Karen spoke Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish, having brushed up on her Russian with Hexamon devices, and having learned Spanish the same way. That was enough to communicate directly with most of the delegates. Those few whose language she didn’t speak—including three whose dialects had arisen since the Death—could usually communicate with others in the group through a shared second language. No outside human or machine translators diluted this early stage of their interaction; they were being taught to rely on each other. Before the week was out, they would all speak each other’s languages—having acquired them within the third chamber’s city memory—and many more, besides.

For the first time in years, Karen felt on the edge of fulfillment. She had suffered as much as Garry during the last four decades, traveling around the ravaged Earth, seeing more death, destruction and seemingly unending agony than she thought she could stand. Losing their daughter. Her breath still took a hitch at that memory. But she had dealt with her grief in a very different manner, not internalizing it as world-guilt, but finally rejecting it, setting her personality aside as a separate thing, and dealing with her work as a nurse might. She did not succeed entirely—she had her own hidden scars—but she had not declined into a permanent funk.

She forced the thoughts back again, a little surprised they had gotten loose. Karen had long ago learned when and how to block off the area of her mind having to do with her husband; she usually managed not to think much about Garry when they were separated, concentrating on the delicate tasks at hand. But their last meeting…Garry, nervous, perhaps even frightened, though doing his best not to show it, escorting a man who could not possibly be on Earth…

She glanced out the shuttle window at stars, temporarily ignoring the steady, polite conversation of three delegates sitting beside her. Was Garry aboard the Stone, with the impossible Russian? She had, in her own stubborn way, come close to resolving the mystery by deciding that someone had played a trick on her husband; that Mirsky had never gone down the Way. But the more she thought about it—and she could not help thinking about it now, with little else to do—the more she realized how unlikely this was.

She felt a flush of anger. Something was going to happen. Something momentous. She resented the mystery of Mirsky’s return, feared it might drive Garry deeper into his funk by making him face cosmic imponderables even farther outside his control than Earth’s pain.

She frowned and turned away from the stars. Unlike Lanier, Karen felt little dismay at the changes in her life. She accepted change easily enough; spaceflight, the Stone, the opportunities offered by the Hexamon. But Mirsky’s return slipped from her understanding like a fish through her fingers.