At Lydia’s second time at the Time Travel Club, she tells them of her pirate activities in the past and her solar sail demolition races in the future, which is all well and good until the outlandish Madame Alberta shows up and asks them all to help her with ethical questions of building a real time machine, not to mention figuring out a rather strange use for the thing.

In a future Earth with an mixture of space colonies and a rigid caste system on Earth, retainer Ythna witnesses a peculiarly dressed red-haired woman emerge from nowhere at the very moment of Ythna’s mistress’s sudden death.