MONICA GREATOREX HAD, in her sixtieth year, resisted acquiring dependents but had (in that easy way we may observe in the rich wherever and whenever we are) accrued considerable wealth without particular effort on her part. Money begot money, and this miraculous alchemy had eased Monica's passage through life, a life which she would be the first to admit had been blessed — with adventure, travel, lovers of all persuasions, and, above all, the liberty to do whatever she chose. Looking back over her six decades, she was satisfied that she had not, on the whole, squandered either her talents or her resources. In her youth she had been glamorous and notorious, making a dazzling match to a writer renowned for his courage and virility; but, seeing herself in danger of being wholly eclipsed by his sun, she ended the union abruptly, remaining the chief (if unadmitted) subject of his prose until the end of his life. After this had come what she called "the wandering years," journeying around the periphery worlds in search of kicks and stories. This was towards the end of the Commonwealth's last big push for expansion, and the sight of a refugee child eating grass transformed Monica's consciousness. She became a warrior with words then, sharp despatches from up and down the front that made her reputation for courage and unorthodoxy. Some credited her with shifting public opinion; Monica herself knew that history was not authored singly and that she had merely been the right person in the right place at the right time. Still, the awards had been pleasant, people's lives had been saved, and an old grudge had been settled.

She enjoyed life in the public eye for many years until she reached her fifties — a dangerous time for a woman — when she was forced to return to old Earth to oversee the decline of her mother and, eventually, the inevitable clearing of a house. Once the necessary formalities were complete, she left that torpid world as quickly as she could, returning to her wandering, pushing ever outwards from the core towards the periphery, in search of something different now — some meaning, perhaps, some form of understanding of the changes she had seen throughout her life, and the changes that were about to come. Her writing by now was long-form, less amenable to the swift attention spans of her former audiences. Commissions and engagements had disappeared and she suspected that many people assumed she was dead. She thought that she was never more alive — pushing out towards the edge, towards freedom, but eventually she admitted that her course, while slow and erratic, had been drawing her ever nearer to the source of all her wandering: Sienna, the world where she had been born, and from which she had been abruptly transplanted after her father's death.

Her haphazard journey had so far taken the best part of three years. She was in no particular hurry, although she was aware that events might overtake her. Still, for the moment she was content to observe, at first hand, the differences in these places since the travels of her early womanhood. Not all of them had resisted the Commonwealth's expansion, accepting it as inevitable, and they had come through those years more or less intact. Even in those which had insisted upon their right to self-determination there was by now little evidence of those years of disruption. All across the periphery worlds, there had been a great levelling, exactly as the Commonwealth promised. There were schools, and hospitals, and business centres, and great towers of glass and steel, and if anything of particular interest or value had been lost in this explosion of creation, there was little sign of its ruins. Except perhaps here and there, in a quiet backwater, where Monica saw old people, in old buildings, clinging to old customs as their worlds decayed about them, their descendants long gone. She would stay awhile, observing, and then would be gone. Dimly, at the back of her mind, she felt the first stirrings of a book forming about these dying worlds, but she committed nothing to paper. It was hard to write, at this time, when nothing about the future was certain.

So her voyage continued, from comfortable long-haul liner to comfortable long-term let, and whenever her companion, Gale, hinted discreetly that perhaps they might think of finishing this trip and returning to the central worlds, she would move them on in the opposite direction. These hints had become more frequent in the past few weeks and, had this not been Gale, and had Gale not been jenjer, Monica might have called them "urgent." She was aware (How could she not be?) that many other people were now in transit, and that she and Gale were travelling against the general tide. But she was not finished. Not yet.

Their next stop was Meridian Station, and she knew that Gale had the impression that this would be as far as they would go. But from Meridian you could perhaps get passage to Sienna, and on Sienna ... Well, what exactly would be waiting for her there? Monica was not sure. Over the past few weeks, as Sienna drew closer, she had been revisiting her earliest memories. She remembered her mother, cool and distant, and her father, source of authority and some affection, but no less distant. She remembered the sun upon old stones, and inexorable water, stretching beyond the horizon, the limitless expanse of the lake. She remembered the shock; but she knew she had forgotten the whole. It all happened many years ago, of course, and more had been forgotten than Monica as yet realised, but memory abhors a vacuum, and pulls that way, pulls and pulls. The river of history bends towards restitution.

Cushioned in her quarters, Monica did not feel the liner dock at Meridian, and it was not until the jenjer steward politely knocked on the door of their berth that they were aware that they had arrived. Gale, who had been sitting beside her, rose up, silently. She watched him twitch his collar and cuffs in a habitual gesture which did not, by law, entirely conceal the indigo marks around his wrists and neck. His bond had been costly, but Monica was used to expensive things. He was high functioning; he was handsome, too, decorative, which pleased her. She liked expensive, beautiful things. When he and the steward finished organising the baggage, he offered his hand to help Monica to her feet. "Ma'am," he murmured.

"I don't think we'll stop here long," she said, and she felt his hand relax, a very little, until she went on. "We'll book passage to Sienna as soon as we can."

She observed no new tension, no anger, indeed no sign at all that he was disturbed by this news. He was, after all, very costly. "Of course," he said. "Of course."

* * *

At Meridian Station, it became impossible to deny that everyone else was going the other way. The station was busy — no, frantic — although not yet with the pitiful desperation that Monica had seen in the many transit camps from which she had reported in her glory days. Many of the people here were greatly invested in showing that this was a temporary arrangement and that they would soon be returning this way, bringing their possessions back with them. A winter holiday, perhaps, or spending a few years on the central worlds for the sake of the children's education ... Anything other than admit that this was a one-way ticket. Was this for the benefit of observers, or for the benefit of themselves? Monica sensed that it was a little of both.

She watched them...