That meant Asach had lived in many flavors of revivalisms and pretenses of resurrection on a dozen member worlds, and another score at least passed through. Had drunk deeply of millennium-old, Pre Empire, Pre-Secession, Pre-transport nostalgia.

Had lived in towns where wheat and monotony were punctuated only by rampant gossip. In villages that had only ever existed as adjuncts to slave markets or recruitment centers or training posts for grunts and jarheads and navvies. In world-class cities big enough to be Targets; cities old enough to have flown five flags before the Crown was welded to The Seal. In cities that remade themselves each decade with such enthusiasm that their natives became economic refugees, fleeing the booms that transformed fishermen’s shacks into priceless boutique-side properties.

Had lived in desert vastnesses so unending that news of rain was carried on late-night breezes spiced with the scent of sage and desert varnish. In rolling hills so dense with trees that travel anywhere was like being catapulted through green tubes of foliage, with nothing to see for a hundred miles but litter and fat beasts browsing in the verges. In America the beautiful, America the urban, America the wild, America the suburban, America of the (pseudo-)potato salad and (mock-)apple pie.

And Asach had not just traveled geographically. Asach had known poverty, and at least seen rich; had known position, and had stood next to power. Most people had, at best, some dim opinion of parochial rivalries, but walked, at best, in the footsteps of their high school valedictorian. Asach had seen levels of society so low, and so high, and so bizarre, as to be unimaginable to broadly-defined middle-class harmony. Or working-class dissent. Or upper class segregation. Yet, for fifty years, Asach had written nearly nothing of import. Reams of drivel—term papers, and white papers, and reports daily, weekly, monthly, and annual. Proposals, and abstracts, and summaries, and overviews, and briefing notes, and speaking points, and outlines as uninspired as obligatory postcards home. All, in the end, barely necessary, and even less memorable.

It began with a cup of coffee. Asach wrote: About Coffee, and underlined both words with one stroke. And then sat and pondered for a good long while about every angle, drip, and smell related to coffee. A diner, with chicken-fried steak. And pie. Asach wrote: Pie, and underlined that, then thought some more about coffee. Coffee could carry you anywhere. Just the geography of coffee could fill walls of maps. Just the price of coffee—Oh Brother! Can you spare a dime?—could fill hours with economics and trade news, fair and unfair. Midnights of exhausted wakefulness: that was the taste and sludgy smell of bad coffee, instant coffee, reheated coffee, coffee ersatz and chicory.

Asach sighed, and put down the pen. The problem with writing was where, and what to begin. The mind begged to write into being every moment of intensity, or imagination, or serendipity. The pen demanded rather more organization than Pie and Coffee. It demanded a sense of place, and a sense of being. Coffee’s place was everywhere Asach had ever been or cared to go, and its being was most of humanity. It was exquisitely broadening, but insufficiently narrowing. A book needed characters. Asach sighed again, picked up the pen, and wrote: People. And then pondered some more.

Saint George, New Utah, 3049

Zia stopped, half whirling, and tugged in exasperation at her billowing black dress, snagged on the iron stump of a sawed-down street sign.

It was just too typical. Nothing worked. The streets had not been swept in a month, and trash was drifting around a desiccated dog that no-one wanted to touch because it was, well, dead, and a dog. For three days, there had not been enough electricity to fill the water tanks on the roof, so now the laundry was piling up to the rafters and the kids were whinging with the awful pouty, edgy crankiness that is the inevitable aftermath of sticky drinks and too little sleep.

Ollie had been gone for hours in a probably vain attempt to fill the transporter’s fuel cells, so that they could tap the fuel, in order to power the generator, in order to run the equally cranky air conditioner and get at least a few hours respite from the heat. Ollie— the head of TCM Contract Security; the man of a thousand eyes. Ollie Azhad, who recruited the local lads; the silent lads; the lads impossible to notice, and had thousands of plain-clothes troops assigned all over Saint George. Ollie-the-rock, now reduced to waiting, himself, personally, in refueling lines.

Dirt was everywhere, billowing down the street in dust devils and forced by the hot, dry wind through every crack. Not that the city government could do anything about the wind, but it just seemed to illustrate the point, in that it was the wind that had snatched her dress and wrapped it around this damnable post—because the one thing the city had managed to do was enforce the signage easements. There might not be fuel, or electricity, or even dead dog removal, but what there was, was a row of sawn-down signs denoting some bureaucrat’s bizarre notions of progress.

It was just too much. Furious, framed with a quavering halo of brown, wind-whipped dust, sick to death of the outfall of economic embargo and frustrated nearly to tears, Zia jerked again at the snagged hem, muttering curses alternately against her ridiculously conservative mother-in-law and the ridiculously officious city bureaucracy. The struggle was its own sort of respite: the world shrank; life shrank; into this one, dress-wrapped, but imminently winnable battle. She dropped her shopping bag and seized the offending fabric with both hands, yanking and swearing and just daring them to win. All of them—the heat, the wind, the dirt, the kids, the mother-in-law, the bureaucrats—just daring them to even try to make even one more day even one bit more miserable then it already was. She just dared them, and yanked with a fury.

Tanith, 3049

Rain lashed the driveway, running in sheets under the truck's wheels; giving life and body to the heavy weight of humidity. Harlan Clegg folded over his keyboard, tap-tap-tapping in the disjointed hammering of a four-finger typist who nonetheless stabs out sixty words per minute regardless of weather or circumstance. Folded over, around, peering through the little porthole of a view screen, hunched into a little universe of safe, virtual space defined by secrecy, unconnected to the gentle peeping of tree frogs emerging to dance their little rituals of increase.

Tap-tap-tapping; peering, the screen glare casting his shirtfront with a bluish glow. He paused a moment. His brow furrowed slightly. He inhaled sharply. He stabbed the transmit key, sending his resume hurtling through the torrents with electronic certainty.

Then, staring blankly at his now-blank screen, he sat a while, still folded around his blue virtual space, while the rain sheeted in a solid grey mist through the trees.

There was a kind, hard edge to certainty. You could decide, right or wrong, but just decide, and then you stopped being virtual, and started being hard and certain as the rain-pelted trees. As certain as the peepers in their quest to spawn in the midst of a hurricane. The wind could blow and blow; the trees could lash; you could just laugh at the rain hitting the truck like a shower of lead pellets, and all of that became real and green and smellable, and not hunched and wavering and peering. One keystroke, and you could walk right through the screen and into another life.