August 11, 2375

Somewhere in Ultraspace

Lorie, I can’t even guess when you’ll get to hear this letter. If ever. I mean, I might just decide to blank the message cube when I finish talking into it. Or maybe I’ll forget about giving it to you when I come home from all this.

It isn’t just that I’m an unstable sort of vidj, which of course I am. By the time I’m able to get any letters into your hands, though, a couple of years will have gone by, and what I have to tell you now may not seem very important or interesting. But I have these message cubes anyway. And right now it seems like a good idea to put it all down for you, to make a record of what I’m doing and what’s happening to me out here.

I guess the proper thing to do tonight is to call you up on the galaxy-wide telepath hookup and wish us a happy birthday, we being twenty-two years of age this day. (Doesn’t that sound ancient? We’re turning into fossils!) A guy really ought to keep in touch with his twin sister on their birthday, even if she’s home on Earth and he’s bimpty-bump light-years away.

But it costs about a billion credits to make a live realtime skull-to-skull call. Well, maybe not that much; but whatever it costs, it’s more stash than I’ve got in my thumb account. And I don’t dare call collect, even though Our Lord And Master wouldn’t suffer much from the charge. Considering the way things were between Dad and me when I took off on this jaunt, I just don’t have the slice to try it. He’d split a wavelength when he saw the bill.

Will this do, then? — Happy Birthday, Sister Mine, from your unique and irreplaceable brother Tom, far, far away. I send you, via message cube and a couple of years after the fact, a chaste and brotherly kiss.

Exactly where I am now is anybody’s guess.