“You’re offering me a flight to Triton?”

“If you’re interested. Your Discontinuity won’t be a serious liability if—”

“Forget it.”

Madeleine stood up. Her left leg buckled and she nearly fell; she had to cling to the desktop. It was as if Madeleine was the old woman. She found she’d been applying too much weight to the leg and the blood supply had been cut off. She hadn’t noticed, of course; and that kind of damage was too subtle for the biocomp suit to pick up.

Nemoto watched her, calculating, without sympathy. “The Triton colony is crucial,” she said. “Strategic.”

This was the Nemoto Madeleine had heard of. “You’re still working for the future of the species, Nemoto.”

“Yes, if you want to know.”

Madeleine’s heart sank. Nemoto would be hard to deal with rationally. People with missions always were.

But only Nemoto would give her a job.

Aside perhaps from Reid Malenfant — and even after all this time nobody knew what had become of him — Madeleine had been the first human to leave the Solar System. Her experiences in the light of other stars had been astonishing.

Her first return to the Solar System had been something of a triumph — although even then she’d been aware of a historical dislocation, as if the world had had a layer of strangeness thrown over it. And she had been shocked by the sudden — to her — deaths of her mother, and of poor Sally Brind, and many others she had known.

At least Frank Paulis’s get-rich-slow compound interest scheme had worked out that first time. And she had earned herself a little fame. She was the first star traveler — aside from Malenfant — and that earned her some profile.

But she hadn’t been sorry to leave again, to escape into the clean blue light of the Saddle Points, replacing the baffling human world with the cold external mysteries of the stars.

Her later returns had been less enjoyable.

The truth was that as the decades peeled away on Earth, and the novelty wore off, nobody much cared about the star travelers — and few were prepared to protect the interests of these historical curiosities. So the last time she came back, Madeleine had returned to find that a devaluation of the UN dollar, the new global currency, had wiped out a lot of the value of her savings. And then had come the banks’ decision to close the swelling accounts of the star travelers, a step that had been backed by intergovernmental agencies up to and including the UN.

Meanwhile no insurance company would touch her, or anyone else who had been through the Saddle Point gateways, after the Discontinuity condition had been diagnosed.

Which was why Madeleine needed money.

Nemoto was attached to no organization. Madeleine couldn’t have defined her role. But her source of power was clear enough: She had stayed alive.

Thanks to longevity treatments, Nemoto, and a handful of privileged others, had gotten so old that they formed a new breed of power-player, their influence coming from contacts, webs of alliances, ancient debts, and favors granted. Nemoto was a gerontocrat, modeling herself on the antique Communist officials who still ran China.

Madeleine wouldn’t have been surprised to find it was Nemoto herself, or the other gerontocrats, who lay behind the whole scam. The closure of the star travelers’ accounts had given Nemoto a good deal of leverage over Madeleine, and those who had followed in her path. And the strategy had put a block on any ambitions the star travelers might have had to use their effective longevity to accrue power back home.

She wondered if the gerontocrats — conservative, selfish, reclusive, obsessive — were responsible for a more general malaise that seemed to her to have afflicted this fast-forwarded world. There had been change — new fashions, gadgetry, terminology — but, it seemed to her, no progress. In science and art she could see no signs of meaningful innovation. The world’s nations evolved, but the various supranational structures had not changed for decades: the political institutions that wielded the power had ossified.

And meanwhile, the world still labored under the old burdens of a fast-changing ecology and resource shortages, and minor wars continued to be an irritant at every fractured joint between peoples.

Nobody was solving these ancient problems. Worse, it seemed to her, nobody was even trying anymore. You could no longer, for example, get reliable statistics on population numbers, or disease occurrences, or poverty. It was as if history had stopped when the Gaijin had arrived.

But it didn’t matter. She wouldn’t have changed a thing. The traveling itself was the thing, the point of it all. The rest was ancient history, even to Madeleine herself.

Ben showed her to her apartment. He had to show her how to open the door. In 2131, God help her, you had to work door locks with foot studs.

The East Guiana Spaceport, built by the Europeans in the 1980s, extended maybe twenty kilometers along the coast of the Atlantic, from Sinnamary to Kourou, which was actually an old fishing village. There were control buildings, booster-integration buildings, solid-booster test stands and launch complexes, all identified by baffling French acronyms — BAF, BIL, BEAP — and connected by roads and rail tracks that looked, from her window, like gashes in the foliage.

Ariane had been nice-looking technology, for its time, 150 years earlier. It had been superseded by new generations of space planes, even before the Gaijin had taken over most of Earth’s ground-to-orbit traffic with their clean, flawless landers. But when the French released political control of East Guiana, the new government decided to refurbish what was left at Kourou.

So East Guiana, one of the smallest and poorest nations on Earth, suddenly had a space program.

Ariane had kept flying even as history moved on, and nations and corporations and alliances had formed and dissolved, leaving new configurations whose very names were baffling to Madeleine. But Ariane remained: an antique, disreputable, dirty, unreliable launcher, used by agencies without the funds to afford something better.

Like Nemoto.

Maybe, Madeleine thought, it wasn’t a surprise that Nemoto, another relic of the first Space Age, had gravitated here.

The residential quarters had been set up in an abandoned solid-propellant factory, a building that dated back to before Madeleine’s birth. The cluster of buildings was still called UPG, for Usine de Propergol de Guyane. It was a jumble of white cubes spilling over a hillside, like a Mediterranean village. It was sparsely set up, but comfortable enough. About four hundred people lived here: the Aboriginal emigrants, and permanent technical and managerial staff to operate the automated facilities. Once, twenty thousand, a fifth of the country’s population, had been housed in Kourou. The feeling of emptiness, of age and abandonment, was startling.

She slept for a few hours. Then she drifted about her apartment, tinkering.

It was startling how often and how much everyday gadgets changed. The toilet, for instance, was just a hole in the ground, and it took her an age to figure out how to make it flush. The shower was just as bad; it took a call to Ben to establish that to set the heat, you had to put your finger in a little test sink and let the thing read your body temperature.

And so on. All stuff everybody else here had grown up with. It was like being in a foreign country, wherever she went, even in her hometown; she’d long grown tired of people not taking her requests for basic information seriously. And every time she came back from another Einsteinian fast-forward it got worse.

Anyhow, a few minutes after stepping out of the shower, her skin was prickling with sweat again.