“Let me tell you something...” Marco opened his hands over the table he and Thomas were sitting at. “Thomas, when you think of women, do not think of them as things to be conquered.”

Thomas looked up at him soberly.

His words hard won, Marco smiled faintly. “a woman is not a mountain. People climb mountains. Mountains stop, move, and because wind, rain, fire, death, destruction, life, and growth. Women do these things. but people do not conquer women. Women are stronger than mountains.”

Thomas stirred his coffee and looked into its inky blackness; easier than looking into the inky black of Marco's beard.

“what makes women stronger than mountains?” he looked at Thomas carefully. Thomas looked up, noting the pointed query.

“Is it that they are as men?”

Marco put a finger to his temple in thought. “that word has confused people for a long time. Women are not as men, some would say for they are men; in terms of man as a species.” Marco shook his head. “No, no, 1000 times no. Humanity is not a species. Humanity is an amalgam of a million things, 100 million, billions even, individual and separate entities. The hereditary nature of humanity does not stop each human being different and unique. We are, in a sense, a species of species.”

My phone dinged, and both men looked up to the phone on the cafe table. Thomas said, “Is that her?”

I picked up my phone with my frustratingly small fingers and unlocked it to read the message.

“Yes,” I said, “she's just about here. 2 minutes.”

Marco brushed the front of his sweater with his hands. His frustratingly large hands. “In essential substance Thomas, men are nothing but shit, but shit made of the most fine and pure gold and silver and precious stones; And so are women. Come, let us go.”

I grabbed my backpack and Thomas heaved his satchel over his shoulder, and we led the way out of the cafe by the sea. Marco's friend, Abigail, had a truck that she used at her farm with her Russian family. She had agreed to pick us up and take us some distance away to the rock by the sea that the locals knew as Morro Rock. Abigail wasn't from here either.

I twiddled my thumbs as the truck hummed and rocked on the uneasy road. I watched the simple keys sway from their spot on the dash, and Abigail's fingers drumming on the surface of the frayed and chipped wheel. The clouds rolled and tumbled about the edges of my window, and small blue and yellow houses, weathered by salt and time, whirred like a broken tape. The strobing of the sun through the trees made me dizzy, in spite of me, as I slowly fell asleep.

Marco clapped me on the shoulder, striking my uneasy dreams of home; and there was the rock.

It towered over us, showing me that I was not the only one who was small here. The sea screamed with the gulls, to either side of it. I breathed deeply, and felt the chill mist of the surf.

Marco handed Abigail a small fabric package, and she bowed. Marco turned away.

We all of us looked up at the rock. It was rough-surfaced, dark, and lightly peppered with growing things and white birds, roosting at the craggy peaks.

"I met a man once who told me he climbed it. A long time ago they had laws that forbade one from attempting, but now there's so few of us here they took it away. He told me it took him all day and a night, and he felt like eating the world when he got down."

"Foolish, no?" Thomas said, squinting. "He may have fallen. Even a young man."

"He was eighty-four. And he told me. He didn't care anymore."

Thomas set down his satchel and drew out the equipment. I flipped my backpack and fished until I found the sensor and its long skinny handle. Marco sat on the ground and pulled a sandwich from his pocket wrapped in leather, and began to eat.

"Do you have a bit of foil? I need more range for the antennae."

"Here's a gum wrapper."

"Thanks. I don't know how it got in here, but I have your power cable."

"Oh, thank god. The frequency is 99.82."

"Noted." I wrote it down.

"Good thing you brought a notebook, that's very important," said Marco with a mouth full of sandwich. He swallowed, and yawned.

Thomas checked the angle of the sun and inserted the jack attached to the miniature dish and the central processor. The sky city Pluto would align itself with four o'clock due west, 50 degrees from the sea's horizon I read from my notebook. I reached over Marco.