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not stop this side of the stars, and we’ll do it without screwing the place up. That would take generations, though. She’d planned on Colorado Springs, before the Event, and dreamed of eventually joining the astronaut program....
    With a sigh she unlatched the rubber-rimmed wooden hatchway at the top of the ladder and stuck her head into the observation post.
    “Oh,” she said. Oh, damn. Must have come up here while I was in the head. “Good very early morning, Colonel Hollard.”
    “Couldn’t sleep, Captain Cofflin,” the other woman said. “Nice view up here, too.”
    It would be impolite to duck right down. There was plenty of room for two; the observation bubble was domed with what had started life as a shopping-center Plexiglas skylight, and rimmed with a padded couch. It was cold, but not as draughty as the wickerwork-sided main gondola below, and, anyway, her generation had gotten used to a world where heating was often too cumbersome to be worth the trouble. You put on another layer of clothing or learned to live with being chilly, or both.
    A continuous low drumming sound came from outside, under the whistle of cloven air, the sound of the taut fabric of Emancipator’s outer skin flexing under the 60 mph wind of her passage.
    Well, you’ve got reason to be sleepless, Vicki thought as she sat and looked at the other’s impassive face. She didn’t know all the details, but everyone had heard something—mainly that somehow the Mitannian princess Kenneth Hollard had saved from the Assyrians had managed to seriously torque off King Kashtiliash ... the local potentate Kathryn Hollard had married in a blaze of publicity and gossip that had them talking all the way back to Nantucket Town.
    I thought we had culture clash in our family, Vicki Cofflin thought. Her father had come from the piney woods of east Texas. I didn’t know the meaning of the word, back then.
    “Cocoa?” Hollard asked, holding up a thermos. Those were within Nantucket’s capabilities, if you didn’t mind paying three weeks’ wages for it.
    “Thanks, ma’am.” The cocoa was dark and strong, sweetened with actual cane sugar from Mauritius Base.
    “You’re welcome ... let’s not be formal. I was just looking at the stars, and thinking about the Event.” Hollard went on meditatively.
    “Oh? Nothing better to do?”
    Vicki grinned, glancing up herself. Thinking about the Event had become a byword for useless speculation and idle day-dreaming; they just didn’t have any data to go on. There was also what amounted to an unspoken rule against talking about it at all, among the older generation.
    The stars were enormous through the dry clear air, a frosted band across the sky. Skyglow’s one thing I don’t miss about the twentieth, she thought.
    “It occurred to me,” Hollard went on, looking up and sipping, “that we may be wrong about what happened up in the twentieth when we ... left. That they got the 1250 B.C. Nantucket swapped with us, that is. That’s what most people assume, but there’s no reason to believe it.”
    “Oh?” Well, a fresh hypothesis, anyway. “What else could have happened?”
    Everything uptime of us could have all vanished the moment we arrived here, like a stray dream. She didn’t mention that; it was another unwritten courtesy rule. The thought that they’d unwittingly wiped out billions of people and their own country and kin was just too ghastly to contemplate. Those inclined to brood on it had made up a goodly portion of the rash of post-Event suicides.
    “Well, I don’t think the Event was an accident,” Hollard said. “The transition was too neat—a perfect ellipse around the Island, for God’s sake!—and we arrived too smoothly. No earthquakes, no tremors even, no tidal wave.... I mean, there must have been differences in sea level, the temperature of the land underneath the wedge that got brought along with us, air pressure ... and despite a subsoil of saturated sand and gravel