"Yeesh. Talk about the long and winding road." Piper was looking at the paper map she'd pulled, at Trish's direction, from the glovebox. Unfolded, it took up about half the driver's cabin of the mobile hab, and it had marked on it every single one of Trish's stopover points. No more information than that, though that alone would likely be a treasure trove to the Affini. "This is really what you're doing all the time you're away from home?"

  "Mmmhmm." She turned the wheel gently, steering around a tortoipus that was sunning itself in a particurly inconvenient pce on the road. "Lots of of old friends to keep in touch with."

  "Wow. You couldn't just text them?" she added with a soft snicker. "Nah, I get it, there's something special about being there yourself." She tried to fold the map back up, and mostly succeeded, before pulling a pack of gum out of her pocket. "You want some?"

  "Is it drugged?"

  "Uh, yeah?"

  "Then no. I'm driving."

  Piper looked confused. "It's got autopilot, doesn't it?"

  "I'd prefer not to trust a machine with both our lives, thanks." Yet another hallmark of that certain generation to which Piper belonged — a completely bsé attitude towards casual drug use. Trish didn't think it was a moral failing or anything like that, but it definitely left one vulnerable, which was why she didn't indulge. "How many of those do you have a day?"

  Piper shrugged as she unwrapped the foil around a stick of the gum. Trish could smell the flowery scent of it from across the cabin. "I dunno. Three or four?"

  "You really ought to cut back."

  "Ugh, you sound like Grandma," Piper said, rolling her eyes and popping the gum in her mouth. "It's like, not even a tier-3 css-A. I could totally drive on this stuff and we'd be fine."

  "Yeah, no, not gonna happen," Trish said. In her peripheral vision, she watched Piper tuck the pack of gum back in her pocket, and pull out a little stim toy, all knobs and switches and wheels, and begin to fiddle with it. "And please don't stim yourself off right next to me."

  Piper snerked and ughed, bending over almost double in the seat. "Holy frost, Auntie Trish," she said as she recovered, "I can't believe you just said that!"

  "What, you think I don't know what you kids are doing these days? Your Auntie Trish has been around the block a few times, even if she doesn't partake herself."

  "No, it just sounds weird coming from someone who's like, Grandma's age, you know?" The grin refused to fall off her face; judging by the way her eyes were half-gzed, it probably wouldn't for some time.

  When they pulled off the road to have lunch a few hours ter, Piper was still gently toasted, but nowhere near as high as she'd been when she'd still been working the gum. The spot itself, one that Trish had stopped and eaten at more times than she could count, was atop a small hillock, and had one of the better views of the Elysium Valley one would find before one got to the foothills. Gently rolling hills swept on towards the horizon to the south; to the west, one could just pick out the tips of the mountains beginning to climb into view. Piper had her guitar out and was pying some old pre-Accord tune in seconds, while Trish compiled a road-friendly meal of hand pies and iced tea. The two sat beneath the awning, taking shelter from the sun, and listening to the crackling of the rockgrass that grew in tufts here and there as the wind swept it back and forth.

  "Okay," Piper said, half a hand pie in, "I gotta admit, this is pretty nice. Just us, the valley, the wind. I can see why you spend so much time out here like this."

  "Well, it's not all scenery," Trish said. "There's work too. Quite a lot of it. Once we get to our stopping point for the night, I'll show you how the printing press works."

  "I still can't believe you actually make all those books," Piper said. She took another bite of her pie and washed it down with a big swig of iced tea, making a rolling motion with her hand to indicate she had more to say. "Like, it's so feral, y'know?"

  Trish raised an eyebrow. "Feral?"

  "Yeah. Like, Grandma made me read Freedom's Ember, I get it, but... it may not be like, the super messed up kind of feral I've heard stories about, but it's still pretty out there. Like..." She gnced up at the sky. "Like you don't think the Affini are gonna just ditch us, do you?"

  "Voluntarily? No." Trish took a pull from her own iced tea. "But logically, no system is perfectly self-perpetuating. And if we let ourselves forget how to thrive on our own, we're going to be in a pretty bad position when the inevitable happens." She tried to force down the memory of the way Koer had ughed at the Entropy Problem — just standard Affini ego, nothing more.

  "You think they haven't thought of that? I mean... they think of everything."

  "Are you familiar with the Bck Swan hypothesis?"

  "Yeah, I think that was in the book, wasn't it? Unforeseeable disaster, or something like that?" She shrugged. "Maybe, I guess, but I dunno." She paused, and turned to look at Trish. "Hey, is it true you knew Cass Hope?"

  Trish's gut tightened around the half-digested hand pie. "Yeah," she said quietly. "I knew her. She gave me the notes for what became Freedom's Ember. It's her book, I just typeset it, edited it a bit. The original was... very stream-of-consciousness. Still is, in a lot of ways."

  "Yeah. Kinda makes it hard to follow sometimes. Like you can tell a lot of thought went into it, but it's like drinking from a firehose. What was she like? Like I've got this image in my head of her, just from reading the book and what people say about her, but I can't get Grandma to talk about her at all, and I'm just kinda curious, you know?"

  Trish rubbed her thumb against the condensation beading on her gss of iced tea, feeling the squeaking rather than hearing it. "She was... something else. The kind of person books are written about, before the Affini came, anyway. She had this way of making you believe, because she believed so strongly herself. She and I didn't agree on almost anything, politically, but it didn't matter to me. I trusted her. And so did everyone else. And because we all trusted her, we could work together, even if we were all pulling in different directions."

  Piper had worn a confused expression on her face for the st half of the answer. "...politically?"

  "Please tell me you understand what politics are," Trish said, sighing.

  "Sure, that's like, dealing with people when you're trying to make decisions. Like the town meetings, that's politics."

  "Okay, well, imagine that, but on a global scale, or broader. How about ideology, you know that one?"

  "Oh yeah, totally. Feralism, that's an ideology."

  "Well... there's a lot of different ideologies, okay? Ones that have nothing to do with the Affini. Purely intra-Terran ideologies. Liberalism, Socialism, Anarchism. It's a worldview, a politically specific worldview, an understanding of the world and an understanding of how to approach solving problems. Cass was an anarchist. She believed in having zero vertical hierarchy whatsoever."

  Piper shrugged. "Doesn't sound so bad. What's to disagree with? That's basically what the Affini do."

  "You may not have noticed, but we humans are not Affini," Trish said with a dry edge to her voice. "We don't do well without structure, at least, not historically. And when things don't go well, we look for an Other to bme. That's just one reason why you need at least some degree of vertical hierarchy — to stop those impulses before they can do harm."

  "Seems kinda pessimistic. But if that's true, it's a good thing we've got the Affini then, right?"

  Trish couldn't help but stare at the innocent expression on Piper's face. "You really do live in a totally different world than the one I grew up in," she finally said, shaking her head and finishing her iced tea.

  "Yeah. Duh." Piper shrugged. "So you and Cass fought a lot?"

  "Argued. Oh, argued." She couldn't help but smile at the memory, painful though it was. "All the time. That's what leftists do, you know, we argue. It's our number one pastime. But I still considered her a friend. A friend with some hopelessly radical political ideas, but a friend nevertheless."

  "Huh. That's nice, I guess. So...what happened to her? No one really talks about that. I know she didn't die in the Winter like a lot of people did, because she wrote about the Affini and they got everyone off the pnet, but no one talks about it."

  "She's gone," Trish said. "And I miss her. But she's gone."

  "So... that's Solstice?" The view out the window — which, of course, wasn't a window, she knew that by now — was of a green and blue marble drifting through inky nothingness. If it weren't for the continents being scrambled, and the shade of green being just slightly off from what she would expect, it might have been the Terra she'd seen in history books and vids from the Early Spaceflight Era.

  "Yup. They really fixed the pce up, huh?" Nikoi was sitting on the bed with her, looking out at the pnet. "I remember when the por caps went all the way down to, oh, about there," he said, leaning in and extending his arm to point, so Haven could follow along.

  "Well, I guess that expins the crater. Asteroid strike?"

  He shook his head. "No, the Cosmic Navy fired some kind of hyper-railgun bomb at us. I looked it up at one point, years and years back, but honestly I don't remember what they called it. Just some kludged-together thing they didn't understand but well enough to make sure it hurt someone." He gnced over at Haven and put a smile on his face. "But you know, they fixed it up good. The Affini. Rebuilt Landfall along the new coastline and everything. You should go down, when you're feeling a little better, have a look."

  "Maybe I will." Or maybe I'll throw myself out an airlock the minute I'm not being watched. Not that Haven was entirely certain the sarcotesta wasn't vacuum rated. "But we're going to the station, right?"

  "Mmmhmm. Hey Clinic? Switch camera to Parthenocisssus, please."

  "You got it, Niko~!" The view out the window immediately switched to show something like an O'Neill cylinder, if O'Neill cylinders were the centerpiece of a quadrillionaire's arboretum. There was no real way to grasp the scale of it, but judging from the ships clustered around the spindle at the near end — well, if they were the same size as the Tilndsia, twelve kilometers or so she'd been told, that would make Parthenocissus...

  Her mind reeled. Each of the counter-rotating rings must have been over fifty kilometers across, and stacked end to end the way they were, they might stretch for hundreds of kilometers from spindle to starward. Leaflike growths and vines surrounded it, further magnifying its apparent scale and making it difficult to tell where the station began and ended.

  "That elevator runs clear down to New Landfall," Niko said, pointing at the spindle end. "Slower than a direct flight, but you can't beat an elevator for sheer efficiency and throughput, even if delta-v isn't a concern."

  "I guess." Haven couldn't help but stare — she didn't have eyelids. She could simute them, she'd discovered, 'close' her eyes when she wanted to, but the autonomic metronome of unnoticed blinks wasn't something she experienced any longer. At least, not until they grew back. I shouldn't give them the chance to.

  Something chirped, and Niko lifted his other wrist to take a gnce at his bracelet. "Oh, hey, there they are." He gnced back to Haven and grinned. "Guess what? You've got a visitor. They've been asking about you basically since they woke up."

  Not even being a more-or-less disembodied brain in a magic pnt-suit could keep the ice water from racing up her spine. No. No. No. Not him. Find something sharp and hurry! It's a hospital, I've got to be able to find a fucking scaplel!

  "I'll just see myself out, let you two catch up, huh?" He pushed himself off the bed and nded easily, and was gone a moment ter, leaving Haven frozen to the spot by her own fear. She was still there, staring helplessly at nothing in particur, squelching down the suicidal impulse as she ever did, when she head a familiar voice.

  "Hello?"

  She turned, and was lost. Haven knew that voice, she was sure of it, but the ... woman? man? person in the doorway wasn't anyone she recognized. Their blonde hair was cut short and styled up in a cssic fauxhawk, and while they seemed almost coltishly long of limb, the loose trousers and the jacket that rested on their broad shoulders nevertheless fit perfectly. It seemed like there were modest breasts under there, but the set of their body was such that even then they still cut a masculine figure. "Wow," they said, and still Haven couldn't pce the voice. "They weren't kidding about it being a full-body thing, were they?"

  "Do I ... know you? I'm sorry, maybe my memory is scrambled or something...." She carefully climbed down off the bed, ignoring the impulse to dive headfirst off and hope for the worst; her bance was still not what she'd have liked, even though she could move around more or less normally.

  She didn't expect the stranger's reaction: a grin that only grew broader as it lingered. "You seriously don't recognize me?" they said, and they seemed almost excited about the prospect. "Seriously?"

  "Sorry...?"

  "Don't be!" they said, crossing the room with a few long-legged steps. They were tall, taller than Haven, who had been not quite been cursed with her father's prodigious height but was still much taller than she'd prefer. Then, without any warning, the stranger threw their arms around Haven and squeezed. "Stars, I'm so gd you're okay."

  "Wh-who—?!"

  They ughed. "What, you don't know your own executive assistant after only sixty years?"

  "...Tara?!" It was impossible — but then, now that she looked, Haven could see familiar features here and there — the prominent bridge of her nose, the curve of her chin, and of course the eyes were just the same as they'd ever been. "How?! Did they... put you in a whole new body or something?!"

  "No, they've just got the HRT of the gods here," they — she? said, ughing and giving Haven one more squeeze before letting go. "They got me out of the freezer a few weeks back. I came through pretty lucky, actually." She held her left hand out in front of Haven, the fingertips as well as the whole of the ring and pinky fingers much paler than the rest of her. "Lost some of these, and some of my toes. They had to regrow them. They're mostly back to full motility, but I still gotta do PT to get the grip strength back where it was. Still.. that's better than most." Her face fell. "Shit. I really did just rub that in your face, didn't I?"

  "It's fine," Haven said. "Really. I'm gd you don't have to be in something like this. You don't deserve that." And frankly, I deserve a lot worse. "You shouldn't have been there. You shouldn't have had to come along." And I should have died on that void-wretched ship.

  "Well... I'm here. We're here. And... look, I may not be your executive assistant anymore, because, y'know, the Company doesn't exist anymore, but...you were a good boss. The best I ever had, actually. Like, there's all the bullshit propaganda about good bosses — or there was, anyway — but you actually were. You respected me, you didn't give me bullshit tasks that weren't my job, and you didn't try to get in my pants no matter how much your father obviously wanted you to." She shuddered. "Listen, I know he was your dad and all, but that man was a sack of shit."

  "Was?" The ice water came back, but with a far different quality this time.

  "... oh, stars, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to break it to you like that," Tara said, sighing. "Yeah, he didn't make it through. And I know you're not supposed to speak ill of the dead, and I know he's still your dad, but I could tell how much you hated to be around him. I can only imagine what he was like when I wasn't around..."

  Henry Hudds-Friday was dead. There was a part of Haven, a familiar part, that wasted no time: What a horrible, awful creature I am. I don't even feel sad. And maybe it was true. Maybe she was a monster. But her father had put himself in that position, pulled the trigger on himself, and taken a lot of innocent people with him for no reason at all besides his own stupid vanity. There was no sense lying about the man, internally or otherwise, now that he was gone. "It's okay. And yeah, he was an asshole," she agreed. "I'm sorry I never stood up to him."

  "The hell are you talking about? Harn, he tried to fire me like six times and every time you told him to pound sand!" The grin, just a little lopsided, returned. "Okay, can I admit, I find it kinda weird to call you by name after so long calling you 'Sir?'"

  "You definitely don't have to call me 'Sir' anymore." Please don't, she thought. It's like a fucking knife every time but it never actually kills me.

  "Yeah, for one thing you're not twelve feet tall and a pnt," she said, giving Haven a wink that she was not prepared for, and that only her facelessness saved her from showing the completely unexpected feelings it brought up. Somehow it was worse than the occasional feeling of attraction she's had towards Tara before. She quashed them back down — she was good at that, too. No, no, no, I am not taking advantage of her. I'm not going to be like him.

  "So." She couldn't swallow to clear her throat, and wasn't entirely sure she even had a throat to clear at the moment. "HRT of the gods, huh? This is... this is you?"

  "Getting there," she- they? said, nodding. "It's not like the way I was felt wrong, just that something was missing. I dunno. It's hard to describe. Woman was fine and all, but it didn't cover all the bases. And I mean, with what we had back in the Accord, I don't know that I could ever have ever found the sweet spot, but this stuff the Affini have? You can dial it in feature by feature. It's amazing. Once you're out of that thing, honestly, even if you don't want to do anything major, I'd say give it a whirl just to see what you can get out of it. Experiment a little, y'know?" They winked again, with the same results as before.

  "I'm gd you're here," Haven said, if only to give her something to think about besides how much she liked Tara's smile. "I've honestly been feeling really lost. I don't know if it'd be any better, meeting the Affini before we were frozen. I think I'd be just as overwhelmed."

  "From what the florets have told me, yeah, probably," Tara agreed. "They don't do anything by halves. But they seem to have their hearts in the right pce, at least. If they have hearts. You know what I mean."

  "Well, you've got a few weeks experience, at least, right? That's more than I have, so-" She paused. Stars, you're really trying to put her back in the same position?

  "What?" They leaned in close. "You okay?"

  "I was just going to ask, you know- but I mean, you're not my employee anymore, I can't- I shouldn't just expect that of you—" She froze as Tara reached out and took her hand, holding it gently. The warmth and tenderness was immediately palpable through the sarcotesta.

  "Harn," they said. "Listen to me. I may not be your executive assistant anymore, yeah, that's true. But that doesn't mean you can't ask me for help as a friend." Her mouth quirked into an ever-so-slight smile. "Am I friend material?"

  Why would anyone want to be my friend? "If...you're okay with that," Haven said quietly. Stars, I'm such shit. I need to find an airlock.

  "I'm very okay with that. Besides," they added, "everyone else we knew our age is in their eighties or nineties by now, and I sure as hell didn't know anyone else on that ship. Did you?"

  Haven shook her head. They're stuck with me. I feel so bad for them.

  "And you want to know something? If I had to pick someone to be frozen and catapulted sixty years into the future with — if there was one person I could have taken with me? — it would probably have been you, anyway." The way they said it, their voice even and calm, their gaze tightly focused on where Haven's eyes ought to be, left no room for doubting them.

  Not for the first time, Haven wished she could cry; this time, it wasn't shame that stopped her, but a ck of tear ducts.