This was the bit Joey Stein welcomed, yet dreaded. The fact he could think at all was welcome. It meant he was alive—which in itself was rather surprising, given his last memories of the crypt under the palace: way too much pain and blood and that psycho PSR officer. Although now he considered his last moments, they were mixed in with another set of memories, of operating within the lifeboat package smartnet and throwing a force field over the Rose Courtyard so that children and parents alike could cower together. Then the sky had darkened as the gargantuan Raiel warship had arrived above Varlan.
His eyes snapped open and he sat up. That was what he was dreading—the abysmally thin force-grown clone body provided by the re-life clinic. Pain and depression for months, attended by well-meaning self-righteous therapists. Too weak to resist their patronizing ministrations.
Except there was no pain, nor even stiffness. He didn’t feel hungry or weary. When he brought his hand up in front of his face it seemed perfectly normal, the hand his twenty-year-old self had possessed oh-so-long ago. Before the colony starship flight to another galaxy, when he was so tired of the jaded lives lived by Commonwealth citizens. Before shuttle fourteen’s science mission into the Forest, when his body was suffering from a glitched tank yank procedure. Before being caught by Faller-Rojas and forced into contact with the egg, the terror of slowly being eggsumed. Before his uncharacteristically noble suicide to save Laura. Before Nigel’s intervention. Before being downloaded into the lifeboat package’s smartnet. Before 250 years stuck to a sodding Tree…
Joey blinked and looked down at his new body, which lay naked under a sheet on a bed. He tugged the sheet aside and saw he wasn’t some spindly bag of bones covered in tight skin that was all protruding veins. This body belonged to a fit, healthy adolescent, ready to conquer the universe.
Cool! Re-life clones have really come on while I was away.
Now that he was awake and thinking, his u-shadow brought up a host of initialization icons into his exovision.
I’m back in the Commonwealth. Fuck me, we actually made it!
He chuckled. The clinic room was pleasant enough for an institution, all pearl-white plyplastic walls occluding the medical systems. A wide window looking out over a leafy suburb with a broad lake in the distance, triangular sails of big yachts sailing around. Mountains cluttering the far horizon. Another bed next to his, with a bemused youth looking at him.
“Bollocks,” a startled Joey blurted, and tugged the sheet back. “Who are you?”
“Is that any way to greet your fellow jailbird?” Roxwolf asked.
Earth’s T-sphere deposited Paula in front the neoclassical Capitole de Toulouse at the center of the city. With a quarter of an hour to go until dawn, the splendid building was illuminated by strategic floodlights, which imbued the region’s famous pink bricks with a warm glow. The vast Place du Capitole where she’d materialized was deserted apart from a formation of bots slowly clearing the night’s snowfall from the ancient stone slabs.
Chaing stood beside her, his body rocking back and forth from the impact of the teleport. “That’s impressive,” he said, staring at the Capitole. “A bit like the Captain’s palace.”
“Really?”
“Not as big.” Chaing turned a complete circle. “Where is everyone?”
“Earth has a very small population these days,” she told him. “It was already heavily weighted to the old and wealthy back when ANA was built. Not decadent, just…staid. Younger people were leaving for the newer worlds, so the ones who stayed got older and more conservative. Then they started downloading themselves into ANA. So the physical population declined further. It’s holding steady at about sixty million these days.” She waved her hand around the center of the city. “ANA preserves our cultural heritage; the buildings mostly have stabilizer fields, and armies of ANAdroids perform caretaker maintenance on the infrastructure.”
“ANAdroids? You mean like Demitri?”
She gave him a small smile. “Not quite.”
A compact ellipsoid-shaped regrav capsule slipped down out of the gray sky, its chrome-yellow fuselage reflecting the city buildings in weird contortions. A doorway opened in its midsection.
“Come on,” Paula said.
There were only two seats in the cabin. She settled in one and waited for Chaing to sit beside her before ordering her u-shadow to turn the fuselage to full transparency. He gripped the seat as they rose and headed toward the northeast.
“So these houses, they’re all empty?” he asked in faint bemusement as they passed over the rooftops.
“Lucky for you and your people,” she said. “I remember after the Starflyer War, when we had to build entire cities on the new planets to house the population of the Lost23 worlds. It effectively bankrupted the Commonwealth for a decade. And that was very basic housing. You’ve got some of the greatest houses on Earth to choose from.”
“I’m not ungrateful,” he assured her. “I just don’t believe anyone wants me as a neighbor.”
“You’d be surprised,” she told him as they passed the city boundary. The landscape below them was dark, revealing little. Not that there was much to reveal, she acknowledged. Earth’s rural areas had been encouraged to revert to their naturalistic pre-farming state. Towns and villages decayed and fell to the encroaching vegetation, with only “historically significant” structures and a scattering of private homes remaining. With woodlands finally reclaiming their original vast domains, wildlife also prospered; even previously extinct species had been re-introduced thanks to modern retro-DNA sequencing. Effectively, Earth became a park planet, with all the ecological damage that centuries of rampant industrialization and agriculture had wrought slowly healing.
“This person we’re visiting,” Chaing said. “Did you tell him everything about me?”
“Yes.”
“And he still agreed to help?”
“You’re not quite as unique as you think, Captain.”
“Don’t call me that. The PSR doesn’t exist anymore.”
“As you wish.”
“What kind of person is he?”
“Someone who had it a lot rougher adapting to the Commonwealth than you. He’ll tell you all about it, I’m sure.”
“That’s part of my problem. So many of your citizens have volunteered to counsel us. Millions, almost one for each of us, and from every Commonwealth world. That level of kindness is…I’m not used to it.”
“I know. Culture shock can be overwhelming. Just trust me, and meet him.”
“Of course. But…I am curious why we don’t just teleport to this place. I thought you could teleport anywhere on Earth.”
“Almost everywhere. People are entitled to seclusion if they want it. There are many reasons: political, personal. ANA doesn’t discriminate, but it does enable.”
Five minutes later, the regrav capsule was approaching a modest valley, barely a couple of kilometers wide, and meandering away to the west with a small river churning away along the center. Thick forests coated the slopes, the denuded deciduous trees and pines glinting pale gold as the rising sun caught the ice and snow clinging to their branches. Several ancient houses were dispersed between the trees and the water, their frost coating making them difficult to distinguish as dawn light seeped across the land. It was the long trails of wood smoke rising from their chimneys that gave them away.
Paula brought the capsule down in a broad clearing, whose tall trees isolated it from the houses. She quickly buttoned up her fur-lined winter coat as she stepped out onto the thick grass. Her breath was white in the still air; it was several degrees colder here than it had been in Toulouse. A narrow path led from the clearing, down the slope to the homes.
“This way,” she told Chaing, setting off. After a moment, he followed.
An old moulin stood on a small rise beside the river. Its thick stone walls didn’t need any stabilizer field to maintain them, though they’d clearly been renovated at some time in the last century.
Paula walked up to the big wooden door and knocked loudly. It took a while—there was plenty of noise from inside: voices, clattering kitchenware—then the iron latch was lifted and the door opened.
Edeard stood on the worn step, wearing a burgundy-colored dressing gown, framed by a wan yellow light. He grinned in welcome. “Investigator Myo, it’s been a while.”
“It has. How are you doing?”
“Pretty good, actually. And you must be Chaing?”
“Yes. Thank you for agreeing to see me.”
“No problem. Come in. We’re about to have breakfast.”
Downstairs was mainly one large room, furnished with old-fashioned chairs and settees and tables and chests. There was no plyplastic or malmetal anywhere, although she did see a holographic projector on top of a dresser; it took a moment to recognize, it was such an old system. A galley kitchen at the far end boasted a big old iron range cooker, with coal glowing pleasantly behind its grill door. The smell of fresh-baked bread filled the whole place.
Paula breathed in deeply. It was a smell that took her all the way back to her own childhood, when her mother had prepared most of the food by hand.
Salrana was standing behind the kitchen counter, filling a copper kettle with water at the white porcelain sink. She gave Paula a quick smile. “Investigator. Tea or coffee?”
“Tea, please. Milk, no sugar.”
“Chaing?”
“Uh, the same, thanks.”
Salrana put the kettle down on the range’s hotplate.
“How’s Burlal?” Paula asked as she, Chaing, and Edeard sat at the long table in the middle of the room.
“Practicing,” Edeard said with a martyred tone, and pointed his finger at the ceiling.
“Practicing?”
“He’ll be a teenager in eight months. He’s asleep.”
“Ah, right. Well, it is only just dawn.”
“Everyone in the community gets up at dawn, especially in wintertime,” Salrana said. “We make the most of the daylight.”
“Of course. And how’s Inigo?”
“He and Corrie-Lynn are fine,” Edeard said. “They live next door if you want me to get them.”
“Maybe next time.”
The kettle started to whistle. Salrana took it off the hotplate and poured the boiling water into a teapot. Then she came around the counter.
Paula raised an eyebrow. “Congratulations.”
“Thank you,” Salrana said, putting a hand on her bump. “Only two and a half months to go now. She’ll be a spring baby.”
“That’s lovely.”
“This is a sweet place for children to grow up,” Salrana said firmly. “When they’re older they can make their choice about which culture they want to be a part of. Until then they have peace and a gentle community to nurture them. Those are the best values a person can start their life with.”
“Like Ashwell?” Paula inquired.
“Yes,” Salrana agreed. “Just like Ashwell. Or as close as we can get in the Commonwealth. Plus, nobody bothers us here. I’m not having our children grow up as freaks for the benefit of the unisphere and gaiafield. Nobody is going to dream their life.”
“That’s over,” Edeard said. “Especially now.” He gave Chaing a long look. “There are a couple of disused cottages farther down the river; a bit dilapidated but…You can stay with us until we make one ready. Projects like that always fire people up around here. It shouldn’t take too long.”
“The wonders of Commonwealth technology,” Chaing said sarcastically. “Makes it all worthwhile.”
“One step at a time,” Edeard said. “You can run away into the Commonwealth if you like. It’s easy enough to alter your features. Nobody would ever know who you are. Except yourself, of course. And that’s the problem, isn’t it?”
“Is that what you’re offering, to help me forget?”
“No. That’s another Commonwealth perk. Any memory can be ripped out. But I don’t think that’s what you need.”
Chaing shrugged. “I don’t know what I need. I used to be certain about everything. The Second Great Transition took that away. I look around at where we are, and I don’t see how I can fit in. I’m wrong for the Commonwealth.”
“I know a bit about having people judging you for the things you had to do.”
“Do you?” Chaing asked skeptically.
“Oh, yes. I did things that were necessary at the time—terrible things—and nobody ever forgets. I believe this little valley might be able to help you come to terms with your past. We live a life without the complications of the Commonwealth mainstream here. Time and understanding are our healers. One day even I might be able to consider leaving.”
“I killed someone,” Chaing said bluntly. “Someone I knew, someone I…liked. She was very similar to me—just opposite. She’s what I see when I look into a mirror. There might have been another way, but I just couldn’t let her win. Bienvenido would have Fallen if she had. So I did what I had to. It’s not what I am. And that sets me apart from everyone.”
Edeard smiled in sympathy. “I learned a long time ago that sometimes, to do what’s right, you have to do what’s wrong. Perhaps I can teach you that.”
Ry and Anala had to take a commercial starship to Orakum; the External world was a long way outside the network of wormholes that linked the Inner worlds of the Intersolar Commonwealth. It took three hours to fly the forty-six light-years from Balandan, the closest planet with a wormhole. Three hours in a small cubicle together, with no viewport. However, the gravity was variable, from one point seven Earth standard (the heaviest H-congruous world ever settled) to zero. They set it to zero.
A regrav capsule took them from the starport out across a continent that was still mostly pristine hills and plains, devoid of human settlements. Finally, it dived down through the spindly clouds. The house was easy to see—a plain white circle with glass edges, standing on a central pillar that was also glass-walled. The gardens extended around it for acres in every direction, looking strangely unkempt and boasting several small stone ruins. They landed in the shade of some giant rancata trees, whose reddish-brown leaves cast a gentle dapple.
“Do you think they’ll take us?” Anala said nervously as they emerged from the capsule, holding hands tightly.
“Sure they will,” Ry said, with a lot more confidence than he felt. “We’re exactly what they want.” He had to put sunglasses on, the light was so bright.
She puffed her cheeks out and exhaled. “Okay.”
A couple came out of the house to greet them—a beautiful young woman with the most carefree smile Ry had ever seen, accompanying a huge rotund man whose scowl was a classic counterpoint. He was wearing a shabby old toga suit, while she had a gauzy white cotton summer dress that seemed to glow in the intense blue-white sunlight.
“Hi,” she said, her smile growing even wider. “I’m Catriona. We’ve been expecting you. Come on in.”
The lounge on the house’s lower level was lined with a rich honey-brown wood, giving the impression it was a cavern carved out of some mighty trunk. Windows overlooked the lakes at the far end of the garden, where a small waterfall ran down the stony ridge between them.
Ry was intrigued by the man waiting for them by the balcony door. Unusually for the Commonwealth, whose every citizen seemed obsessed with maintaining a physiological age of about twenty-five, he had allowed signs of aging to contaminate his body, with wrinkles on his face, and receding hair just starting to frost above his sideburns.
“Oscar Monroe?” a nervous Ry asked.
“Yes.” He shook hands and waved them onto a long settee. “I have to tell you, this is a bit unorthodox, even for us.”
“I know,” Ry said. “But thank you for agreeing to see us. We’d love you to consider us for your company.”
Oscar smiled softly. “Well, you do both have a very unusual résumé. You flew into space on a chemical rocket? Seriously?”
“Yes.”
“That must have been pretty…intense.”
“It was glorious,” Anala told him. She and Ry pressed together a little tighter.
“We’re astronauts,” Ry explained. “That’s all we’ve been and all we want to be. To get out there and explore the other side of the sky.”
“My company doesn’t do a lot of outright pioneering; we tend to do follow-up science missions for the Navy Exploration Division.” Oscar mock-grimaced. “Plus a few off-the-file excursions.”
“Sounds fabulous,” Ry said.
“Yes, well. Your technical knowledge and skillset are a little behind what we need. If we do take you on, you’ll have a headache for a year with the amount of information we’ll have to cram in to bring you up to Commonwealth standard. That’s not a metaphor; it will hurt.”
“If it means we fly actual starships at the end, it’ll be worth it.”
“Great Ozzie,” Oscar muttered, blinking in surprise. “And you got married yesterday? Shouldn’t you be on your honeymoon?”
“This is our honeymoon,” Ry explained earnestly. “What could be greater than an interview for this kind of job?”
“Wow. Okay; ordinarily I’d hold off a decision for a while, but you have Paula as your sponsor, so I guess: Welcome aboard.”
Ry and Anala whooped and hugged exuberantly.
“Do you know Paula, then?” Ry asked.
“Our paths have crossed.”
“Thank you so much for this,” Anala said. “We won’t let you down.”
Oscar grinned wryly and sat back. “I know. Hell, you flew a genuine rocketship to fight enemy aliens attacking your planet. I don’t know anyone else with so much Right Stuff.”
Only a few years ago, Florian would have been utterly terrified of the grand Welcome Ceremony thrown by the president of the Commonwealth in his official residence—a mansion that could’ve given the Captain’s palace in Varlan a run for its money when it came to scale and opulence. There were four hundred planetary senators in the ballroom, along with representatives from every major Dynasty and Grand Family, with the Brandts taking center stage. Plus alien ambassadors, from the downright scary-looking to the bizarre. Then there’d been a swarm of media representatives, celebrities who’d managed to snag an invitation, officials, friends of friends…
President Timothy Baker had made a long speech about how the human race was now a complete family once more. Prime Minister Terese had made a bland response about the wonders of the Commonwealth. A bit rich, Florian had thought, coming from a politician who had spent her life suppressing anyone on Bienvenido who even mentioned trying to find the Commonwealth.
But her title was honorary only now, and in a couple of weeks no one would remember her. The Golakkoth had delivered Bienvenido’s citizens to Earth, where there were so many empty homes waiting for them. Apparently there were only about sixty million people living on Earth these days. Only sixty million! Those were the kinds of concepts Florian was struggling with even though it had been years since the space machine gave him the Commonwealth files. Their epic flight back to the galaxy had given him time to prepare himself. For the rest of Bienvenido, snatched to salvation without warning only to materialize in the New York reception center with a mere second of personal time-lapse, it was a shocking revelation. Everybody, Eliter or not, was struggling to adapt to the Second Great Transition.
Consequently, many Commonwealth citizens had generously volunteered to move back to Earth temporarily to help counsel the refugees as they acclimated to their new circumstances. Florian had been deeply touched. More than anything, that proved the Commonwealth was a society where he truly belonged.
ANA and the counselors were helping to reunite families and friends. They were also diplomatically separating Eliters from former PSR officers, as well as keeping an eye on known criminals. Once things began to calm down, people had to make a lot of decisions. Commonwealth medical treatments could rejuvenate them, their Advancer gene sequences could be repaired and upgraded; biononics was a strong option. Education packages and training were available (probably a necessity if you wanted to live in a modern technological society). Then, of course, they had to face their final decision: where to live.
At the Welcome Ceremony, the Commonwealth had formally offered the refugees their own planet so they could live among people they knew and preserve what remained of their culture. Florian still grinned at the idea of that—Here, have an entire planet; we’ve got more than we need. After all, the Raiel had already found an ocean planet for the Vatni; and the Macule Units had been delivered to a fresh world, where their gene banks could reestablish their entire biosphere. A New Bienvenido was tempting to many, although every existing Commonwealth world had extended an open invitation to the newcomers.
For himself, he hadn’t quite decided what to do and where to go. He’d spent the last couple of months in London, occupying a grand apartment in Kensington overlooking Hyde Park, sharing its luxurious rooms with his mother; Lurji and his wife, Naniana; and his complete handful of a niece, Zoanne. It was a blissful and addictive happy family life he’d never known before, with Aunt Terannia and Matthieu in the apartment underneath. Commonwealth medical technology had swiftly repaired Matthieu’s hands, and he was playing the guitar again. They’d all been avoiding thinking about the opportunities that now lay open to them, content with a quiet life.
However, the Welcome Ceremony had made him realize it wasn’t a decision he could put off for much longer. There had been a moment when Timothy Baker had called Florian up onto the stage to shake his hand and present him to the assembled dignitaries. Apparently Baker was one of the oldest humans alive; a fact never more obvious than when you met him in the flesh. It had only been a brief handshake, a few private words, when the president had asked what he was going to do now. Florian had mumbled he wasn’t sure, and just knew he was being judged for saying that. “The Commonwealth can give you a good life,” Baker had told him. “It’s up to you, of course, but take my advice: Don’t waste it.” And for an instant, the ancient man had looked terribly sad before smiling and greeting the next guest.
Florian had managed to duck out of the official reception after an hour or so. Laura Brandt had pleaded, teased, and coaxed him along to a nightclub in Paris—only three trans-stellar wormhole stations and a quick teleport away. Who knew that Mother Laura was actually quite fun, and sassy, and friendly, and a good dancer? So here he was in some kind of medieval cathedral, sitting in a big curving settee that seemed to vibrate like a purring cat, with music that was far too loud and weird semi-solid lightblobs that oscillated their way through the air like angry sparrows.
The sticky mauve cocktails with bubbling vapor that Laura ordered helped damp down the initial discomfort. By the third, he was quite chilled. It helped that Corilla had joined them on the settee. If anyone had learned how to embrace Commonwealth society, it was Corilla. She was busy telling them how she’d started her quantum physics degree at Oxford University when he caught sight of a tall blonde on the other side of the dance floor, wearing a very small black dress. She kept looking at him when the gyrating bodies parted. He was awarded a sultry smile.
“Justine Burnelli,” Corilla said with breathless excitement in his ear. “She helped get rid of the Void. She’s even more famous than we are.”
“Really?” News that the Void had transcended had always seemed slightly unreal to Florian—just another aspect of living in the Commonwealth, with ten impossible things happening every day.
“Very rich, too,” Corilla said in a slightly slurred voice. “You should go over and say hi.”
“Don’t,” Laura said. “She’s like a thousand years old. I remember her from before we left the Commonwealth. Looks like a seraph, but she’s a real hard-ass. Her whole family is hardwired that way.”
“Thanks for letting me know,” Florian said—and now he, too, seemed to be slurring somehow. He’d almost said: Thanks, Mother. But he’d made that mistake with Laura once already today at the Welcome Ceremony, and it wasn’t something you repeated. Besides, he couldn’t quite see her in the wholesome matronly terms history lessons at school portrayed; in her new re-life body, Mother Laura looked absolutely stunning, especially in a clingy scarlet dress with so many interesting splits. Shame she didn’t seem to like Corilla much. For some reason they were acting like rivals.
“So do you know where you’re going yet?” she asked.
He shrugged. “No idea. Still catching up with my brother. We hadn’t seen each other for years, you know. I like family life.”
“Awww.” Corilla smiled at him, her hand squeezing his leg in a sisterly fashion.
He smiled back as she wobbled in and out of focus. A bot held up another silver tray of the mauve cocktails for them.
“Cheers!”
The three of them chinked their glasses and drank. Corilla downed hers in one. Laura took a long sip, giving Florian an intimidatingly level stare over the bubbling vapor. He found it impossible to look away, unless it was at one of those splits in her dress. Which, he began to realize, were very exciting in a bad, bad way. With Mother Laura? He was abruptly sober. And her smile widened in recognition.
“There’s no need to rush a decision,” she said. “You should take a while, look around to see what the Commonwealth can offer you. Maybe find someone who could show you.”
“That’d be a blast,” Corilla said merrily. “Hey, we could scope it out together. What do you say, Florian? I’ve only been to nine planets since we got here.”
“Nine?” he asked slightly enviously, which judging by Laura’s expression was the wrong way of saying it.
“Oh, wow, is that her?” Corilla demanded, gazing at something over his shoulder. “For real?”
Florian turned to see Paula leading a teenage girl over to them. Except it wasn’t quite Paula as he remembered. She seemed to have aged ten years.
He stood up and peered forward as Paula pushed through a scarlet-and-emerald lightblob. “Paula?” There was a lot of quizzing in his tone.
She produced a wry smile. “Yes, Florian. I’m the original. Pleased to meet you, finally.”
“Uh, right. Likewise,” Florian knew he was blushing; his cheeks were terribly hot when she gave him a very Parisian kiss on both of them.
“And this,” Paula said in a slightly pained voice, “is Mellanie. We go back together all the way to the Starflyer War—though it seems longer sometimes. Okay, you’ve been introduced; favor repaid. I’m out of here.”
“Er, hello,” Florian said automatically to the teenager with long golden hair. Paula was turning to leave. “Wait,” he blurted. “What’s going to happen?”
“Happen?”
“Well, there’s two of you. I know that’s a huge no.”
She grinned knowingly, and it was reassuringly familiar, even though she wasn’t his Paula. “Trust me, Florian, there’s only one Paula Myo. And that’s me.”
“But—”
“I’ve assimilated my Bienvenido memories. My spare body will be put in storage.”
“Will be?”
“Ah, you are quite sharp, aren’t you? I remember.”
He shrugged, for what could you actually say to that?
“She has one last thing to do,” Paula said. “Which is fair enough; I always finish my cases.” She chuckled. “And as you looked after me so well…if Mellanie asks you to go for a walk with her, think very carefully before agreeing.”
“Okay. Thank you.”
He turned around to face Mellanie, and decided she was probably the sexiest girl he’d ever seen. He had no idea how she did that; her nose was long and her chin too prominent to be classically beautiful, but the way she carried herself, the wayward self-confidence, impish smile…There was something primal about her, as if she’d just walked out of a Pliocene forest. Okay, strange first impression. And for some reason Laura and Corilla were spiking her with disapproving looks.
“So?” Mellanie said with a husky purr. “The Hero of Bryan-Anthony Boulevard, himself. Did you really stand between a horde of alien cannibals and a crowd of helpless children?”
“Oh. Well. You know.”
“I don’t.” Her finger tapped playfully at the base of his throat. “But I’d love to hear all about it.”
Nigel walked along the Martinique loop for most of the afternoon. It was a tropical environment, five thousand kilometers wide, with a twenty-seven-thousand-kilometer circumference, revolving slowly to produce a point-eight-five gravity effect on its inner surface. Three other loops were interlocked with it, in turn knitted with more loops. The inside of the Dyson shell contained thousands of them, all rotating at varying speeds in the most fantastically complex piece of clockwork humans had ever created. The underside of the loops contained terminus strips, wormhole-linked to coronal flowers in close orbit above the A7 star, scalloped rings of exotic matter absorbing the searing light to shine it across the shell’s interior.
Looking up, he could see the full multitude of loops in their awesome three-dimensional lattice-chain, stretching away into a distance that gave a far greater impression of infinity than naked space ever did. Some sections were in darkness as the terminus strips fluctuated their emissions, creating nighttimes for the loops.
It was a sight that still mesmerized him, despite watching it grow and develop—the first nest of a true post-scarcity society, where accomplishments were driven by culture and artistic whimsy rather than economics. A home that encouraged self-development and experimentation. Biononic transforms were already laying claim to the air between the loops, humans bodyshifting to giant avians that soared amid the churning thermals. Oceanic loops were alive with the first colonies of aquarian bodyshifters. While outside the shell, rock-like transforms clung barnacle-fashion to the surface. Already they were trialing integral solar sails. By the time the next generation of Dyson shells were complete, they’d be able to surf the ion gales between them.
So many possibilities awaited. But for now he was content to keep his human identity.
“You are so rooted in the past,” Ozzie had taunted on one of his increasingly rare visitations.
“You have to know where you’ve come from to see where you’re going,” Nigel had replied.
“But, dude, you’ve stopped going anywhere.”
And onward he walked. Across tropic loops, and subtropics, arctic wastes to windswept moors, and more exotic environments garnered from the records of the Commonwealth Navy Exploration Division and reproduced with interesting twists, content simply to examine the newness and diversity firsthand. An old factory boss performing an everlasting quality control check.
Late afternoon, local loop time, he emerged from a line of royal palms that were only just taller than him and onto a long sloping beach. Small waves lapped against the fine silver-white sand. Kilometers out to sea, coral isles jutted enticingly up out of the clear water. He took his boots and socks off, and walked along the shoreline.
After a while he sat down and watched the astonishing array of fish venturing into the shallows. When he tipped his head back, he could follow the Martinique loop’s turquoise-and-green cartography curving above him. It was two-thirds sea, with lush emerald vegetation spreading across the small continents and various archipelagoes. Its only fault was how small the palms and ferns were, but then it had only been commissioned seven years ago.
They’d learned a lot from terraforming Zoreia. Thousands of asteroid-sized biovat stations formed a bracelet swarm around the Dyson shell, growing the necessary bacteria to bring the loop soils to life. Equally vast clone houses grew the seeds.
Such quantities meant they didn’t have to wait decades for the biota to establish itself. What had taken years on Zoreia was complete in weeks here. Already photosynthetic vegetation was established on 70 percent of the loops—though, of course, trees still had to grow. Fast-grow versions had been rejected. The humans of the Dyson shell wanted a genuine feel to their environment. Nigel still laughed at the irony of that.
In a couple of hundred years, the jungles and landscapes would have a decent primordial feel to them. He watched clouds streaming over the edge of the loop, floundering in wispy curlicues as they lost the integrity provided by the artificial gravity. Intra-loop weather currents were still a huge challenge for the shell climatology engineers. They were having to intervene more than any simulation modeling suggested.
Nigel rather liked that. We haven’t perfected everything yet.
“Can you bump these waves up?” he asked Central. Induced gravity pulses could simulate the more basic effect of moons, given the loops didn’t have any. Now, there’s a thought for a shell.
“What sort of size are you looking for?” Central asked.
“I just thought I might go surfing. Give me some decent ocean rollers, maybe? That way I can rip down tubes like they did off Hawaii back in the day.” His neural augmentation rose to run routines calculating the kind of gravity field orientation and power necessary to create the required effect.
“When have you ever done that?” Central queried.
“First time for everything.”
“Ozzie was right. You are regressing while everyone else is moving off into the new.”
“Yes, Mother.”
“Would you like me to select a surfboard based on your size and ability?”
“My size?” He looked down his chest, which was rather well muscled these days. Muscles he’d earned by all his exercise, not bought with biononic manipulation. He grinned at the foolish vanity. Maybe Ozzie is right, I am sliding back into the primitive. But that’s allowed. The loops can embrace any foible.
“Nigel, I am detecting a quantum field displacement point coming toward us.”
“A what?”
“A node similar to myself. This one is traveling FTL.”
“You mean we’re being visited by another post-physical?”
“It doesn’t have the same field depth as myself, but it is decelerating from nine hundred light-years an hour.”
Nigel sat up fast. “Holy shit!”
“The trajectory indicates it could have come from the Commonwealth galaxy.”
“Ah! The infamous deterrent fleet?”
“A strong possibility, yes.”
Nigel’s primary routine meshed with Central, allowing him to observe the twist in reality hurtling toward them. It reached the star system’s outer comet belt and dropped to ordinary hyperdrive speeds before approaching the Dyson shell. A signal was transmitted.
“This is Paula Myo. I’d like to visit Nigel Sheldon, please. And I am bringing a guest.”
Nigel laughed. “Who else? Give her my coordinates.”
The quantum fluctuation changed, a swirl of energy rising up out of the field interstice and phase-shifting into two physical structures. They teleported into the Martinique loop beach.
He raised his arm in a cheery greeting as Paula materialized five meters in front of him. Paula, younger than the last time he’d seen her, which was unusual. “Twice in fifteen years. I’m flattered.”
“Hello, Nigel.” She stood aside, and Nigel saw who it was standing behind her.
More than a thousand years of experience in controlling his emotions, neural augmentation running routines to objectify any situation, meant nothing now. For it was her standing there, wearing her familiar brown suede skirt and white blouse, the wide-brimmed hat he’d bought her perched at a spry angle on her lush red hair.
“No,” he moaned incredulously. “You’re dead. I saw Uracus kill Bienvenido.”
“It didn’t kill us,” Kysandra said. “The Void expelled us.”
“What? Where?”
“Intergalactic space. Deep intergalactic space, actually. It’s taken a while to get back; we had a few problems there. Nothing I couldn’t handle.” There were tears brimming in her eyes, as if she was scared of something.
Nigel put his trembling arms around her. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. If only I’d known, I would never have stopped looking. I would have found you, no matter what.”
“Well, now I’ve found you. And you’re the real you, this time.”
His grip tightened. “Yes, you have. And I’m not going to let you go again. Not ever.”
“You have no idea how much I wanted to hear that!”
“Oh, I do. Because that’s what I’ve felt every day since I lost you.” He kissed her.
Kysandra smiled through her tears as she stroked his face. “You know what? That was almost worth waiting two and a half centuries for.”