When Nasu reached Titan she felt she was a different person. She’d left too many of her memories behind, scattered on Earth and Mars. Most of her childhood was gone. Whole decades were missing.

In Polyport under the dome she whiled away nights in the humid tropics of that place, trying to find a shred of who she once was. On Titan they told tales of the Nine Billion Hells, and the lost asteroid of Carcosa. Out on the Kraken Sea, Nirrti the Black and her pirates held sway, and a strange, cold war took place between the Others of the Conversation and the things in the Oort and their Quietude. It was a war Nasu didn’t understand.

She took on odd jobs. She went hunting for bopper artefacts, guarded cargo shipments from Nirrti’s attentions, worked in the fish tanks and the hydroponics gardens, painted. She thought of finding berth on one of the Exodus ships leaving the solar system in search of other worlds. But there wasn’t enough of who she was left, and she didn’t know the woman she was on Titan.

“You’re lonely, I think,” she whispered to the planet-sized entities in the Oort. She painted them feverishly. Odd graffiti appeared on city walls throughout Polyport. “I am lonely too. I want to go home again.”

That realisation came gradually. The voices in the cosmic dark still whispered to her from their lonely hiding places, but she listened less.

“I was Nasu once,” she told them. “I was once a child born on Earth under a clear blue sky. I am sorry. I am going back.”

She took a fragment of a soul rock with her to remind her of their story. Their pull grew weak as she made the Second Crossing and then the Great Crossing and found herself back near the sun. The things in the Oort were far from its light and its warmth.

Nasu felt herself changing again, but she didn’t know into what. An old alarm tripped on Earth, pinged a hidden server on the moon that sent out dandelion packets across near-space mirrors and hubs, until one landed in her node.

She went back to Gateway, and descended to the Earth and breathed its air once more.

17. The Lull

“Well, make yourselves comfortable, I suppose,” Mariam said.

She’d put bedding down on the carpet in her small living room and now the boy, Saleh, wriggled under the thin blanket, the jackal Anubis by his side.

The boy smiled at her shyly. “It’s plenty comfortable,” he said. “Thank you.”

The jackal’s eyes were crossed. It was accessing something in the Conversation.

Mariam left them to it and went out on her balcony. She was lucky to have this apartment. In Mars they were all crammed into pods, or so she’d heard. In the asteroids people lived in dormitories. Having this much space was luxury, surely.