And so it was an easy enough hike that day, and a sort of vacation: a chance to let his mind, unshackled by the Internet, roam wherever it willed. Mostly he thought about the reactions he had been having to the discovery that Zula was still alive. For during the last several days he had, as it were, been trying the idea that she was dead on for size, and trying to get his head around what that meant. Certainly he was no stranger to people he knew dying. He had reached the age where he had to attend a couple of contemporaries’ funerals a year, and even had a special suit and pair of shoes that he kept handy for such events. But all deaths were as different as the persons who had died. Each death meant that a particular set of ideas and perceptions and reactions was gone from the world, apparently forever, and served as a reminder to Richard that one day his ideas and perceptions and reactions would be gone too. It was never good. But it seemed particularly unfair in the case of Zula. If he was now trading his death for hers, well, that was much better overall, and a trade that—as Jones knew perfectly well—he would gladly accept.