But space travel is still shit. It’s expensive and unpleasant, and it takes you a long way from your friends — but not, unfortunately, your enemies.

OF COURSE, I don’t hibernate for the entire voyage. That would be foolish, and possibly fatal, and although I am unconvinced that I desire life, I am not yet ready to embrace death. I wake briefly as Lindy happily chatters her hellos to the laconic High Wire, and I force myself to stay awake as the spaceship’s tether grabs her and she crawls hubward and settles down on the spaceship’s load-bearing truss. I sleep again after she bites into the feedlines and power circuit and starts to metamorphose around me — a boring interlude, as her brain undergoes considerable rearrangement at this time. And then I wake again as we near our destination.

High Wire cycles permanently between Mercury and Venus on an elliptical transfer orbit, taking half a year on each trip. He never enters planetary orbit, but uses his powerful tether — a smaller sib to Telemus — to catch incoming travelers and launch departing ones. Lobbing us up to him, or catching us at the other end, is the job of the local tethers or maglev tracks at the destination planet. Unlike many ships, especially in the outer reaches, High Wire works alone, without a crew of auxiliaries. But he’s not lonely: He gets to talk to a lot of travelers. In fact, it’s almost a rite of passage. So I spend a good three days hanging upside down from a structural truss covered in cargo pods, the sunlight casting acid-sharp shadows in front of me, giving him an abbreviated lifedump.

“So you left your home because you wanted to segment your self from your sibs,” High Wire rumbles thoughtfully. (He pitches his voice low, adopting the gravitas due his station.) “But you are fond of them. Why did you do that?”

“They were dying too fast.” I hug the graveyard of memories inside Lindy’s silent chrysalis. “I couldn’t stand to think I’d be just another.”

“But they were all older than you, subjectively. Your sixty-one-year gap.”

“What’s six decades?” I’d shrug if I could. “We developed differently, of course, but we all had the same problem.” The yawning hole in the center of our badly designed lives. “How can you love yourself if you can’t love somebody else?”

“Many people do not find that a problem,” High Wire muses. “They exist adequately without loving anything, themselves included.”

“Yes, but that’s not the point. You’re happy, you’re doing exactly what you were designed to do. But imagine… imagine somebody invented teleportation and made you obsolete overnight. What would you do then?”

Without missing a beat, High Wire replies; “Without a job, I think I would head for the stars, to see what’s out there.”

He’s obviously been thinking about that question a lot…

BUT WHY WOULD anyone want to go off-Earth?

I did. Once.

I had a lot to run away from. Too many bad memories, too many sibs gone before me into the beyond… I’m one of the last, instantiated after we were already obsolete, frozen for over sixty years at one point, running far beyond my design. Over the past century the exigencies of space travel have driven body fashion in a direction I can’t follow. Designed as companion for my One True Love (deceased), my sense of identity is strongly bound to my physical shape. I can’t easily remodel myself as a chibi-san, small, wide-eyed, and big-headed, because it would deny my whole purpose, lovely and obsolete. Without even that tenuous raison d’être, I might as well die. And so, demoted from goddess to ogress with close-set, tiny eyes, I chose to flee.

We all make mistakes, don’t we?

ALL GOOD TIMES come to an end, and bad times, too: boring ones just taper out. I sleep after my'tête-à-tête with the shipmind, and when I awaken, Mercury is a blazing-hot disk, visible just beyond the rim of Lindy’s sunshade. “Wake up, sleepy bones!” she sings. “It’s time to disembark!”

I glance around. On every side of me, cargo pods are twitching from their slumbers and changing shape, growing legs and grapples and ion thrusters, and migrating toward High Wire’s tether. “How do we land…?” I start to ask, then feel Lindy shudder.

“On a rail! It’s fun!”

“On a—” A memory of Mercury tickles my head, but it belongs to a dead sister I haven’t fully internalized. Juliette, maybe? One of the wild ones. I can but clutch the box of soul chips and swear to myself. Lindy is expanding lengthwise, reconfiguring around me. “How long have we got to go?”

“Not long! Not long at all!” And she lets go of High Wire’s tether.

All around us, pods and cocoons and modules are scattering from the High Wire like fluff from the hub of a bursting flywheel, propelled by spring-loaded ejectors or dropping from the end of the tether. A snowstorm of mechalife swarms in the void as the gangling cycler ship fires up his ion drive and backs away slowly. For a moment my view blacks out as Lindy shields my face from the searing godwheel sun, then we roll around under the impulse of a tiny thruster and I see Mercury ahead of me, a half disk now visible, burnished and shining, larger than my fists held at arm’s length. “Two hours, and we’ll be down! Whee!” Lindy squeezes. “Are you worried? Be happy! I can relax you!”

On a rail. I have an archaic emulation mode in my fight/flight module. It makes me swallow, my throat dry. “Massage. Please.” Resolved: If I’m to die at a time not of my choosing, I will die happy. But Lindy’s theory of mind is too weak to model me, and so she takes me at my word. I arrive on Mercury butt first, scared witless, with my spine totally relaxed. Just as well, really.

Mercury’s escape velocity is over four kilometers per second, and there’s no atmosphere to speak of. We are coming in at just over orbital velocity, without a thruster pack, and there can’t possibly be enough orbital tethers for this crowd. But the Mercurials have come up with a solution: the equatorial maglev track. Come down just so, and its magnets will catch you in a grip of steel and drag you to a standstill at the gates of Cinnabar. (Miss it even by centimeters, and you learn exactly what it’s like to be a meteorite.)

The maglev track is a blinding-bright line slashed across the cratered lunar landscape of Mercury. We’re landing in daylight but driving into the twilight zone, with the searing solar glare blasting our shadow across the gray-brown landscape that blurs beneath us. I can’t look back — even if I could, Lindy’s solar parasol would block the view — but there’s a string of glittering pods lined up behind our approach path, like those arrayed in front, all with blinking emerald beacons like an expensive and fragile necklace. The horizon pancakes up and flattens beneath me as the landscape unwinds. It seems to speed up as we fall toward the track. Mountains frame the distant horizon. Is that Cinnabar’s huge dome I see at the vanishing point? I’m not sure — even with vision boosted to the max, I can’t quite make it out. “This is the fun part!” Lindy enthuses. “Try not to flinch! Whee! ”

The horizon is coming up fast now. I glimpse sawtooth underpinnings as a giant hand grabs us and squeezes. For a moment my vision sparkles with myriad brilliant disconnects, pixelating alarmingly; then a series of titanic jolts rattle my teeth in my head and try to squeeze me down into a puddle. My spine creaks as Lindy’s grip tightens painfully, and I can feel myself bloating, my internals settling in the grip of her foam. But then the deceleration eases, and my vision stabilizes. I can’t see directly ahead, there’s something in the way — something on the track ahead of us. For a panicky moment I think, We’re going to crash! then I realize it’s a fellow steerage passenger. The struts beneath the track are still skimming past alarmingly fast, but they’re no longer a sawtooth blur. We must be down to less than a thousand kilometers per hour. “Is it always like that?”