I’m still searching for a suitably withering retort when I glimpse the arm of Telemus tracing a white scar down through the beaten-bronze dome of the sky toward us. And then I do have second thoughts — but by then it’s too late.

LINDY HAS OBVIOUSLY been looking forward to sex with Telemus for ages, if not her entire life, and he reciprocates. They fuck hard and fast at too many gees, his docking hectocotylus locked tight inside her launch adapter. I find the comm setting to screen out their groans and shuddering endearments before I get caught up in it. I lie alone and slimy in Lindy’s abdomen, squished down by the centripetal acceleration as Telemus yanks us into orbit. I have a lot of time to think black thoughts. It’s not that I mind that my steerage cocoon is a slut, but if I don’t get some decent conversation en route, I’ll go mad before we arrive. I should have plugged in the graveyard before we left, I realize. At least the ghosts of my sisters would keep me well-grounded. But it’s too late now, and I’m not going to ask Lindy to hook me up — some things are too private.

The thundering pressure of the ride falls away from me, and I cut back into the open chat channel in time to hear Lindy whisper tearful good-byes to her beau. I open my eyes and see Telemus in all his glory, dropping back toward the pearlescent cloud tops, tentacle tip retracting into its maintenance shell. “Good-bye!” Lindy calls. “I love you!”

“Until the next you,” rumbles Telemus, his voice dopplering away as we rise above him.

I try to get the star-crossed lover’s attention as we drift away. “Lindy, can you see High Wire yet?”

After a brief pause: “Yes! He’s over there!” A blinking red ring flashes around a barely visible speck of starlight. “Isn’t it exciting?” She gives me a brief squeeze.

I close my eyes. Patience. “I don’t like travel much,” I say, the most tactful lie that comes rapidly to mind. “Can you put me into full hibernation until we arrive?”

“Are you sure?” She sounds doubtful, as if the mere idea of anyone not enjoying drifting helplessly between the stars with only a vacuous tart for company is incomprehensible to her.

“I’m sure, Lindy.” I pause. “Do you have any alternative personality modules?” I add plaintively.

“Sorry!” She says brightly. “I’m me! We’re all me! With the Mod-42 short-duration environmental-support capsule what you see is exactly what you get! And I want you to know, I really love having you inside me! But if you’re sure you want to sleep…?”

“I am,” I say firmly, and close my eyes, hoping that it’ll be dream-free.

“Awww! Alright. Sleep tight!”

The universe goes away.

THE DIRTY TRUTH — a truth universally acknowledged today, but bizarrely never admitted by any of my True Love’s kind — is that space travel is shit.

(I use “shit” as a generic placeholder for a vile and unpleasant substance with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Being instantiated as and when I was, I have no direct experience of scat. We had to practice with diatomaceous earth and brown dye. But I digress…)

If you’re rich, you can rent a stateroom in the supercargo spaces of a big strange person with a magsail or a nuclear-electric drive, depending on what direction you want to go in. And you, and a few sixteens of other folk, get to socialize and intrigue and backstab and be bored together for weeks or months or years on end, in a space not much larger than my rented rack in a cloud-city afloat over Venus. Bandwidth is expensive and metered — someone must keep a relay antenna pointed at your host’s brain, and feed it with kilowatts, just to support your idle chatter — and the stars and planets move so very slowly.

But it’s much worse if you’re poor.

If you’re poor, they wrap you in a stupid cocoon and strap you to the outside of the ship. It’s cold, or hot, and the radiation burn keeps your Marrow techné churning with the demands of self-repair, and if you’re unlucky a sand grain with the energy of a guided missile blows you limb from limb. If not for the stimulating company of your cocoon and any other steerage passengers you can talk to, you go insane from sensory deprivation. You can opt for slowtime, but that’s got problems of its own — or you can go into total shutdown hibernation, and possibly die in transit and never wake up again. And that’s it. It lasts for months, or even years.

You want to know what it’s like to emigrate to Saturn system? Imagine spending six years in a straitjacket tied to the outside of a skyscraper, with only a couple dozen similar lunatics for company. Even with slowtime, it’s going to feel like months. You’re wearing a blindfold, which is probably appropriate because every couple of days, just to break the monotony, a not-very-accurate cosmic sniper fires a random shot at the building. And you wonder why my sisters don’t get out much?

(Of course that’s nothing compared to interstellar travel, where they freeze you and chop off your limbs to save weight — and grow you new ones at the other end if you arrive sufficiently intact after decades and centuries in the vasty deep — but I’m not planning on going to Pluto or Eris or Quaoar to seek passage on one of the starships. At least, not just yet.)

My One True Love’s species used to dream about space travel. It’s ironic: They were so badly designed for it that a couple of minutes’ exposure to vacuum would have killed them irreversibly. To go up and beyond Earth’s atmosphere required elaborate preparations, a complex portable biosphere — journeys of any duration necessitated cumbersome and heavy radiation shielding. And that’s before you consider all the other drawbacks.

When they first developed the organs of exploration, there was no there there. So they built timid, stupid machines and hurled them into the airless void to report back. Then they built idiot phone exchanges and put them in orbit to fill the void with chatter. Obsessed with biological replicators, they ignored the most interesting corners of the solar system and focused on dull, arid Mars. They periodically scurried up above the atmosphere and hunkered down in tunnels on Luna or ventured on expedition to domes on Mars, and they died in significant numbers before the end, simply because canned primates couldn’t thrive in vacuum or survive solar flares.

Late in the day, when there weren’t enough of them left, they sent people like me — intelligent servants — to run the domed bases and camps and to conduct their research by proxy, and finally to build cities that they would never walk the streets of. Some of the people they sent were orthodox in body plan, but most were designed for vacuum and high-radiation environments and corrosive cloudscapes and microgravity. They — we — slaved in mining camps and died in launch accidents and built places where my True Love’s kind could live, made somewhere out of nowhere… but one day they weren’t there anymore. Dead, they were all dead.

(What killed them? I can’t say. Rhea, template-matriarch and prototype of my kind, might have been able to tell us, for she lived among them in their twilight decades: But she died before I was instantiated, leaving only stale regrets to we final few who came into being too late to know True Love.)

Before our dead Creators built my kind, space was empty as far as telescopes can see, and desolate with it. But we filled the void, and now there are places to go. Circumsolar space has been settled; starships are en route toward the nearer extrasolar worlds, crewed by the brave and the foolhardy. The colonies are barbarous and lawless compared to the huge cities of Earth, playgrounds for jaded aristos, where fortunes are made and lost and empires built and demolished against the breath-taking beauty of sterile planets and moons: And at last we’re not alone among the stars.