain too dangerous. Here they finished that work some years before, and now, as Freya can see, they have deposited much of the sand for the new beach. About half the sand has been salvaged out of the shallows offshore and out of the underwater canyon, sucked up to barges, deposited where they want it. The rest has been manufactured on the bluffs. It gets distributed according to protocols that are always evolving as they study the waves in this region of the coast, and the river patterns of this estuary. And as they learn more about beaches generally, all over the world.

Ah, she says.

This beach is stabilized under the north bluff, and the south one is almost finished too. The starfarers can settle in and help, learn more about the process, get to know the people who do the work. They can see if they like it. As there are scores of such teams around the world, it seems very possible they could simply melt into the beach people, and become after that one little forgotten clump among Earth's billions.

Freya nods. "It sounds good."

She can go swimming off this beach if she wants, they say, it's safe now, lots of the young beach people are doing it already. Does she know how to swim?

"Yes, I do," she says. "I swam in Long Pond quite a lot."

Very good, very good. She'll have to try it. Water temperature here is good, just a little cool, warms up as you swim in it. She'll find that the ocean's salt water gives one quite a lift. It's fun to be more buoyant. Waves tomorrow will be small, but some people will be bodysurfing anyway. Some people you just can't keep out of the water, waves or no waves.

"Lovely," she says, feeling the thrill of fear shoot down her spine and out her arms and legs. Even her numb feet can feel a little tingle of dread.

Back at her bungalow, feeling exhausted, she finds Badim and Aram still out under their ramada, arguing about the sunset, which happened just a few minutes before. They either saw the green flash or not. Their bickering is very relaxed, and she can tell that they like having a problem that they can't resolve right away. Something to chew over. Two old men bickering by the seaside.

They welcome her back. The western sky is a deep, dark, transparent blue, over a sea that now seems lighter than the sky, a kind of blackish silver, more than ever lined by the ever-oncoming waves. There is a vastness to the scene that can't be taken in. Freya stands in her doorway watching, feeling the wind push onshore. The old men leave her alone.

"I've done a new translation of that Cavafy poem," Aram says to Badim. "The end, anyway. Listen to this: "There's no new world, my friend, no New seas, no other planets, nowhere to flee- You're tied in a knot you can never undo When you realize Earth is a starship too."

"Ahh," Badim exclaims, as if hearing a pun. "Very nice. I like how that takes it away from being something you've done to yourself. It's more just the way things are."

"Yes," Aram says pensively.

Then after a while Badim chuckles and lightly slaps his friend on the thigh, points out at the twilight sky, a pure indigo unlike anything they have ever seen. "But hey-pretty damn big starship!"

"It is," Aram admits. "But, does size matter? Is that it?"

"I think maybe so!" Badim says. "That makes it robust, eh? Big enough to be robust. And I'm beginning to think it's robustness that is the thing we want."

"Maybe so. You are getting more robust every day, I notice."

"Well, the food here is awfully good, you have to admit."

Freya leaves the two old friends to their banter, goes into her bedroom, lies down on her bed.

That night the sea breeze pours through her room and over her, she can smell the salt and feel it, until just before dawn, when the air goes still. All night she fails to sleep; she is quivering slightly, or the room is quivering under her. Her numb feet tingle a little, her stomach clenches. She feels her fear like a weight on her chest. It's hard to breathe, and she tries to breathe deeper, slower. From time to time she stirs from a salty trance that was not quite sleep.

When the sky lightens outside her west window, illuminating the square of curtains, she gets up and goes to the bathroom, comes back out, paces around, sits on her bed, holds her head in her hands. She stands and goes to the window and looks out.

Sunrise blasts the ocean with its light. Dawn on Earth. Aurora was the goddess of dawn; this is the thing itself.

She opens the door to her bungalow, feels the air, now pushing offshore. The breeze is just slightly offshore now. It's like the earth is breathing: in by night, out by day. It was like that in the Fetch. It's already warm; it's going to be a hot day. The offshore push of air is dry.

She washes her face at the bathroom sink, stares at her drawn face in the mirror. She's a middle-aged woman now, the years have flown by; she hardly remembers what she used to look like. She pulls on shorts and a shirt, pulls on her helper boots, grabs up one of the bungalow's big bathroom towels, puts on a hat.

"Fuck this," she declares, and walks outside.

Big blue sky. Warm dry air, gusting gently offshore. In the shade of the bluff, down to the beach. Staggering down blindly, gaze fixed on her dead feet, moaning as she stumps down, tears and snot running down her face. She can barely see. She feels crazy, stupid, but most of all, scared. Just scared.

Down on the beach it seems a bit smaller, more like a biome. A very big biome, but not so much bigger as to cause her to faint outright. She is hyperventilating, sweating, gasping a little, sick to her stomach, staggering still on her weird boots. She has a big hat on, sunglasses on, she keeps her head down.

Onto the sand of the dunes at the bottom of the bluff. The sand sinks under her boots a centimeter or three with each step. This is enough to make walking tricky, given her feet. The sand trends slightly up as she walks toward the water, until she gets to a kind of low ridge, beyond which the sand falls away in a clean sweep, down into the foaming edge of the ocean. Broken waves are rolling up at her across this bubbling tilted expanse, the water clear over the wet gray-brown sand under it. This tilted wet verge is fringed with lengths of white foam. It's loud here with the sound of breaking waves, most of which break about a hundred meters offshore, she guesses, then rumble in, white and foaming at the rounded edge of an incoming layer that is distinctly higher than what it rolls over, the white edge bouncing, hissing, a mass of bubbles in a line, moving in across the shallows, hitting other lines moving outward.

At the high-tide line stretch masses of blackened seaweed, also long lines of dull brown-green seaweed, with dimpled long wide leaves, and bulbs marking the lines. Kelp, she thinks. She goes to a line and sits down hard in the sand next to it. Keeps her head down, keeps breathing in a steady deep rhythm, tries to quell the nausea, halt the spinning of the world around her. Just a big biome! Hold it together! The kelp in her fingers feels like a hardened gel, just a little slimy. There is sand stuck to it. The individual grains of sand look not quite round: little beveled boulders, about fifteen or twenty stuck to the pad of her forefinger. She can see them best when she holds them about six centimeters in front of her nose. There are black flecks of something like mica stuck there too, much smaller than the blond sand grains. These black flecks mix with the sand grains, and where the broken waves are running whitely up and down the strand, some twenty meters from where she sits, there are delta patterns sluicing back down to the broken water, delta patterns of black in blond, crosshatched chevrons all pointed out to sea. It's loud with the sound of breaking waves.

The sun comes up over the bluff behind her, and she feels the radiation on the back of her neck like the blast from a fire. It is indeed the blast from a fire. Her stomach clenches again. She digs in her bag past the bath towel, and pulls out a canister of sunscreen, shoots the spray on the back of her neck. It smells funny. Her hands are shaking, she feels sick. The smell of sunscreen makes it worse, she feels on the edge of vomiting. It's good she doesn't have to stand now, doesn't have to go anywhere. Keep her head down, watch the sand grains glowing transparently on her translucent fingertip. Try not to throw up. God, what a lot of light. She has to clamp her teeth together to keep them from chattering, to keep the bile down.

"Fuck this!" she says again through clenched teeth. "Get a grip!"

"Let me take you to the beach!

Na na na na na na na na na-na!

Let me take you to the beach!