They had almost three hundred hours of fun-and-games broadcasting scheduled before they could expect the first feedback from their audience; before they found out which of their hours had been valuable and which had fruitlessly duplicated things the groundhogs already knew. There was an advantage to the lack of feedback, though, since once they had their basic plan agreed upon, it only took a few months to set up and record all of the lessons. So in January of 2109, O’Hara delivered the last lesson to External Communications and went back to business as usual.

It was Dan’s last year in office and her last year before running. They’d long planned for her to announce her candidacy for 2112 the day after he stepped down. She would spend this last “nonpolitical” year making good impressions, mending fences, doing favors that could be called in. Of course, the political community in Newhome was so small that there was no secret as to what she was doing and why; it was a rite of passage, a genteel excruciation ritual. This was a game, as Purcell had taught her, with unwritten but not very flexible rules.

She spent as much time with Sandra as possible, knowing that once she became Coordinator (losing the election was not an option she wanted to consider) the time wouldn’t be there. By then Sandra would be fairly independent, anyhow, at thirteen. The age her mother had become a mother!

She took Sandra on trips to Earth and New New via the dream room. They were standard tourist matrices, but she could walk alongside her daughter and say, this bar, the Light Head, is where I met Uncle Dan; I lived down that street in New York; that statue, there weren’t so many pigeons on it when we were there, because it was winter, snow drifting into the Seine, can you smell the chestnuts? No, of course not. Nor feel the snowflakes kissing your face.

Sandra was old enough, at ten-going-on-eleven, to recognize the dual nature of these outings, to see how important it was to her mother both to revisit and to share the places. So although she was bored most of the time, she never complained, even though she was using up VR time that could be going for games with the other kids. That wasn’t so important; like her mother at her age, she was a loner, and not completely by choice.