"You'll have to send my goodbyes to Uldren. Little age creases surround her eyes, illegible encryption, unbroken despite Mara's centuries of effort. "No thank you." Osana squints into the dawn. "Sure, Mom," she says, "you've got a ranch to run, after all. This is a nightmare one of those stress dreams where your powers of persuasion and manipulation fail. Mara has been so afraid of this answer for so long that she actually giggles. Now they sit side by side, mother and daughter, watching the sun rise over the Chriseiad range from Osana's little ranch house on the tundra. They're tipsy together, and the evening has wrapped around to morning. She doesn't want to but she does, and the memory blindfolds her and muzzles her and plugs her ears so she can hear nothing but Osana's voice on that final night. World of laughing Corsairs, world of breathless forest hunts, world of mountains flickering with pale Cherenkov fire, world of sweet berry-stained lips and mathematical insight pure as a rhodium chime. The world of her rebirth, shining water-blue and beautiful, wrapped like a gyroscope in its twin rings. Mara orders herself not to crane her neck, but she does it anyway and gets a terrible cramp as she searches the sky for the Distributary.
The Hulls gleam in the stark blue-white light of the star, each ship a silver seedpod braced by immense structural members and cocooned in reservoirs of spectrally adaptive smart fluid: theoretically enough to survive the horrible forces of transit through a singularity. Sound off for final hold."Īs her flight controllers confirm the state of their technical domains, Mara looks out into space through the synthetic gaze of her sensorium. She speaks into the flight directorate channel.
The waveguides in her helmet detect the image and obey the encrypted command scheme she's rooted into every system in her fleet. Mara thinks of the banyan trees that sprawl across the shallow silty lakes of a world she will never see again.
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