Watch it, girl. Keep this up and you really will start to imagine yourself a goddess, like those poor creatures— barely human anymore— who followed Ingersoll down into the deepest caverns, who bow to my mechs and address them by my name.

The last two years had been so busy, for her, for Saul, and for Carl. It struck her that she had not taken any time to stop and think about what had happened to all of them.

A fine trio, we are. None of us were important at all, back when Captain Cruz lived, and everyone was one big, happy research expedition. Carl was just a petty officer, I was a junior Artificial Intelligence tech, and Saul was a doctor with a strange passion for bugs.

Now poor Carl is whatever passes for commander, these days. I’m the Spider Woman, sending out her web of drones to keep the tunnels patched and the gunk controlled. And Saul…

She paused, pondering. Of usall, he’s the one who’s changed the most. Lord, I hope I don’t lose a good man to godhead.

He had been so preoccupied lately. Almost obsessed. Reluctant to link with her in the intimate touch of neural amplification. As if he were hiding something from me… or protecting me from something he felt I’d never understand.

Finally, it had come to a head. Last week she had lashed out, shouting at him in her frustration. Since then, he had left a few terse messages for her, her mechs had seen him in the halls, but for all intents and purposes they might as well have been on different planets.

All around her the holo displays glowed faintly. Even some of the units that had gone blank over her long sleep were replaced, now that she and Jeffers had gotten the autofac working properly up on A Level. For perhaps the first time since her awakening, no red warning lights glowed.

She found her gaze lingering on the Kelmar bio-organic machine that she had spent half her personal weight allowance to bring aboard… ages ago. The heart of her bio-cybernetic computer.

“JonVon,” she whispered. “I need some distraction from my troubles.”

There were things she used to do, for amusement, which she had not had time for in years. But now—

“Let’s see just how rusty I am at visual simulation,” she said, low, and pressed the Kelmar’s thumb ident. A display lit up.

She shook her head. “Let’s have some fun, like we used to.”

Virginia spent a few moments flicking switches and calibrating before slipping on the worn disk of her neural tap. She had grown so used to direct data flow, controlling or programming distant mechs as if they were parts of her own body, that it took her a few minutes to get back into the experimental, “synthetic” mode that had once been her own special way of interacting with JonVon.

But JonVon remembered. She had only to desire it, and a rainbow of light burst forth… an artist’s palette of brilliance.

I forgot about the colors! How could I have stayed away from this for so long?

Virginia constructed pink clouds over a placid, blue-green sea. She drew seven multihued balls and juggled them in make-believe hands, something she never would have been able to do on the “real” plane.

She smiled. “Yeah, we are, JonVon. I’m going to have to go down into you and find out what you’ve done to your simulation software.”

“Later. Right now I Just want to play a little while.”

It wasn’t only in visual simulation that JonVon had made progress. Only her trained ear caught the little signs in his words, phrasing, and timing, that this was still far from an intelligent being. Otherwise, the voice might easily have been that of a living person.

She toyed with the images, making the broad, moonlit sea open up before her. A school of flying fish. Diatoms sparkling in the churned wake of a mysterious shadow, just below the surface.

It felt good. Here within the machine, there were none of the muddy, confusing crises that beset them all on the outside. Here nothing could frighten her. It was too much like home.

Lord, how I miss Hawaii.

She crafted a porpoise in the waters, which chattered and splashed her playfully. The simulation was so vivid that she almost seemed to feel the droplets.

How long has it been since Saul and I made love linked this way?

She quashed the thought.

She shook her head. “No, JonVon. After so long, I’m not ready to try that again quite yet. I’ll tell you what, though. Let’s run a simulation of the gravitational sling maneuver Earth Control sent up. The one Carl got the Council to vote for last week. Do you scan the copy I inserted yesterday?”

“Full sense, JonVon. I want to ride the comet… to see what it’ll look like forty years from now, when we pop open the sleep slots and find ourselves nearing home.”

Home, she thought. Eighty years changed. Will they even remember us?

Virginia felt she could almost sense the rush of supercooled electrons as her counterpart made its preparations.

“Begin with the Nudge, with the equatorial flinger launchers engaged under Earth Control’s program.”

She settled back as the clouds and sea vanished. The porpoise, too, faded in a last-minute chittering of defiance.

Blackness settled in, conveying a sense of depth that stretched outward, to where stars glittered in their myriads. And below the starscape an image formed… white-streaked gray against sable. It was the by-now-familiar scene of dusty ice on the comet’s surface.

JonVon showed her the new launchers, optimistically depicted as completed at Halley’s equator. It’ll be some chore, building new accelerators to replace the ones the Arcists seized. We couldn’t ever do it without the Phobos technologies.

Arrayed in a ring around the equator of the prolate spheroid, the narrow-barreled guns began firing— throwing pellets of native nickel-iron away into space at large fractions of the speed of light— slowly, imperceptibly changing the momentum of the ancient iceball they were anchored in.

There was no sensation of movement, but Virginia identified with the tiny, simulated figures jumping, waving their arms on the surface. It was a nice touch for JonVon to put them in. For it would look like this— jubilant spacesuited workers leaping in joy when they finally began nudging the comet into a new orbit.

Using gentle signals as natural as moving an arm, Virginia let her sense of presence float upward to watch the simulation better. As the Nudge went on, she followed the icy core’s changing path through the vacuum.

Aphelion, four years from now, and bit by bit Halley s ancient orbit was changing. The launchers stole slightly from its angular momentum, causing it to begin its long sunward fall a few days before it normally would have. The comet’s inward velocity was small at first, but it grew.

Virginia knew this simulation wasn’t intrinsically any more accurate than the ones Carl had used, only more vivid. She wanted everything represented in images. It just wasn’t the same in graphs and numbers.

She rode the comet. The stars turned slowly as the time scale expanded and years flickered past. She and Halley fell together toward the cusp at the center of the solar system.