Maya Katarina Toitovna woke in a foul mood, disturbed by a dream that she deliberately forgot as she rolled out of bed. Like flushing the toilet after that first trip to the bathroom. Dreams were dangerous. She dressed with her back to the little mirror over the sink, then went downstairs to the dining common. All of Sabishii had been built in its signature Martian/Japanese style, and her neighborhood had the look of a Zen garden, all pine and moss scattered among polished pink boulders. It was beautiful in a spare way that Maya found unpleasant, a kind of rebuke to her wrinkles. She ignored it as best she could, and concentrated on breakfast. The dead boredom of the daily necessities. At another table Vlad and Ursula and Marina were eating with a group of the Sabishii issei. The Sabishiians had all shaved their heads, and in their work jumpers looked like Zen monks. One of them turned on a tiny screen over their table and a Terran news show began, a metanational production from Moscow that had the same relationship to reality that Pravda had once had. Some things never changed. This was the English-language version, the speaker’s English better than her own, even after all these years. “Now the latest on this fifth day of August, 2114.”

Maya stiffened in her chair. In Sabishii it was Ls 246, very near perihelion— the fourth day of 2 November— the days short, the nights warmish for this M-year 44. Maya had had no idea what the Terran date was, and hadn’t for years. But back there it was her birthday. Her— she had to calculate . . . her 130th birthday.

Feeling sick, she scowled and threw her half-eaten bagel on her plate, stared at it. Thoughts burst in her head like birds scattering out of a tree; she couldn’t track them; it was like being blank. What did it mean, this horrible unnatural age? Why had they turned on the screen at just that moment?