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“These are biorobots. They are much more sensitive and precise than the mechanical robots. They are similar to the Interstitial robots that people can have implanted now, but they are only connected to each other, not to the Interstices. I understand that you don’t have the implant?”

“No,” I say. I am not sure what Uncle Stephen has told her. As a time traveler, I can’t have any kind of permanent implant; I would lose it the first time I traveled, and the Interstitial implant is so invasive that losing it might cause a brain hemorrhage.

“I don’t have it, either,” she says. She turns and raises her braided hair, shows me the base of her skull, the hollow where the head joins the neck. She has the tattoo, a little target with a lightning bolt, but there is a red X tattooed over it, just like my mom and dad’s. They both had theirs removed when they went underground. Is Mrs. Baxter a dissident? I know better than to ask her why she doesn’t have it, but she tells me anyway.

“I have allergies,” she says. “By the way, that’s a good explanation to give anyone if they want to know why you don’t have it.” She winks at me. Is she trying to tell me that she is lying?

“Why did the cube turn red?” I ask her very softly.

“It’s a transmit/record cube,” she says, whispering. “My cube is reforming it.”

“Won’t my uncle be angry?”

“I don’t know. He was told not to bring such a thing here; he won’t be surprised. I don’t like anyone listening in on me, even if I am teaching their child. You mustn’t worry about it, my dear.” Mrs. Baxter smiles kindly at me. “I think we can go back to the music room now.”

When we come back, the cubes are both white and still. Mrs. Baxter’s gray cat is crouching on the table. It jumps down as soon as we enter the room. “Let’s begin again,” she says. She sits at the piano and pats the seat beside her. I sit, feeling shy. “Go ahead, Oliver. Press a key, any key . . .” She strokes her hand across the white and black keys, making a sweep of sound.

I press one of the small black keys in the middle. It makes a timid bleat, like a kitten.

“Come on,” she says. “Mean it.”

I press the same key, harder.

“More,” she says. “Go exploring. Find out what all the keys sound like.”

I lean forward and reach to touch the white key at the left end of the row. It sounds satisfyingly dark and growly. I press it a few more times, then move to the next one . . . each sound is like a new flavor. Mrs. Baxter slides off the seat so I can have more room. I change hands and keep pressing keys. I listen to each one, I press hard, soft, fast or slow.

Mrs. Baxter sits down behind me in her armchair. I hear a quiet raspy click. I sneak a glance at her; she has a cigarette in her mouth and a lighter in her hand. “Don’t stop,” she says, the cigarette somehow attached to her lower lip as she speaks. When I press the last key, I hear her exhale, and a cloud of smoke rises and blends into the air above the piano. “Yes,” she says. “That’s very good. Very orderly. But to make music, we have to be disorderly. Let’s mix up the notes. Do you want white or black?”

“White?”

“Low or high?” She indicates with her hand, left or right?

“Low?”

“Okay, move over, Oliver.” She sits back down beside me, on my right. “Now. I want you to play any white keys on your half of the keyboard, in any order, as many as you like, however fast you like. I will play only black keys on my half of the keyboard. Here is our border—” she taps a white key three times “—this is middle C, remember this one, okay?”

“Hǎi?”

She laughs. “Our robots are confused. Not like the sea, like a letter in the English alphabet. Here . . .” She stands up and goes to her cabinet, pulls out a small square book, opens it. “. . . this is C.” The page shows a curved line, almost a circle, next to a picture of a cat. Mrs. Baxter slips the robot out of her ear. I do the same. “C,” she says. “Cat.”

“C, Cat,” I say. Her cat has taken her place in the armchair. I point to it. “Cat?”

“Cat.” She puts her robot back into her ear. Once I have mine back in, she says, “Her name is When.”

“When?” I don’t think my pronunciation is correct; we repeat the robots out/robots in sequence as she says Gwen and I watch her lips and repeat Gwen until she is satisfied. Gwen the Cat watches us, bored.

Mrs. Baxter says, “I’m not sure the robots are doing you any favors, Oliver; you won’t learn English if you never hear any. But, back to the original point: where is middle C?”

I panic; she’s asking me to remember something she said ten minutes ago. All the keys look the same. She touches a white key, but the sound is wrong. “No,” I say. She touches another key, a black one. Also wrong-sounding. I press a white key. “This one.”

“Excellent. How did you know that? Did you remember by eye or by ear?”

“The sound was between those two, the ones you pressed.”

She smiles. “I will sing a note, you find it on the piano. Ready?” She sings. I close my eyes, listen to the sounds of the keys in my head. I press a black key. She sings another note, much lower, she has to make an effort to sing it. I press a white key; it is not so low on the piano, the piano can make that note without difficulty. She makes a sound so high it comes out as a squeak. I press the last, highest key. The sound doesn’t match, I say, “No, no.” Mrs. Baxter laughs.

“All right, then, let’s experiment. Remember, you will play any white keys up to and including middle C—” she plays it twice “—and I will play the black keys on my side. Go!”