“The Sun is my life’s work, you see, Dr. Scholes. I’ve known that since I was born. I once knew much about the Sun. And in the future,” she went on ambiguously, “I shall once again know a great deal. More, perhaps, than anyone who has yet lived.”

He decided to be honest with her. “That doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

“No. No, I don’t suppose it does,” she said sharply. “But that doesn’t matter, Dr. Scholes. Your brief is to do just what you’ve been doing: to show me the sights, to let me feel the Sun from a human perspective.”

A human perspective?

Now she turned and looked directly into his eyes; her gaze, watery as it was, was open and disconcerting, searing. “But your curiosity about my role isn’t what’s throwing you off balance. Is it?”

“I—”

“It’s my age.” She grinned again, deliberately — it seemed to him — showing her grotesque, yellowed teeth. “I’ve seen you studying me, from the comer of your eye… Don’t worry, Kevan Scholes, I don’t take offense. My age is the subject you’ve been politely skirting since I climbed aboard this flying refrigerator of yours.”

He felt resentful. “You’re mocking me.”

She snorted. “Of course I am. But it’s the truth, isn’t it?”

He tried not to let his anger build. “What reaction do you expect?”

“Ah… honesty at last. I expect nothing less than your rather morbid fascination, of course.” She raised her hands and studied them, as if they were artifacts separate from her body; she turned them around, flexing her fingers. “How awful it is that this aging was once the lot of all of humanity, this slow disintegration into decay, physical and mental. Especially the physical, actually… My body seems to crowd out my awareness; sometimes I’ve time for nothing else but to cater to its pressing, undignified needs…” She frowned. “But perhaps AS treatment has robbed our species of rather more than it has given us. After all, even the most vain, or most attention-seeking, refuse to be AS-frozen at more than, say, physical-sixty. So meaningful interaction is restricted to a physical range of a mere six decades. How sad.”

He took a breath. “But you must be — physical-eighty?”

Her mouth twitched. “That’s not a bad guess, for someone who’s never met an old person before… unless you’ve ever encountered an unfortunate individual for whom AS treatment has failed to take. These are humans in their natural state, if you think about it, but our society treats them as ill — to be feared, shunned.”

Gently, he asked, “Is that what’s happened to you?”

“Failed AS treatments?” Her papery cheeks trembled briefly, and again he perceived resentment, a deep anger, just under her abrasive, disconcerting surface. “No. Not exactly.”

He touched her arm. “Look there… ahead of us.” There was a structure before them, looming out of the flat-infinite horizon, rising from the photosphere itself. It was like a viaduct — a series of arches, loops of crimson-glowing gas which strode across the Solar surface.

Once again he heard her gasp.

He checked his data slate. “Prominences. The whole structure is a hundred thousand miles long, twenty thousand high…” He glanced up and checked their heading. “We’re only ten thousand miles above the surface ourselves. We’re going to pass through one of those arches.”

She clapped her hands in delight, and suddenly she seemed astonishingly, unnervingly young — a child trapped in a decaying husk of a body, he thought.

Soon the arch through which they would pass was huge before them, and the mouths of the others began to close up, foreshortened. In this landscape of giants, Scholes found he had trouble visualizing the scale of the structures; their approach seemed to take forever, yet still they grew, thrusting out of the Sun like the dreams of some insane engineer. Now he could make out detail — there were places were the arch was not complete, and he could see knots of higher density in the coronal gas which flowed, glowing, down the magnetically shaped flanks toward pools of light at the feet of the arch. But despite all this the illusion of artifice persisted, making the structure still more intimidating.

At last the arch swept over them, immense, aloof, grand. “Five thousand miles thick,” he said slowly. “Just think; you could hang the Earth up there, at the apex of that arch, like a Christmas tree ornament.”

She snorted, and pressed the back of her hand to her mouth.

He looked at her curiously. She was — he realized slowly — giggling.

They passed through the arch; the vast sculpture of gas receded slowly behind them.

Scholes checked his data slate. “We’ve almost completed our orbit. Three million miles of a Solar great circle traversed in three hours…”

“So our journey’s nearly done.” She folded her hands neatly in her lap once more, and turned her face to the clear wall; corona light played around her profile, making her look remote, surprisingly young.

He felt suddenly moved by her — by this lonely, bitter woman, isolated by her age and fragility from the rest of mankind… and, he suspected obscurely, isolated by some much more dramatic secret.

He tried to reassure her. “Another hour and you’ll be safely inside the habitat. You’ll be a lot more comfortable there. And — ”

She turned to him. She wasn’t smiling, but her face seemed to have softened a little, as if she understood what he was trying to do. Again she reached out and touched the back of his hand, and the sudden human contact was electric. “Thank you for your patience, Dr. Scholes. I’ve not given you an easy time, have I?”

He frowned, troubled. “I don’t think I’ve been patient at all, actually.”

“Oh, but you have.”

His curiosity burned within him, like the Sun’s fusion core, illuminating everything he saw. “You’re at the heart of all this, aren’t you? The Superet project, I mean. I don’t understand what your role is… But that’s the truth, isn’t it?”

She said nothing, but let her hand remain on his…

He frowned. She seemed so fragile. “And how do you feel about it?”

“How do I feel?” She closed her eyes. “Do you know, I’m not sure if anyone has asked me that before. How do I feel?” She sighed, raggedly. “I’m scared, Dr. Scholes. That’s how I feel.”

He let his fingers close around hers.

There was a subtle push in the base of his spine, and the sound of the Lightrider’s drive was a deep, low vibration, a seismic rumble he felt deep within the fabric of his body.

Slowly, the little ship climbed away from the Sun’s boiling surface.

The flitter tumbled from the shimmering throat of the wormhole transit route from Port Sol to Earthport. Louise Ye Armonk peered out of the cramped cabin, looking for Earth. Mark sat beside her, a bookslate on his lap.

Earthport was a swarm of wormhole Interfaces clustered at L4 — one of the five gravitationally stable Lagrange points in the Earth-Moon system, leading the Moon in its orbit around Earth by sixty degrees. From here, Earth was a swollen blue disc; wormhole gates of all sizes drifted across the face of the old planet like electric-blue, tetrahedral snowflakes.

The flitter — unmanned save for its two passengers — surged unhesitatingly through the tangle of Interfaces, the mesh of traffic which passed endlessly through the great cross-System gateways. In contrast to the desolation of the outer rim, Louise received a powerful, immediate impression of bustle, prosperity, activity, here at the heart of the System.

At the flitter’s standard one-gee acceleration the final leg from L4 to Earth itself would take only six hours; and already the old planet, pregnant and green, seemed to Louise to be approaching rapidly, as if surfacing through the complex web of wormhole Interfaces. Huge fusion stations — constructed from ice moons towed into Earth orbit from the asteroid belt and beyond — sparkled as they crawled above green-blue oceans. The planet itself was laced with lights, on land and sea. In the thin rim of atmosphere near the North Pole Louise could just make out the dull purple glow of an immense radiator beam, a diffuse refrigerating laser dumping a fraction of Earth’s waste heat into the endless sink of space.