A minute after closest approach, Earth had receded by seventy miles, and Benacerraf could see the planet falling away; a couple of minutes after that and Discovery had risen more than a thousand miles above the surface. As Earth closed over its own spherical belly of silvery ocean, Benacerraf felt a stab of loneliness, of loss.

Earth receded, now, as dramatically as if she was rising in some kind of high speed lift. The huge, delicately-edge crescent of blue and white opened out rapidly, the sky-bright sunlit side expanding into the darkness. She could see how rapidly she was moving; the clouds piled up over the equator seemed to flow steadily into her view as Discovery flew on. After perhaps fifteen minutes the orbiter had receded to about a full Earth diameter, and suddenly she could see the half-shadowed disc of Earth, contained in her window, hanging over the payload bay like some unlikely Moon…

And, over the night side of Earth, Benacerraf saw a bright streak of light: a flare, hair-thin, its length of perhaps a few hundred miles dwarfed by the carcase of the planet.

The light died, as rapidly as it had formed.

She felt her mouth draw into a smile.

That was what she had been waiting up here to see. Now, Discovery would sail on alone; now, perhaps, Niki Mott would be able to get some sleep.

After sailing with Discovery around the sun, Siobhan Libet had made it home.

When he got off the plane at Sea Tac, Marcus White found a long queue at passport control. He stood in line like everyone else, ignoring the pain in his back and his rebuilt hips and his osteoporosis-stricken legs and the pressure from his bladder, which seemed to hold no more than a shot glass these days.

The thing of it was, he felt just the same as he ever did, inside; he was just stuck inside this decaying, betraying husk of a body, getting slower all the time, in a world that was moving past him ever more quickly.

There was a huge screen up ahead, Frank Sinatra and Katherine Hepburn starring together in a new gender-reversed version of Casablanca, and everyone else in the line seemed to be goggling up like mesmerized sheep at sim-Sinatra’s digitized face.

The line shuffled forward. His attention drifted.

…Sometimes he thought he could see that light-drenched landscape again: the glowing regolith under the black sky, his own reflection in Tom’s mirrored visor, breaking through the washed-out reality of the present…

Some guy poked him in the back. He’d been holding up the line.

He remembered something that Chinese kid, Jiang Ling, had told him during her visit a few years back. In China, for all its faults, things were different; in China, they were aiming for economic growth, but without dumping the family en route. Jiang talked about how it was her duty to protect her parents, her surviving grandparent.

He could see it in the faces of people around him, even here, in this goddamn line: they looked on him as just an obstruction, an irritation.

Meanwhile that prick in the White House, Maclachlan, was talking about “radical solutions to our demographic problems…”

Happy booths, they were calling them. Sometimes, when White thought about it, he got scared. But Geena was long dead, and his son, Bob, had a family of his own, who White hardly ever got to see. Most of the time, he couldn’t give a fuck.

At last he got to the front of the line. The clerk was just a kid; her face was so covered in image-tattoos she almost looked like one of those fucking Nullists who were making life miserable for everyone. White took the opportunity to vent off a little steam at her. Maybe Washington was a different country now, but as far as he was concerned it was a joke to have to produce a passport — even the new type, a shiny patch tattooed to the back of your hand — just to get from Houston to Seattle.

The clerk just tolerated him; she had, of course, no reply to offer.

Outside the terminal he caught a cab, and gave the driver Jackie Benacerraf’s address, just off 23rd Avenue, in the Capitol Park district.

Seattle was bright, clean, growing; the air seemed clean and fresh, and he felt he might have been able to smell the scent of the woods. He didn’t even need the umbrella he’d brought, against the habitual drizzle.

It was a city he’d always liked; a long, skinny town sprawling along an isthmus, a tongue of land, with its parks and waterways and its neat views of mountains and lakes. He’d come out here years ago, during Apollo, to visit Boeing for training and familiarization and glad-handing; they’d been responsible, back then, for the development of the Saturn first stage. He recognized a lot of the landmarks he’d gotten to know then. But there was a lot of construction going on, and it seemed to White that everywhere he looked he saw plump Asian faces: Chinese, Japs, Malaysians. And the walls, even of the older buildings, were covered with those huge new softscreen billboards, pumping out ads and infomercials and online soaps day and night, so that it was somehow hard to make out the shape of things, the sweep and structure of the city, and he could have been anywhere.

New Columbia,they called it now: an amalgam of Alaska, Washington, Oregon — all seceded from Maclachlan’s imploding U.S. — with the old Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Alberta. On its formation the new nation had instantly become an economic giant, with a massive trade surplus and a lot of assets: Alaskan oil, Albertan natural gas and wheat, Washington’s nuclear, aerospace and software industries, Oregon’s timber and high-tech industries, a string of massive ports serving the Asia-Pacific trade, not to mention a highly educated workforce.

He was a long way from what was left of the old US of A now, he thought, all that smoggy old development on the East Coast. This was a modern Pacific nation-state, prosperous, aggressive.

He shook his head. He hated to find himself thinking like an old fart. His real trouble was not that Seattle wasn’t part of the USA any more, but that it wasn’t the 1960s. The young people were remaking the world, and Earth was becoming an alien planet to him: more alien, in fact, than the Moon, if by some magic he could have been transported back there.

Still, he thought, if you had to go to somewhere that had seceded, he still preferred Washington State to Idaho.

At Jackie Benacerraf’s house, it only took a minute to be allowed in through the security barrier, although he had to present his passport tattoo to the cameras. A kid, a little boy around ten, let him into the house itself, and directed him to the living room where he’d find Jackie.

White dropped his bag in the hall. The house was big, sprawling, bright, but messy. Softscreens were playing in every room, mostly kid’s stuff, pop videos and animations. It was a clamor of noise and imagery to White, but it didn’t seem to faze the kids — two of them, Fred and Ben, Paula Benacerraf’s grandchildren, boys who ran around and wrestled and seemed to be doing pretty much what White had gotten up to when he was nine or ten. But the kids looked odd, to White, with their image-tattoos and pierced cheeks and ears and shaved-off, sculpted hair. The younger one, in fact, was pretty much coated with image-tattoos, like a Nullist, but he was too young to hold still for long enough to let the processors turn his flesh invisible.

It ought to be possible to exert some kind of control, he thought. These kids ought to be playing softball in the yard, not dressing up like high-tech Barbies, playing with the designs on each other’s faces.

We got decadent, he thought. Like ancient Rome. No wonder the Chinese are beating the pants off of us economically.