Riding her ion scooter the million kilometers to theQuietener, Cass found herself reveling in the view for the first timein years. The scooter was doing one-and-a-quarter gees, but the couchpressed against her back so gently that she might have been floating.Floating in dark water, beneath an alien sky. Even at half alight-year, Mimosa punched a dazzling violet hole in the blackness, apinprick ten times as bright as a full moon. Away from its glare, thestars were far too plentiful to suggest constellations; anystick-figure object that she began to sketch between them was soonundermined by an equally compelling alternative, then a third, then afourth — like a superposition of graphs, each with a different choice ofedges between the same nodes. When she’d first arrived, she’d homed inon her own star, watching with a mixture of fear and exaltation as ithovered at the edge of visibility to her thousandth-scale eyes. Now,she’d forgotten all the cues she’d need to find it, and she felt nourge to ask her navigation software to remind her. The sun was nobeacon of reassurance, and she’d be seeing it close-up again soonenough.

Each time one of Livia’s staged targets had beenachieved, Cass had dispatched a small army of digital couriers to passon the news to seven generations of her ancestors and descendants, aswell as all her friends in Chalmers. She’d received dozens ofmessengers herself, mostly from Lisa and Tomek, full of inconsequentialgossip, but very welcome. It must have grown strange for her friends asthe years had passed, and they no longer knew whether or not there wasany point continuing to shout into the void. If she had traveledembodied, as a handful of ancients still did, she could have caught upwith centuries of mail on the return voyage. Reduced to a timelesssignal en route, though, she’d have no choice butto step unprepared into the future. Her homecoming was going to be thehardest thing she’d ever faced, but she was almost certain now that hertime here would prove to have been worth it.