In a split pulsebeat, she calculated how to bring Faraday onto her viewscreen. To her the operation felt everyday: felt like knowing where to move her hand to pick up a tool or knowing which way a sound was coming from. The instant after she desired that particular celestial location, she had calculated it. The helmet was already on her head, the linkage to computer, memory bank, and ship's instruments already complete. At least she had glimpsed it when outbound, and countless pictures of it throughout her life. Unwilling to wait the hours, maybe days until she could see Sol again, she ran fingers across the keyboard before her, directing the scanner to bring in Phoebus.
The past eight Earth-years must have drunk deeper of her than she knew. She, the holothete, to whom everything visible was merely a veil that reality wore. The need for the comfort it would give surprised her. Each cell within me felt in a secret way how the sky first shone aloud and afterward grew quiet, air gusted or whooped or lay dreaming, rain flung chill and laughter, water and worms did their work for my reaching roots, nestlings piped where I sheltered them and soughed.
Waning days turned me brittle golden, frost stripped me bare, snow blew about me during my long drowse, then Orion hunted his quarry beyond this heaven and the sun swung north to blaze me awake, but none of this did I sense. My leaves drank of the sunlight that streamed through them and set their green aglow, my leaves danced in the wind, which made a harp of my branches, but I did not see or hear. I was a birch tree, white slenderness in the middle of a meadow, but had no name for what I was.
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