Freed from her subterranean existence on the Moon, she couldn’t get over the freedom of being in space. She got a job as a pilot on a ground-to-orbit shuttle, and later spent a few years as an ice miner shepherding comets in the Oort cloud, out on the ragged edge of interstellar space. When she finally left the solar system entirely, she did so as the captain of a freighter, hauling colonists and supplies out to the newly settled worlds of the fledgling Generality.

En route, she married the ship’s first officer, Carlos Konstanz.

After a hundred trips and a dozen years together, they had earned enough between them to buy the freighter from its owners. By the time Sofia reached her early thirties, they owned a small fleet of merchant ships and had become modestly wealthy. However, her diaries from this time indicate that she struggled with a lack of fulfilment, feeling herself rudderless and devoid of purpose, seeking to dedicate herself to something more meaningful than the simple acquisition of wealth—a sentiment sharpened by the untimely deaths of her parents and, soon afterwards, the unexplained disappearance of her husband during an otherwise routine trading expedition to Hopper space.

For a time, she became depressed. She worked routes alone, preferring the solitude. She became a virtual recluse, operating her business remotely and spending the majority of her time hundreds of thousands of kilometres from the nearest human being, with only the pitiless stars for company.

Those who knew her best feared for her sanity.

But then, a year or two after the tragic losses, while browsing an old archive that had been offered as payment by a computer-based civilisation that existed purely for the accretion and cross-referencing of information, she found something that piqued her interest.

According to the trove, a race known as the Hearthers had once existed close to the forward edge of our spiral arm. The Hearthers had hailed from a watery world in an elliptical orbit around its star. Its summers had been brief, heady months of frantic fecundity and gorging, all too swiftly over. For three quarters of its orbit, the planet swung beyond the outer limit of its star’s habitable zone, plunging the surface into a deep and seemingly endless winter. In order to survive, the Hearthers had been forced to cooperate. Their philosophy was one of abnegation and service, dedicating their lives to the survival of others and the furtherance of the greater good. There was, in their culture, no more noble or heroic act than the rescue and adoption of travellers caught far from home in the first freezing blasts of winter.

Small wonder then that when they joined the Multiplicity in their turn, they took their philosophy with them to the stars.