Chapter 6
Earth was not at all as Richard had expected.
He’d never been there before, of course; with the exception of his brief fund-raising trip to Nouvelterre he’d lived his whole life in the secluded little backwater of Iwagen. But Alain Cheney was born and raised on Earth, and Richard’s memories were infused with his. Alain remembered his home world as a happy place, bustling with energy and vitality, a world that knew itself as the center of human existence even though its colonies had grown to independence.
But Alain Cheney’s memories were long since out of date. He’d last visited Earth only briefly twenty years ago, when the TIA tried to kill him for going telepausal. Before that, there’d been another fifteen years as a TIA agent on other worlds, with only short visits home for
