The date was displayed on the bedroom’s large wallscreen. Since she had entered coldsleep, three of Homeworld’s short months had passed. That was puzzling and alarming. Usually, the senatorial stasis breaks lasted half a year.

Something important was happening, then. The disquieting sound Oxham had heard on the limen of madness returned to her. She called up the status of her colleagues. Most were already animated, the rest were coming up as she watched. The full Senate was being awakened for a special session.

As Senator Nara Oxham crossed the Rubicon Pale at the bottom of the Forum steps, the reassuring wash of politics surrounded her, drowning out the shapeless anxiety she had felt coming out of coldsleep.

In one corner of her hearing she now registered the drone of the Inherited Intellectual Property filibuster. The filibuster, in its eighty-seventh decade, was as calming and timeless (and as meaningless, Senator Oxham supposed) as the roar of a distant ocean. Farther away in the echoey space of secondary audio she sensed plodding committee meetings, strident media conferences, the self-righteous energy of a Loyalty Party caucus meeting. And, of course, easily discernible by its sovereign resonance, the debate in the Great Forum itself.

She blinked, and a lower-third informed her that Senator Puram Drexler had the floor. A tiny corner of her synesthetic sight showed his face, the familiar milky gray eyes and elaborate, liquid rolls of flesh that poured from his cheekbones. President of the Senate, a figurehead position, Drexler was said to be over two hundred fifty years old (not counting cryo, and in his own relativistic framework—not Imperial Absolute). But his exquisitely weathered face had never seemed quite real to her. On Fatawa, which he represented in the Senate, the surgical affectation of age was almost as fashionable as that of youth.

The ancient solon cleared his throat languorously, the dry sound as gritty and sharp as a handful of small gravel poured slowly onto glass.

As she climbed the Forum steps, Senator Oxham brought the fingertips of her left hand together, which signaled her handlers to pick her up. The other voices in the Senate infostructure muted as her chief of staff confirmed the day’s itinerary with her.

“Where’s Roger?” Oxham asked after her schedule was confirmed. The morning scheduling ritual usually belonged to Roger Niles, her consultant extraordinary. The absence of his familiar voice disturbed Oxham, brought back her earlier uneasiness.

“He’s deep, Senator,” her chief of staff answered. “He’s been in an analysis fugue all morning. But he leaked a request that you see him face-to-face at your earliest convenience.”

The morning’s disquiet flooded back in now. Niles was a very reserved creature; a meeting at his own insistence would mean serious news.

“I see,” Oxham said flatly. She wondered what the old consultant had discovered.

“Bring my synesthesia to full bandwidth.”