They became weightless. Kath Two took her helmet off but kept her head nestled in the couch’s rest for a minute while her inner ear adjusted. Meanwhile she was groping in a compartment in her armrest for a varp, which was what people normally used in place of flat-panel display screens when they wanted to interact with some kind of app. It was an old enough word that most people had forgotten it was an acronym for something like Vision Augmentation Retro-Projector. Styles varied, but the baseline model looked like a heavy-framed pair of glasses. Mounted in that frame were cameras that could see the way her hands were moving, a microphone that could hear her speech, and other cameras that could track her gaze. A number of glowing figments appeared in her peripheral vision as she slipped them on, and she was able to reach out and activate one of them to launch Parambulator. This gave her a schema of the flivver’s situation in the universe: in the center, a blue disk representing New Earth, under a gray film of atmosphere. Well outside of that, the orbital track of the bolo’s center, the twin trajectories of its two hangers snaking around it. This was what they had just left behind. A blinking green dot showed their current location on their new orbit, a fat ellipse whose apogee coincided with the circle of habitats that hung above the planet at geosynchronous altitude. Over the next twelve hours they would coast up to that height, then strap back into the couches and use other means to effect a delta vee that would sync them up with whichever habitat they decided upon.