- Connie is taken off the ward for testing.
- She meets Skip again and they chat; he tells her the testing won't hurt.
- They also meet Alice Blue Bottom, who seems remarkably happy and confident considering she's in the depressing asylum.
- Connie also sees Sybil again. Sybil is depressed; the electroshock damaged her memory. She's in the group to be tested too, now.
- One inmate is struggling with the television, but Connie doesn't need to watch television because she's got the future in her brain.
- In the future, Connie and Luciente bicycle around in the rain looking at gardens.
- No, it's not a space bicycle. Not that kind of future.
- They go to Cranberry, which is an Ashkenazi Jewish culture.
- They attend a government council meeting. It's kind of boring. Meetings are boring even in utopia.
- They explain that in fact the future has a lot of meetings, because no one tells anyone to do anything, so they all have to negotiate it.
- Luciente drops a hint about how poor people staged a revolution and changed the world… but we don't follow up on it.
- Instead, Sappho, who Connie met before briefly telling stories to kids, is dying.
- Sappho is waiting to die until her child Bolivar (formerly named Swallow) can get there.
- Connie remembers being in a hospital in her own time, and the way that doctors were cruel and made mistakes and didn't seem to care.
- This book is not very fond of the medical profession as it is currently constituted. We've already mentioned this, right?
- Bolivar finally gets there, and Sappho dies right off.
- They're going to have a funeral but before they can, Connie is pulled back to the present by Nurse Wright slapping her. She's been out cold.
- Soo… is Connie insane or isn't she? Is the future all in her head? Will we ever find out!? (Spoiler: no.)