I lived for thirty years without seeing Arkady.

We did not keep in touch.

I moved on. I grieved, then found a house beyond the city, bought it outright and made a new life. I never remarried and I did not have a third child, but I learned not to dwell on the past. When I was ready, I bought a cemetery plot near where my husband and I had lived before Mendeleev-1 and buried three empty caskets, leaving space for one more. The cemetery gave me a discount on account of my "background."

The people on Earth were like that: treating us kindly but with a certain distance. They referred to us as the Vectoriens.

One day, a young woman arrived at my house.

She asked my name, and when I gave it said she had come on behalf of someone asking for my presence. "An elderly man," she said, "who doesn't speak."

I knew at once.

Arkady was a patient in a decrepit hospital in Costa Rica, located on the outskirts of San Jose. The staff were kind, but it was clear the institution lacked funding, and provided care mainly for the poor. When I entered his room I barely knew him: still a large man, but now bloated and flaccid, bald, with glassy skin and languid motions, even of the face, he did not appear to acknowledge my presence. It was only when I bent forward over him that a brightness came over his eyes!—but briefly, like the final flicker of a dying flame, followed by a diminishment to darkness.

I don't know what I felt toward him.

"He's a Vectorien," a nurse told me outside his room. "It's a miracle he's lasted this long. We used to see a lot of them after they came back, the ones who couldn't adjust to the world. Crime, drugs, any form of self-destruction. But that was in the months and years after. Here we have decades. I can't imagine what he's been doing all this time." She put her hand on my arm. "But all of a sudden he remembered you, I guess. It's good for him to have a visitor."

I stepped away from her. "Do you know where I can find a grocery store. Maybe something with household goods?"

"There's a plaza nearby. What is it that—"

I was already outside.

In the heat.

I bought what I needed and returned, as I had promised him.

I asked the nurse for a kettle.

When the water boiled, I steeped a tea and poured one cup. Then I asked the nurse for privacy. When she had gone, I added the other ingredient, and gave the tea to Arkady.

He took it in his large, calloused hands and tried to drink.

I helped him.

When he had finished, I sat beside him and held his hand, watching the remnants of his life evaporate, peacefully, like summer rain from asphalt.

He died without a gasp.