From the upper rooms where they are confined, overlooking the topmost deck of the township, which is like a flying park under the sky, they can see for what they guess is about a hundred kilometers across the immense flat plate of ocean. The horizon is often clouded, and the clouds are colorful at sunrise and sunset, orange or pink or both at once, then mauve and purple in the last light. Sometimes there is a haze between the two blues of sea and sky, whitish and indistinct; other times the horizon is a sharp line, out there at the edge of the visible world, so very far away. Ah Earth, so big! Freya still can’t look at it; even sitting in a chair by the window she still loses her balance, is overcome by the clench of her stomach, the nausea in every cell of her. It’s scaring her how poorly she can face it. Aurora didn’t have this effect on her; of course she only saw that through screens, rendered and so somehow miniaturized. This window should be just another screen, a big screen, giving her yet another feed from Earth, as during every night of her childhood. But somehow it isn’t, it’s different, as in certain dreams where an ordinary space warps and goes luminescent with dread. It’s a fear she can’t dodge, a kind of terror; even when she leaves the window, pushes a walker down halls to other rooms, to the room she has been given to sleep in, it pursues her, a fear that is itself terrifying. She’s afraid of the fear.

They are in 1 g, by definition, but the voyagers decide, and the records in the computers they brought down with them confirm, that they were living in something close to 1.1 g for most of their voyage home. Why the ship did this, they cannot determine from the records they have.

Freya says to Badim, “It must have done it to make sure we felt light when we got here.”

“Yes, I guess that’s possible. I suppose. But I wonder too if there was some programming done by the people in Year 68, some kind of alteration that left the ship with no frame of reference. We can ask it when it comes around the sun.”

Ah—that’s the source of her fear. One of them, anyway. There may be more, there may be many. But that one stabs her in the heart. “Has it reached the sun yet?”

“Almost.”

A lighter 1 g or not, Badim is showing the effects of—something. Of being on Earth, he says. He jokes that their bodies are oxidizing faster in this world, the real world. He is stiffer, slower. “The truth is,” he says to Freya when she expresses concern, “depending on how you count it, I am now some two hundred and thirty-five years old.”

“Please, Beebee, don’t put it that way! Or else we’re all too old to live. You were asleep a hundred and fifty of those years, remember that.”

“Asleep, yes. But how should we prorate those years? We count the time we sleep, usually, when we give our age. We don’t say, I’ve been alive sixty years and asleep twenty years. We say, I’m eighty years old.”

“And so you are. And a very healthy eighty at that. You look like you could be fifty.”

He laughs at this, pleased with her lie, or pleased with her lying.

Then their ship has reached the sun, and Freya, heart filled with fear, asks their minders to show them what they can. The minders put images on a big screen in a large room where all of them who want to can gather. Not everyone wants to face it together, but most do, and indeed as the minutes pass, almost all the ones who said they wanted to be alone, or with family, come creeping out to join the big group. The screen is showing images of the sun. They sit there in a darkened room looking at it. It’s hard to breathe.

The image of the sun is filtered down to a simple orange ball, marred by a scattering of black sunspots. The image on the screen shifts, the sunspots jump to a new position, possibly this present moment. The predicted time of their ship’s transit behind the sun is just over three days, and now that time is almost over. They sit there in that no-time in which one can’t say whether time is passing or not. Maybe it was like that when they were hibernating; maybe now they have the ability to get back into that mind, when pushed that way. It’s too long, no one can say how long it is, or remember how long it’s supposed to take, or sense how long it feels. Freya is feeling sick now, obscurely aware that there is perhaps a rocking of this immense ship that is impacting her even though she can’t quite feel it. Many look like they’re feeling the same. Ungodly edge of nausea, the feeling she hates most of all, worse than the sharpest pain. Queasy dread. Like others, she staggers off to go to the bathroom, walks around the halls to make the time pass, feeling the dread squeeze her insides harder and harder.

Then a line of minute white particulates emerges from the right edge of the solar mass on the screen, like a meteor that has broken up, like a brief shimmer of the aurora borealis, and she sits down on the floor. Badim is beside her, holding her. Around her is everyone she’s ever known, all stunned and holding each other. They are stunned. Freya looks at Badim, he shakes his head. “They’re gone.”

She leaves that moment, that place.

Badim and Aram share a sad glance. Another conflagration of mice, going up in flames by the tens of thousands, as they have a wont to do. All the animals likewise. And Jochi. And the ship. It spawned them in its last days, like a salmon, Aram says. Have to hold to that thought. Poor Jochi, my boy. Aram wipes his eyes over and over.

Their minders are solicitous. They tell them that their ferry included a computer with ten zettabytes of memory, which may include good backups, may constitute a viable copy of their ship’s AI.

Badim shakes his head at them as they say this. “It was a quantum computer,” Badim explains gently, as if breaking the news of a death to a child. “It was not reducible to its records.”

A coldness comes over Freya, a kind of calm. So much has died. They made it back, they are home for the first time: but this place is not their home, she sees that now. They will always be exiles here, on a world too big to believe. Indeed it seems best to stick to disbelief for a while, stay in that disconnect. The intermittences of the heart being what they are, the feel of things will come back, eventually. And that will be soon enough.

They are taken to Hong Kong, and a couple of weeks later their township anchors offshore from it—a harbor city as big as a dozen or twenty of their biomes stitched together, and filled with many skyscrapers quite a bit taller than any biome, taller than a spoke, possibly taller than the spine. It’s hard to keep any sense of perspective against the sky. The day before it was cloudy, and the flat gray cloud looked like an immense roof over the visible world. Aram says those clouds were three kilometers high, and now he and Badim are arguing about how high the clear blue sky appears to be.

“You mean if it was a dome,” Badim points out.

“Of course, but it looks like one,” Aram says. “At least to me. I know it’s a scattering of sunlight, but doesn’t it look like a solid dome? I think it does. Just look at it. It’s much like a biome ceiling.”

He and Badim have taken to consulting a book they’ve found on their wristpads, an ancient text called The Nature of Light and Color in the Open Air, and now they pore over a section called “Apparent Flattening of the Vault of Heaven,” which confirms Aram’s contention that the sky can be perceived as a dome. “See,” Aram says, pointing at his wristpad, “the top of the sky looks lower to the viewer than the horizon is distant to him, by a factor ranging from two to four, it says, depending on the observer and the viewing conditions. Does that seem right to you?”