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the local power microgrid—usually a glitching in the main supply frequency—and shut themselves off. It was better this way, better than the bad old days of stupid systems and massive blackouts, everybody said. But it was a royal pain in the butt even so.
    My mother stuck her head out of the window. “And that’s another reason I don’t like that silver stuff.”
    John laughed. “We’ll have to finish tomorrow, Ma. Sorry.”
    “You’d better come in; the mosquitoes will be at you in minutes now that the electric fences are down. I’ve got no-brain-chicken slices, and cookies, and cards to keep the kids quiet.” She shut the window with a bang.
    I glanced at John. I couldn’t see his face, but glimpsed the whiteness of his teeth. “Gin rummy,” he said. “I always hated fucking gin rummy.”
    “Me, too.” It was one thing we had in common, at least.
    He clapped me on the back, a bit more friendly than before. Side by side we walked into the house.
    That was when I got an alarm call in my ear so loud it hurt.
    There had been some kind of explosion in Siberia. Tom, my son, was out of touch, maybe hurt.
    Chapter 4
    As she had grown up and become aware of her world, Alia had always known that the
Nord
was a ship, an artifact, everything about it
made.
And that implied it had an origin, of course, a time before which it hadn’t existed. She had never really thought about it. The present was the thing, not some discontinuity in remote history; wherever you grew up you always assumed, deep inside, your world had existed forever.
    Nevertheless, it was true. This ship had once been built, and named, and launched, by human hands.
    The
Nord
had once been a generation starship. Crawling along at sublight, it was designed to journey for many generations, after which the remote grandchildren of its builders would spill onto the ground of some new world. It was believed it had been launched from Sol system itself, probably built of the ice of a remote moon, perhaps of Port Sol itself—and perhaps even by the legendary engineer Michael Poole, descended from the subject of Alia’s Witnessing, an earlier Michael Poole who had been doomed to live in a much drabber time.
    But that was probably just a story. The truth was the
Nord
’s port of origin was long forgotten, its intended destination unknown. Nobody even knew who its builders were or what they had wanted. Were they visionaries, refugees—even, it was whispered deliciously, criminals?
    Even the ship’s name was a subject of intellectual debate. It might have derived from
nautilus,
a word from old Earth referring to an animal that lived its life in a shell. Or perhaps it derived from
North
or
Northern,
an earthworm’s word for a direction on a planet’s surface.
    But whatever its target had been, the
Nord
had never reached it. Long before it completed its voyage it had been overtaken by a wave of faster-than-light ships, a new generation of humans washing out from Earth and rediscovering this relic of their own past. It must have been a huge conceptual shock for the crew on that day when the first FTL flitters had come alongside.
    But when that generation had passed, the crew had accepted their place aboard a bit of bypassed history. They had begun to trade with the passing ships—at first with the
Nord
’s reaction-mass ice, billions of tons of which still remained, and later with hospitality, cultural artifacts, theater shows, music, elegant prostitution. The
Nord
was no longer a vessel, really; it was an artificial island, drifting between the stars, locked into a complex interstellar trading economy. Nowadays nobody aboard had any ambition for the voyage to end.
    Of course if you lived on a spaceship there were constraints. The
Nord
’s inner space was always going to be finite, and the population could never grow too far. But two children were enough for most people: indeed most had fewer. Alia knew that she was fortunate to have a sister in Drea; siblings