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claimed to represent a number of investors and pharmaceutical firms that might be interested in further research on the fungus.
    Ms. Griego had turned out to be a very high-powered and intense woman in her early forties, small of frame but with the sort of preternaturally high-riding and large spherical breasts that suggested structural augmentation. During the meeting she had struck Paul as shady somehow, a wheeler-dealer, an operator. Griego had promised to get back to him in a week, but he had heard nothing since. Some sort of response was very much overdue. The agent, for all her signifiers of power and augmentation, had apparently turned out to be much talk and no action.
    Yeah, he thought as he re-folded and re-sleeved the spore print, whatever string of good luck I might once have had, I ran it all out a long time ago. Taking up the bottle and getting out of the car, he wondered why: Why had he been so obstinate? Why couldn’t he have just kept his mouth shut about the tepui and what had happened there—from the very beginning? Why had he thought it so important for the world to know?
    Maybe I’m just self-destructive, he thought. Maybe I’m doomed to crash every merry-go-round I make for myself, just as soon as I get it spinning up to speed.
    As he staggered away from the car, Paul knew his stubbornness had to be more than just that. To bury the truth of what he’d seen at Caracamuni would be to bury the memory of his sister, to bring her disappearance closer to the death he feared that disappearance had already become. To turn ten years’ absence and “might as well be dead” into quite dead indeed. He didn’t want to bury Jacinta when she—or at least some part of her—might still be alive somewhere.
    In his study at home, Paul had a desk drawer filled with memories, all carefully filed away. The specific details of his sister Jacinta’s life and death receded and faded and vanished, yet the emotions surrounding those memories grew always nearer and more powerful. He could not resolve the paradox of that, so he tried to live in it.
    Through the sparse brush he staggered his way toward a sandy scarp he had seen while driving into the desert valley earlier in the evening. Looking about him at night and desolation, Paul realized that he had not done very well trying at living in paradox. Instead, he had tried to fill the empty space of Jacinta’s disappearance with work and study and research.
    In the drawer at home with his memories of his sister there were also clippings and notes about quartz: fused from silicon and oxygen, the two most common elements to be found in the crust of Earth and Earthlike planets; harder than steel, fashioned into weapons for the past fifty thousand years; beloved by ancient Sumerians and Egyptians, Bedouins and crusaders, Oriental craftsmen, electronics manufacturers, shamans and witches, alchemists and New Age spiritualists. He read the notes and sometimes wondered about the source of humanity’s long romance with that rock.
    Though it was certainly not his field, he had for the sake of Jacinta’s memory read with a certain dislocated interest the speculations that the indigenous Tasmanians, extinguished a few hundred years ago, had a Mousterian toolkit—and physiological features too that would later be described in terms of neandertalensis and soloensis .
    In memory of Jacinta he also kept any notes and clippings he found about living fossils, the small groups of plants and animals that are the last living representatives of ancient categories of life, time-frozen creatures still resembling relatives that lived tens or hundreds of millions of years ago, even billions of years ago. Such creatures seemed to him undying memories in the mind of Life.
    He stared again at the plastic sleeve and the folded paper that contained the spore print. Why had he guarded so closely the existence of this living fossil, if it was that? Why had he been so reluctant to release the spore