There was no physical sensation when the shuttle lifted off from the landing field at Christchurch. Karen Farley Lanier closed her eyes briefly and listened to the exclamations of the delegates, many of whom had never flown until the last few weeks, much less traveled in space. They would spend seven hours in transit before docking with the Stone—Thistledown, she corrected herself. Only the Old Natives referred to the orbiting asteroid as the Stone.

Still slender, her blond hair graying into sunlit ash, Karen seemed mature, but nowhere in age near her sixty-eight years. She might have been a well-preserved forty. Pride in her appearance and fitness had been part of her bulwark against the Death; if she could maintain her strength and youth, she felt more subconsciously than otherwise, then the Earth could regain her vitality. Sometimes she accused herself of self-serving vanity, but what did she have to be vain about, or for that matter, who could she be vain for? Her husband hadn’t complimented her on her looks in at least five years; they hadn’t made love for three years; she had neither time nor inclination for affairs.

Life had made her almost completely self-contained, a kind of emotional analog to the homorph Olmy.

The atmosphere in the shuttle was electric with excitement. The delegates sat glued to the ports, eyes wide. After an hour and a half, the novelty passed sufficiently for some of the delegates to turn away from the view of stars and Earth. Karen looked around the broad, dimly-lighted white interior of the cabin. As with almost all Hexamon shuttles, the furnishings resembled ingeniously molded soft white bread dough: couches arranged almost casually for maximum efficiency, all capable of customizing themselves to fit their occupants’ bodies; opacity where no windows were needed, transparent ports where passengers wished to see out; pools of light where a delegate read a small stack of papers (archaic in this setting!), and shadow where another slept.

This Hexamon shuttle was much larger than most, easily capable of carrying several hundred passengers. There were forty-five aboard now, forty-one men and women from around the Earth, as well as herself. It was going to be a grand experiment—a by-your-bootstraps knitting of these individuals into a single family, teaching them to see that their problems were not separate but intimately linked, and to see their companions not as competition, but as helpers.

The introduction at Christchurch had gone smoothly enough; Karen had blended in, despite her rank as Chief Earth Coordinator, and had been accepted by most of the group as a peer.