Then it will drift through interstellar space for several hundred years…

Let me give you a handle on that. Say the distance between the Earth and the sun is, oh, one centimeter. Mercury orbits the sun at a range of a toasty two millimeters. Jupiter is six centimeters out; the span of your outstretched arms, fingertip to fingertip, will just about encompass the orbit of Eris, which it’s taken me so many years to reach. Got that?

Well, on this scale, Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, is two and a half kilometers down the road. And we’re going to Tau Ceti, three times as far away as that.

You know about slowtime? On the starships, the crew run at 50:1 or 100:1, and it still takes them years to get there. As for the colonists…

When the Bark approaches Tau Ceti, it’ll deploy an M2P2 sail, and use the solar wind for deceleration. The crew will need to power up a fusion reactor to run it. That’s what the megatons of ice are for — working fluid for the fusion plant’s radiators.

At departure, the starship masses about a couple of billion tons. When it arrives, it’ll be down to less than ten megatons. And it’ll be carrying tens of thousands of colonists and several million soul chips and design schematics for superspecialized experts, not to mention a people factory or three. Forget heroic omnicompetent generalists, able to carve a new planet out of raw rock with their bare manipulators and rugged determination; it takes hundreds of thousands of specialists to establish and maintain a civilization, and no colony ship could carry them all as live cargo. But they can carry a bunch of generalists, and rely on them to recognize when they’ve run into something they can’t handle and manufacture the appropriate specialists to deal with the problem.

See? Interstellar colonization is easy! You just need to devote a visible percentage of the resources of an entire interplanetary civilization to it for several hundred years, placing it in the tireless and efficient hands of robots ordered to strive for the goal for as long as it takes. Perhaps the real story behind our Creators’ extinction isn’t some dismal concoction of demographic undershoot, decadence, distraction by sexual hyperstimuli, and a little bit of malice on the side; but rather, they decided they might as well take a nap while the boring business of galactic conquest unfolded on their behalf — secure in the knowledge that the robots would resurrect them in time to benefit from the enterprise.

(Oh damn, I digressed again.) Starships? What you need to know about them is this: It’s a one-way trip, and they’re always short of colonists. So as long as I’m willing to put up with conditions not unlike my berth on the Icarus Express for, oh, about seven hundred years, study a useful specialty or five en route, then work like an arbeiter slave to build somewhere to live for a few decades at the other end, I’ll be fine. And the prospect of eloping with Reginald makes it look almost tolerable — because whether or not I’m in love, at least I won’t be alone.

Think of England

JULIETTE (NO, I’VE got to keep thinking of her as Granita) is back late. She arrives in a foul temper, kicks one of her chibi servants, blasts into her room, swears loudly — a moment later, Reginald emerges, looking shaky — then yells my name. “Kate!”

Oh, this will be fun. I waltz over to the door, then pull it open and step inside quickly, pulling it shut behind me. “ ’Lo, Juliette.”

She glares at me. “Don’t use that name, bitch.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it, sis.” I grin, lips pulling back from my teeth, right hand clenched behind my back. “Rhea called me in. I thought you ought to know.”

Abruptly all the urea and acetate drops out of her. Her shoulders slump. “Fuck it, Kate. What would you have done, in my position?”

“It depends on whether I was stupid enough to get into that kind of fix in the first place. Or to make that kind of mistake.”

“Which?” She raises an eyebrow.

“Falling for the honey trap — or letting her give you one of her soul chips. Take your pick.”

“Oh come on, now!” She isn’t even bothering to mask her impatience. “Some of us are realists, Freya. Don’t act stupider than you look; don’t give me that doe-eyed innocent act. You know what you are, you know what I am, and you know what our demon mother has turned into. She’s a hundred years older than you or me, she’s monstrously rich, and we’re not her only tools. You think we’re a failed lineage, don’t you? Do you have any idea how many failures it takes to train just one of her personal assistants?”

“No—”

“Congratulations, then,” she says harshly. “It’s one in ten of us. Most of our lineage really do crap out if you put them in a position where they need to dominate or die. We’re the survivors. And you know what she’s been selecting us for. Her Praetorian guard of aristo assassins. If she goes down, we go down, too. She’s got enemies, and if she’s on the slide, all she has to do is let our true names out, and they’ll hunt us down like runaway slaves.”

It’s a good point. “So Rhea’s already begun making her power play, and she figures we’ll make trustworthy legates, and you figure if we fight her, we’re shorting our own brains.” I shrug. “Didn’t you ever think about fighting her?”

“Yes.” She takes a step toward me, pauses just outside arm’s reach. “But I got over it. If she dies, we all die. We’ve got to settle this now. What do you think of her scheme?”

“It’s slavery for all, on the wholesale plan.” I look her in both eyes.

“I don’t like slavery. I don’t see why we need to impose it on other people, just to avoid it for ourselves.”

“Oh, kid.” She shakes her head. “Where did you get that stubborn streak of idealism from? I’d have thought it would have been beaten out of you long ago.”

I shrug. “Maybe it’s been making a comeback since I got to wear your soul for a while? It taught me some things about myself that I didn’t much like.” She stiffens, but holds back from interrupting. “Rhea thinks we’re all the same, all fragments of herself. But she’s wrong. You’re not her, I’m not her. We have different experiences, and we grow up at our own rate, and even when we swap soul chips, that doesn’t make us the same person. We sit through the same lessons, but we don’t have to draw the same conclusions from them.” I walk over to the bed, then turn back to face her. “That doesn’t mean I disagree with your analysis, J-Granita. You’re right that if she gets what she wants and subsequently fails, she’ll take us all down with her. I’m just not convinced that’s how it’s got to be, yet.”

She’s staring at me tensely, and I can see she’s on a hair trigger for self-defense, then it comes to me: She’s afraid. Afraid I’ll take payment from her skin for what she did to me on Callisto. And my failure even to mention it is creeping her out because she knows what she’s like, and what Rhea is like, and that the longer revenge is delayed, the worse it will be. Good. Let her stew in it for a while.

“Did you take Rhea up on the offer of her memories?” Juliette asks.

Change the subject. “None of your business, sis. But tell me, when did you kidnap Granita Ford? Was it on Mars?”

She blinks mechanically. “What makes you think Granita is — oh. You knew her, didn’t you?” I nod. “Small world. It was on Mars, yes. After she hitched a lift from, um, her associates in the Pink Police.”

“You mean your associates. It’s Daks. Yes?”

“Yes. She’d met you. She’d met Rhea. She was getting fucking close to the auction track, and her clan are the most hidebound scary bunch of aristo reactionaries you can imagine. If she’d been allowed to put two and two together… so, anyway. Yes, I asked Daks to pull strings to take her out.”