When she reached her offices, she strode past supplicant aides and a few hopeful lobbyists, heading straight for Roger Niles’s dark lair at the center of her domain. No one dared follow her. His office doors opened without a word, and she walked through, removed a stack of laundered shirts from his guest chair, and sat down.

“I’m here,” she said. She kept her voice calm, knowing his interface AI would bring him up from the data fugue if she sounded impatient. Better to let him cross back into the real world at his own pace.

His face had the slack look of deep fugue, but his eyebrows lifted in response to her words, sending ripples up his high expanse of forehead. One finger on his right hand twitched. He looked too small for his desk, a circular monstrosity of dark wood that enclosed Niles like some giant life-support machine. Senator Oxham had recently discovered that its copious drawers and pigeonholes held only clothes, shoes, and a few emergency rations extorted from military lobbyists. Roger Niles thought the habit of going home at night to be an inexcusable weakness.

“Something bad, isn’t it?” she asked.

The finger twitched again.

Niles looked older. Senator Oxham had only been in stasis for three months, but in that short absence a frosting of gray had touched his temples. Her staff had the right to go into cryo during the breaks, but Niles seldom did, preferring to work out the true decades of her term, aging before her eyes.

The loneliness of the senator, Oxham thought. The world moved so quickly past.

Senators were elected for (or appointed to, competed for, bought—whatever their planet’s custom) fifty-year terms, half an Imperial Absolute century of office. The Risen Empire was a slowly evolving beast. Even here in the dense coreward clusters, eighty populated worlds was an area thirty light-years across, and the exigencies of war, trade, and migration were bound by the appallingly slow rate of lightspeed. The Imperial Senate was constituted to take the long view; the solons generally spent eighty percent of their terms in stasis sleep as the universe wheeled by. They made decisions with the detachment of mountains watching rivers below shift course.

Unavoidably, the planet that Oxham represented had changed in her first decade in office. And the trip to Home from Vasthold had consumed five Absolute years. When she returned, sixty years total would have passed, all her friends infirm or dead, her three nephews well into middle age. Even Niles was aging before her eyes. The Senate demanded much from its members.