There was more known, but always more to be known. Yes, she thought, and the unknown can masquerade as the… — Gregory Benford

“Quite patently artificial,” she said.

“Looks like it to me, and I’m just a physicist.”

“I thought you were an engineer-pilot.”

“Hey, physicists can do anything.”

“Um. So they think. But not biology…”

Definitions, her grandmother once said, had to be like a fat man’s belt—big enough to cover the subject but elastic enough to allow for change.

“Why paired?” Viktor asked. “Have two sexes?”

“Hard to imagine how electromagnetic creatures could,” Mary Kay said.

Viktor grinned. “Lack of imagination is not an argument. Especially lately.”