“Don’t let Ashok sit next to you during dinner, then, or you’ll learn more than you ever wanted to about thrust. Anyway, the Tanzer drives are great, and give us good speed and maneuverability within solar systems, but the big thing the Liars gave us – eventually – was the bridges. That’s how we travel light years in under half a minute. The reason those first Liars kept appearing near Jupiter was because there’s a wormhole there. Or a place where a wormhole can be – we call it a bridgehead. We think the bridges are artificial, constructed by someone, millions or billions of years ago – the Liars sometimes take credit for building the network, and sometimes claim it’s a natural phenomenon, and sometimes say other aliens made it. Who knows? The point is, if we bombard that particular spot in space with the right kind of radiation, it opens a passageway. We can travel almost instantaneously to any of twenty-eight other systems, scattered across the galaxy, with the destination dependent on the exact energies we bombard the bridgehead with. Once we pop out the other side, we have to make our way with conventional propulsion, but even so, the bridges have opened up a vast expanse of space for us. Over the past few centuries we’ve established scores of colony worlds, and ships routinely make supply runs to systems hundreds of light years away.”

“That’s astonishing,” Elena said. “Though it does make my mission a bit redundant. I should be happy humankind has found so many homes among the stars, but it’s hard not to be disappointed. Five hundred years ago… things were bad. We thought the goldilocks ships were the last hope for humanity to survive. We believed our work mattered.”

“It did, though. If nothing else, the goldilocks ships gave people hope, right?”

“I didn’t anticipate my life’s work becoming a symbolic gesture.”

Callie shrugged. “More than most lives amount to. Do you think you’ll go back to Earth?”

“It seems almost cowardly, when there are all these new worlds to explore, but… What’s it like there now? In my time…” She grimaced. “Between the storms, the jellyfish infestations, the untreatable bacteria, the desiccation of the west…”

“Earth… it’s a walled garden. It’s mostly where people live when they’re afraid to live anywhere else, I guess. The Liars gave us tech to scrub the atmosphere and sequester carbon, and there was a big exodus of colonists once the bridgeheads opened, so that reduced the population load significantly. Those left behind got busy on restoration. Earth is nice enough, but boring. I haven’t been there since I was a little girl, growing up in the Hawaiian Archipelago, spending summers with my grandparents in a bubble settlement near Old Lisbon. Gravity wells don’t agree with me.”