I.

The window looked out on rain—as it always did; as it had for decades. By then to us it was nothing but white noise—the dull, rhythmic tapping against the roof, the hiss of tyres as cars slunk by the street outside, the splash of boots in puddles that never seemed to dry. You could almost ignore it, and in those days I suppose I did.

I had more important things to be focusing on, after all. As the lead biologist in the Sequencing Department of the Renaissance Project, I, Aaron Turner (Class 1, Lower Echelon) faced the unenviable challenge of preserving the Earth's biodiversity against its now inevitable extinction in the most difficult way possible—moving it to another planet. My research partner said that the only difference between the work we did and the work of Sisyphus was the temperamental and not always helpful intermediary of our computers.

It was at these computers that I now swore. The rain was drilling into my head; I was losing my objectivity, my sense of detachment. If you weren't careful, you could lose sight of your immediate goal—then the magnitude of the whole damned project came down on you, and you were useless for awhile. I'd managed to stave that particular problem off, for the moment, but the computers... I struck the table next to my terminal—hard, hard enough to make me wince. "Son of a god damned bitch."

"I don't have children, remember?" Across the table, Maria Wells (Class 3, Lower Echelon) looked as tired as I was. She was a shepherd, like me, with dark eyes that always seemed thoughtful. Wells was five years my senior, though you would never have guessed it to look at us; I was already starting to go grey around the muzzle. When I didn't respond to her joke, the shepherdess prodded further. "What's going on?"

"We're losing it," I said.

She smiled grimly. "What else is new?"

Maria had a way of being quicker than I with words; I shook my head again to clarify. "I mean the simulation. It's going unstable at about nine hundred iterations in."

Her eyebrow raised. "Nine hundred? Well, you're doing better than I am. I get terminal indicators at about... four-fifty, and the collapse goes geometric at six hundred, consistently."

"So maybe it'll just be a short vacation." I rested my muzzle on my paws and stared into the numbers and charts that marched over my computer terminal. Six hundred cycles was only three hundred days—not even a full year. Not only was it not acceptable in the long run—in the long run, the ecosystem had to be completely stable—it wasn't even long enough to justify our division's existence. There were plenty of people who thought the resources were being misallocated already.

"'Remember, it's a one way trip,' Aaron." Maria's voice was a sing-song mockery of the phrase we heard constantly at the Renaissance Project. We were consistently exhorted to remember that, for the massive arks at least, the journey to Mars was permanent. The plants and animals we took to stock the Martian ecosystem would have to be self-sufficient for creating a new world. It was a clever truism, and it made our problems substantially worse. "What are you doing, anyway?"

"I moved all the third segments forward plus twenty, to buffer the atmosphere, and then delayed the fourth segment introductions by thirty cycles. But if you push either of those variables any more, you lose the edge. Nine hundred and eight is the best I've done."

Maria scratched her long muzzle thoughtfully, her whiskers twitching in the too-bright lights of the laboratory. "What if you doubled the complement of three-segments you deployed?"

I shrugged, and typed the new variables in. At first the system seemed stable; it gave no signs of distress as it crossed a thousand cycles, and then fifteen hundred. Suddenly, we lost the field mice; three hundred cycles later, Mars was a dead rock. "The problem is genetic diversity, it's as simple as that. The computer's pretty conservative, and it's projecting they're going to collapse under their own weight. Now, maybe they will and maybe they won't but... it's damned foolish to believe that we'll completely avoid disastrous bottlenecks, with the mass we're being given."

"It's like trying to cover the Washington Mall with a wad of gum," Wells said glumly. "Don't try increasing the CME delta, either. I tried that, it's... well, the readout is buried in one of these stacks. Didn't work, although I have to admit, it sounded like a good idea, in theory."

"CME sounded like a good idea, in theory," I pointed out. Rheingold and Ng had won the Nobel Prize, fifteen years before, for publishing a method of computer-mediated evolution. They had been fostering artificial genetic diversity to model speciation in the Galapagos; we were trying to use their tools to stretch the limited populations we were going to be allowed to take with us off the planet. The arks could only carry so much weight, and much of it was slated for the infrastructure of the planned Martian colony. The biosphere was... well, nobody would come right out and tell us that it was a secondary concern, but you could tell that given a choice between packing fifty palm trees and packing an auxiliary power generator, they were going to choose the generator every time. So we used sophisticated (for certain values of the word) computer algorithms to make up the difference, replicating millions of years of genetic variability with the press of a button. The only problem was that it didn't work.

"You know? I have no faith in the Nobel Prize anymore. None whatsoever."

At this joke, I finally chuckled. Nobody had faith in the prizes, which had been bought out by Saab ten years before. "Admittedly, to their credit neither of them think what we're doing is a good idea. But then..." I sighed. "But then, neither do you or I. Not that we have much of a choice—how do you suppose Noah did it?"

Maria's back was to the window, with its constant streaks of rain; that aspect of the metaphor was perhaps less obvious to her. All the same her answer was characteristically laconic. "He had help," she said, and then her fatalistic grin returned. "We should be so lucky."

Divine intervention, of course, was categorically unlikely, and we both knew it. "Perhaps we should just tell them to build another spaceship," I suggested. "Then it would become an 'engineering problem.'" Our mutual friend, a terse and frequently morose man named Jake Ellis, had complained to us at length about the many issues that were simply foisted on the starship designers as 'engineering problems'—as though they could be easily solved with just another iteration of the blueprints. Ellis designed the software that ran the life support system for the massive arks, and I imagine he was probably more overburdened than most of the engineers—something we, of course, didn't help with at all.

The problem, you must understand, was that all of the theoreticians—the people not involved in actually creating the ship—were in the same boat, so to speak. Besides the three arks being built at McChord, there were the two under construction in the Eurozone, six from the Ni-Si-Ko tripartite alliance, five from India, and four being constructed under the auspices of the United Nations—in theory. We never heard much about the UN arks.

They were massive, of course—the largest spaceships ever built, by far. All the same, there were practical limits of what could be taken aloft, and no good way to increase those limits—the world's industry, or what was left of it, was already being overtaxed. The genetic bottlenecks being faced by Wells and I could've been solved easily had we been given room to take more than a handful of samples of each species—but we weren't. Thus we had to improvise—with computer-mediated evolution, with careful balancing of species introductions, with deliberate sacrifices made to leave one whole clade behind on Earth, likely to perish forever, in exchange for another that might exert a stabilising influence.

I could not have denied that we were playing God, and I wanted no part in it.

Wells seemed to sense my frustration, then, for the shepherdess sighed heavily and stood, her expression set. "Hell with it, Aaron; I'm going to get some coffee. You want some?"

My stomach quailed at the thought—neither of us had eaten since early in the afternoon—but I realised that I was unlikely to make much progress asleep. "Yeah. A coffee and... see if they have anything decent to eat, why don't you? A bagel or something. Do you need my card?" As government employees and members of the Renaissance Project, we were privileged to get real food—at least most of the time. They were strict about controlling access, though, to prevent us from becoming too demanding with our allotments.

"I think they know us well enough by now. Cream or sugar in the coffee?"

"No, paint it black." I turned back to my computer as she left the room. Ellis said to me once that the trick was not to get too smart. You needed tunnel vision—needed to be able to focus on the task immediately before you. My task was stabilising the populations of small mammals. Wells and I hoped that we could recreate Earth like a pyramid, built trophic level by trophic level. We'd get the appropriate bacteria in place, and then the flora, and so on—each successive layer would build on what was already stable. With luck—and incredibly precise timing—we could get things working again.

It appeared, at least so far as the simulations were concerned, that we had built up the first several layers successfully. The problem was that they needed a cycle—otherwise the bacteria would eventually run out of food. They needed bigger things to disturb the soil and create waste, waste that the bacteria could feast on to begin the whole process over.

For the first few weeks, I'd kept a log of all the animals I'd killed—sort of as a joke, you know? It was before the reality of it all started to sink in—before the numbers crept over a million, and then ten million, and then a hundred. Wells and I knew that the simulation software continued to keep track of this—in the long term it could've been useful information—but we no longer checked and, when the numbers occasionally presented themselves, we looked away as if by superstition.

Regardless, by the time Wells returned and sat down, I was in the process of bungling eight million field mice towards a second extinction on the Red Planet. I was so engrossed by the genocide that I didn't notice Wells' toothy, grinning smile until I caught it from the corner of my eye. Then I turned. "Yes?"

"I've got it."

I caught the space-capsule mug of coffee she slid over the table, and took the bagel she offered me. "You've got more than the coffee, I'm guessing?"

"I think so. Take a drink. It's coffee, right?"

It wasn't an obvious question—even at the Renaissance Project, they sometimes foisted godawful-tasting ersatz on us. This time, however, as I took a sip, I favoured the shepherdess with an appreciative nod. "Sure, it's coffee."

She leaned forward, almost girlishly animated. "But you know, they don't have a coffee plantation back behind the counter."

"No..." Truth be told I wasn't even certain where the coffee plantations were, these days. It was possible, even, that we were still subsisting off freeze-dried stock squirreled away before the rains really got bad—the government said that they were importing fresh coffee, but then the government said a lot of things that we knew were merely propaganda. Either way I wasn't sure where Wells was going. "No," I said again. "They probably don't have a plantation, unless they've got some kind of ultraviolet lamp setup going on—actually, you know, I heard they were testing some hydroponics in the old hangar complex. Little Marty said that—"

Wells shook her head fiercely. "No, that's not what I meant. They don't have a plantation in the canteen, Aaron. Actually, they don't even have beans—I watched them make it. They just have freeze-dried grounds."

"Oh, Christ..." I breathed. "No, so they don't..."

My coworker's grin broadened. "They just have the coffee essence—"

"Mixed with a common substrate," I finished for her. "Of course. And if we can't bring along six hundred buffalo..."

"We can bring along the material to construct them—in a fraction of the space. They're all going to be suspended anyway, right? So instead of thawing them out, we can just build them. Doesn't that seem to make more sense to you? You see, I got to thinking of it when I was walking down... DHW has been talking a lot about artificial fertility, right; how even if you conceive, you can't always carry? That's why they've got those artificial wombs. But that has to be scalable—we can just use that, I'm sure of it. The only thing I'd be a little concerned about is behaviour; we know a lot of these animals have to be taught survival skills by their mother. So we could just take a family, for good measure."

I pondered this, frowning in thought. "That won't help for gregarious animals like prairie dogs, though... it'll take more work, but we can just do a cut and paste, can't we?" I used the slang term for what was, admittedly, incredibly complex neuroscience—scanning the electrical impulses in an animal's brain and then imprinting those impulses on a different one; crowd control, developed twenty years ago when they were trying to create identical, docile stock animals. "We'll have to do some research, but I have to imagine it'll pan out. It seems like a good idea—you agree?"

"At least in theory, sure. I'm with you; I don't know that it'll be possible to reconstitute them. But you know what that is?"

I shook my head.

"That's an engineering problem."

I laughed and, after a few moments, Maria joined me. After it started to ebb—we'd been working on the problem for ten hours that day alone—I took a bite of my bagel, chewing on it slowly. My partner watched me intently; I guess she must've known I had something to say. "That's genius level work there, Wells."

"You really think so?"

The bagel was terrible, really. But it was substantive; it gave weight to my thoughts. "I do."

The shepherdess quieted, splaying her fingers as her paws turned towards me to accent the question that followed. "Promotion level genius?"

I sighed heavily. "Probably? I mean, if not for this, then for the last four months worth of work. You must've put in a request, at this point, I imagine..." The class system was the government's attempt at triage—brutal, cold, and so effective it had been emulated all over. They divided us up by our abilities, at least in theory—I say "in theory" because I know it wasn't always so clean cut. There were a lot of useless bureaucrats with very high classes. "Didn't hear back on it?"

"Didn't hear back on it," she confirmed.

Where we tried to create solutions to biology by making our failures 'engineering problems,' all of our human resource issues became 'Ad Int problems.' The Ad Interim Democratic Authority held final sway over everything; I scratched behind one of my ears with a slight frown. "It's not really in my hands..."

Wells' fingers played nervously against one another. "Ah, I know. I know. It's just that... it's just my mother, you know? They've got her in the class three clinic, but it's getting worse, and... they say they can't move her." I had no real idea what ailment plagued her mother—it could've been any one of a hundred issues, the result of all the fallout, and the rain, and the constant clammy chill of Earth's eternal winter. "I just don't know what to do, is all, and I thought maybe..."

She was asking for my help. We'd become an economy of favours and pull. I wasn't good at playing the game, or at making my voice heard, but I nodded softly to her. "Look, I'll... I'll talk to Elizabeth. Maybe she'll listen, I just can't promise anything. But I'll see, ok?"

Maria smiled, faintly, but she knew that it was all we could do. Ad Int—they preferred "AIDA" on the grounds that it was a bit more noble sounding; neither I nor anyone I knew really cared about their feelings—was generally both unwavering and heartless in the exercise of their authority. After a minute, to let the silence hang, Maria shrugged in surrender. "So do you want to try a few more simulations? I think we can—"

"No," I said. "No, go home—it's not worth it. We're both too beat to make anything useful out of it, wouldn't you agree? I'll see you tomorrow, Wells."

"You sure?"

I closed the clamshell of my terminal with a firm, solid clunk. "I'm sure, yeah." Wells nodded, packing her belongings and exiting the office with a parting bow. When she was gone, and I heard the outside door click shut, I opened my computer again and started typing in a new set of variables.

*

The next evening I made my way down the hall of our office building to a door marked "ELIZABETH YUN" in imposing brass letters. Technically, I suppose, I outranked Yun—if I remembered correctly, she was a middle echelon class two. It didn't matter. As Ad Int's representative at the Project, her word was god. Nothing I could do would ever change that.

She was a tabby cat, slightly built—a quarter of a metre shorter than me, at least. All the same she was... imposing, I guess, is the best word for it. I didn't like going into her office, and I didn't like having to ask her for anything. It was the control she exerted—the absolute authority, hidden under a smile that was almost matronly, and a thin, graceful frame that made everyone who saw it thinkgeisha.

She'd seen me, waiting outside the door, and beckoned me to enter. "Good afternoon, Aaron—please, please, come in! Come in! What can I do for you?"

They asked this often, the Ad Int wallahs who were tasked with keeping eyes on us. It was part of the fiction of our relationship—that they existed to serve us, and that we respected their assistance. "You received a copy of the report I sent to Dezirian, I hope? I think I included you in the distribution chain." I'd summed up the progress Wells and I had made in a short brief, easily digestible.

It took her a moment to recall, but then she nodded. "I did! Congratulations—that puts you only a week beh... no, I'm misreading this. I'm very sorry—this puts you ahead of schedule, now, doesn't it? It's good to have some news like that... the propulsion department is forecasting another two weeks of delay, from their last update..." She sounded slightly melancholy—it was always hard for me to tell if this was an act; if she was trying to draw some information from me. I knew nothing about what was going on in the propulsion department.

"I'm happy that we're finally making progress, yes ma'am."

Yun smiled—beamed, almost, really. She was probably trying to ingratiate herself; the Ad Int employees knew that they weren't really welcome. They knew they were a formality—a necessary evil. Her voice was bright and chipper. "Good, good. Was that all you wanted?"

I wanted to run for the door. Instead, of course, I merely shook my head. "No... I have a personnel request, one I didn't attach to the progress report."

"Oh?"

"Well, you've probably noticed from our past reports that what tends to happen is we claw our way back ahead of schedule at the end of a trophic level, and then immediately wind up behind again when we hit the next one. I want to be more prepared, now—we're starting to put carnivores together. It's going to be tough... I'd like to try to stay ahead of it."

Yun pulled a thin tablet computer out, and began flipping through our records. "That does seem to be what happens... at least, I can see regular, punctuated cycles in your predictions—I presume that's what you mean? Yes, I can see it then. Do you know why this is happening? Are you getting worn out?"

"Well, that's some of it, I suppose. But mostly it's that each new layer is forcing us to innovate, and we can't tell what we're going to have to do when we first start. I don't think it's an issue of our workload; the work is pretty constant. Wells and I have been putting in solid days for the last month and a half, since the spring rebrief. Ten, twelve hours, most days—I'm not sure we can really push much past that."

Her smile, this time, was decidedly motherly. "You know, the environmental reports suggest you're here a bit longer than that. And yes, I know that your timesheets disagree. I also know that you don't have it easy in your department, don't worry. Can I help?"

"More people would be useful," I said. I knew this would be turned down—every department wanted more people, and it was hard to argue that we really needed it when we kept on schedule with what we had. "Ideally, I'd want another class three or two, to handle some of the work we can't farm out to the programming teams in Portland." Wells and I only came up with the ideas, and a vague idea of how to execute them—the nitty-gritty of the planning came from the Renaissance Project's Portland office, another class two settlement further down the Pacific coast.

Yun's expression didn't really change as she thumbed through a few readouts on her computer. "I might be able to send another analyst your way, but probably not before winter or next spring, and the commit date is supposed to be this fall." That was another thing; Ad Int employees spoke in terms of seasons—propaganda that, I have to imagine, they were explicitly directed to use. Nobody else took the concept seriously; it could've been used for a shibboleth. I never used the terminology myself—for it was, after all, hard to think of the constant dreary rainfall outside as 'summer.' In the movies, summer was full of sunlight, and children eating something called ice cream. Ad Int's world was not our own.

"Not any sooner?"

"Offhand, I don't see how, Aaron. I'm really sorry we can't make that happen."

I shook my head. "No, no. I understand." Christ, but it was all a charade, wasn't it? All of us playing a part. I didn't understand Ad Int at all. "I guess... our real problem is that we get all this high-level work, and I'm spending a quarter of my day filling out forms to give my class three access."

"That's Wells, right? Maria Wells?"

"That's right. If she was a class two, I wouldn't have to do that. We could... spend more time trying to get our work done, and less trying to make sure we're all on spec. I mean, having the guidelines is great, but... you can see from our timesheets that it doesn't always work." In theory we were allowed to spend no more than sixty hours a week in the office, for mental health's sake. In practise, as Yun knew, I was frequently in far longer, especially if weekends were considered.

"You want Wells moved to a new class?"

I had tried to couch the request in terms of efficiency—we weren't supposed to get emotional, when dealing with our work. "That would be ideal, yes. I'd think with that we could get another six hours of productivity a week."

Yun leaned back. "Will you answer a question for me?"

Was I on thin ice? I wasn't sure. "Yes?"

The tabby leaned forward, her look conspiratorial. "This is just so you can send somebody else to the progress checkins, isn't it?" I must've looked surprised, for she laughed. "I know I'd want to get out of listening to Crawford drone on."

So she was kidding—letting me know that her guard was down. The smile I gave her was intended to look unforced, as though I was in on her joke about Dr. Crawford—the deputy director for the Renaissance Project, whose biweekly "progress checkins" could be guaranteed to suck four or five hours out of my day. "Oh... well, maybe just a little." It wasn't true, but perhaps if Yun thought she and I shared something in confidence, she might be more willing to play along.

She laughed, and sat back once more, tapping her computer screen a few times. "Well, your secret's safe with me. I can authorise a class transference." Because the class system was not officially hierarchical, and because it was supposed to be innate, she was careful not to describe it as a promotion—though we all knew what it was. "What's the green line for your departmental files. Class two lower or middle?"

"Middle, ma'am."

"Well, then we'll be classmates!" She tapped a few more times, and then smiled up at me. "Done and done. Was that all, then, Dr. Turner?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Glad I could help. Come back soon, Aaron, you hear?"

I heard, yes. It wasn't a command I was eager to obey; I bowed as gracefully as I could, and then stepped back into the hallway. I was happy that she'd authorised the change for Wells—and it would no doubt make the shepherdess's life much easier. All the same, I never enjoyed having to meet with Yun.

Sometimes I regretted being so standoffish with her. Perhaps she was a perfectly nice person, outside of work—she had never been anything but polite in the office, at least. There was just something about it, though I felt guilty saying so. In the past they talked about "business casual" dress; Jake Ellis described the Ad Int manner of speaking in a similar way: "formal informality."

What Yun reminded me of, more than anything, were the chipper pre-recorded voices on the autobus or the subway, the ones that told you to have a nice day and announced the upcoming stops. They were warm and bright—like summer, if what the movies said was true. They just weren't quite... human. 

*

I don't know who's going to read this, ever, but I hope to god you don't know any of this firsthand. And on that hope, on the prayer that your world looks a lot different, I guess I'll explain.

It's not that nobody knows who to blame for the nuclear war. It was the Chinese, although I'm sure they didn't really know what was going to happen—who could? So it's not that nobody knows who to blame, it's that nobody knows what blaming anybody gets us. A historical record, is what I figure.

They say that it started as a fight over the Spratly Islands, but it goes back a little bit further than that. As an economy, China was running away—their industrial output, fifty years ago, was completely unmatched. By 2015 they were consuming a sharp plurality of the world's concrete and steel and coal. For a time, that was alright—NorthAm, which at the time was the twin countries of the United States and Canada, could keep up with that. So could Europe, and India.

But they kept growing, until at last they had nothing at all to spend it on—it's a problem with exporting countries, I was told by a friend of mine who used to be an economist. Eventually you find that you can't export anymore. They had a lot of money, a lot of resources, and a lot of unemployment. At first that just meant the prestige projects—the Three Gorges Dam, the base on the moon, the space elevator they started constructing. But that can only employ so many people, and they looked elsewhere.

In the very early days of nuclear technology a century ago, the Windscale reactor in what was then England caught fire. They tried to suffocate it, the same way as you might fight any other fire. But it had gone too far for that; the inferno was so hot that it stripped the oxygen away from the carbon dioxide and combusted it anyway. That's the image I get when I think about the Chinese Empire's economy then—literally so powerful that it could not be stopped.

The only reasonable place to spend that much money was the military, and they developed the strongest one in the world. But standing armies get antsy, and they suffered from the same problem as many other great empires—a sense of entitlement. In this case, their eye turned to the Spratly Islands, with their abundant reserves of oil and natural gas. They weren't the only ones who wanted the Spratlys; the United States and some of her allies did as well. It was those allies that China attacked.

Reports from later, from afterwards, make it seem like, once it had been started, the war could not be stopped—that it happened so quickly that nuclear devastation was completely inevitable. Not enough of the military leadership survived to know for certain what happened, except that the eastern seaboard of the former United States, and many of the largest cities in China, had effectively ceased to exist.

It was worse, I think, for the rest of the world—Europe, India, Africa, South America. Those countries that had nothing to do with the war, but suffered for it anyway. That was when the ash started, and the skies got dark. For a few years, they say, you could hardly see the sun. By 2059, the year that I was finishing up work in the Renaissance Project, there were a few weeks of sun a year on the west coast, and certain parts of the world where it was relatively common—including the capital at Denver.

Things had changed enough by then, anyway. The governments of Canada, the United States, and Mexico had re-coalesced in the Ad Interim Democratic Authority—technically an elected body, although so few people bothered to vote that their terms were effectively limitless.

It was they who, in 2036, realised that the scarcity of the Earth's resources called for drastic measures. It was called the Triage Bill; an attempt to classify people based on how useful they were to the future of the territory under Ad Int's control. It was so cold, and so utilitarian, and so practical that every other government soon followed.

For the people already in the workforce, they looked at skills and educational history. The rest of us, they started out earlier on. When I was 17, I took a test—the Provisional Aptitude Assessment. That was what placed me into Harvard. It told me that I was a "class 1," and when I received my job offer from the Joint Defence Advanced Research Centre it came with it a guaranteed formalisation of my rank as class 1, lower echelon—though the echelons were less important, and mostly figured in to pay calculations. It was class, the larger category, that everyone paid addition to.

Class one was reserved for high-ranking government officials, scientists, doctors, and the managers of the few large corporations that still existed. Class two encompassed military personnel, police officers and rescue workers; engineers like Jake Ellis were also generally class two, because the work they performed was essential in keeping the country going. Class three included educators, bureaucrats in the civil service, technicians, and average businessmen. Class four was for farmers and skilled labourers. Menial labourers made up the fifth class—most people, I'm told, were class four or five.

Children were class six, at least until they could be reclassified. The mentally ill and those who were too sick or old to work were class seven. Class eight were the homeless and the criminals, those people that Ad Int had for all intents and purposes completely forgotten about. The first five classes comprised what Ad Int considered to be a functional society.

I know there's been a lot written about class—where it came from; whether it was justified. I myself found it abhorrent, but the cold fact was that it could not be escaped. It was so logical, and so difficult to argue with, that they applied it rigorously.

Class determined where you could live, what medical facilities were available to you, and who you were expected to associate with. It limited your travel options, your work opportunities, and your rations.That was the genius of it, its ubiquity. It was rational, it was impossible to challenge, and it was everywhere.

For instance, in the mass transit system that threaded through the Pacific Northwest, which blatantly told me: "Class two lower status or above is required to board this vehicle." The voice sounded like it was coming from inside my head, though I knew it was only the little speaker chip I had implanted in my ear. I raised my card so that the autobus's scanner could see it. "Welcome aboard, Dr. Turner. The first available seat is in row six." It was, I thought again, very much like listening to Elizabeth Yun. I took the seat and dropped into it heavily.

The busses were electrical, running off the nuclear plant at Fort Lewis—we weren't supposed to think too long about how quickly we'd turned back to the atom, after it had levelled the whole of human civilisation. Irony, that was another thing Ad Int recommended we all move past. But, at least, it meant that the busses weren't contributing to the crud that was messing up the atmosphere.

Before the Fires, and the reconstruction, the space where the Renaissance Project was located had been called McChord Air Force Base. It had supported the nation's transport aircraft, when aircraft still needed paved runways; the runways were all that was left, really, though they hid behind the scaffolding of the three great arks. The hulls had been completed the previous year; disappointly, they looked nothing like I'd hoped science fiction spaceships might. Long, gunmetal grey, and perversely phallic, the arks appeared somewhat like whale-shaped missiles.

But they were our hope, the promise of a ticket off the planet. As long as they were there, with a bustle of frantic activity around them, we knew we had another chance. Did we deserve it? Well, that was a different question, of course. I closed my eyes as the bus pulled away—I didn't like to watch the scenery, because it was bleak and frightening. In my more idealistic days at the Renaissance Project, I'd tried to empathise with that outside world; now I found I had no empathy left to give.

But I can reconstruct the trip from memory, anyway. McChord City, which encompassed most of the old airbase, was a class two facility—so were most of the workers there, with the exception of people like Wells, who had special dispensation. Olympia, where I lived, was also class two, with a few outlying lower-class suburbs. I was a bit of an aberration there; the closest class one settlement was the Microsoft Enclave, and a few of the higher-ranking Renaissance employees did live there. For me, well,there was little love lost between myself and the businessmen—I was content enough in Olympia.

Between McChord and Olympia lay the slums of Eleazaria. The town—the "City of Lazarus," proving that Ad Int wasn't beyond irony after all—was class five, slotted for the lowest of menial workers. There were few services there; even power, I'd heard, was intermittent. For all intents and purposes it was what, fifty years ago, we would've called the third world.

I'd heard it said that the Pacific coast had it easier, comparatively—that they were spared most of the devastation of the Fires. Having worked for a time at JDARC, the Joint Defense Advanced Research Center in old Arlington, I'd have to agree—the compound had been alright, and the Defense Complex on the site of the old Pentagon was class 1, but the rest of it was pure misery. It's small wonder they moved the capital to Denver, even though the Fires spared Washington, DC itself.

Whether or not any given city had been burned down, the whole eastern seaboard was an endless sea of decay, a bleak expanse of grey skies and greyer people. And, looking at the pictures of the oldtimes, the contrast was greater there—as if those cities were nothing more than a monument to just how far we've fallen. Cities like New York, where the skeletal skyscrapers stand empty, maintaining their dismal vigil like watchmen dying on their feet. Cities like Pittsburgh, where deer nose among the toxic, rusted ruins of what was once a great industrial hub.

My experience at JDARC had suggested to me that even the scattered outposts of civilisation there—the Defense Complex; RBC Financial's enclave, and so on—did little to help. They merely magnified the devastation, in the same way that a flashlight deepens the night around it, or food reminds the starving of their hunger. It was the kind of bleakness that, if you stayed out of Eleazaria, you could avoid in the Pacific Northwest. The kind of bleakness that makes you wonder how we manage to endure.

This was the sort of thought that you pushed out of your mind, if you could. The bus rolled through a kilometre or more of run-down, weathered, empty houses before it crossed into the sheltered Olympia complex. Once, I guessed, these had been part of the town too. Now "Olympia" was just the buildings that hunkered down under the protective geodesic that shielded us from the rain. It was a fraction of its former size; we were not encouraged to dwell on what had happened to the rest.

The bus let me off three blocks from my house. The turns had been worn into my feet through muscle memory; there was no chance of getting lost, even though I closed my eyes. I tried to think of what it must've been like, forty years before. There must've been playgrounds; must've been outdoor swimming pools and those 'convertible' automobiles you saw in the old movies, the ones with the removable tops.

I had an apartment near the top of an older skyscraper—built in the final few years before the war, back when people were still in the business of creating great architecture. Then, it might've conveyed some status; now, it was hard to imagine anyone showing any particular enthusiasm for the grey, miserable scenery its broad windows looked over.

I picked a random book from my shelf—the wealthy are expected to indulge some conceits, and I had anachronistically picked literature; I had something of a library, composed of volumes from all over the last few centuries. In this case, it was a Frederik Pohl novel—Gateway, a story about a man from a world more or less like my own, with too many people for too few resources. For Pohl, it was possible to transcend this. For us... I had frequent doubts.

It was better at night, at least; I took the book with me to my balcony and sat, reading in the light from the low-wattage bulb set into the wall. Beneath me, autobuses and a few private electric vehicles crawled along the streets, and the lamps cast their dull white pall over the sidewalks. This world, of darkness punctuated by the occasional light, could almost have been a mirror of the night sky—had we ever been able to see such a thing. As it was, it was so stark and mechanical that it gave no hint of how mournful the tableaux might otherwise have been.

In the morning it would be worse; with daylight, the world was composed only of the light grey above and the dark grey of concrete and granite below. There was no colour—early on Ad Int had paid people to create murals, in order to break up the incessant dreariness. When, after a few months, people started ignoring these as they faded into the background, Ad Int had mostly given up. I couldn't blame them; most of us had as well.

But what could you do? They played ancient music, in the Project offices—mostly because it was public domain; EMI had fired a few missiles at a government plane ten years back following a licensing dispute. One of the songs stuck in my mind, a guttural lament. "No one here gets out alive," the singer says. I sometimes wondered if he had a crystal ball.

*

Three weeks later, Friday evening found Maria and I still at the office, struggling with a new kink in the rebirth. The essential problem was that it wasn't as simple as adding another species in sequence. We had to consider everything—each new species had a relationship to every other species, and causality was not always clear. It had taken us two days to realise that the extinction of a species of green algae had been due to our addition of some squirrels, through a complex chain of two dozen plants, animals, and microbes.

On Earth, relationships are pretty robust. I guess we realised that after the Fires, when so much of the planet was devastated but life, somehow, managed to keep going. The Earth can absorb a lot of punishment, if treated properly. But that's because an ecosystem is a dense net of chain mail with millions of individual links.

We didn't have that luxury. We had to pick and choose carefully, and then meticulously plan the order of introduction of all the species—but we had to do so with a margin of error large enough to accommodate for the fact that we were lifting human civilisation up and setting it down somewhere else. There were bound to be complications and holdups; we had to account for these too.

If all we'd wanted to do were provide a sustainable atmosphere and maybe some food animals, the job would've been much easier. But that wasn't good enough. Maria Wells had coined a phrase: "apple pie colonisation." It had defined settlement in the past, and nobody felt like giving it up now just because we happened to be talking about another planet.

Apple pie colonisation, to Wells, meant that anywhere you wound up, you had to make sure that you could bake an apple pie—meaning sugar, wheat for the dough, fresh apples, and whatever else—without having to have anything imported. But it went beyond that. It meant that, if you were sitting on a porch swing, you could have a bite of the stuff and never know whether you were in the Great Plains or the Utopia Planitia. Though they would never have admitted it, the Renaissance Project was single-mindedly focused on apple pie colonisation.

That was another one of those “big picture” things that we tried scrupulously hard to avoid.

At the moment, Wells and I were focused on the results of our latest simulation, the sixteenth one of the day—“sixteenth time’s a charm,” Wells had said, with a heavy sigh. Collapse, when it came, was characteristically swift. We lost a species of pollinating insect, followed shortly thereafter by a whole clade of plants, and within a few dozen more cycles Mars had gone completely dead once more.

“I am become death,” I proclaimed. “The shatterer of worlds.”

Maria was more succinct. “Well, fuck.”

“Do we have any idea what happened, at least?”

Wells unfolded the computer screen like a triptych, giving us more screen real estate to review the figures. “Yes... yes, right here. It’s the macrofauna again, look, see? We introduced those voles, and they decreased the oxygen content of the atmosphere, which took out the pollinators. That was it for the plants, then...”

I rubbed at my temples, trying to make sense of the graphs. “Shouldn’t they have compensated for that? Oh." I checked the numbers a few times—things had come apart quickly, in only a few dozen cycles. "No, no time, I guess. And we don’t have anything in the database with faster replication rates, if I’m not mistaken.” Nor was the solution simply increasing the number of plants—oxygen, like all corrosive materials, was highly toxic at sufficient concentrations. 

"None with the parameters we need, no." She looked as weary as I was.

"Alright, let's try this. Look how wide our lines are, all the margins for potential error. Let's remove those, and assume it goes absolutely perfect."

Wells lifted a mug of coffee to her lips, trying to take a drink—though, judging by when we had last gone for coffee, it had been dry for half an hour. We were operating on instinct, on reflex. "You know what happens when you assume, Aaron..."

I held my paw up, to still this line of discourse. "Sure. But let's try, ok? I mean... because here's the thing. If it doesn't work out under the assumption that everything goes perfect, then we know we have to start from scratch across the board. If it does work... well..."

"Fair enough." She brushed her paws over the computer screen to comment out some of the subroutines we'd written to make the model more robust. "Ready?"

"Let there be light," I said.

As the simulation started working again, Wells stepped away from the desk, returning in a few seconds with her coffee mug filled with water—the only thing we at the Renaissance Project had in unlimited supply. "What do you suppose the odds are that this will work?"

"This simulation?"

She shrugged, and tapped her claw on the ceramic rim of the mug, watching the ripples. "The Project."

"Well, you know, ninety-nine percent of all species that have ever lived on this earth are dead."

"Doesn't mean we have to join in. It's not like there's peer pressure, Aaron..."

Between the two of us, I had always been the more cynical one—although Wells had her moments. "It doesn't mean we have to, no, but you just asked about the odds."

"I guess partly I was trying to figure out why you're here, you know? You push yourself so hard for this, and... I have to wonder why, if you don't think it'll make a difference."

It was a question I'd asked myself, before. The truth was uncomfortable and I admitted it to few people—I was terrified of the future, which I had neither faith in nor hope for. I was terrified of each successive day, and so I tried to fill as much of my day as possible with distraction. It was that, I knew, or turn to alcohol. "It pays the bills, mostly. And for a geneticist, it's that or go back to JDARC, working on protective phages for the military." It wasn't true. I couldn't go back to JDARC because I hated the work and the hours were too short; the Renaissance Project wasn't just another job for me, and it wasn't just about the money. It was about occupying my spare time, so that nothing else could creep in. But the lie was easy. "How about you?"

"I think—I really think—that you need something to believe in. You need a reason to get out of bed in the morning. This is mine. Every day, I get up and I tell myself that I'm making a difference. This is going to work, and I'm going to have been a part of it. Because if it doesn't work, then we're all worm food anyway."

I'd heard similar fatalistic arguments before—the post-apocalyptic version of Pascal's wager. "Well, I think that you're probab... ly..." I trailed off, tilting my head at the computer screen.

"Son of a bitch."

I shook my head. "No—no. At least we know it's possible in theory, now."

Wells' laugh was much more bitter than her optimistic outlook on the future might've suggested. "Great, in theory. It's the practise that's the real bear..." She closed her eyes, and from her shifting expression I could tell that she was trying to steel herself. "Alright. Well, let's reset the sims, and delay the first introduction by another six... what?"

I was still shaking my head, though the period had shrunk. "No, let's not bother. We're not going to get this cracked tonight, Maria; might as well not beat ourselves up over it. I'm going to close up shop." When I saw that she was considering making an argument, I held up my paw—I was thoroughly exhausted. "Don't make me pull rank, miss class two."

She faltered, and then the shepherdess grinned. "Alright, alright. You win." She closed her terminal, almost vengefully. "I was getting tired of destroying the planet anyway."

As I shrugged on my heavy, waterproof jacket, I chuckled—though not with much mirth. "You know, fifty years ago there was a philosopher who argued that we were all probably a computer simulation, ourselves. If that's true, then what we've done... shit, Maria, if those squirrels have a god, we're going to face one hell of a reckoning."

Wells, too, was becoming formless and dark beneath an overcoat. She folded down the collar and drew the hood up and over it, so that just her muzzle protruded. "I want to read their genesis story, when they get it together, that's for sure. You ready to go?"

"Yeah." I took a quick look around, and flipped the power switch for the lab off. It was a heavy thing, and rested below a plastic placard that, in clean white type, asked: 'are you doing your part?' It was strange to think that, once upon a time, people had left lights and computers running all the time—or had just turned them off from a switch on the device, without considering the parasitic drain on the grid. The Project's computers were all solid-state, and had been designed to resume nearly immediately and without error if power was removed and then reapplied. Before they built the new nuclear generators at Fort Lewis, power outages had apparently been a constant problem in the complex.

In the hallway outside, walking towards the exit, Maria turned to me. "So, do you have plans for the weekend?"

"Get some reading done, I guess. Maybe spend some time tomorrow or Sunday thinking about this stuff." I jerked my thumb back at the now dark office.

"You spend too much time here," the shepherdess said with a slight frown. "This is the first time we've left together in a couple of weeks. Is it that important to you?"

I grinned. "Do you really think we'll keep ourselves out of the fateful ninety-nine?"

I hadn't meant it entirely seriously, but Wells' ears flattened—I could tell by the way her hood dipped slightly. "You know... I do, actually. For hundreds of millions of years, now, life has found a way to keep going. It's the impulse to survive, you know? If I gave up on that, there wouldn't be a reason for me to come in. It'd be a damned fraud." She held the door open, and I stepped through into the eerily grey summer's night. The rain had abated slightly, until it was just a light drizzle.

"Maybe that's why I keep coming in, then. Sometimes I try to forget what we're really here for; just take it as a series of puzzles, all one after another. I find that helps, a little, too. Anyway, you don't have to worry about me. Is that your bus coming?"

Maria tilted her head. "No, I think it's yours." As the vehicle pulled to a slow stop, she shrugged a little beneath the heavy greatcoat. "Well, there's a community-building party in my neighbourhood. I hate going to those, so... if you wanted to drop by and keep me company, you could at least get out of the apartment a little."

"I'll consider it," I said. "If I don't see you, have a good weekend, Maria."

*

It was actually her earlier point that I considered, though—the one about the will to survive. This basic, animal desire is what causes us to fight against insurmountable odds. It keeps the drowning from letting go their final breath; the terminally ill from permitting their eyes to close for the last time. It's a potent, powerful impulse, and it's driven everything from soldierly heroism to Alferd Packer. The problem, if I had to put words on it, was that I was no longer convinced that it was enough.

A few nights previously, the radio had reported that cancer rates continued to climb. We were constantly exhorted to have children. Birth rates were abysmally low; part of this was due to the widespread infertility we sometimes heard of, but the greatest part was no doubt one of choice. Why, why in god's name would you want to bring a child into this world?

As far as our species was concerned, I had little doubt that we were dying. It was not all sickness; for the most part, we were simply giving up. There was something miss, some vital spark that had gone out of the machine. Listless and bereft of purpose, we ambled along like zombies—the living version of all those factories in the old heartland, full of potential but completely inanimate.

I closed my eyes and tried to focus on something, anything, but my own nightmare of our future. It was impossible; impossible, too, was reading the book I had brought with me—an inspiring tome that I reread often to keep my spirits up. With each kilometre it clicked along, the bus seemed more and more like a coffin. Finally, impulsively, I pressed the button to bring it to a halt at the next stop. Obligingly, it began to slow almost immediately; a minute or so later, I was stepping out into the cold, damp dark of a Washington evening.

The rain had started up in earnest, and I pulled my coat tighter about me as I tried to ascertain my location. Eleazaria—it was, in theory, a class 5 settlement. Now, in the thick of it, it seemed far worse. It was dark; it reeked of filth and human misery. The cold night had given me one advantage: in my heavy jacket, I was shapeless, and looked nothing like a class one. There were no emergency services in the town; if I were to be attacked, nobody would come to my aid.

I walked purposefully through the slums—through stacks of desolate tenements from which no sound could be heard, and in whose windows no light could be distinguished. Despite the red brick and featureless, utilitarian concrete buildings, Eleazaria was near on to a human wilderness. I began to talk to myself to stave off the quiet, returning to my original quandary. I tried to isolate myself from what I saw in a cloak of words.

This persisted a few minutes—I was walking up along the main street, towards the next closest bus station—with the white noise of the rain broken only by my soft murmurrings and the crunch of glass beneath my feet like the remains of so many dreams. It was not until a voice interrupted me that I was forced out of my dark daydreams at all. I turned towards the source, a huddled mass on the corner. "What did you say?"

"Change, mister," the voice repeated. "Every bit helps..."

He sounded old, although I didn't think it was to the point of senility. There was strength left in it, if not dignity. "I—what for? Don't you get the government stipend, sir?"

The bundle of cloth made a low moaning noise, and I suddenly wanted to know what it was. Who it was, I corrected myself swiftly. I bent towards him until the stench repelled me, but was still unable to make out a face. At my inquiring gesture, though, he started to explain again. "I do, I do..."

"What do you need my change for, then?" I straightened up, tilting my head at him.

The coarse, harsh laugh was muffled through the blankets, and he moved a little with the rustle of plastic bags. "Because they fired me from my job, and the government won't pay for booze."

It was an honest answer, just not one that I was particularly enthusiastic about. "And why should I help you with that?"

He coughed. "Because I'm being straight with you, kid. Ain't honesty worth anything?"

I tried to force some conviction into my voice. "I don't have to help you kill yourself, though, do I? And I'm no kid—I'm in my thirties."

The form moved again. His cough and laugh met together in a sick sound—he must've been ill with something, one of the myriad diseases that, in the civilised world, we ought to have eradicated. "Thirties? Christ, kid, I remember the Fires. I remember when it wasn't like this. Jesus, kid, you don't want to help me die? Then tell me what I've got to live for..."

I had no answer. Maybe, in fact, there was no answer possible—maybe he was right; all we could do was hasten the inevitable. I looked around, and suddenly there were more huddles, it seemed, receding from every still-working streetlamp like cockroaches. Or like childhood monsters, lurking in the fringes of the dark.

I saw Eleazaria again as if for the first time. I saw the windows; perhaps half of them were gone, and what remained were stained and cracked with neglect. I saw the bottles of potent liquor, drained to keep the wolves of living at bay. They stood like votive candles—or lolled here and there lazily, like dejected pets. I saw the trash, discarded carelessly so that the streets looked like the untended nest of a carrion bird. I saw the rain, splashing against puddles that brimmed with human waste. The rain was starting to soak into me.

I gave up.

At the sound of clattering change, he mumbled something—I took it as thanks, but it might've been nearly anything. Advice, a blessing—a curse. I'd given him all my loose change; maybe twenty dollars worth. Enough to forget that he was alive for a good long while—I hated to think that this was a gift, although of course it was.

Now, as I continued my walk back to the station, I wondered about every empty bottle, every discarded appliance, every shard of a bitter life destroyed. Where was the will to survive here? I reached the bus stop without any clear answer, and was disappointed to find no bus, and no indication that any was incoming. I was increasingly cold and wet, with my resolve draining swiftly. Finally, unable to bear it a minute longer, I looked around for shelter. My options were slim: there was only a single lamp on along the entire block, casting a pallid glow on the word 'coffee'. It was still open; I cracked the door just wide enough to enter, and then stepped into the light.

*

The sign above the door had read, simply, "Eighth Street Café." At first I thought it might've been one of the government-run shops, but there was none of the sterility I generally associated with Ad Int. The inside was old, and yellowed with age, but reasonably well-kept. Most importantly it was warm—there was a fire burning in the corner. If nothing else, the Pacific Northwest is made more bearable by its abundance of lumber, and Ad Int has never seen fit to keep the class fives from coughing more soot into the atmosphere.

Troublingly, however, the restaurant seemed to be abandoned. I glanced about and saw no one; it was not until I stepped closer to the counter and accidentally disturbed a chair that there was any sign of activity at all. A woman emerged, presently, from what I took to be the kitchen. Judging from her markings, I guessed that she was a raccoon—if not purebred, then at least more than half. I couldn't see her tail, but the black mask that framed her face was striking. Her dark hair was pulled back, cinched into a ponytail, which accented the effect.

The face itself, and its owner, looked somewhat worn; it was not hard to tell that she'd been there for some time—was probably, at that point, closing up the establishment. "Can I get you anything?"

So much conversation was mediated by the expectations of class—what you were allowed to say; what one person should say to another when they didn't know where the other person sat... It was all nonsense, of course. Rigid, silly formality that did nothing to help anyone. Regardless—since people seemed to take to those class-based roles—transactional conversations were always interesting for a first impression. When everyone is working from the same script,it doesn't matter what class you are—you always have the same lines. I recited mine, as though in a foreign language class. "Some coffee, please."

"Sure thing, five dollars a cup." On seeing my appearance—I imagine I looked incredibly pathetic—the woman diverged ever so slightly from the expected reply. "No, on second thought, the first cup's on the house." Her voice was soft and unaccented, and she sounded like a local. She didn't look old, either, which meant that she'd almost certainly spent her entire life in Eleazaria, or very close by. If she thought I looked miserable, it suggested that I was truly wretched—knowing what she had to compare me against.

And I felt miserable, so she wasn't alone in this assessment. I glanced down, at the battered jacket, dripping water steadily onto the floor. "Do I look that bad?"

At this, she only smiled. "If you want, you can put your coat over by the fireplace. Might dry a bit faster. I'll be right back, alright? I'm going to put you on the honour system, far as the coffee's concerned—the pot's right here." It was behind the counter, but not so far as to make reaching impossible.

I nodded, and when she left I took her up on her offer, stretching out my jacket and resting it on a rack by the fireplace. My shirt and slacks beneath had also started to succumb to the damp, and on reflection I sat close to the fire myself, opening my attaché case—the one thing I had that was absolutely waterproof—to take out my book.

It had always been a quick read, and I was perhaps a chapter and a half into it by the time the woman reemerged, carrying two bowls of something hot and steaming. "You want some clam chowder? Seems a shame to throw it out, you know?"

The café, I suppose, must've been getting a government stipend of some kind—otherwise, with no customers, I saw no way for them to afford any ingredients at all, let alone the dairy products for chowder. I hadn't had any for years, at that point, so I nodded, even though clam chowder had never been one of my favourite dishes. "That would be wonderful."

She poured a cup of coffee for herself and joined me at the table. "So what brings you here at this time of night, anyway—if you don't mind my asking?"

"Waiting for the bus. Do you know the yellow line schedule offhand?"

One of her eyebrows arched, and the raccoon's head tilted ever so slightly. "Yellow line? Uh, well, they run all night, on about thirty minute intervals. We don't have a tracking computer here, though, sorry."

"Oh." I thought for a moment, and then shrugged—my coat was only going to get dryer the longer I stayed. "Well, thirty minutes isn't so bad."

She shook her head, and then we ate in silence for a few minutes—it was halfway decent chowder; not great, but better than you'd expect in a class five settlement. Finally my companion spoke up. "What's a yellow-line rider doing here?"

"I guess I needed a walk."

The woman seemed a bit taken aback. "Through the E? Christ, hon, you've got stones."

"I didn't know where I was at the time. I..." catching her expression, I shook my head swiftly. "No, no. I didn't mean, like, drugs."

"Oh, alright." It wouldn't have been a bad guess; nearly everyone spent at least some fraction of their time under the influence of one chemical or another. Eleazarians, I had learned, apparently leaned towards liquor—probably because it was cheap.

The upper classes tended to indulge in highly engineered designer drugs, a vice that was so commonplace Ad Int no longer even bothered to police it. I knew nobody who didn't partake every once in a while, including myself—but not tonight. "I was... well, I just had a lot on my mind, and I wanted to clear it. And this was the only light on, you know? It seems like a pretty nice place, though."

We had finished the soup; she took the bowls back and set them on the counter. "Thanks, I guess. I just work here, but... well, it's been nice enough to me, anyway. I'm Amy Buchanan, by the way." She offered me a handshake, which I took quickly; her hand was warm, and slightly damp from washing up. It was a nice, solid handshake—that's another good way to communicate without the trappings of the class system; good handshakes aren't limited to anybody in particular.

"Aaron Turner," I answered in kind. "It's nice to meet you."

She sat back down, and reached out to brush a finger over the novel I still had slightly open. "What're you reading?"

"Uh. La Montagne d'Or, I think it's called in French."

"Oh... I don't speak French," she said—it sounded, to my ears, almost regretful.

"Neither do I; this is an English translation. It means The Gold Mountain—it's about a family who chooses to emigrate from France at the end of the First World War. They want to come to America, because they're told it's a land of wonder, where even the mountains are made of gold."

Amy scoffed. "Oh, is that so?"

"No. It wasn't true then, either. But after the war, I guess France must not've seemed like much, with all the death and the destruction of the war. People are always willing to believe an interesting story over a dismal truth, aren't they?"

"I suppose..." She seemed unconvinced by the book. "That was a long time ago, though, wasn't it? The war and all that?"

"Yes. I mean... the book was only written ten years ago, but the war was.... early last century, I think. 1915 to 1920, if I remember correctly—really, a completely different time altogether. Think about it, I mean... airplanes were less than ten years old. No computers, no automobiles, no satellites or atomic shells..."

"How?"

I blinked. "What?" Her question had caught me off guard, and I had no ready answer. It was silly on its face, though with a moment's reflection I realised that it spoke to a deeper question. How had there been a world without cars? Without nuclear war?How could you even imagine such a thing? Was it any less silly than believing in a hollow earth, or alchemy? "Because it's... you use your imagination, that's all."

The raccoon shook her head with a frown, and honed the objection to a razor's edge. "I guess that's why I never got into books. They want you to pretend all this stuff is true when it's just... well, it's all made up, isn't it? If I wanted something made up, I'd just trip, or get drunk or somethin'."

"Well... there's something of a practical difference," I ventured. "When you're tripping, it's all created from within your mind, right?"

"'Tis."

"Then you're limited by your own perception and experiences. A book is... well, it's a little more like dreaming, I think, when you get lost in it—but it's somebody else's dream, see? It's like your living in someone else's dream. You get to see their perspective on the world; their unique ideas. It's a little bit more open—you think about things you wouldn't have otherwise. Also," I added as an afterthought. "They're cheaper, and maybe a bit better for you."

"Maybe," she allowed. "Well, alright so. I guess that's a fair idea. So you mean like you get to thinking about what it might be like a hundred years from now? I mean, I guess they probably didn't know that they didn't have satellites an' all that. So what don't we know we don't have? Your book tell you that?"

"No." I grinned. "That's our job. And it's a question for the ages, isn't it?"

"You could still think on it, now couldn't you? I bet what we'll do is have a way to make the sun shine more often, instead of for just a couple weeks a year. Actually... no, I bet we'll find a way to just store it in a box, or a battery, the way they do with those powerplants that use volcanos." She stopped. Her tone was an odd mix between combativeness and optimism, and I guess she was waiting for something, for my scorn or my judgment. When I didn't offer any, her next suggestion was more prosaic. "And we'd make the trash gone, just like that." She snapped her fingers.

"It's not a bad idea." And a particularly Eleazarian concern—higher-class settlements rarely had to deal with unpleasantness like that. "And that's my point... I might not have thought of that; you did."

Finally, Amy smiled—shyly. "I guess. Every years I hear about something new I'd never thought of. All these laboratory geniuses coming up with all these ideas—wonder whose dreams they're living in."

"I'm never sure," I said. "That's something I do pretty often, I guess; I look at the people around me and try to see the world from their eyes. I don't claim I'm good at it, just... otherwise, you get to feeling trapped."

"I know that feeling," she said, and stirred her coffee, staring into it and watching the vortex developing in the centre. "I do know that feeling."

"You know, Amy, can I ask... what... what are you doing here, anyway?"

"Instead of?"

"Instead of... something else, I don't know. Working in a laboratory somewhere." Part of me wanted to still believe that anyone was capable of everything. I knew that Ad Int's classification systems weren't completely baseless, nor completely arbitrary—so it was possible that there was something I was missing. On the other hand, I knew that some people chose to work below their class, for whatever reason—religious, frequently.

"'Cause I didn't like books when I was growing up," Amy said—much too quickly, for she averted her eyes for a moment. "'Sides, maybe I like what I do, you know? Y'ever think of that?"

"Sort of. I guess. I'm always hesitant to conclude that. You seem like the kind of person who wouldn't really get a whole lot out of watching the world pass by in double-decked busses while you serve coffee to homeless alcoholics living on a stipend. Like you wouldn't get a whole lot of this settlement, all the crime and the brokenness..."

"Maybe I do." Some of the firmness had ebbed, though she still wasn't looking at me. "Besides, it's all I'm good for, anyway."

That surprised me. "What's that supposed to mean?" My voice was angrier than I'd intended—angrier, certainly, than one would expect from Dr. "Turn-tail" Turner. That had been my nickname at JDARC, given behind my back for my willingness to retreat from something when my ideas were attacked. It had taken several years to try to work past that one, when I'd finally been told by a friend of mine. I pressed forward. "Why say something like that?"

"It's true," Amy said bitterly. The woman's eyes were fierce with it, hard stones set in her dark velvet mask. "If it weren't true, I'd not be here. You know that. If I weren't supposed to be living in Eleazaria..."

"I know what the government says. I also know they make mistakes—or that people do things by choice."

She shook her head. "I don't get what your problem is, mister. You come in here telling me I shouldn't be doing this? What the hell's your right to say that, anyway? What are you, Ad Int? I was six-fifty on my PAA, ok? Six goddamned fifty. What do you want me to be doing?" She looked up, finally, with an accusing glare. "What are you, anyway? Class three?"

Not for the first time, particularly when dealing with people who were lower-ranked, I found myself somewhat class-conscious. "No. And, look, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to step on your—"

I had tried to avoid answering, but she was having none of it. "I asked what you were."

Now it was my turn to look away. "Well, I'm a geneticist up at McChord, working on the project there." I covered my muzzle with my paw, as though it might hide the words. "Class one—lower echelon," I added quickly.

It wasn't enough; Amy's eyes went wide. "Oh!" Her voice was a sudden squeak, and then she was backpedalling. "No, no, I'm sorry—I... I, ah, I'm a middle five, I didn't mean to, uh... I didn't mean..." She had become a completely different person.

At that moment, I would say, I hated everything—hated me, hated the class system, hated the world that had made it necessary. "Please don't do that."

She stopped trying to apologise, but something was clearly different. The quiet came down hard; it left us to our thoughts for a few lingering moments. Finally she spoke again, willing herself to look me in the eye. "I think your coat's probably dry now, sir." So I was a pronoun again. I reached over to grab the garment; she was right, it had largely dried out. I thanked her, and she nodded shakily. "I should finish up in the back, sir, ok? Have a... ah, have a good night, yeah?" Then she vanished, without waiting for an answer.

Out of all of Ad Int's crimes, by far the most insidious was the belief that they had inculcated in us that we could be marked as inferior so easily—by a simple number, whether that was the class designation or the Provisional Aptitude Assessment test that drove it. We were being taught to think that you could reduce people in this way; it was almost unbearable.

So I sat quietly, waiting for a few minutes. Amy didn't reappear, and I resigned myself. I hadn't paid for the coffee, nor for the soup. I pulled out a twenty-dollar bill and then, thinking better of it, added a ten as well. For a few seconds I looked these over, and thought about the money itself. Did it care that two pieces of paper—the same size, weight, and colour—could be made so vastly different by the number stamped on them? Of course not—at least, no more than a coin realised how valuable it was to decision-making.

I flipped a fifty-cent piece, and when it landed face-up I slipped the thirty dollars into The Gold Mountain before leaving it all behind.

II.

It had been a chance encounter, and it seemed strange to me, in the weeks that followed my departure, how strongly it had marked me. Even Wells saw fit to comment on my mood, which had become notably more withdrawn—you know how you can get, when you're spending your life holding out hope for an impossibility.

For three weeks, I steadfastedly attempted to focus on the positive side of things. For example, the grain harvest was reported at fifteen percent over the projections—courtesy of an unexpected bout of sun that Maria and I had both missed, earlier that May. The news spent several days, also, talking about the nuclear detonations and asteroid impacts that were catalysing the Adhikari process in the Martian atmosphere. They attempted to make much of the irony of weapons of war being used to turn a planet inhabitable, and it was a fair point—but I had to admit that I rather wished we'd had no nuclear war and no Adhikari process.

I shut my ears to the robotic voice of the autobus, when it announced upcoming stops—as though the word 'Eleazaria' had become poisoned. Actually, that wasn't entirely wrong. It was, for me, coming to represent the whole of the failings of our race—not just Ad Int; not even just the United States government that had come before it. The whole of humanity's foibles—racism, classism, suffering, disease—I heaped upon the town. It was destroying people, I reckoned—and, by extension, it was destroying me. As Donne had said, no man is an island—no matter how much rain fell.

There was some cognitive dissonance, too, of course. I knew that Buchanan had probably never read the book I'd left. Maybe it was still in the café, waiting for me to reclaim it. Maybe it had been given away, or thrown on the fireplace—paper books were increasingly rare, but maybe she didn't know that. After all, she wasn't the reading type.

Of course, the worst part of it all was not knowing. So it was that, in late June, three weeks to the day after I'd first stepped foot in Eleazaria, I got off the train there once more. The rain had eased up until it was only an uncomfortable mist—indeed, you almost didn't need a jacket. I brought mine anyway, because it made me look like I fit in.

Amy Buchanan was behind the counter, tidying up, when I entered. Her short ears perked up when she saw me—my entrance was obvious; I couldn't help noticing that I was the only customer there. "Welcome back, stranger," she said—if there was any deference in the tone, I couldn't immediately detect it. "Wasn't expecting to see you come back 'round here."

"I wanted some coffee."

She didn't press me further, only poured a mug and handed it over. It was burnt, and slightly stale—but then, it hadn't really been my reason for visiting, had it? Still, I drank it without comment, as though there was nothing unusual at all in the ritual. Amy was the one who broke the silence. "I guess you were right," is what she said.

"I was right?"

"About books. About them being a way to get into somebody's head. I can't quite reckon whether that was your head or whether it was Morrison's head, but I got somewhere."

"You read the book, then?"

She smiled instead of speaking. Then, after pouring herself a mug, she looked at me across the countertop, her head tilted. Her eyes were bright, inquisitive—green, flecked with something else, they were striking against her distinctive black mask. Now they danced. "Tell me something, though. Why did he stay?"

"Who, Jacques?"

"Mm-hmm, Jacques." Whatever might've been said about her class, her pronunciation of the name was flawless.

"Because... well, it wasn't that he believed everything that the barber told him. For me, I think that he made the decision on his own. France was proven, solid... but it was the old way, you know? There wasn't any promise of change."

"You're saying he wanted something to believe in?"

"I'm saying that..." Was it really that simple? Was that what we were looking for? No. "It's not just that. I mean, we do want to believe in something, but it's... it's shifted these days, you know? Two hundred years ago, we believed in science. Two thousand years ago, we believed in salvation. The trick is that it can't be outrageous. We don't want the truth—the truth is that inner-city America was brutal and savage. But we don't want a lie, either—nobody really believes that the Rocky Mountains are made of gold. What we're looking for is a story, I think—a plausible myth."

"Did it come true? Do you think Richard's brother could really get him that job?"

The answer to this question depended, largely, on whether you were an optimist or a pessimist at heart. It wasn't uncommon to read Morrison's novel as a scathing indictment of optimism, as seen through the lens of its protagonist, a young man named Jacques. There were subtle clues that could nudge one in either direction—to thinking that the ending of the book was either uplifting, and pointed the way to a better future for Jacques, or to thinking that he had been lied to once more, and was condemned to suffer in squalor. As for myself... well, I smiled at Amy, musing. "For me, I think he could."

"I'd like to think so," the raccoon said. "But it almost seemed to me that Morrison thought it wasn't genuine. It was almost like... almost like he wanted Jacques to have an unhappy ending."

One of the chief reasons for a cynical reading of the novel, of course, was that it was the defining book of my generation—Morrison had published it only fifteen years before, when the scope of the tragedy that the Fires had been was starting to become clear. When the sun had finally faded from daily memory. The year after it topped the best-seller lists, Ad Int announced the Renaissance Project. "Some people think that," I explained. "Ted hasn't ever given a concrete answer one way or the other as to the most correct interpretation. I think he was probably trying to give us something to believe in. Or maybe he just looked outside his window, saw the rain, and couldn't bring himself to do that."

"It's funny that just a couple of lines could be so powerful," Buchanan said, softly. Then she reached beneath the counter, and retrieved the book. "Thanks for letting me borrow it, Aaron."

I pushed it back a few inches, towards her. "Keep it. I've... ah, by now I've practically got it memorised." Taken optimistically, the book could animate one's whole being—one reason why I did so; I needed the encouragement.

Amy dropped the subject of the book then, as though not wanting to dwell on the gift. "I'm sorry I ran out on you, last time. I just wasn't expecting that."

I shook my head quickly. "No, it's my fault. I was too aggressive; I didn't even stop to think about what I saw saying. It's not right of me to just assume anything about you."

"You mean, like just now when you assumed I wouldn't have read Gold Mountain?" She said it flippantly—I wasn't certain whether something in my mannerisms had given me away, or whether she was just, as the Brits say, 'taking the piss' a little.

"I'm just happy somebody else seems to like it as much as I do."

"Well, I guess that's alright," she said. "I guess you probably like it because you see yourself in Jacques, don't you? Dreaming about the future an' all, hoping that those dreams come true? I know what you mean by that..." She took a moment to pause. For a moment, as she stared past me, through the wall and out into the night, her whiskers were the only things that moved. "You know, Aaron, I do want to go places. I suppose that's probably why I got mad at you, right? Because you were making me think that I wanted to be somewhere else. Only I guess you were just reminding me of what I already knew..."

"I might've just been being pigheaded," I offered. "But either way, I think you seem like the right kind of person to be somewhere else—if you wanted."

Amy's smile was a little sad; knowing, I think, that what she or I wanted was irrelevant. "Sometimes I do forget it, though. You can't have that, really—it ain't gonna fall into your lap. If you're gonna go anywhere, you got to be dreaming about it first, yeah?"

My heart went out to her, in a way. It might've been true that you could get nowhere without dreaming first, but it was definitely true that you could get nowhere by dreaming alone. The unspoken thing, which neither of us saw fit to address, was that social mobility for a class five was a joke. Really, it was the punchline too—Ad Int couldn't have cared less about people like Amy. She probably knew this, but it was her willingness to believe something different that made her so unique amongst the people I knew—including myself. I probed a little. "Don't you wonder, maybe, if that dreaming kind of obscures something, a little? Gives us the wrong impression?"

"No," she shot back immediately. "Everyone says so, but they're wrong. Dreaming is what gives us purpose. Christ... there's so much wrong with the world—and you think that, sure, I know, but I live it, every day. All these people, all these... what did you call it last time, all these alcoholics on a stipend, they ain't got no money, no. That's not why they're poor, Aaron. They're poor because they don't got any dreams, either. And they use it like an excuse—like a way so they don't blame themselves. They say that dreaming ain't worth somethin' 'cause if it turns out that it is, then they're really penniless, you see? And if they can ignore dreams, then it's always somebody else's fault that they ain't worth nothing." She declared this last part almost angrily; her eyes were filled with a passionate fire. It was if she was daring me to counter her. "You people, with your fancy office jobs and all that shit, you can get away without dreaming just because you can pretend your money's worth something. Well, fifty years from now—when somebody else is writing the book about us—all your money's just going to be a number, nothing more."

"I sometimes lose sight of that," is all I said. "But you're right, of course. And I try not to forget that you need to have something to believe in..."

"You'd better," she warned. "Else you're just like them. Just like everybody else—an' that means y'ain't got a right to give me a book like that."

We kept talking, then, about other things that were mostly unrelated. My mind was elsewhere—trying to figure out what was going on. She was no simpleton; I didn't know what disadvantages happened to keep her working the graveyard shift of an unoccupied coffee shop. It was entirely possible, of course, that there was no disadvantage at all beyond her class. And while, mostly, I marvelled at what fuel might be stoking the fire she'd shown, I considered other things too, as they emerged.

Buchanan, I learned, was her mother's surname—her father's was long lost, with the man himself. She'd never met him—which was common enough, in the class five settlements. Her mother told her that he, too, had been a raccoon, and since she didn't look as though anything else was mixed into her heritage I thought that was likely.

In many ways she was like Maria Wells, if the product of a different upbringing. Her positions, though passionate and strongly defended (there was very little she didn't have an opinion on), were also uneducated, and sometimes reflected a knowledge of the world that was fifty years out of date. I didn't know what, exactly, I thought about her—nor what I wanted her to be. As the night wore on, though, I began to realise that I was going to be spending a lot of time in the café.

We both put off departure for as long as possible—it was nearly half an hour beyond the café's normal closing time when she finally allowed that she should shut things down (or, at least, when she finally said this with the intent of doing so). And I, too, was overdue at my residence—not that anyone would notice or care. As I stood to go, I had a second thought, and reached into my attaché case to pull open a slim computer, handing it over to her.

"What's this?"

"Some of my library—what I had with me, anyway, but you should be able to put other things on there. Uh, Heinlein, Carter, Atwood, Levin... they aren't all the same kind of book as Gold Mountain, and some of them are quite a lot older. But I think you might enjoy reading them all the same."

She grinned, taking the computer from me. "Thanks, Aaron," she said. I bowed, and departed, and left the Eighth Street Café for the second time, in one of the best moods I'd had in years.

*

The following Monday, Vasily Dezirian asked to meet me for lunch. It wasn't an unusual occurrence—we were old friends. He'd finished his dissertation two years ahead of me, which made him just senior enough to take a position of responsibility, and just junior enough to get thrown into something like Renaissance. He was the overall director of the biology side of the Project, which made him very busy—lunch was the only exception; he took it religiously.

"How's it been going, in sequencing?"

I laughed. "We're about thirty percent of the way through our proposal. This one ought to be final, I think—I'd like to have it tested and written up by September. That might be a pipe dream; I don't know. The commit date is mid-October, isn't it?"

"October 17th, yes." The 'commit date' was when we were supposed to have all our plans finished—so that they could begin loading the big spaceships. It had already been pushed back once, but Dezirian privately told me that he felt certain that this last attempt would be successful. I was still a sceptic. "Do you need to make any changes downstream?"

Maria and I were responsible for programming the sequencing of species reintroductions on Mars. We did not, however, have control over what species we were to have available—that was the responsibility of the Selections Department, half a dozen scientists so prestigious and so dedicated that they were generally unable to come to any consensus. "So far, only minor ones. I passed my recommendations back to Selections about two weeks ago and haven't heard back yet. That's just for buffer, though. We can make do with what we have."

"Hopefully so. Six weeks before the commit date... well, you can amend a plan, I guess, but it'd be damned hard to rebuild one from scratch..." He mulled his next words over a bite of roast beef sandwich. "But I hear you are ahead of schedule, so if anyone could do it, I guess we'll have to have faith in you, won't we? Yun has high praise for you, for what that's worth."

"What we're doing?" I shook my head. "Every week it's a new roadblock to get over. We shouldn't get praise, brother—we should get gold medals and the national goddamned anthem."

The big Anatolian wolf laughed, his shoulders moving with the sound. "It's probably easier for the Olympic competitors, you know? At least they know where the hurdles are. But I'm glad to hear that things are going well. Enough time for you to relax a bit?"

"I think." Well, I had been relaxing, so that was probably more or less true. "Yeah, yeah, it's been getting easier, now that you mention it."

Vasily was a big man, but his dense fur was lustrous, and he carried himself in a way that made him look regal. The effect disappeared when he flashed his trademark grin—something about it made him look like a bear, shaggy and good-natured and impossible to resist. He gave me this grin now. "You know, then, you really ought to be thinking about settling down."

"Settling down?" I repeated the phrase as though I might've misheard.

"Well, they increased the housing allowance by fifteen percent last month, you know." I'd heard something about it. It was a bribe on Ad Int's part, trying to get people to marry. This was transparently their goal—some research or another demonstrated that it was good for everyone. It made things more stable, they said—and of course, although they did not admit this part, heterosexual married couples were more likely to have children.

"You're one to talk, aren't you?" Dezirian himself did not fit into this latter category and was, so far as I knew, unmarried—although he and his boyfriend had lived together for as long as I'd worked at the Project. "Besides, I don't have any prospects right now, you know?" It wasn't entirely inaccurate, though there were complications to the answer that I knew Dezirian was about to raise.

"I know," he echoed. "If only there was an eligible partner for you... maybe in your office somewhere. Wait!" He set his sandwich down, feigning the sudden strike of an idea. "Who's that woman you work with? Marta somebody?"

I sighed. "Maria." Vasily and Wells were decent friends—since before I'd joined the Renaissance Project, actually, I think; Wells had started the year before me.

"Maria! You know, I've heard that she is actually quite fond of one of her officemates. It turns out there's another Alsatian right in the same building! What are the odds?"

"What are they," I muttered. "We work together, brother. You don't think that's going to create conflict?"

"I bet you could get dispensation from Yun." The grin returned again. "Besides, you two are both reasonable adults. Come, come, Aaron—what's the downside? Why are you holding back?"

The simple answer was that the woman who had been dwelling in my thoughts lived in Eleazaria, but I indulged the wolf for a moment. "Wells? She's... whip-smart—probably smarter than me... friendly, a good sense of humour..."

"Very pretty—for one of you shepherds."

That was true; to the extent that I cared about physical appearances, Wells was quite attractive—of good genetic stock, one might say in our line of work. "Yes, very pretty..." In actuality there was no reason why I should not like Wells, and indeed I did—as a coworker and a friend. We'd never attempted to cross that line. I wasn't entirely certain what was holding me back. "I don't know, Vasily, actually. Now that you mention it."

"There are a lot of benefits for couples, in this government," Dezirian said. His tone had become a little more serious. "But that's not really why I suggested it—I hope you know that. You and Wells... I think you'd make a nice couple. I know you don't really care about stuff like that, but..."

But what? Dezirian was right—I'd never really felt the need to seek out a companion. And he was right that, on paper, Wells was ideal. There was something missing, though, some gulf between theory and practise that I couldn't quite puzzle out. I steered him away from the conversation, to avoid having to come to any conclusions, and we spent the rest of lunch lost in trivialities.

*

"Wait, what did you say?"

Amy cocked her head. "That some of the words were a bit confusing—I had to ask somebody what a lot of 'em meant, I guess because they're so old. It's not a bad thing, god knows..."

"No, no. Before that."

She paused, trying to recall. "Oh... right. I just meant that, you know, I'm used to heroes being really black and white, you know? Like they are in the movies. Ahab ain't so simple, an' I really like that. He's different from the others—ain't so boring."

Our discussions, late at night in the Eighth Street Café, were becoming routine. What had started as every Friday had quickly become every other day—arguments, nearly always, and nearly always about books. "But Ahab wasn't the hero..."

The raccoon looked at me as though I had missed the point of Moby Dick entirely. "Of course he was."

She had a lot of free time, both inside the café and out—apparently, she occupied most of it in reading. As a consequence she was going through three or four books a week, and frequently they were ones I had not read at all, or had not read for some time. Moby Dick fell into this latter category, and I tried to remember it. "But he was... a tragic figure, consumed by the need for revenge. He destroyed himself; his crew, his ship. He was a madman." It was a rote interpretation, drawn from what I could recall.

"He was driven," she countered. "He pursued what was most important to him—he didn't let anyone tell him that it wasn't worth it. Dreams are like that, Aaron—they ain't always simple and they ain't always nice and clean. But you have to chase them anyway, don't you?"

"It killed him."

"We all die eventually, Aaron—sooner rather'n later, these days. That's no matter, is it? It ain't what kills you, anyway—it's what you do when you're alive. Now, you say that he was driven by revenge, an' I guess maybe that's true. For me, though, I think it's one of those... ah, what you were saying, that it's a metaphor, is that the right word? A metaphor for the things we choose to pursue. Hell, Aaron, what are you guys doing at the Renaissance Project? You're sacrificing your life for something that most people don't understand—they call it wasteful, silly, destructive. Say we ought to be spending our resources elsewhere. Look around you—I can see their point. But you wouldn't give it up, would ya? That's how dreams work—that's what makes Ahab a hero. He was willing to die for something, and not take shit from any busybodies what thought he ain't got the right to do it."

Very cynically, Orwell had once had his character, Winston Smith, make this claim: if there is hope, it lies with the proles. I was starting to understand that view—set apart from Ad Int's propaganda, Buchanan's ideas were nothing if not unorthodox.

That itself—I realised this in a sudden flash—was what Wells was missing. She was smart, and probably well read, but her ideas carried the weight of a lifetime dealing with Ad Int. Buchanan was more unencumbered—when she said something, it was more likely to come from the heart. And she had no problem admitting what Ad Int refused to, which was that the Renaissance Project was deeply unpopular.

That was not, really, especially surprising. We were well-paid, and well-fed, and well-protected—at a time when slums like Eleazaria contained most of what remained of humanity. More than that, we were spending prodigious amounts of energy and raw materials on what, to many, was a simple pipe dream. I didn't necessarily agree, but it was refreshing that somebody else was willing to tell it to my face.

I had been in love exactly once, and it was back in high school. She was a girl in my geometry class. I'd started out tutoring her, and then we'd naturally fallen into that mutually-obsessive delirium of teenaged attraction. Hormones, mostly—actually I'm certain we made plans to start a family, though as it turned out she was infertile. Medical testing confirmed what should've been obvious, after the first summer we spent together—young and reckless, as teenagers are wont to be.

When I was a junior, we took the Provisional Aptitude Assessment, the PAA—they still called it provisional, though it had been around almost a decade when I took it. Out of twelve hundred possible points, I scored eleven hundred and fifty. Maddie scored nine hundred—respectable, and enough to be placed into a class three billet. There was, however, no way we could possibly end up in the same schools. I went to Harvard; she went to a vocational school, where she learned to repair busses.

After her results came back, we filed an official protest together with the Assessment Board. They turned it down—who gives a damn about two starry-eyed teenagers trying to fight an entire political system? I idealistically pledged to join her at her college. It wasn't her who talked me out of it, it was my parents—I have never been good at sticking to my principles.

It was a learning experience. What my parents wanted me to understand was that the rules were there for my protection, and that if I worked within Ad Int's guidelines I could make something of myself. That there were sacrifices that occasionally needed to be made, but making them would produce a long-term happiness. That was not what I took away.

Instead what I took away from it was that the system could destroy your life at any time, and I never bothered to try to get in touch with her again—I know now that she wound up marrying a technician at Boeing, which is about as happy an ending as you can get. For me, I gave up on romance, mostly. I dated a few times, in school and after, but my heart was never in it.

Now, at long last, my heart was thawing. Or, perhaps, I was starting to realise that I could love again; that as adults we were transcending the limits put upon us as youth. I wasn't certain that I wanted to spend my life with Buchanan—yet. But it was no longer something I viewed as out of the question.

It pleased me to think that this was not some crude plebeian pairing bred only out of physical attraction—Ad Int placed so much emphasis on genetics that one could sometimes get caught up in a very functional view of relationships. It was the ideas, more than anything else, that drew me to Amy. The way she was capable of getting to the point where a bureaucrat would've talked around it; the way she stridently fought the party line where anyone more orthodox would've simply repeated what they'd been taught in school. Like I had, about Moby Dick.

Happily, I realised that it was no longer my work that kept me going. I had something outside of the office, which paradoxically made the office itself more bearable. We continued making progress at a breakneck pace, and by the time we had settled in the rainbow trout and some of the larger ferns, I was ready to say that I was in love.

*

I could, of course, always count on Jake (class two, upper echelon) to provide the countering point of view. "In love? Ah, Jesus, Aaron, what the hell do you think you're doing?"

"It's possible that it could simply be an infatuation," I admitted, and the cat harumphed. "Possible."

"Correct me if I'm wrong, but what's your class again?"

"What's your point?"

Jake Ellis was a cat of some fashion, like Yun but stockier—I suspected some mountain lion in his heritage, judging by his face. Now, though, as his tail lashed and he leaned forward, he looked nothing so much as a predator, stalking. "Nobody is going to take you seriously, is my point."

"Why not?"

"Because nobody believes in love, damn it. What the hell do you think this is? Are you courting? Did you ask her father for permission? Jesus H. Christ, Turner. You hook up with someone four classes below you and you expect anyone to think it's because of the mythical power of romance?"

I considered myself to be a cynic—my coworkers did, as well. We all thought, though, that Jake was far and away the most jaded of us. This was, no doubt, due in some part to the way he tended to eat by himself, and his decidedly dim view of our conceits. Whatever the reason, next to him I looked like a polyanna. "Are you saying you don't believe me?"

Like most cats, Jake was capable of a witheringly scornful look, a facial expression that suggested that what had been said was beneath him somehow and did not require his contemplation. This he now turned on me. "I'm saying that I believe you, at least as much as I believe anyone who says they're in love."

"I don't follow."

"And you call yourself a biologist?" Ellis himself was an engineer, working on the life support software both of the arks and the upcoming settlement on Mars. "Love doesn't exist, any more than Zener cards tell you anything. It's what we do instead of going into heat. And now here you are, prattling on like Romeo about a coffee shop clerk. So, now, I'll buy that your neurotransmitters are currently aligned as to make you think this girl is your soul mate, fine. But..."

He could be incredibly unflinching, which was useful when I needed advice and murderously frustrating when I wanted to debate something with him. In this case, I was looking for advice—debating Ellis on the topic of romance could end only in self-destruction. "But?"

"If you tell Yun, Yun is going to shrug it off and think you're just going down the class ladder for a bit of sport, isn't she?"

"Oh." Yes, that was probably true. To some degree this worked out in my favour—inasmuch as it was not surprising that a class one and a class five might wind up together, in a purely transactional sense. It was, indeed, almost expected for such things to occur—though neither I nor Dezirian partook, and I could not imagine that Jake himself did.

"Look." Throughout the conversation, Jake had been busy reworking a circuitry diagram—I had no idea whether it was for work or for pleasure. Now, he set his pencil down, and met my eyes again, the scorn having ebbed slightly. "Look," he repeated. "I'm just saying, be careful who you start talking to, that's all. If word starts to get around, it might not go so well for you. Fifty years ago, I'm sure you could have an inspirational story about romance between the classes. Nobody's looking for that these days."

"Well..."

"Fine." He waved a paw to shut me up. "Almost nobody. My point is that fifty years ago, what you're talking about would've seemed sweet. Now it's just anachronistic. There are expectations that are made of you, when you start fucking around with the class structure like that."

"But they can't really stop me, now can they?"

"Of course not. But they don't have to make it easy for you, either. You think you're going to pick up the housing allowance? I bet you twenty dollars Yun thinks you're either keeping a hooker around or trying to game the system and kick somebody up a few notches. And how's that going to look on your yearly review, eh? They're going to suggest that you're difficult and that you don't play nice with the system—which happens, I would note, to be true."

I frowned heavily, and I could feel my ears starting to droop. Everything that Jake had said was more or less accurate—since the class triage system was supposed to be for our own good, anybody trying to circumvent it was, logically, acting against the best interests of humanity. Of course it would be impolitic to strictly forbid interclass dalliance—especially since so many higher-class individuals weren't above taking someone to bed.

This last practise was, so far as I know, more common amongst women than men. For various reasons, fertility rates were low, and most class one and two men chose to hold out for a partner who could have children—Ad Int propaganda encouraged this, in any case. Someone seeking a relationship where this was off the table was, therefore, forced to look lower. It was no longer exactly clear to me how my relationship with Amy would be perceived. I growled, my muzzle falling to the table wearily. "Christ on a crutch, Jake."

He tilted his head at me, and then he sighed. "Well, what's she like?"

When I spoke, it was half into the table. "Wonderful."

"Flowery language like that, she must be very inspirational," the cat said dryly. "You could at least tell me a little bit. Is she pretty?"

I lifted my muzzle, and then, after a moment, sat up, resting my head on my paws. "Cute, perhaps. She has very expressive eyes. And she's pretty insightful. She's been reading a lot, since we started talking—I gave her some books, and that got her started... she says a lot of things I wouldn't have thought of by myself, you know? She's actually quite smart. I'm not sure what got her put in her class. She said she had a six-fifty on her PAA."

"Maybe not good at spatial? Maybe not motivated, really, come to think of it. The PAA's a bunch of crap anyway. Well, I'm glad you seem to like her. At least it's not just for her looks."

"Now who's the hopeless romantic?"

Jake laughed, and returned to his circuitry. "Ain't I just? Nah, Aaron, I'm happy for you—really. Just be careful, alright? Just be careful."

*

Steeling myself, I went to talk to Yun the following day. I rapped on the door, and when she looked up, I forced a smile. "Do you have a couple of minutes for a personal question, ma'am?"

This provoked a raised eyebrow, but she nodded. "Of course. Come in and have a seat, please."

I did, smoothing down my jacket and then folding my paws in front of me—trying to look as professional as possible. "Can I ask you about the class system? I'm curious as to how it works, as far as, ah, relationships are concerned."

Yun's eyebrow lifted again. "Oh, relationships?" Her smile widened. "Of course I can try to answer any questions you might have, Dr. Turner. What were you wondering about?"

"To begin with, I suppose I'm most interested in how cross-class relationships work—I know it happens, but none of my old colleagues or friends have married outside their class, that I know of."

She nodded. "It doesn't happen all that often. It must be at least a little bit more difficult for you, being a class one and all... it's a smaller pool, isn't it? Well, generally, the way it works is that when it's applicable, they merge classes upwards, with one level of difference. So if you were a class one, then if you married anyone who wasn't a class one they would become a class two."

"You can't go down a level?"

"No... that wouldn't make sense, would it? The job you do or the importance it has to our community wouldn't have changed any. But, by being integral to your life, your partner would have increased their own importance. We've also found that relationships with minimal class separation are optimal in terms of stability."

"Wouldn't that mean I could marry a class four or five and they'd just... up and become a class two? That seems a bit odd, doesn't it to you? What's the point of the class system, then, if it's so malleable?"

Yun thought about this for a moment, as though the scenario had never occurred to her before. "I suppose they would? We don't... discourage that, exactly, but we don't go around encouraging it, either—for the reasons I just mentioned. Our research has repeatedly demonstrated that more than two degrees of class separation is a key indicator for instability—what with the difference in occupation, residence, and so on..."

I wondered if it was hard for her, pretending that what Ad Int had created wasn't a caste system—that the reason to distinguish between types of people on the basis of a number was not only inherent but also for their own benefit. In all likelihood, of course, it wasn't very difficult at all—that was the trouble with the government folk, was that they believed it. "Two degrees? I thought it was one."

"Well, the potential for adverse impacts on the relationship increases with any difference at all, of course. Dr. Turner. The ideal pairing is either within the same class or with a separation of only one. That's why the marriage and partnership benefits are limited to those relationships."

"Ah," I said. That explained why nobody Jake or I knew had done anything else—Ad Int's marriage incentives were quite generous. Indeed, I half wondered if the Ad Int employees like Yun received any incentives of their own, for encouraging the practise. "So for me, that would be a class two, then..."

"Right." Throughout this all, Yun had kept the same grandmotherly smile. "If you were at a business, that might be a problem for you—but there are plenty of eligible class twos in the Project." She was thinking the same thing Dezirian had been—that I was, with her promotion (sorry, class transferrance), finally considering asking out Maria Wells.

Well, there was no reason to let her think differently. "Are there any legal ramifications I should know about, if I'm looking for a partner at my workplace?"

"Some things bcome a bit more complex... if you were to begin a relationship with an immediate subordinate or superior, for example, we would require a third party to supervise any command decisions. Of course, Dr. Turner, your immediate superior is Dr. Dezirian, if I'm not mistaken, and I don't think he's likely to be interested. And, if I'm not mistaken, you only have one subordinate..."

"Right," I confirmed.

"That would seem to add some... well, some unnecessary bureaucracy, wouldn't it?" She laughed self-deprecatingly, in acknowledgement of the irony. "If you're considering someone outside your department, I don't think you'll encounter any problems at all. And if you're looking within, well... your numbers have been very good, in terms of milestones. So long as they stay that way, I wouldn't be inclined to add any more restrictions."

I nodded slowly, and started to get up. "Well, thank you, ma'am."

"Of course! Just remember to go to DHW for a checkup, alright?"

I promised that I would, and slipped back out into the hall. The Department of Human Wellness checkups were largely perfunctory and, so near as I was aware, concerned entirely with fertility. I hadn't had a checkup in more than a year, though, and I didn't feel especially pressed for one.

I didn't think that Amy and I intended to have children, but I had to wonder what Yun would think if we did. On the one hand, it was an inter-class relationship and, as she had clearly said, they didn't go around encouraging that sort of thing. On the other hand, it would be offspring, and there was precious little of that. Even in my neighbourhood, full of people who were settling down into stable careers, the sound of children was sparse.

On balance, Yun would probably be happy. Maybe she would even take credit for it—oh, yes, I told him we certainly didn't discourage a relationship like that! Well, it was all irrelevant anyway, wasn't it? I'd gotten what I came for: no legal ramifications to a relationship with wide class spacing, only the rescinding of Ad Int's incentives. I could live with that.

*

Whatever my plans had been, I was beaten to the punch on Friday when, after work, Maria asked me if I would impregnate her. The question seemed to come out of the blue, and to her credit she was—though obviously quite nervous about this—very direct and to the point.

I was rather less so, and it took my brain some time to catch up. "Excuse me?"

She splayed her long fingers out, staring at the tips. "I know it's a bit of a strange question. Basically, though, I had a meeting with a specialist from DHW last week—Yun required it as a condition of my class change, you know? They came back and... I mean... I can have children, and I was thinking... with the bonus, and all..."

She looked less certain of herself than, perhaps, I had ever seen her. "Ah, so you were thinking that you might try for it?"

"Yeah." Wells looked at the wall behind me, avoiding eye contact. "I know it's pretty sudden, but I was thinking that, you know, what with you being a class one and all..."

"They pay more for that, don't they?" Officially, this was because high-class relationships were more stable, and spent more time and energy on their offspring. And, again, we knew that the class system was not supposed to be stratifying—certainly not eugenic. But it was, of course; Wells and I weren't self-delusional enough to think otherwise.

"Yeah." The shepherdess pinned her ears back. "I mean, that's not why, exactly, Aaron. I don't really have anyone else I'd ask, and... I mean, the cards are in our favour. Good genetics, good profiles... with my promotion we're in the ideal bracket. Yun thought that if I was willing to try, I ought to take the opportunity... before I get too old, I guess. So... here I am. I'd be willing to split the bonus with you, Aaron, obviously."

I blinked—this thought hadn't really crossed my mind. Money was not generally a problem, and in this context it seemed almost like prostitution. "It's less that I'm concerned about and more... you know, aren't children a pretty big step for you? You really want to do that?"

Maria shrugged. "I wouldn't be carrying them to term. It would be the embryo thing, you know? Extraction, analysis, and then cold storage to Mars. We wouldn't want to trust the survival of the species to anything as imprecise as pregnancy, now would we?" She laughed, trying to inject a little levity into the conversation. It was true—there were so many things that could go wrong in a natural pregnancy that Ad Int discouraged them, although they did little to discourage people from attempting natural conception. Doubtless this was simple pragmatism on their part.

"No, I guess not. Listen, I... I'm not really sure I'm ready for that, either. I mean, especially with the launch coming up, and all that, I... I guess, you know, I don't... I hadn't really considered settling down. I'm not sure I'm in a place where I can plan for that."

"Oh... I wouldn't expect you to be, Aaron." She fidgeted with her paws awkwardly. "God—no, I'm not, like, trying to marry you or anything—that would be a terrible proposal." Again, the slightly nervous laughter. "I just can't reproduce by myself, and... well, like I said, who else would I ask? You don't have to trouble yourself over it at all, just that initial bit. We're not parthenogenetic, after all."

I was not good at standing up for myself—that was where the "Turn-tail Turner" epithet had come from, back at JDARC—and I found myself being backed into a corner. "Well... I mean... alright, what would that entail, I guess?"

"Whatever you're most comfortable with," she said. "I mean, there's the scientific way, right, with test tubes and all that. Or there's the more, uh... the more biological way, you could put it? I don't mean to impose on you, so... whatever you're most comfortable with is fine."

I shook my head, waving the question off. "You're not imposing."

"Still, probably the weirdest way you've ever been propositioned, right?"

When I looked at her, she was smiling. "I think so," I admitted to her. "You do have a knack. When were you thinking is the best time?"

"What are you doing tonight?"

Maria's apartment was on the outskirts of Tacoma, on the fourth floor of one of those garish, vaguely rococo buildings Ad Int had commissioned to show that we still believed in serious architecture. It looked out on a greenhoused park; at that hour, there were still a few people sitting within, looking at the plants. Community gardens were decidedly a sign of the middle class—a social caste elevated enough to want to consume fresh produce, but not quite elevated enough to simply purchase it from abroad.

"Good tomatos," she said, catching me looking. "Not so good apples, in the fall."

"They grow apples?"

"Sort of," she said. "One tree—supposedly a transplant from a larger orchard... somewhere. I don't know how old it is. They planted a few more... you can just barely see them, towards the left there."

"I think I can, yeah."

She stood next to me, looking down into the park. "Planting a tree, now, there's an act of faith. You're basically saying that you trust that the world will still be around in ten or twenty years. Apples aren't like vegetables... they take a long time before they start giving you anything usable. Quarter of a lifetime, on some occasions. They planted those trees four years ago."

"Did you plant one?"

Maria turned to me, and her ears drew back an inch or so. "I did," she said. Her tone was quiet, and somewhat shy—as if trusting in the existence of the future was a guilty and uncharacteristic pleasure. "You can't quite see it from here. Sometimes I buy some fertiliser and go down to help it out a little—isn't it strange, that I feel a bit odd about thinking we could do something good for the world?"

The shepherdess in her apartment was much softer than the hard-edged person who came to work and relentlessly killed the same trophic levels, over and over and over. I shook my head, and when I felt her paw seek mine I took it, and gave it a squeeze. "Perhaps it's a little strange, yes. But it's better than the alternative, isn't it? I probably would've ignored the greenhouse, myself."

"It's alright," she said. "You spend the same amount of time staying late at work, I think, as I do in the greenhouse. We're both out to help, in our own way."

I didn't say anything in response—I didn't really have anything to say. The world was quiet, except for the soft beat of the rain, and it remained quiet as she took me by the hand, and led me away from the window.

*

Propped on one elbow, my eyes wandered over Maria's face. She seemed to have softened; her sharp nose had become blunted, her tall ears seeming fuzzy and indistinct as they pinned against a pillow. Her eyes were still closed; her breathing was irregular and shallow. When she looked at me again, her muzzle turned up in a smile that was utterly peaceful. "Aaron?"

I settled down onto my side. "Mm?"

The shepherdess turned as well, and draped an arm thoughtfully over my shoulder, her paw dangling precipitously in the air. "You mean a lot to me, you know? I mean... no, no... no, I'm sorry, that's not what I mean." Her words wandered, until she closed her eyes again to get her thoughts back. "When I said that I didn't expect you to marry me, or anything, that's what I meant, you know... there's no obligation or anything. Just... just this; you can be done, now, if you want."

From the tone of her voice I could tell that she meant this, at least literally, though the underlying sentiment was a mixed message—to say nothing of the way she had begun talking. This meant that my reply was also subject to certain rules—I didn't want to commit to anything, but at the same time I had no desire at all to hurt her feelings. "I know."

Her errant paw toyed with the fur of my side. "I mean, if you don't, that's ok too. I'm just saying that I don't want to pressure you." She paused. "I talked to Vasily, first, to see if he thought it was a good idea to ask you. He was..." She stopped, looking for the right word.

There was no point in being demure. "Enthusiastic?"

Maria smiled, and her next breath was almost a quiet laugh. "Enthusiastic, yes."

"He likes to fancy himself as a matchmaker," I told her.

Her nod was so slight that it could almost have been mistaken for nothing at all. "I figured. I told him that... you know, that that wasn't really... I mean, we're coworkers, right? That's a bit awkward."

"We are, though... that's not unheard of, exactly. And we're professionals, I think."

"That's true. I guess it could work out. It's one of those things where... I hadn't really ever thought about it before, you know? I... before my promotion—class switch, whatever the hell they want to call it..." She laughed; her voice was muzzy and dreamlike, and she took her time to meander back to her point. "Before that, anyway. I was spending so much time taking care of my mother that I never really gave any consideration to... well, to anything like... finding somebody."

Whether or not I wanted to be the person she had found, the touch of her fingers in the bare fur of my side was still ticklish; I twitched a little. "I think everyone's been that way, though. Everyone except Vasily, and... he's got no room to talk; he met his boyfriend in college, if I remember right."

"Yeah. They were roommates, at first. I don't... I don't have a roommate, though, just the office. There just aren't very many... good... guys there, you know? I mean there ought to be, but it always feels like you don't really have a whole lot of options. And I spend most of my time in the department, or... I guess sometimes we work with Sustainability... so there's Greg, I guess, he's available. But... don't take this the wrong way, or anything, Aaron, but... you are the only person I've ever really considered. It's just the work thing that's a bit of a... a complication, yeah? But you're right, I think we could work past that."

I didn't want to hide. In answering her earlier question, I had given the impression of defending our possible romance, which was not exactly my goal. Nor, however, did I want to abandon it on a false pretense. The issue with Wells had nothing to do with our sharing an office. "If we decided on that, yes, I imagine so."

"But you're not decided." It was not really the tone of a question, so I didn't answer. "It's alright, though, you don't have to be. I'm just babbling, Aaron; ignore me."

"You're not really babbling, Maria. I just don't always know what to say."

She nodded, and her fingers resumed their distracted staccato at my side. "I guess I can't blame you for that. Or... at least... I'm not making it easy for you." She took a deep breath. "Can I at least ask you something, ah, perhaps a bit presumptuously?"

It was a terrible way to begin a question. "Sure."

"I never really found out before, which was a very poor assumption on my part—I'm sorry. I guess what I mean to ask is... ah, is there someone else, Aaron?"

"Yes." I didn't accord the answer a long, dramatic pause; I was not ashamed of the truth.

For her part she took this stoically, and nodded. "Well... oof. I am sorry I didn't ask first... I hope this is not too awkward for you?"

"It's not awkward, no. I would've told you if it was going to be awkward."

"Oh, good. Good," she repeated, in a louder voice. For a few seconds she was quiet, and I thought that I might be asked to defend myself, in some fashion. Then she just smiled at me, and gave my nosepad a brief kiss. "I hope you're happy, Aaron. That's the important thing."

"It doesn't make things awkward for you?"

"I don't think so." She could tell that it wasn't entirely a satisfactory answer; she looked thoughtful for another brief spell. "No, I meant what I said. I hope you're happy together, that's all."

And that was all. She didn't pry further; didn't try to figure out who my partner might've been. All the questioning was on my part, trying to figure out if I was making the right choice. I am not a person given to strong defence of my ideals; second-guessing is in my nature. Having someone else make my decisions for me helped also—and now there was none of that, no easy answer.

It would've been so easy to settle down with Maria. It was the path of least resistance; we enjoyed each other's company, after all. The opposition was merely my belief—quite possibly unfounded—that I was looking for someone more exciting, someone to spark those whirlwind emotions of youthful passion again. That those feelings, in and of themselves, were justification for romance.

Reclining on her bed, lost and out of place, staring up at the mottled white of the ceiling, I listened to the sound of Maria's breathing, growing more regular next to me.

III.

Jake, facing me across a lunch of reheated pasta, looked sceptical. "I can't possibly imagine how it wouldn't be awkward," he said.

"We didn't really get together of our own accord. That was Dezirian's doing, I think."

He focused on getting some of his lasagna to behave, and when he finally got it to his mouth he chewed at length, as though the topic of conversation was bound up in it. "Well... you two are about the most logical choice, aren't you? I guess attraction is a funny thing. How are you and your girlfriend doing, by the way?"

"I don't think it's that serious. We're just friends, for now." It was not for the lack of anything on my part—Amy was constantly in my thoughts, and I treasured our every conversation as though it carried the kernel of universal truth.

"But that's not your aim, is it? You want it to become something else, after all. How's that part of it going?"

"It's going alright."

"You know, it's pretty hard to read you, Aaron."

I tilted my head. "What do you mean?"

"You're willing to make a lot of strange choices; hooking up outside your class and all that, it's not something most people would take kindly to. But whenever I ask you anything about this person, you give me these ambivalent one or two word replies. I guess she must mean something to you, otherwise you wouldn't be involved with her at all, but..."

"But?"

"But I have to—" he stabbed at a piece of lasagna with sharp purpose. "Drag it out of you. You've said she works at a coffee shop. I think you said she was a cat of some kind?"

"A raccoon."

"Good, now you're up to six or seven words of description. Alright, a raccoon. You say she's kind of cute. Ok. But this is a person you're willing to sacrifice your reputation for, isn't she? Why? What could you have to do with her? What do you see in her?"

My reticence was largely due to worrying about what other people might think. Certainly, not everyone would respond as well as Jake—that was his point. But there was part of me, too, that was afraid of listing my reasons for fear they might be exposed. "You know how you're a cynic, Jake?"

"Practical," he clarified. "A practical cynic."

"Fine. But you know how you're that? She's the same way, I think. That's what I like about her. I can give her something to read, or we can be talking about something, and her answers are completely free of all the nonsense Ad Int shoves down your throat if you're in our classes. Her ideas are completely untainted."

That, at least, seemed to motivate the cat a little. "So she's an alternative to all the brainwashed folks up at the Project? I guess that makes sense. I could see how you'd come to be pretty wary of Ad Int, in a class five settlement. More than Yun, definitely, I'm sure. More than Wells, though?"

"More than Wells. They're two sides of the same coin, I think. Maria's very smart, and very dedicated, but she's been brought up in this system—the same as you and I have. That changes somebody, you know? Amy—her name is Amy, by the way... Amy doesn't have that burden. So she reads a book, This Perfect Day or something, and the conclusions she comes to are completely different. Maria is smarter, I think—I mean, she's smarter than you or I are, so why not?"

"But she's not as unorthodox."

"Yeah. I think working in a coffee shop in Eleazaria will break you out of being willing to trust Ad Int very quickly. Our cynicism, it's a bit more learned—not everybody feels that way. Dezirian's pretty pro-Ad Int, after all. Amy's is ingrained. None of the propaganda. She's like a blank slate."

"Or clay."

I looked at Jake, whose face was still largely expressionless. "Clay?"

He shrugged. "You give her books, it sounds like; you tell her what to think about. You say she's a blank slate, I just wonder if it's more like a clay figure, you know?"

The question gave me pause, because I didn't have a quick rebuttal. Outwardly, he was wrong—I left her to draw her own conclusions, after all; that was what I liked best about her. On the other hand, I had to admit that I liked the learning process I saw taking place—liked that I was responsible for it. It was a constructive act, and it, like Maria's apple trees, required some faith in the future.

*

So I started reading George Shaw. I had almost finished Pygmalion, by the next time I saw Amy—the final act, where Eliza Doolittle finally begins to come into her own as a completely emancipated figure. This outcome, I figured, was ideal for Buchanan—the question, of course, was whether or not I wished to play the role of Henry Higgins. No, not really.

Amy was busy in the back when I entered—as a rule, the café was not busy at night, and she frequently started cleaning up early. So engrossed was I in the play that I didn't notice her until she sat down opposite me, carrying two cups of coffee and a bagel. "Evenin'," she said—I wasn't certain whether or not her elocution had improved, since I'd first met her—I think my imagination was playing tricks on me.

"Same to you."

"Particularly interesting book?" She gestured to my copy of the play—a worn paperback. It was easy enough to find digital copies of older books, especially by authors as famous as Shaw, but the story seemed the sort of thing I'd want to keep in my library, and there was nothing like the spine of a book to mark out the space on a shelf.

I replaced the book quickly within my satchel. "Ah... it's alright."

"What's it called?"

"Oh. Ah, Pygmalion. It's rather old. I'm sorry I didn't notice you—I think I must be tired."

She nodded, and sliced the bagel in two, giving me half. "Long day at work, then?"

"Desperately," I confirmed.

"If I didn't know better," she said, and took a bite, continuing to speak around the bagel. "I'd say that you weren't just thinking about work. Personal stuff?"

I nodded, just once. "One of those things where I can't really see a clear answer, either."

"What's the problem?"

"I'm thinking about what it means to have your own personality, I guess. What it means to be your own person. Your own consciousness. What are we, really?"

The raccoon rested her muzzle on a black paw, setting the bagel down. "Didn't you say that was that French guy, that philosopher... 'because I think, then I know that I'm here'?"

"Yeah. That was Descartes. But the way I've been thinking about it is a little more complicated, I guess. What makes us who we are? We have this we can do, at the Project. We call it a 'cut and paste.' We scan the brainwaves of an animal, and we can then... clone it, or take another animal if it's closely enough related—the same litter, say—and we can... we can imprint it, we call it. So they become identical twins. We can't do that with humans; we're too complex."

"And maybe there's some... moral concerns, right? Like maybe it's just wrong to do that?"

It hadn't exactly occurred to me, though, yes, she was right. "Yeah. I mean... yeah, it would raise some... substantial ethical concerns. But the main thing is, the main thing I'm curious about is... we can't do that with humans but... even if we did, it wouldn't take long before they diverged again, right? We... we're constantly changing, based on the people around us."

"Learning things? Making new friends."

"Yeah. And sometimes, I mean... we learn a great deal from just one person. They impact our thoughts, our manner of speaking, our view of the world..."

Her ears flicked, and the raccoon pursed her lips in thought. "You mean to say you're asking where one personality ends and somebody else's begins?"

I nodded. "Mostly."

"Damn good question, ain't it?"

It was, and the question was still on my mind when I returned, two days later. I didn't have the chance to suggest an answer, however, because as soon as I answered Amy was upon me. "So you think that's what you've done, huh?"

I flattened my ears, taken aback. "Excuse me?"

She held up her computer so that I could read it—Bullfinch's treatment of mythology. "Pygmalion and Galatea? You didn't think I'd be curious about what you were reading?" Her eyes were aflame, and her voice was sharp—each word cleanly enunciated.

"No... or..." I started to clarify my flat denial, but she cut me off.

"Or what? Do you consider me some kind of project? Like I was one of your simulations?"

"No." That was easier to deny. "Can I explain? It was a question... an issue that a friend of mine raised. He asked me what I liked about you, and I said I liked your independence. But all the same, I mean... you said that you didn't like reading; now you do. You've changed, since we first met. I like that change, I just... I wanted to make sure I wasn't trying to do that to you. I wasn't reading Shaw for pointers, Amy, it was... a cautionary tale. I didn't want to become that."

"But you didn't tell me you were having these kind of doubts?"

I squirmed a little. "No. And I wasn't going to... I... I'm always doubting myself, you see?" It was a terrible flaw of mine. I doubted myself, and I dwelled on my doubts. This is why I still thought about the epithet I had earned at JDARC, even though nobody had mentioned it in half a decade—because I thought that it might very well be true. "I thought it was just another one of those things. I wouldn't have troubled you with it."

She frowned heavily. "Why would you think that in the first place, though?"

"Because I've fallen for you. I mean, you have to know that. But I needed to be sure I wasn't just... projecting, I guess. There wasn't any plan; there wasn't any great game afoot. Just me, trying to make sure I wasn't dreaming. That's what coming here is like."

"Fallen for me," she repeated quietly.

"Yes. It's not easy... That's not really something that's very easy to say, actually, but it's true. We only met a couple of months ago, and ever since then, basically, you've constantly been in my thoughts. But it's the self-doubt thing, again... I needed to know that you weren't just some creation I'd built up in my mind. I didn't mean for you to think that I was out to own you, or control you in some way. I just wanted to be sure..."

"And?" Her voice had softened; her head was half-cocked, curiously. The fire had gone from her eyes, replaced with a more muted emotion.

"And of course you weren't a creation. Of course you were your own person, and it's exactly that person that I've been so captivated by. I love you, Amy."

Her ears splayed for a moment, and then she wrapped her arms behind me, in a warm embrace that brought her lips against mine.

*

Back at McChord, the arks looked very nearly complete. Inside, of course, there was still much work to be done—and neither the engines had been fuelled nor the supplies loaded. Wells and I went down to the gantry, late one night after work, and stood above the number two ark—it had yet to be named.

The floodlights kept the spaceships constantly in sunlight, there was an incessant high-pitched hiss as raindrops struck the red-hot shields over the great lamps; where they did not hit the gantry, the drops slanted like meteorites, down against the curved white hull of the ship.

The ship itself was massive, long and sloping like a humpbacked whale. Where its fluke would've been, one could perceive the nozzles for the engines that would carry it out of the atmosphere; along the sides, two nacelles buried into the hull marked the stardrive it would use to get to Mars. They were recessed, and the entire ship seemed fluid and organic. Now that they were painted, they looked elegant; the eye was drawn to wander over the outlines of the hull.

"It's beautiful," Wells said. "Like a work of art. If all human endeavour on this planet has truly come down to those things... perhaps we have not done so poorly, as a species."

"Perhaps not." I was not an aesthete, myself. The ships were massive, and I could appreciate the lines of their form, but for me the true beauty came from within. They were very nearly self-sufficient, once launched; I had seen computer simulations of the resource consumption rates, which were astronomically low. Every square centimetre of the ship had been perfectly designed and calibrated; the only wildcard in the equation was we organic creatures, whose muscle and blood could not be plotted so cleanly.

The news was saying that the terraforming process continued apace. The atmosphere would not be fully developed by the time we got there; we would be living in domed structures for a time, and the animals would inhabit what amounted to a massive zoo. The domes were also nearly complete, we were told; robot constructors, supervised by a small and lonely team of humans, had been hard at work for two years now. They sent back pictures of the Earth, viewed through a telescope from atop one of the habitats. Looking at that blue dot, vibrant and unassuming, for the first time in some years Maria and I were given cause to feel hope. Perhaps we were going to survive, after all—and these ships would be the ones to empower us.

As an employee of the Renaisance Project, I was guaranteed a ticket on the ark, as was my spouse. Amy and I had not really discussed this, and indeed, though we had spoken several times since I had professed my love for her, she had not done the same. I wasn't terribly put out: all I had offered her was honesty, after all; I didn't really expect anything by way of return.

Regardless, I looked forward to her joining me—which I felt fairly certain was guaranteed, especially given that the alternative was lingering on Earth, waiting to be drowned by the ever-present rains. I found myself thinking frequently about our future: where would we live? What would we do, on Mars? Geneticists like Maria and I were guaranteed work, at least until the colony was up and running; it was harder to see whether or not Mars needed a coffee shop.

I told Dezirian about Buchanan, finally, at lunch a week after Maria and I had gone to see the ships. He looked briefly surprised, his eyebrow lifting. "Marriage, though, really?"

"I think so. I haven't felt this way since high school. Mostly I'm concerned about how AIDA is going to respond. I spoke to Yun, awhile back, and she said it wasn't frowned upon, but of course they don't sanction it, either. What with the class system, and all."

"A five middle? They'll have a hard time justifying the marriage incentives, that's for sure. Do you have any idea why she was rated like that?"

I shook my head. "A friend of mine, Jake Ellis down in life support, suggested poor spatial reasoning. Of course, she might've just been unlucky."

"That's true enough," Dezirian admitted. "Have you gone about filing a twelve-twenty form?"

The 1220F form had been created to permit an appeal for the class assignment, though they were generally regarded as completely useless—widespread challenging of the system undermined its legitimacy, which was not a step Ad Int was about to permit. "I haven't, no—you and I both know they'll just ignore it."

"Probably, yes. But in the runup to commit and launch, folks are starting to become real sticklers for the rules. They've increased security, down by the ships, too."

"I noticed. Wells and I had to show our badges to three different people."

Dezirian smiled. "Well, they weren't supposed to let you in at all. No, not even Project employees. Like I said, Aaron, real sticklers about the rules. I'd make sure you put a twelve-twenty in. I'll sponsor, if you want. It won't matter—you've already guessed that—but it'll look good. I presume you're planning on marrying her, to get her on the ark? No, don't look so noncommittal, I know that's what you're planning. I don't think they can deny it, one way or the other, but I wouldn't want to give them any room to complain."

*

We filled the form out—all eight pages of it—and scanned it over to Ad Int's headquarters in Denver. I didn't expect anything to come of it, and neither of us were surprised when, in the coming weeks, nothing did.

I was more irritated at this than Amy was; the raccoon simply shrugged when, several days past the window that the form alloted for Ad Int to generate a response, we had still heard nothing. "It's what happens, Aaron; ain't worth getting too worked up about."

Frowning, I stirred some creamer into my coffee. It had been getting worse, of late, which lent some credence to my theory that the only supplies left were freeze-dried beans that predated the worst of the weather. Regardless, it made me irritated with the government and their general dysfunction. "I guess I'm just not quite as willing to forgive and forget? This is important, Amy."

She shrugged again. "Weren't saying it's not, but that don't mean they're going to be any better about it, now does it? Do it? Does it."

"Does it," I nodded at her self-correction. "I do; it does. And no, of course it doesn't mean it's going to get better, it's just... god damn it, all these bureaucrats, you know? And what comes out of it? No response at all. Sometimes I'd like to walk on over to Denver and really give them a piece of my mind."

Amy grinned. "You know what the difference is, between me and you?"

"Longer hair?"

I was rewarded with a wider grin, and she stuck her tongue out at me playfully. "No. At least not just that. I think the big difference is that you don't trust the government on principle, do you? I can understand that, they do a lot of things that makes 'em not worth trusting, but I mean it's like a principle thing for you. Like if they released a bulletin that said you should eat more red meat, you'd up and become a vegetarian just to show 'em what for."

"They've never really given me reason to trust them, no."

"Now, me... I believe them, mostly. I don't believe that they do good, mind you. I just think that they mean good. Like, take this coffee... you don't normally put so much cream and sugar in it—in fact most days I don't think you put any in at all, do you? So it must not be very good today."

I didn't want her to think that this reflected poorly on her, but I shrugged lightly. "It's not especially good, no. It's very bitter."

"That's fair. Now, I know that means the government guys sold us some bad grounds. But do I think they did that on purpose? Naw, I ain't so quick to judge. I think they either made a mistake, which lots of people do, or it was the best they could find."

I knew that, while they were never, strictly speaking, liked, most people had a slightly more favourable view of the Ad Interim Democratic Authority than I did. My experience, though, had done nothing to convince me that they were anything other than a bureaucratic, dysfunctional, and self-serving mess—the existence of slums like Eleazaria only reinforced my opinion. "You're saying that you think they're a good thing?"

"I'm saying that I think we're better off with leaders than without leaders, so I guess that makes them... well, not a bad thing, anyway. I think they have our best interests in mind, generally."

"Our best interests as individuals, or our best interests as the NorthAm district?"

The raccoon thought about that, her claws tapping a faint rhythm against the tabletop. "Both, I think. Maybe it's true that if some Ad Int guy saw a little kid suffering, he'd really think that was best for the rest of NorthAm, but why? I don't think they're that... evil, I guess."

"Oh." I dumped another packet of sweetener into the coffee and took a drink with a slight wince. "No. I didn't mean to say that they were evil. I don't think that."

"Then what do you think?"

"I think that Ad Int is composed of people, that's what I think. There was a man, about fifty years ago—a scientist who studied the way we form social networks. He came to the conclusion that we could only readily distinguish a hundred and fifty people. Past that, our brain simply can't cope. We don't recognise that many people, and we can't empathise with them. How many people would you say you really, sincerely, genuinely care about?"

I loved Amy's black paws, and the way the fur crept up her lower arm to a stark divide against the flat grey of her elbow. Now her paws twitched as she counted on her fingers. "Four, I guess? I guess I'd say I really care about four people. But if you counted, like, regular customers here and all, I bet it's closer to a hundred or two that I could name."

"I'm in the same boat as you," I said. "There's my coworkers, but even then there's only about a dozen people I really, honestly care about. But that's my point, right? I'd go out of my way to help them. Would I go out of my way to help some random guy on the street? I don't think so, and I don't see that there's any reason to believe that Ad Int is much different. It's not that they mean harm, it's that our brains just aren't wired that way. So most people are out for their own interests, and the interests of the few people close to them."

"Like they're... greedy?"

I shook my head. "No. Like they're human. I expect from them the same thing I expect from any human being—that they behave in a logical, rational way. But that means they aren't always looking out for me, and they aren't always looking out for the human race. They might very well be doing the best they can, as a group. But as individuals, they're just trying to get through the day. So they ignore the coffee, and they ignore the forms, and they ignore whatever else would require them to stretch that empathy out a bit."

She nodded, slowly. "So it's science, then, you're saying?"

"That we can only empathise with a hundred and fifty people? Science, yeah. And I'm guilty of the same thing, I know. That's why I figure the way I do. It would be somewhat hypocritical of me to expect the employees of Ad Int to be supermen, the way I see it. It's human nature, anyway, I guess. How do you even care about thirty million people? What are thirty million people?"

"A number," Amy said quietly. "Basically, ain't that what you're saying? Thirty million people is a number."

I splayed my fingers out against the table, fidgeting. "I guess it's not the nicest thing to say, is it?"

"No," she agreed. "No, it ain't. But I guess you're right, though. If you don't care about them, why would they care about us? No... no, that seemed like I was trying to be mean. Sorry, I didn't mean that. I meant it logically-like. You're right, it's probably just some guy, trying to do his job... if he came into the café—like if he came through the doors right now? I'd do my job, nothing else."

"I try to care," I said—quiet, too. It almost sounded like a plea. "But they beat it out of you. They turn you into a number, or... they make up some new word to try to take the sting out of some new deprivation. But I try."

"I know you do," she said. She took my paws, resting hers atop mine and keeping them in place.  "I know. And you know what? Maybe that means there's someone down in Denver who cares, too."

I smiled at her, softly—unconvinced, but willing to take the fiction on faith. "Perhaps."

*

In general, though, we found more pleasant things with which to occupy our time.

Thinking about Amy made me giddy, and so, naturally, I did this as often as possible. It was like being in love with Maddie Cross all over again; I wanted to spend every minute of the day with her, but I found that even those moments when we could not be together were made more pleasurable simply by the thought that there was always the evening yet to come.

On occasion—always on the weekend—we stayed at the Eighth Street Café past the final yellow line bus. The first few times this happened, Amy simply kept me company in the coffee shop, waiting until the busses began running again in the very early morning and, still invigourated by her mere presence, I could journey home for a few hours of sleep.

She had already closed up shop, save for a final two cups of hot chocolate, and we were arguing over what Ad Int should do in response to requests for food aid from the Eurozone when, both at the same time, we realised that it was just turning 2 in the morning; the last bus would already have left. "I need to keep a better eye on that," I muttered. "Keeps getting the better of me."

Amy smiled. "Well, you ain't the only one, are you?" She saw that I was glancing around the café and shook her head. "Look... there's no reason to be stupid about this. You can crash at my place, Aaron—it's like two blocks from here."

"You wouldn't mind?"

The raccoon rolled her eyes. "No, I think I can handle it. Weren't expecting company, though, so... my place is probably a mess. You'll have to be able to put up with that—but it's a bed at least, ain't it? Better than one of the chairs here."

I admitted to her that it was, indeed, and she stood up, pulling on her coat. I followed suit, and a few minutes later we stood outside, back in the summer drizzle. "Which way?" The café was on one of the better streets in Eleazaria, such as there were any—it didn't take long in any direction for things to get substantially worse.

She jerked her head to the side. "Lincoln Street, it's the next block up." She started walking, swiftly, and I had to trot to catch up—it was a practised, easy, purposeful gait she had, and I noticed that nobody bothered to ask her for change or even remark upon her passage.

Her apartment was, in fact, quite close, and at her pace it only took us a few minutes. It was an older building—judging by the absence of any flat concrete on its face, it had to have been from the last century. "It looks nice." She shot me a look, and I raised an eyebrow. "Well, it does. From the outside, anyway."

"It's got surprises, then," she said. She turned a key in the front door, and then turned the knob while giving the door a sharp kick. It opened with some resistance; when we were inside, she had to kick it closed as well. "Water gets into the frame, swells it up. We actually got somebody from Ad Int to fix it once, about three years back, because it was rotting. Come on, I'm on the seventh floor."

The stairs creaked precariously beneath her feet, and I followed behind a little hesitantly. "The stairs, too? They're sound?"

She laughed, and, quite close to my face, her tail flicked playfully. "Yeah, I think. I wouldn't worry too much about it, Aaron." So I didn't—focusing on the steep climb, instead. Amy made very good time; I was winded and panting slightly by the time we reached the door to her apartment. She stuck her tongue out at me. "You high-class guys, you don't get enough exercise."

"No, probably not." I waited for her to open the door, and then followed her inside. "Well, it's warm enough in here, isn't it?"

Amy nodded. "Space heater. That must mean the power's on..." She reached out to flick a lightswitch; after a moment of hesitation, an old fluorescent came to life. Her apartment was small—a studio with barely enough room for the mattress that rested up against the wall. The floor was littered with clothes, sprawling haphazardly against the tile or spilling from a few cardboard boxes. Besides this, there was a wooden table and two chairs—though one was liberally covered in envelopes and sheets of paper. "Like I said, it's... it's kinda rough. I ain't picked up awhile, nor done laundry... the boxes are kinda like my dresser, I guess..." She kicked the boxes up against the wall quickly. "Don't mind it none."

"No, it's ok. Is the power a problem for you often?"

"Eh." She sighed. "Comes and goes, you know? We get our power from those nuclear plants, up where you guys are at... but, folks short the power cables and steal 'em, sell 'em for scrap. They started burying them below ground, and that helps... I'd say we have power about three quarters of the time now?"

"What do you do when it goes out?"

"Go next door, most times. My neighbour's got a wood-burning stove—he's a garbage collector in Olympia. You'd be surprised what you guys throw out. Anyway he got the stove, an'... I go over there and hang out, wait for things to start again. You can cook on it, if you're careful... sometimes I make us dinner. Real nice guy, he is. What are you looking for?"

I turned, shrugging off my coat. "Place to put this?" She took her own jacket off and threw it unceremoniously onto the table; I folded mine and set it down next to hers. "It's not a bad place, really."

"No, it's pretty good," she admitted. "Got a working lock, that's something."

"And you live by yourself?"

"Oh, yeah. I mean, that's—I'm gonna change; y'ain't modest, are ya? Good." She grabbed something from one of her boxes and retreated to the bathroom; I waited politely in the kitchen, which was separated by a wooden partition. "People think we're all living like it's a barracks, or something... I think we're supposed to? But the reality is, there's so many empty houses that you can basically squat wherever. I mean, if I weren't employed and all? That'd what I'd be doing. Could do it now, and try to save some money, except that it ain't really worth it in the long run. What do you wear to bed, Aaron?" She reappeared, clad only in an oversized t-shirt, the remainder of her clothes having transformed into a tight ball of fabric, which she tossed at one of the boxes. "You probably got some fancy aristocrat clothes or something, huh?"

I laughed. "No. A shirt—like that, basically. When I'm home, anyway; I guess I figured I was probably going to mostly keep these clothes on, just in case the space heater drops out overnight. If the power's an issue."

Amy raised an eyebrow at that—then grinned and stepped closer to me, shaking her head. "That's another thing you upper-class folk do, ain't it?"

I tilted my head as the raccoon pressed up against me, looking into those wonderful eyes of hers. "Hmm? What do we do?"

Now I could feel her paws, her fingers toying with the buttons of my shirt, undoing them one by one. "You're always so damned overdressed..."

It was not something I could've accused the raccoon herself of. In either case, I had no opportunity to make any reply; she leaned up, then, and I could feel her lips against mine, warm and soft and inviting. Her mouth tasted vaguely of cocoa, and I could smell just the faintest hint of the café still lingering in her fur, coffee and vanilla and hazelnut and cinnamon. When she pulled away, after a moment, I pressed my muzzle forward to capture her lips again; when the kiss broke, finally, we were both out of breath.

She recovered first, and laughed. There was something about her eyes, and the dark mask of her face, that made her grin devilish and irresistible. "What do you say," she breathed, and I could feel her tail curling against my thigh. "That we change into something more appropriate?"

I cocked my head, feeling my ears perk. "Mm? Appropriate?"

Amy stepped back with a nod. "Appropriate." She reached down to take the hem of her t-shirt, pulling it up and off of her in one smooth movement—within which I could watch the soft grey fur of her body reveal itself, centimetre by centimetre. She was wearing nothing beneath the shirt, and the effect, as she grinned at me, baring her sharp teeth playfully, was utterly captivating.

*

We spent most of the weekend at her apartment, though not all of it in bed. I resolved to repay the favour, though it was liable to take some doing—it was harder to get into a class two settlement like Olympia than it was to get off the bus in Eleazaria, self-evidently. This would take some time; back in the quotidian world of the Renaissance Project, Wells and I continued the methodical task of planning evolution, version two.

Fortunately, our job was getting easier. Buckminster Fuller wrote, more than a century ago, about something called tensegrity. A structure, Fuller said, was strongest when it was supported not just by tension or compression, but by a mix of the two. He was talking about buildings, objects like his famous geodesic spheres—if you've been to any of the class one settlements, the dome that keeps the rain out is a geodesic as well. It's the triangles that do it.

The same principles, though, defined an ecosystem. The more species that are present—the more links there are—the stronger the overall whole is. As we added more and more into the simulation, layer upon layer, it became paradoxically robust. Our simulations started to fail less frequently; the margins of error grew much wider.

Jake, who first taught me about tensegrity, told me that there's a point, when you're building a geodesic dome, that the structure pulls new members into it—you hardly have to do any work at all. That was where Maria and I now were: we could add in the species that the Selections Department had identified practically without plan at all. We continued to model the system, for our peace of mind if for no other reason, but it had become self-supporting. We spent most of our days in exceptionally good cheer.

Maria Wells herself had other reasons to be happy; one morning she took both my paws in a firm squeeze, and let me know that she was pregnant. Biological science told her this, and biological science would ensure its eventual success—but, almost certainly, on Mars. She had the embryos removed less than a week later—as she had pointed out, the continuation of our species was far too important a matter to be left up to our outmoded natural processes.

Even after this, she continued to remain close to me; we took lunches together, generally—sometimes with Dezirian or Ellis as well; more rarely, instead. She continued to work, quickly and diligently—Yun and Dezirian were right; nothing was capable of impacting our dedication to the Project itself—but she engaged me after work, as well, more often than not.

"It's starting to sound different, I think," she said—nearly randomly, so far as I could tell. The sky was still light, although the sun had gone down a few minutes before.

"What is?"

"The rain." Her ears were pricked up, and they twitched a little as a particularly forceful gust drummed the rain down against our office window.

I closed my eyes, and tried to focus on the sound. That is more difficult than you might imagine; growing up with it, you just naturally take the rain as part of your environment. You forget about it, in the same way that you forget about breathing. "I'm not sure," I said. "It's hard for me to tell, at least."

Maria smiled, and came to stand next to me, looking out at the tarmac of what had once been McChord's runway. "Normally, you think it's just something that soaks you; makes you cold, ruins your papers and your computers... I mean, that's still true, yes, but there's a softer cadence to it, I find."

"There will come soft rains," I said.

She turned, and looked at me somewhat strangely. Then she took my paw in her own, and gave it a squeeze, her muzzle sweeping back towards the glittering lights of the Renaissance gantries. "There will come soft rains, and the smell of the ground, and swallows circling with their shimmering sound. And frogs in the pool, singing at night, and wild plum trees in tremulous white. Robins will wear their feathery fire, whistling their whims on a low fence-wire... and not one will know of the war; not one will care at last when it is done. Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree, if mankind perished utterly. And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn, would scarcely know that we were gone."

"You know that poem?"

I felt, rather than saw, her nod. The bright orange fire of sunset had started to spill into the clouds; I watched this, wondering what it must've been like to see the end of the world, when the atomic war—Teasdale had not been wrong, only slightly ahead of her time—had started. Reputable men said that six hundred million people had died in only a few days. Precipitation, like rain and snow, forms from a nucleus, a small particle around which the water can start to gather. Much of the soft rain that fell upon us, I had no doubt, was borne of human ash.

"We probably won't see spring, here," I pointed out.

"Probably not. Have you ever considered going to a place with raw sunshine?"

At higher altitudes, and separated from the coast, one could still find places where the rain was infrequent—Denver was one of these; the Atacama, I'd heard, was another. Journeying was frequently difficult, and the spots were highly contested. "No. I guess not really, at least. I've travelled through Denver, when it was only mostly overcast. You forget how blue the sky really is..."

"I try not to." The shepherdess's paw abandoned mine, and she pulled a pendant from within her jacket, so that it hung freely from between her dark fingers. The silver rim caught the dying glow of our star, but in the full-spectrum light of the office one could see the clean blue of the turquoise centre. "This was my mom's, before me... it has the right colour, don't you think?"

"It does. You'd not confuse it for anything else."

"My mother was a jeweller," Wells said softly. "Back when she could still work. After the war, when nobody cared about jewellery anymore, she started collecting these stones. She said it was so we wouldn't forget. There's a mosaic she made, a few years before she got too sick to work... twilight, or how twilight used to look, in the desert. It's all dark stones; lazuli, obsidian, a band of beautiful green jasper. The moon is done in an iron spinel, hematite I think. It's not worth fifty dollars, the whole thing." She turned the pendant over and over in her fingers, stroking along the silver. "Not worth one damned thing."

It was a peculiarly introspective side of Maria, one I hadn't seen before. "For some people..."

"No." She shook her head, and looked back out at our twilight, which now appeared sickly even to me. "Nobody needs to be reminded of a fantasy. This is our sky now, Aaron. We used to live in a world of turquoise, and now it's one it's one of slate. But what can you do?"

She let the pendant fall again, along with her arm, and I took her paw lightly. "Indulge the reckless hope that things will get better."

"Reckless," she echoed. "Well, it's better than the alternative."

*

It was clear enough to me, as the days marched on, that Maria had not wholly given up her interest in me, in the long run if nothing else. Fortunately, we both had the presence of mind to ignore this, at least when at work, and things continued more or less as normal. August tumbled inexorably into September, and the return of the driving, incessant rains that marked winters in the Pacific Northwest.

About the Renaissance Project, there was a sense of raw energy, a feeling that our hard work was cresting into something magnificent. Wells and I turned our simulations over to Dezirian and then immediately began work on contingency plans we didn't really believe we needed—so optimistic were we in the strength of our models. Long-term supplies—food, fuel; canisters of oxygen—were being loaded in quantity into the arks, which swarmed with intensity like a disturbed anthill.

Maria and I were by no means particularly cheery, but even we cynics allowed ourselves to be caught up in the excitement; our work became more playful, our exchanges filled with the levity that comes from a great burden being lifted. Amy noted the change in my demeanour and, securing a yellow-line day pass for her from a friend in the system, I took her up to the gates at McChord, where, half-a-kilometre beyond, the ships rose up like the living embodiment of a promise.

For a reality check, I met Jake at lunch, one Thursday in early September. "We've still got a long way to go. Well, maybe you guys don't—in engineering, at least, there's a lot of work to do."

"I spoke to Dezirian earlier this week, and he said engineering was all four to six weeks ahead of schedule. What happened?"

"You weren't at the brief Monday? No, I guess you wouldn't have been. The East Asian and the Indian arks are ahead of schedule, too—word is the Ni-Si-Ko guys are pretty much ready to load and launch, and India's only a couple weeks behind us. The Eurozone and the UN, they're behind schedule, but... I guess somebody figured we could lend a hand, so, we're putting in overtime trying to get the modules for the arks in Toulouse ready."

"Oh. No, I wouldn't have been at the briefing. There's so much infighting about what species to preserve as it is... I'm sure they wouldn't listen to a NorthAm selections committee, and they're not going to release their choices to our sequencing department." It amazed me that politics still played such a role, even at the end of the world—but it did; I was half-surprised that they were even willing to talk to our engineers.

"Yeah, well, that's because you don't solve engineering problems." He gave a derisive snort. "God damn it—I'm sorry, but these idiots should've asked for help six months ago. Four weeks to commit on our project, and we have to pick up something completely different? We'll make it, I'm sure, yeah, but... Christ on a crutch, Turner, this is bullshit."

"Well, have you considered trying to—"

The cat waved his paw. "No, leave it. I don't really want to dwell on this; I'll start ranting. How's your life going? Sequencing is done, I heard?"

"Pretty much. We're just waiting, at this point, to hear back from anybody with comments or criticism. I gave our stuff to Vasily, and he passed it on over to engineering and the loadmasters—far as I know. It almost feels like we're going to make it, doesn't it?"

"Almost," Jake agreed. "I have to admit... I have to admit, it's pretty impressive. We've come a long way, that's for sure. When do they start releasing boarding passes?"

"Two weeks from now. Why, are you worried about your room assignment?"

"It's not me I'm considering. You must be thinking about it, I assume?"

"A little. It's a long shot, obviously, but I'm kind of hoping that Amy wins the lottery on that one. Dezirian had us fill out a 1220F, but, of course, we never heard back, so I guess her class assignment stands. That's not supposed to matter, though, right?"

"So I hear," Jake said. All told, the three arks at McChord could hold ninety thousand people. Half of these had been preselected—including all of us at the Renaissance Project, though the majority of the preselected were engineers, scientists, and bureaucrats from other organisations throughout North America. The other half of the manifest was to be randomly selected—so as not to give the appearance of impropriety—although forty-five thousand people from across all of North America still did not tend to put the odds in my favour. "Of course, if she's not picked, then... you can just marry her, right? It's Renaissance employees and their immediate family, I believe?"

"Yes. But if I marry her, then... that means somebody who would've been randomly selected gets bumped. I mean. That just feels a little... coldhearted, to me. Who knows what I could be doing?"

"I wouldn't worry about it," Jake said. "It doesn't really matter."

"It doesn't?"

"Well there's us—the people they need to actually keep the arks working. Beyond that, there's the functionaries, people who can write employee management software and people who can give speeches and whatever. Those are the important ones. The rest of 'em? The people who are just going to be on Mars to clean filters or do data entry? Shit, we don't know what life there is really going to be like. Any one random person, hell, that's like as not to be as good as any other random person. I wouldn't sweat it, Turner."

*

I didn't, really. I had more important things to concern myself with. That evening I met Amy at the Eighth Street Café, and waited patiently until she could close up shop—staying close to her, toying with her paws and that marvellous tail of hers. She stuck her tongue out at me, but said nothing to dissuade me from distracting her.

When she clicked the lights off, I checked my watch. Time, or close enough. We stepped outside, and when she turned towards her street I took her paw, pulling her to a halt. "Hold on a second."

"If you're not careful, it's going to start raining," she said. "I ain't gonna be responsible for your clothes if my space heater's out."

"We'll improvise. Do you need to go home tonight?"

She thought about this, and shook her head. "Not especially, I guess, though I don't have anywhere better to be that I know. Do I have somewhere better to be?"

There were lights, coming closer on the street. Presently they resolved themselves into a taxi; I opened the door for Amy. "You do now." She looked at me questioningly, but then took her seat; I joined her, nodding to the driver. "Olympia, please. The 590 tower."

Taxi service was difficult to come by—more difficult still were taxi drivers willing to take a fare in Eleazaria. I'd had to call around a few times before finding this one, who charged an exorbitant fee—though the trip would only be one way; the yellow line bus didn't check ID cards in the McChord bound direction, so Amy would be able to get on when she left.

Amy turned, her ears questing about, eyes flicking over the scenery as it swept past. Her tail flicked against my ankle, and she finally turned back to me curiously. "Where're we going?"

"Well, you were nice enough to show me your apartment, I figured that I could repay the favour to you—if you don't mind. And it may be a bit unfair—I actually did have the opportunity to clean up. A little bit. I don't really have that much, which helps."

She laughed. "Bastard. I want a level playing field."

"Too bad." I pulled her into a quick kiss—the cab driver asked no questions. I didn't really need to think very hard as to what he was thinking—that Amy was just another trick, an indulgence picked up on the streets of a class five slum. To hell with his speculation; I didn't require the vindication of a random cabbie.

Amy didn't either, or said nothing about it. She was, actually, very quiet throughout; she rested her muzzle on my shoulder and watched the world passing by—if it was not her first trip in an automobile, it would at least have been a rare experience. For that matter, it was for me; it was strange to be in such intimate quarters.

Soon enough, however, we pulled up in front of my apartment; I tipped him, and the cab wandered off for greener pastures. Amy leaned back to look up at the tower, and then at the geodesic dome beyond it. "It don't rain here, do it?"

"No. They got that fixed pretty well."

She pulled the hood of her coat back to let it rest around her shoulders. "Ain't that a good idea? You live here? Really?"

"Yeah. It was live here or live up in Redmond, and I didn't want to do that. Ad Int doesn't even like me living here—they want to keep everyone in one place, you know? So that we don't up and cause trouble." I punched in the code to open the front door of the building, and it slid open with a soft hiss.

Inside the elevator, I gave Amy a tight hug, and when I let her go I squeezed her paw, watching the black fur mingle with my own. Her eyes drifted over the control panel for the elevator, and the display as it crept steadily upwards. "How far up are we going?"

"Second from the top. The top's a greenhouse—which is nice, actually, it's a good place to go relax. The whole thing is just messed up, you know? They built the dome so that rain doesn't get in, but then when they need to water the plants, then... well, then they need to pump rainwater all the way up here. Nothing about anything makes sense."

"Story of our lives, ain't it? I always figured that's probably how it went everywhere. Is this it? Do we need to get out now?" The elevator doors had opened.

I nodded, and led her out, turning down the short hallway to my apartment. Tapping my ID card against the door, I turned the handle and opened it. It was cause for a brief moment of self-consciousness; I had never thought of my apartment as anything particularly spectacular, but at the little gasp from the raccoon next to me I remembered that the standards of class one occupancy were somewhat different. Dezirian's house, for example, was magnificent—my residency was rather plain, for my class. "Make yourself at home. I don't... I mean, sometimes I have clothes on the floor, but I did pick them up, this time."

She glanced around, and shook her head. "God damn, Aaron. This room's twice as big as my whole place... what's this even for?"

"Entertaining guests, I suppose. It's my living room." It led out to the balcony by way of the large, plate-glass windows that covered one wall; the others held my bookshelves. "But I don't really have guests often, so I just put books in it. Can I take your coat?"

Amy shrugged it off distractedly. "Are these all your books?"

When I had hung our coats up to dry, I joined her, and nodded. "Yeah. I pick 'em up at flea markets and the like. Nobody really reads paper books anymore, because computers are so much simpler... I'd rather they not be burnt, though, you know, or recycled? So... so I bring them here. It's kind of like a book retirement home."

The raccoon nodded slowly, turning and canting her head. "And the windows? What's that for?"

I took her over, and opened the door out onto the balcony. "Fifty years ago, you would've... I dunno, had a party out here? Or a pool, or something... more entertainment. A barbeque. Now it's just where I keep some plants. And the chair... sofa... thing.do you want to sit down, by the way? I didn't ask you."

"I'm fine." She was standing at the railing, looking down the skyscraper to the streets far below. "You know what's funny, though, Aaron?"

I stood next to her, and when I put my arm around her Amy leaned heavily against me. "What's that?"

"You've got this apartment, with this gorgeous balcony, and what's the view? Grey buildings and the clouds. Could be anywhere, couldn't it? They spent all this money to build this place—probably to rent it too, I ain't stupid about that—and what do you get? Same view you could get anywhere."

"Like you said, it's the story of our lives." I let her go to sit down on the sofa, and after a moment she joined me. I fumbled for a moment for the catch, and then pulled it, bringing the sofa flat so that I could lie back on it, staring up at the geodesic dome above us. "I can't see how it's all supposed to make sense, you know? But I've been ignoring it, more. Focusing on other things."

Amy flopped back, and after a moment her face entered my vision, head cocked curiously. "Other things?"

"You, for one." I reached up a paw to brush back the fur of her muzzle and cheek. "That's a pretty good distraction, all things considered."

She snickered, and reclined to lay flat on her back. "Me an' Eliza Doolittle, huh?"

I found her paw and held it tightly. "Eliza Doolittle was a fictional character. You, miss, are very real. Now if I tried to tell anyone how wonderful you were, perhaps they might think I was making that up. But that's their loss, isn't it?"

"I don't always understand you, Aaron," Amy said. Then she returned the squeeze to my paw. "But I love you anyway. You thought about what you're going to do when they finish your ships?"

"Well that's... that's a bit of a question. We're supposed to go with them, to Mars. I... I'd been planning on doing that. I have a guaranteed ticket. They already gave out half of the seats on the ship. The other half is going to be done by random lottery. Everybody's eligible, and that includes you."

"To go to Mars?"

"To go to Mars. But... the odds are against it, obviously, and... well, there is one way to guarantee you a ticket. If we were married, then you'd get a provisional class two rating—and a ticket."

"If we got married," she said. She was quiet for a few seconds. "Are you asking me to marry you, Aaron?" She propped herself up on an elbow and looked at me curiously, her black-gloved paw reaching out to give my muzzle an inquisitive poke. "Really?"

"Sort of," I admitted. "I'm saying I would love you to come to Mars with me, and if you don't get a ticket through the lottery, I can get you one through other channels."

Amy laughed, and turned, swinging her leg over to straddle me, putting her paws on my shoulder and peering curiously down at me for several seconds. "Well... I'll agree. But only on one condition, alright? 'Cause... we'll see if the lottery happens first, of course."

"Of course. What's the condition?"

"Will you at least, like, get down on one knee and ask me to marry you? If it's not too much trouble?" When I nodded, she leaned down to give me a lingering kiss, and when she drew back, she looked at me with a toothy grin. "I'm going to hold you to that, alright?"

This was not something that bothered me one bit.

*

But, when they released the passenger manifest—internally; they contacted potential passengers directly—I scanned it eagerly. Amy Buchanan was not on the list—which wasn't really a surprise. The lack of concern situations like this were paid led me to conclude that I was in a very unique situation; nobody else seemed to have any people outside Renaissance (or their immediate family) that they cared about very much.

Late on the night after the lists had been released, I pulled them up, scanning through them again to look for names that I recognised—old high school friends, coworkers from back at JDARC. The only ones I found were those I expected to find—people at high-level positions, back east. And, with a population as large as North America still maintained, it wasn't exactly surprising to think that nobody would've made the random cut.

Something about the numbers still bothered me, though—even the randomly selected names seemed to have far too few class fours and fives. At first, I rationalised this—thinking that there must've been some criteria that they used, age or health or something, that tended to reduce the number of the marginalised. Then, judging that I was ill-suited to make such an analysis myself, I gathered the numbers together and went down to the engineering department. Jake was still there, his eyes scanning over a big systems monitor.

"Hey," I said, to catch his attention. "Can I trouble you?"

"You don't trouble me, Turner; you just distract me. But... I guess this isn't going anywhere—what's up?"

"Did you look at the passenger manifest?"

He shook his head. "I don't really care about it, to tell you the truth. Why, did you? I guess your girlfriend wasn't on it?"

"No. But, I mean... that's not that surprising. I'm just... I was noticing that in the randomly selected people, there are still very few fours and fives—and virtually no sevens and eights." Class seven included the elderly, the mentally ill, and the nonworking; class eight was criminals, the homeless, and those who Ad Int had lost touch with.

"You think they're fiddling with the numbers?"

"Maybe. I'm not sure yet—I just figured that I'd ask you, because you can probably write something to analyse these faster than I can. It's a 205-formatted table, I don't know what all information is included." I handed over the thin computer.

Jake took it, scanned it for a moment, and then tapped a few keys to transfer the data to his workstation. "Well... I'm all for paranoia, but... there could be a lot of stuff at work here. I don't know what exactly Ad Int has got cooked up, and... well, either way, we don't know what rules it took to get you into the initial selection criteria. Could be something pretty restrictive." His claws clicked at his computer for half a minute or so. "Alright, so it looks like—this is just the randomly selected? It looks like it's coming up fifteen percent class one, twenty-five percent class two, thirty percent class three... twenty percent class four, nine percent class five and less than one percent anything else."

"That's not real random, is it?"

"No..." he murmured, distracted by the numbers. He typed something else, and then cocked his head. "Look at the vocational codes on the class fives, too. I mean, the occupations are all over the map—cooks, janitors, whatever... but the vocations are all... comp sci, civil engineering, agriculture, mechanical engineering, nursing... CE again, agriculture again, agriculture again... there's all at least some education. Oh, huh, that's odd."

"What's odd?"

I hadn't noticed before how quickly Jake's fingers could move; he clicked a few more keys and then nodded his muzzle at the computer screen. "Fifty-three people—all different classes. Look what unifies them. They did a stint at the Cheyenne College, and I'll bet... let's get the transcripts... yeah. Here you go. Forty-seven of them took the same class in engineered agricultural genetics, between 2046 and 2052. You know who a Hahn is? Looks like an E. Hahn? He taught that class."

My blood was starting to go cold, although the reason for this was still drifting around the periphery of my senses. "Jesus Christ. Yeah, Eric Hahn, he runs the aeroponics department of the sustainability division here. He works up on the seventh floor."

"I don't think this is a random list, Turner. I think these guys have all been selected. I mean, I caught the agricultural thing but... look at the vocationals. What are the odds that you'd pull more than a hundred people trained in library science and archival studies? Look at this—look at this—this has to be half of all the reclamations specialists in Mexico City. What the fuck, Turner? You sure this is the final list?"

"It's what they gave us, yeah. What were you saying, about any two random people having the same utility?" I sighed, and leaned in to look at the numbers. "What I don't get is why they'd do that... I mean I get the choices, I just don't get the charade. Unless..."

Jake turned to me, and his emotionless veneer dropped for half a second. He'd come to the same conclusion as I had, and the cat's face looked haunted. "Unless this is it. Oh, god, Turner. They're really going to do it. There aren't going to be any more arks."

*

"Vasily," I said, the next morning—I hadn't slept the night before, and was back on the Project's property before eight. "We need to talk."

"Sure," the wolf said—his ears quirked, and he tilted his head at me. "Is everything alright, Aaron?"

"I don't think so, no." I was willing to be persuaded otherwise, but I'd been given no cause to think that everything was, in fact, alright. Dezirian beckoned me into his office and shut the door. "Have you looked at the manifest?"

"Your friend isn't on it?"

My mind had dropped this fact entirely, and it took me a moment. "What? Oh. No. She's not, no."

"You can marry her, don't worry—I checked. Just do it soon, so we can try to adjust our manifest to compensate. You don't even have to get permission from Yun."

"That's not... look, brother, this list isn't random. I know that. What's going on?"

I didn't mean to catch him in a trap, but even I could see the wolf's face twitch, slightly and only for a fraction of a moment. "What do you mean?" The words were chosen carefully—not the practised dialogue of a real Ad Int natural like Yun, to be sure, but close enough.

"I ran these figures, and it's immediately clear that this isn't a random sample. There are... groups of people, connected to taking a course that Eric Hahn taught in Wyoming. There's nearly every veteran of the team that put together the bridge in Toronto. Almost everyone has some education—even the class eights, of which there are only sixteen."

"The algorithms for the manifest, that wasn't my department, Aaron. I... agree, it looks strange, but... I don't know... why those people are there. Or... why... the list looks the way it does to you. I know it's not nice, that your friend didn't show up on it, but... I promise you, there won't be any issues."

"That's not what I'm talking about, either. I know you didn't pick these people, brother, but you have to know what's going on, up at the top levels. Can you at least answer one question—a yes or no question, very simple. I know you know the answer to it."

The wolf's eyes scanned my face—Dezirian had been putting on weight, I noticed; he looked older, as though the years were finally catching up to him. "Aaron, brother, you know I can't turn you down, we go back too far... but please... please don't ask..."

I swallowed heavily. "Are they going to build any more ships?" I could see his ears droop with each word of my question; his shoulders sagged precipitously.

His voice was scarcely a whisper. "No."

"This is it?"

Vasily nodded, and said nothing.

I sat down opposite him, because my knees had failed me—the confirmation of our suspicions was crushing. My voice, too, was starting to give out. "How long have you known?"

"Last week. They gave us the numbers last week. Just the department heads, and some politicians. Nobody else knows. Nobody else is going to know."

"We have to tell someone, brother. We have to." My voice was pleading—trying to salvage my humanity, I guess. "If this gets out..."

"They'll kill you, Aaron. And they'll kill anyone who tries to run the story. It's too important now; we're too close. If it got out that the list was non-random, then anyone could draw the same conclusion that you did. If and when that happens, then it's... civil war, Aaron. Riots, fighting... we'd lose everything we've worked for."

"We're abandoning them," I said. "Isn't that their right, to fight back?"

"Yes," he said flatly. "It is. But it's beyond our control. The powers that in play here... they go beyond you or me, brother." He bunched his paws into fists, and choked back an angry, wretched noise. "They're not going to let anyone stand in their way. In fact, they're probably going to want to terminate you now, Aaron. I can protect you... I think... you didn't do anything wrong."

"For certain definitions of wrong, maybe." I was still in shock, trying to figure out what to do. "They'd kill their lead geneticist?"

"It's not enough to buy you anything. That senator, last week, in the car accident?" I must've looked even more surprised, for he nodded sadly. "They'll get you too. I won't make you promise anything, because... I wouldn't want you to have to break a promise. But... I need to know who you told this to. I know you didn't come to all this on your own, not just last night. You work with Wells?"

"No."

"Little Marty?"

"No."

"Ellis?" He must've caught a brief change in my expression. "Ah. I guess that makes sense."

"We haven't told anyone else."

"Keep a low profile, alright? It might matter; it might not. And don't... well, try not to do anything stupid, brother." He reached across the table, took both my hands, and squeezed them. As the long, long seconds ticked forward, I could tell that he was trying to hold back tears.

"I won't. I won't, I... that's why I came to you first. I figured you might know... you might... you might have some plan..."

"The projections..." he swallowed heavily, and let my paws go to dab at the corners of his eyes as he shut them tightly, trying to keep his composure about him. "Good god, Aaron. Forty years of uranium left before we have to go back into the dead zones to get it. Twenty years of coal. Maybe we could get around that... geothermal has been picking up; I'm sure they could make something of it. But there's only three years of fertiliser left—we've had to use so much more of it, now that we're growing things in greenhouses, without natural soil. And even with the projections from the next crop, there's only six months of grain."

"Six months? They said there was a bumper crop."

He shook his head. "They opened the granaries up. Some of the last ones, the ones that they'd been keeping in reserve... we're empty, Aaron. The planet's empty. We can't..." he choked, and when he removed his paws from his face the dark tears staining his fur were impossible to miss. "It's over—everything here. Nobody knows. Nobody knows it." His words were coming in short little bursts, and his chest heaved. "Just... buying time, it's all just buying time. Renaissance is it, Aaron—it's our only hope."

IV.

They didn't kill Ellis or I—at first, I thought this might be because we still had work to do on the Project, but Dezirian had said that this wasn't important, so perhaps it was simply that Ad Int was feeling good-natured. Outwardly, the only change was the security personnel who followed us, whenever we were not working and in the offices. They never seemed to eavesdrop, and they sat just out of earshot when Ellis and I met for lunch.

"Could ask them to join in," he suggested.

"I suppose." It was Friday, two days after I'd first told Vasily. "What are we going to do, Jake?"

"What do you mean?"

"About this. They're not going to tell anyone—I don't know what they threatened Dezirian with, but even he's not going to go to the press. But... Christ, Jake, we have to do something..."

Jake tilted his head ever-so-slightly at me. "We do?"

I was slightly taken aback. "You don't think so?"

"Please, Aaron. Did you really think that it wasn't going to come to this? I admit, I wasn't certain they were going to be so... brutal. That shocked me. But we've always known, really, that the triage system had to be about more than just creating slums and rationing health care. Something like this has always been in the cards."

I could feel my ears falling. Had I known that? Had I ever really stepped back to consider the big picture? No, because I wasn't supposed to. Ellis had. Ellis had seen that Ad Int's goals extended far beyond governance—and why shouldn't they? They had a mandate to preserve the species, after all. "I hadn't... I mean... some of it, sure, yes, has always seemed slightly... eugenic..."

"Only some of it? Oh, face it, Aaron, we're not one of the good guys. We're the system. If this was a movie, we'd be cannon fodder the hero would kill on his way to confront the main villain—somebody like Dezirian maybe, or maybe the project director."

"And you're okay with that?"

Ellis stopped buttering the roll he had been working on, and thought about that for a moment. "Only to an extent. To an extent, I'm just pragmatic about it. There's nothing we can do—you and I both know that."

"But shouldn't we try? Would you feel comfortable raising children in a society that had left its home planet to die? Could you do that?"

"I don't intend to raise children at all, Aaron; we've been over that. My point is just this: we've been riding the tiger for a long time at this point. Now you want to get off, right before the destination, and try to tame the tiger into a pack animal? Put a bridle on it? And for what? What would you get out of it?"

Something about the decision to lie about the arks grated with me, although now that Ellis had posed the question directly I wasn't certain what it was. Dezirian had seemed to think that they were the only hope for the entire species—what was holding me back? A lingering sense of morality, I guessed. The sense that it was, in some ephemeral fashion, 'unfair' to abandon people to their deaths without even the courtesy of telling them. "Our consciences? What's that saying, that all that's required for evil to exist is for good men to do nothing?"

"Oh, get off your damned high horse. The Renaissance Project isn't about you and your conscience and it never has been. We're talking about the species, Aaron, and while I may have given up on humans I haven't been pushed yet to the point of giving up on humanity. If you break this story, the only thing that will be helped is your own sense of ethics—which will do you precious little good when they shoot you like an animal for being a traitor. What do you want them to do? They can't get us all off this planet. We don't have the resources to build more spaceships, Aaron—we've been pushed to the brink just bringing the population they've selected. So what are you going to do? And aren't you going to marry your friend to get her a seat on the ark? Who do you think is going to get bumped—one of the officially preselected people? Some congressman? No, it would've been one of those people you were willing to think was randomly selected if you hadn't gone poking your nose into things. Where was your hatred of preselection then?"

"That's a bit of a unique situation, don't you think?"

He arched an eyebrow, and shrugged. "Is it? The end result is still the same. But fine, forget the other people. Do you want to give up your ticket so that some random clerk can pick it up instead?"

"Maybe..."

"And maybe you're just that good-natured at heart. Just that altruistic. Is that clerk going to be able to figure out where to start planting some... heck, I don't know, some species of arctic lichen? Are they going to know when the right time is to start allowing the carpenter ants to reproduce at full scale? Is Mars going to be better—is humanity going to have a better future—because you listened to your conscience? What would your children think of that?"

It was, admittedly, a hell of a time for me to have developed a sense of conviction. "I guess I don't really know, to be honest... it just doesn't sit right. I've been around long enough not to think that they have our best interests at heart."

"Not as individuals, no," Jake said. He took a moment to choose his words. "You're right, Aaron, it's a bastardly thing that they're doing—that we're doing, too, now that we know about it. But I think you have to take the long view, right? You have to look at the bigger picture. You're a biologist; you'd know better than I whether they're telling the truth about the cancer rates and all that. It seems to me that we can't stay on this planet, and that if this effort here falls through, then we have nothing. Maybe it was our time. But you know, I look at some of the things we've done—Angkor Wat, the Large Hadron Collider, the Sistine Chapel—and I think that the minds that produced those things, that they're worth saving, you know? That we ought to do something to save them. Not to save you or I, or even the president, but to save that species. That sense of potential. I guess I'm not willing to throw that away because I can't stomach the sacrifices that we have to make."

I toyed with the crust of my sandwich and mulled that over. Jake made no further reply, and after several long seconds I broke the silence. "Do you think the future will judge us?"

"Of course. The future always judges the present, just as we judge the past. But if they've any decency about them, they'll realise this: we weren't caricatures, lumbering towards some predetermined finale, and we weren't fortune-tellers. We were just people, ordinary men and women trying to make their best of a terrible situation, and doing, I think, the best that we can."

"This is the best we can do? Really? Thousands of years of science and philosophy, and this is where we end up?"

Jake sighed. "It is a bear, isn't it? To think that with all our knowledge and all our power, the best we can do is ninety thousand people? But consider the alternative conclusion, Aaron, why don't you? You think Ad Int is a bunch of cartoon villains, twirling their whiskers and cackling about the fate they've condemned the planet to? None of them were responsible for the fires, Aaron; none of them pulled the trigger. They're just people. Just like you and me. They thought about this for a long time; they lost sleep over it, same as you did. And, somehow, they decided they could live with it. Perhaps they know something we don't?"

"Perhaps." I thought about Dezirian, his shoulders jerking as his emotions got the better of him—yes, it was unfair to think that he was the only one; that the people who had come to this decision did so willingly, even gleefully. I was sure they suffered. "But that doesn't mean that we have to come to the same conclusion, now does it?"

"No," he admitted. "It doesn't, of course. But in some ways, it's easier to be an iconoclast, isn't it? It's easier to say what you wouldn't have done. That sort of raises the question—what would you have done, in their position? Limited resources, too many people trying to consume them... what's the answer, Aaron? What's the good way out?"

"Honesty, I guess. That would make it a lot better, as far as I'm concerned—it's not what they're doing that bothers me, so much, it's the fact they can't even be bothered to admit it. Maybe you're right—they're acting in the best interests of humanity, not any individual humans. That's fair. And maybe it would be... impolitic, I guess, to be so honest. But damn it, to lie to people..."

He nodded slowly. "I'm not saying I like it, Aaron, believe me. I'm just asking whether we can really take it into our own hands. Because it would cause riots, you have to know that—it would bring the whole thing down around our heads. Who are we to say that the best course of action is for the whole human race to go gently into that good night?"

*

I guess that he was probably correct: not only was there precious little that we could do, but it wasn't really even our right. We had the power to destroy the entire Renaissance Project and, as Jake had pointed out, Earth had neither the time nor the resources for another attempt. If we killed it, it would stay dead—was this for the better?

At the same time, it was so blatant, so brutally utilitarian, to stand by and condemn so many people to linger because there wasn't enough room to take them all with us. It was, I thought, as if we stood on the deck of the Titanic, that ancient steamship—and, knowing that catastrophe was inevitable, we were springing for the only available lifeboats. Raising the alarm could only engender panic—and yet it seemed, eminently, the only appropriate thing to do.

The security personnel guards tailed me to my apartment, and then set up watch outside—I had no doubt that my communications were being monitored, as well. I took a pencil and a piece of paper torn from the inside jacket of one of my books, and began writing a letter.

I've never been good at thinking on my feet. Jake and Amy were both quicker with an argument than I was, and Wells could use her tongue like a scalpel. Me, I needed time to put things together, and writing down all my objections to what Ad Int had done helped to crystalise them in my mind. It reassured me, internally, that I was doing the right thing—that I was properly acting in the long-term best interests of our species by preventing those in a position of power from simply absconding. I was, after all, looking at the bigger picture.

I decided that if I could present a compelling case in only a few paragraphs, it might get traction in the local news agencies. From there, it would propagate virally—it had all the makings of a story with legs. I rewrote the letter with an eye towards conciseness.

It explained in detail who I was, and it contained the details of the Renaissance Project's passenger manifest. It said that I had confirmation from high-ranking officials within the Project itself that there would be no further arks constructed and that, to the degree that it was even possible, Earth would be compelled to fend for herself. I tried to keep the note as brief as I could, without skimping on verifiable details. Then I folded it over, sealed it, and scrawled a date and time, two days in the future. If I did not contact her before that date, I wrote my lawyer, she was to deliver the note, by hand, to the local press.

I tucked this into a copy of A Tale of Two Cities and took the book with me to work the following day. I had been keeping a close eye on the security personnel who followed me, and I knew them by face. That made it easy enough to give them the slip for a few minutes, just long enough to hand the note—with a fifty-dollar tip—to a random person in the bus terminal when I transferred from the yellow line onto the route for McChord. When they picked me up again, they gave no sign that they were aware of anything out of the ordinary and, for my part, I returned to reading the Dickens novel.

I still wasn't certain what I was going to do. In the evening, after work, I took the bus to Eleazaria, waiting until the last possible moment to announce my stop—they watched me disembarking, but the guards had no chance to get off with me, and I made my way to the Eighth Street Café unmolested. Amy seemed to catch my mood.

"Is everything alright?"

"No. No, not exactly, it's not—I need some advice, if you're willing."

She poured two steaming mugs of coffee, and gestured to the booth next to her. "What's wrong, Aaron?"

I took the coffee gratefully. "It's a question of morality. Suppose something terrible was going to happen, and only you knew about it. Suppose, twenty years before the corrupt government came to power in 1984, somebody realised what was going to happen, with absolute clarity?"

"But how could they?" The raccoon tilted her head curiously. "Twenty years, Aaron, that's a damn long time, ain't it? Anything could change. I imagine if they'd told somebody, they would've just been ignored, wouldn't they? I'd've ignored them, sure."

I frowned. "Well... alright. Have you read the Iliad? Or some story of the Trojan War? Oh—good, okay. Suppose somebody knew that the Trojan Horse was supposed to be a good thing, but it would actually destroy them."

"You mean like Cassandra?"

I raised an eyebrow. "Hmm?"

"Princess Cassandra—the daughter of the king of Troy, weren't she? Apollo gave her the ability to see the future an' the like, except then he cursed her, too, so as nobody would ever believe what she said. She knew what was gonna happen to Troy, and nobody believed her... maybe I guess it ain't just that twenty years is a long time, maybe we just never believe anybody who tells us about the future."

"They didn't believe her," I mused, and chewed on my lower lip. "But then what should she have done?"

"What do you mean?"

"Suppose," I tried again, abandoning literary metaphor. "Suppose you were the only one with knowledge of a destructive act—suppose I found out that the government was secretly removing people from their homes so that they could recycle their possessions for the recoverable resources?"

"They're doing that?"

"No, but suppose they were. If I were to tell the truth, there would probably be great dissent against the government. Maybe even riots, open demonstrations. And maybe the government is using those resources to build greenhouses and hospitals. It's still wrong, isn't it?"

"Sure."

"Then..."

She leaned back. "This ain't just a friendly argument, is it?"

"Sort of. It's not anything that has to do with you, specifically," I lied, "I just wanted your advice on it, that's all. I figured you might be able to give me a new perspective."

Amy's whiskers twitched as she lost herself in momentary thought. "Well I think... mostly, an' all, it's what I said a couple months back, when you tried to make it like Ahab was some kind of bad guy. How you live your life is the most important matter, an' that means, I think, that you have to do the right thing."

"Even if it might mean your life?"

"Everybody dies, Aaron. Only some of us die for anything meaningful. Ain't no shame in being one of them, though."

I smiled. That was, I think, what I had wanted to hear—not Ellis's practical utilitarianism, arguing that we needed to act for the greatest 'good' irrespective of morality. I wanted to hear that it was permissible for me to act according to my conscience. I stood, and when she did as well I gave Amy a tight, lingering embrace. "Thank you."

When I stepped back, finally, she grinned. "Any time. Don't be too crazy, Aaron, hon. I'll see you soon."

I returned the smile warmly. "Of course. I love you, Amy."

She paused, and then she gave me another swift hug. "I love you too."

Outside, I was shocked momentarily to see one of the security guards waiting for me. He dipped his head. "Evening again, sir."

"Evening," I said.

He grinned, giving me a wink. "Never would've pegged you as the type."

I laughed genially—my good mood, I'm sure, helped the act immensely. "I have needs, too. When's the next yellow line bus?"

"Six minutes," he said. Even in his neatly pressed uniform he seemed shapeless, with a blunt muzzle and short ears. I could not have placed his ethnicity, and maybe, I figured, it didn't matter. He would be irrelevant soon, anyway. That night, ensconced back in the warmth of my apartment, I slept better than I had in years.

*

Wells and I now worked primarily in bureaucracy, filling out forms and other miscellaneous bits of information. The models had been accepted, and as I had told Jake, I had little reason to believe any other agency would ask for our assistance. The planning of ecosystems and the selection of species had a deep nationalistic bent, and was highly sentimental. We were unwelcome.

In the early afternoon, with the clouds a bright grey above us, we watched our cargo—palettes and huge boxes of genetic samples—being loaded onto the arks. Some of the species we would introduce from cultures or living examples; the rest we would recreate in artificial wombs, as Wells had suggested. It was a strange thing, to see one's homeland reduced to crates.

"It's amazing, isn't it?" Wells said quietly. "That's six years of work for us. We did it, Aaron..."

"It seems like yesterday," I agreed. "You remember when we first got the new 1450 mainframe? God, that was nice. We spent that whole day just screwing around, didn't we? That was worth it, though."

"It all was worth it." She smiled, closing her eyes in reflection. "It all was worth it. And it's only a small rest, and then we have a whole new set of challenges. Oh, Aaron, it's so exciting! Have you thought about how we're going to start the actual seeding process yet?"

"Not yet," I said. "I figure we still have a few things left to concern us on Earth."

"Oh, Earth." Maria's tone bordered on dismissive; she shook her head. "You know, I think I realised yesterday, finally. Earth... there's nothing here for me, anymore. Mars is where the opportunity is. And we get to be the first, Aaron—the very first there. It's going to be something else. No, Earth isn't really worth it anymore."

"It's not?" I had not told Maria about what Ellis and I had discovered, but I knew that having to stay on Earth would not please her—she'd only said as much explicitly now, but there had been several days of hints, as we watched the loading process from our window.

"No, not really. Ever since mom died, the connections keeping me here have really just been my coworkers—you, Little Marty, even Jake. But you're all going with me to Mars, so... why do I care about this rock? It's just dismal, now, just dismal failure and a lot of lonely ghosts. We should be jumping at the chance to be the first ones off it, don't you think?"

"Mm." I didn't say anything, exactly. In point of fact, I had nothing to say—I didn't have the heart to tell Maria anything. She would find out soon enough, after all—my lawyer had been instructed to go to the press on the following day, and I didn't think Ad Int could move fast enough to muzzle them. The story would break inexorably.

"The launch date can't come fast enough," Wells expounded. "It can't come fast enough. But we should get back to work, I suppose—still got some things to finish, don't we?"

Nor, I discovered, did I have the heart to still her from this task, and so I joined her, planning the irrelevancies of our pre-launch preparations. I wished that there was a solution that didn't involve hurting her, but the strength of my convictions had only grown since leaving the Eighth Street Café. We have to be willing to fight—and, yes, even die—for what we believe in.

And maybe it would not be all that bad. Maybe people would realise that there was a solution that didn't involve the ludicrous triage system, or the wholesale abandonment of the planet (though what had Maria and I concluded? Ninety-nine percent of everything that had ever lived on the planet was dead? Perhaps we were just keeping with tradition). Maybe Ad Int would step down peacably, and we could have some semblance of democracy again.

I was willing to trust that such occurrences were, if not probable, then at least quite possible. This response to chaos is, I've found, what distinguishes the religious from the agnostic. Religion is all about avoiding chaos, ordering it; giving it a name, a personification.

But chaos can be generative, too. Chaos can spark new ideas; revolutions can birth new civilisations. It takes believing in the power of serendipity—the same force of smiling fortune that brought me to Amy Buchanan in the first place. I was a growing devotee of serendipity.

My life, I knew, was soon to become chaotic. Even if the government chose not to prosecute me (which I thought unlikely) my job with the Renaissance Project was about to be over, if for no other reason than that the Project itself could not possibly survive the revelation that it had merely been a lifeboat for the preselected.

Even the notion, however, that everything I had come to know and rely on was about to change did not especially trouble me. I wondered what Wells would think, and hoped that she would understand. I would not have the opportunity to explain—after my lawyer went to the press, I would probably be arrested immediately. She would have to draw her own conclusions; hopefully, I thought, she would at least consider my motives to have been pure.

This was the first time in my life I had ever really had a sense of pure conviction; that complete, unmarred absence of self-doubt. I refused to second-guess myself, not in my discussion with Ellis, not in my internal monlogue, and not when I suddenly found two men flanking me, as I left the office building that evening.

"Dr. Aaron Turner?" one of them asked. He was ten centimetres taller than I, and stocky.

"Yes?"

"Please come with me."

*

There were no handcuffs, and no outward threats—but there was also no possibility of resistance, either. Thus it was that I found myself in one of the outlying offices of the Renaissance complex; to be honest, I'm not sure exactly where it was—I'd never seen it before. I was ushered into a small room, containing only a table and a couple of chairs.

The door was shut behind me and I had some time to consider my situation. The men had seemed to be official, though they weren't wearing any conspicuous uniforms—Ad Int, probably, not Project police or security guards. What did that mean?

Probably, I concluded quickly, it was that Dezirian's protection had not extended as far as he'd initially thought. At the time, the notion that they were going to kill me didn't even cross my mind—deposition, certainly, and perhaps even an aggressive interrogation. But I had done, as of that point, absolutely nothing wrong, and I highly doubted that they had guessed what I was about to do. It was, after all, very out of character.

The room was completely barren, save for the metal table and chairs, and there was no real way to mark the passage of time. Speculating about my predicament became tiresome quickly, but this left only trying to figure out where I was and how long I had spent there. Thirty minutes, perhaps, was my guess; maybe an hour, before the door opened, and admitted two people, a man and a woman.

They were outwardly expressionless, lacking even Ad Int's veneer of pleasantness. The man was blue-grey and white, with folded ears that made him either a mutt or, more likely in my estimation, a shepherd. His eyes were sharp and penetrating—a Border collie, then, perhaps.

His partner was much easier to place—obviously a fox, with burnt-orange fur and eyes that constantly swept the room. They were both exceptionally well dressed, in close-fitting, neatly tailored black suits. The man grabbed the chair from next to me and set it down on the other side of the table, so that both he and his partner could sit down, facing me.

"Dr. Turner, I presume?" The woman's voice was clearly enunciated and crisp, although not especially formal.

"That's me."

Just as their emotionless expressions had been purer than the Ad Int employees I was used to, the sudden smile she gave seemed much more genuine. They were better actors, if nothing else. "Ah, very good. It's nice to meet you. This is Adam, and I'm Barbara."

"Do you work for AIDA?"

"Not quite." Adam had a deep voice, with a growl and a curtness to it that suggested it saw little use. "We merely keep the peace. We're enforcers."

"Enforcers?"

Barbara smiled again. "We're not really relevant, most of the time, Dr. Turner. Think of us as AIDA's peripheral vision—figments of the American dream. We try to keep things running smoothly. That's where you come in, obviously."

"I'm not running smoothly?"

Adam's face had yet to display anything but stoic blankness. "Who have you told about what you know, Dr. Turner?"

I had been brought up to trust policemen, but I didn't feel compelled to think that this trust extended to Ad Int. "What I know?"

The vixen next to him nodded. "Please understand, Dr. Turner, that this room is not currently being recorded. You don't have to worry about speaking your mind. Now, please, who have you told about your understanding that the Renaissance Project will not be constructing any further starships."

I glanced between the two. "If you know that I know that, then I don't really have any surprises for you. Jake Ellis and I looked over the manifests and came to that conclusion, which I then confirmed with Dr. Vasily Dezirian, the overall director for biology. At that time, he told me not to tell anyone else and, until you two came along, I haven't."

"But you're going to."

"Sir?"

It was Barbara who answered my question. "You've deliberately evaded your escort on two occasions in the last two days. Combined with your psychological profile and a stress analysis of your behaviour, the conclusions are very easy to draw."

"So. Who are you going to tell?"

I closed my eyes, made an internal gamble, and then smiled softly. "A lot of people. You've probably guessed that, too. It's a dead-man switch to a random person I picked. If I don't contact them by six o'clock tomorrow, they're going to go to the press."

Adam nodded, as though this knowledge was not surprising. He didn't say anything, though, and the room fell quiet until I felt pressed to continue.

"This person is well-connected to their local press. I don't think you'll be able to stop the story from getting out."

"I don't either," Adam said.

Barbara nodded her agreement. "Only you can do that. Now, the nicest way to do this would be to appeal to your better nature. You know that if you break this story, a lot of people who don't really deserve it are going to get hurt. And, moreover, nobody is going to be helped."

"You're a weak man." Nothing in Adam's voice suggested that this was intended to be an insult, merely a statement of fact. "You lack a strong moral centre, so you rely on abstract concepts to define what is 'good' and what is 'bad.' In this case, you've settled on 'the truth.'"

His partner continued, still without ever appearing condemnatory or judgmental. "For you, truth is an ephemeral concept representing goodness. Although you cannot define how the truth would improve society, or the world, you wish to introduce it anyway. You believe that the decisions that have been made are unfair and, although you likely cannot clearly define what is unfair about them, you wish to do your part to rectify this perceived situation."

"What's unfair about them," I said, "is that you've made an arbitrary decision about who lives and who dies."

"No, please choose your words more carefully. Chaos is arbitrary, Dr. Turner; the selection process may not be up to your standards, but it is most certainly logical." She smiled again, thinly. "Have you considered the consequences of your actions, incidentally?"

"I have been thinking about them continuously, since I decided to do this."

She opened a slim laptop computer, and turned it to me. "Here are the results of an internal simulation AIDA conducted. It's using the same basic modelling software that you do—you can therefore confirm our input parameters. Thirty thousand deaths from rioting in the first month, the collapse of the Ad Interim Democratic Authority and, of course, the permanent dashing of any hopes for our escape from this planet."

"Possibly. Or possibly not. I'm not saying it immediately points the path towards a rosy future, ma'am. I'm saying that people should be given the information to decide what to do with you. I'm saying that there should be a choice."

"Choice? Choice is an illusion, Dr. Turner. For example, you think that Adam and I are giving you the option to choose whether or not you comply with us. I don't really believe that you have a choice. I believe that appealing to your sense of pragmatism will win out. Don't you agree? I think that explaining to you the dire consequences of your actions has changed your mind."

The numbers on the screen were indeed fairly stark, and although I didn't have the time to analyse the parameters of their model I didn't really have a reason to doubt it. I knew, and Ellis had said, that there would be fallout from telling the truth. It didn't surprise me. And, at this point, it was irrelevant. I was doing the right thing, after all. I shook my head at Barbara. "No, I'm afraid not."

"Your final answer?"

Adam had asked the question; I nodded to him. "Yes."

He shrugged, removing a small remote control from his pocket and pressing a button on it. "Very well. Turn to your left, please."

I did. "Oh, god."

*

The wall to the left of me had become transparent, revealing another room immediately adjacent to mine. This room was empty, save for a single figure. Judging by her demeanour, Amy Buchanan was not able to see us—it was a one-way mirror, I guessed. "What's she doing here?"

"We figured it might be best to bring her in for questioning. She doesn't know why she's here yet."

Adam's voice was constantly curt, and though I realised they were playing me I nonetheless turned to Barbara when I asked my next question. "What's going to happen to her?"

"That depends on you," she said. "If you decide to be reasonable, then of course we will let her go. We're not monsters, Dr. Turner. All you have to do is agree to cooperate, and she can be sent on her merry way."

"And if I don't... cooperate?"

"We can't run the risk that you've told her anything, so she'll have to be killed, of course." Adam's voice was completely remorseless, and never moved beyond his customary matter-of-fact monotone. "Since we never know what might make you willing to compromise, she will naturally be tortured first."

It wasn't possible to tell immediately whether or not I was being bluffed. "We don't torture people anymore, though. I already know that's off the table."

"Perhaps you weren't listening well enough, when I went through the model?" Barbara turned from the wall and indicated her computer again. "I'm sure AIDA would let us make an exception to a silly rule like the torture thing, in your case."

A hundred and fifty years ago, a Russian filmmaker named Lev Kuleshov did an experiment, in which he showed the same face over and over again, but in a different context. The exact same face—but, depending on what people saw around it, they read completely different emotions into it. His voice had never really changed, but now I heard in Adam a sort of bored indifference. "She has very long fingers. You probably think we'd break them, but it isn't really that simple."

"We're professionals, after all," Barbara added.

"It's not the way you break the fingers, it's the way you can grind the bones against one another, after they've been broken—there's something about that that seems to help, you know? In extracting a confession, or whatever you need. It does make the healing process more complicated, but as I said, that's not really relevant in her case."

Sometimes, when our conversations had trailed off into emptiness, I took Amy's paw in mine, and our fingers intertwined. I thought of this now, and cringed. "But you're not trying to extract a confession. Why don't you torture me instead?"

"We will be."

"What Adam means is that it's not just the physical element of pain that is important to consider, Dr. Turner. Of course, breaking Amy's fingers, one by one, will cause her a great deal of pain, but that doesn't really affect you, does it? You're motivated by a greater good—the truth. Freedom. Choice. The excruciating pain of someone else is... well, almost ancillary to that. It's why people become martyrs—something else is in play. Do you suppose she'll scream, Adam?"

"Not at first, no."

"That's something, then, isn't it, Dr. Turner?"

I shut my eyes—my breathing was starting to pick up, for reasons that were completely beyond my control. "You'd do that. Why would you do that?"

"Because it's the easiest way to get to you. Because you've told yourself that you're a man of principle. Principle occasionally means sacrifice. It's not always self-sacrifice, either—and your strength of will should allow you to see that. I certainly respect it. And I hope that Amy will as well. She doesn't know that you're here yet—it's a one-way mirror, right now. We'll make it completely transparent before we start—that way she'll be able to see you, and she'll know that you could stop this whole thing at any time."

"But you won't. Because you're in the right, aren't you?"

I swallowed heavily, looking at Adam. "Don't you think I am?"

"Morally? Philosophically? Of course. There are arguments to be made about the greater good, but if this was a Socratic dialogue, you would be absolutely correct. On the other hand, that doesn't mean we can let you go. Nor her."

Barbara leaned forward, her black-tipped ears pricked and alert, her voice insistent and slightly conspiratorial. "All you have to do is realise that you don't matter. That you're only a cog, Dr. Turner; that you can give in. That principles are not worth having. All you have to do is realise that, and all of this can be over."

"I still don't get why you'd torture her. She's an innocent victim—a bystander."

"No," Barbara said, settling back in her chair. "Or at least, not in a way that absolves her from pain. She's guilty of consorting with you. The path to greatness and strength of principle is frequently littered with innocent bystanders, in that fashion; she's not really any different. Her innocence is a construct, just like your morality. Both can be attacked..."

"Attacked?" I asked, already knowing that I didn't want to hear the answer.

Barbara nodded crisply. "Yes. Savaged, until it's visible as the construct it is. Of course, when the inevitable time comes for her innocence to be taken down, we'll continue our 'good cop, bad cop' charade. Adam, not I, will be the one who is forced to violate her, repeatedly."

"I won't be deriving any sexual gratification from the act," Adam said, levelly. "And I don't think she'll scream then, either—though, actually, the silence will probably be worse for you."

"You'll have to trust in your principles, for strength." It was perplexing—terrifying, even—how they managed to avoid seeming to sneer, or even to attack me personally. Everything was merely a fact, coldly stated.

"My principles..."

"In some ways," Barbara said, as though she was musing aloud and had not heard me, "it's the fact of her innocence that makes this worse. She'll be completely confused, won't she? Lost—terrified. Trying desperately to bargain for some relief, and not understanding that it's not in her power. That there's nothing at all she can do to stop the pain. I wonder what she'll think about you, Aaron. Will she know what you've done to warrant her torture? Do you suppose she'll think of you as a hero, bravely standing up to something? Or will she think you're merely a common criminal."

"Please... stop." I asked, my voice soft. I was trying to think.

They had none of it, though it was Adam who spoke next. "She'll do anything, you know, as it goes on. It's nothing personal about you—it's just what torture does to people. She'll offer you up; she'll say terrible, terrible things. She'll think we're after you for some grave offence, so unspeakable that we can't tell her. So she'll manufacture your crimes wholesale, trying to get us to stop."

"We won't be able to, is the unfortunate thing about that... "

Adam nodded in agreement. "Right. My point, anyway, is that you're thinking that the screaming will be the worst part. It won't. It will be the things she says, at the end. Even if her last words aren't cursing you—if they're some other plea—it's the oath you'll remember. You'll blame us, at first, because it is our fault and I'll admit that. But thirty years from now, when you're lying awake at night, you'll be haunted by the thought that it might have been you, after all."

I couldn't put the image out of my mind—the sight of Amy, Amy who had convinced me that Captain Ahab was a hero, Amy who had reminded me that people could be good and decent at heart, crying out in terror at a fate I had, with the best of intentions, brought down on her head. "What do you want from me?"

"Nothing," said Adam. "We want to hear nothing from you. We want you to continue your work—your diligent, useful, exceptional work. We want to hear nothing from your random contact, or from anyone else."

"And if I do?"

"All of this goes away. You return to your life, you talk about the classics with Ms. Buchanan for the next few months, and you never see us again."

"Next few months?"

Barbara spoke up. "She's not embarking, so far as I'm aware. You could stay with her on Earth, I suppose, since you seem to want everyone else to. Otherwise, I rather think you're a dangerous combination, and I'm sure Adam agrees. We may have to have her terminated."

"No, that's not good enough. I have the power here, don't I? Really? Even if I agree to let you turn me into an accessory to this little bit of genocide, I can still make demands."

The vixen smiled. "Demands? What do you want?" Then I realised why she was smiling, and I went cold. She was smiling because she'd realised that she'd won—that I'd played into their hands. That as soon was I was willing to compromise, nothing else mattered.

I was drained; beaten. "I'll call my friend and tell them to destroy the note." It took presence, and thinking, to not say 'my lawyer'—though maybe they already knew. Maybe they were just trying to break me. I gritted my teeth, trying to keep my wits about me. "I want Amy promoted to class 3, and given a ticket aboard the ark. She's smart, you can find something for her—I don't even know why she undertested on the PAAs."

"Done—of course," Adam confirmed my utter defeat. "But you really don't know why she scored so low?"

I shook my head, and the two exchanged glances.

"She's functionally illiterate. It's a real failure of the educational system, that. She seems very bright."

V.

In the lobby of the office building, I pulled out my cell phone and dialed my lawyer, telling her to burn the note. She said she hadn't read it, which defeated the last hope I might've had. It also meant that I was left to carry the burden of my attempt, and its subsequent failure, alone.

When I clicked the phone off, I found that my knees would no longer support me, and I had to lean heavily against the wall for support. I sank down, slumping into a bench set up against the side of the wall.

Adam and Barbara had become extremely cordial for the remainder of our discussion—upbeat enough that I wanted to end the conversation as soon as possible. There was nothing for me to sign, no paper trail. They had thanked me again for my cooperation, and then permitted me to leave.

Now I was alone with my thoughts. The receptionist stared at me blankly for awhile—the way you do, when you're trying to think about whether or not to say anything. He never did.

I wan't certain whether or not I wanted to hate myself. Partly, the answer was yes—I should've been stronger. I should've fought them for longer. Maybe I could've talked them out of their threats. Maybe they wouldn't have followed through on them anyway, considering how barbaric the notions had been.

But probably not. Probably Ellis had been right: the only thing that would've happened was that my demise would've some degree of dignity, cared about only by myself. Nobody would bother to write "he followed his conscience" on my tombstone, and the world would end anyway. The world, and Amy Buchanan.

I wanted her advice, but it wasn't something I could actually solicit. What was the point? Even if I thought Adam and Barbara would permit me to do so—and they almost certainly would not—what could this possibly accomplish? Drawing her into the abyss of my wretchedness? Amy, who could not even read? That was a surprise to me, at first, though I suppose it explained some things—her uncanny habit for pronouncing foreign words correctly; the general limiting of her reading to those books that could be obtained in the public domain and downloaded to a speech-synthesising box. I'd never asked her; it hadn't ever mattered.

And why should it have? Between the two of us I was, after all, the real charade. I put myself together enough to meet Amy for a late dinner that night, at a diner closer to Olympia—she didn't have the chance to get out of Eleazaria often, and I figured it was a good, neutral place.

"You know, I had the strangest day," she said.

I didn't want to discuss this, but there was really no choice. "Oh? My day was pretty normal—just a lot of paperwork, really."

"I got called up to where you work. At first I thought that maybe something was wrong, you know—like maybe something had happened to you? I don't know whether you ever told anyone about us. So I thought maybe it was that, but then... they made me wait for a good long while. Turns out it was actually pretty good news."

"Oh, good news, huh?" I was only picking at my dinner, drawing out a flat noodle on occasion and taking a halfhearted bite.

Amy nodded, with a smile—her tail was starting to wag; I could feel it, flicking against my ankle. "It turns out that, you know, that lottery, for the tickets on the ark? The one you was talking about, awhile back? I got a ticket, an' so they pushed that twelve-twenty we filled out to the front of the line. I got reclassified as a class 3—lower echelon, sure, but still!"

I wanted so desperately to be happy for her, but I had to force any emotion into my voice. "Oh—that's really good news!"

She must've caught some oddness, some hesitation in my voice, for she leaned forward conspiratorially. "You didn't have anything to do with that, did you? Pulled some strings?" She took my hand and squeezed it tightly, leaning across the table to press her lips against mine quickly. I returned the kiss as best as I could. "No, no, you don't have to tell. But... you know, if you did then... thank you. I know it's not like... you're bribing me or anything, nothing like that. I'm just really happy, I think. You know, I'd say, it's about the best day of my life." She paused, so that it wa clear that the train of thought had been broken and she was beginning a new one. She smiled widely, showing off white teeth and the bright, dancing eyes within her black mask. "I love you, Aaron."

She was beautiful in her ecstasy, and I wanted to scream.

*

"I know that you and I weren't ever very close, Dr. Turner." Elizabeth Yun began the conversation by acknowledging the undeniable. "I know that you didn't really like me. Or any of the AIDA employees."

We were sitting at the edge of the gantry; the rain had stopped, for a time, and we were watching the rockets, being lifted into their launch configuration. Word had come in the previous day that the other countries who were participating in the Project were ready—even the United Nations had managed to rush their spaceships to completion. Watching the end result of our work changed what I had to think about; I was no longer invested in its completion. "I think it was the government," I said. "Nobody likes the government. It means I guess nobody really likes the face of it."

"I tried to do the right things. I didn't want to hurt anybody, Dr. Turner, we just... sometimes we didn't have a choice. As a species, we have so few options..."

"I know," I admitted, very quietly.

She continued as though I hadn't spoken at all. "That doesn't mean that it was right, not all the time. The triage system... it must've seemed like a good idea, when it was first proposed. You have two kilos of wheat for two people for a week. Do you split it up evenly, between the agricultural scientist and the homeless person? I think the answer is supposed to be 'yes,' you should. It's the Christian thing... we're all children of the same god, aren't we?"

"Are we?" I didn't have a good answer. I didn't even really know that many Christians, not even the bastardised version that Ad Int had coopted into something like a state religion—Dezirian belonged to this church; it was why we called each other 'brother.'

"We're supposed to be. But how do you do that? It's not enough for both of them. If the scientist lives, then he might find a way to grow more food and save a dozen people from starvation a week. If the homeless person lives, he... I don't know. So it was supposed to be logical, clinical even. That's where the tests came from, too. Of course it wasn't that simple; it was never that simple. It became complicated... political. You'd get torn between things."

"Things?" I wasn't sure what to make of this meeting—she'd asked for it, quite out of the blue. I was not any more comfortable talking to her than I ever had been.

The cat nodded, her eyes flicking over my face—never quite meeting my gaze, as though she herself was ill at ease. "They were always looking at our statistics, trying to make sure we weren't gaming the system. But what can you do? You try to do the right thing. I remember, a few months back you came in, asking if I could get Maria Wells promoted. We did, and three days later her mother checked into a new hospital. I'm not stupid, Dr. Turner. I'm not... I'm obviously not as smart as you guys, but... I knew what was going on. But we had a quota, right? So... if I did that, then that meant that I had to turn down Rodger's request for a special dispensation for his brother. Cancer, I think, from the request sheet. I'm sure he thinks that I'm... heartless. A monster..."

"No," I lied. Rodger Kumamoto worked in life support engineering with Jake, and I only knew him distantly. The sickness and eventual, inevitable death of his brother had been crushing to him; I'd heard him inveighing against Ad Int repeatedly. These days, Jake told me, he had taken to heavy drinking. And, as with forty-five thousand other crimes, I now learned that I was partly responsible.

"He should," Yun said, as if sensing that I felt this way. "I am a monster—evil, calculating. But that's what they do to you. They make you that way... until there's nothing left of you. And when you try to do the right thing, it's like they know. I was so happy when you came and asked me about Maria's promotion, because it was something I could do—like I could make something right. It was the end of the month, the end of my quota, and I had a spare slot. Rodger came in the next day and... I had to turn him down."

"I don't know what you're supposed to do about that." My voice came out sounding haunted, and I forced some energy back into it. "I don't know how you do the right thing when... you're right, there are limited resources. It must be a terrible burden."

"But you know that," she said quietly. "It's why I asked to talk to you. I got called into one of my supervisor's office, after you went to talk to Dezirian. He explained everything about what happened. I knew, about the selections. They told all of us the week before the lists went public."

"Do you know when they made the decision?"

"To select them? It's probably always been part of the plan. What else would you do? You'd end up with tens of thousands of petty thieves and alcoholics. So I'm sure they always wanted to do it, really." She frowned heavily, and her right paw bunched momentarily into a fist. "You know that you're the only one who ever said anything. Probably that's a combination of your class five girlfriend—I know about that too, don't worry; it's been in your file for a couple months now—and your... temperament. You don't challenge the system, which means you spend all the time you might've spent fighting irrationally deep in thought, instead. You and Ellis both are like that. Maybe somebody else has guessed, but... they couldn't bring themselves to think that we'd actually be that cruel."

"So I guess you know what happened last week, then?"

"Your final stand? Yeah, it was the internal bulletin this morning." The feline's face lost its grace in a moment of brief anguish. "I wish that I could do that. That I could've even tried... I just... I can't, Dr. Turner. I'm sorry. I don't even know why, I just... can't." She swallowed again, and her breathing started to catch. "I'm sorry," she repeated in a low whisper, almost lost in the white noise of the loading machinery below.

"I don't really think there's anything you could've done."

"Maybe not. But..." I could no longer tell what the cat was looking at, and from her expression it might not have been anything that I could have even seen. "Maybe it's better for you? We had to lie a bit. We said that you could take your immediate family, on the ark. For most people, that would've been true. Marriages of convenience... that was another matter. I probably would've had to deny your wife a ticket. I was going to try to tell you that, last week, but I couldn't find the strength to talk to you. I... you and... a hundred others, but... you're the only one who understands..." Her voice had taken on a pleading, desperate tone.

"There's no way out," I sighed. "They'll get you in the end, anyway, I... if I was foolish to think otherwise, Ms. Yun, then I don't see how you could be expected to do anything more."

"Ellie." She murmurred this so indistinctly that I couldn't hear it, at first.

"What?"

"Ellie. Please call me Ellie."

Yun had asked us to call her that on countless occasions. It had always felt like a transparent attempt at winning our sympathies. Now, it sounded like a blatantly, desperately human request, and I found myself wondering whether it might've been so all along. "Aaron, then. And... at this point, Ellie, the only thing I can say is that I think we've moved past the point at which men can judge us."

"Then who's left?" The tone of her voice suggested that she dearly wanted someone to step up to the task. Tears had begun to stain the yellow fur of her face, darkening it ever so slightly. "Oh, god, Aaron, who's left?"

"God, I guess," I said. Honestly I wasn't sure. "If you believe in him, then god can judge us. I don't, myself, but... you do, don't you?"

She nodded, and her expression was so plaintive that I put my arm around her. Yun collapsed against me, sobbing openly into my jacket. I held her, and tried not to join her. The rain was starting up again, lightly at first, and I could no longer hold back. At the edge of the gantry we wept, and the world wept with us.

*

We discovered, the next morning, that Ellie Yun had hung herself in her office, an occurrence that the official bulletin that came out at noon described as being related to family issues. I surmised that she had not been willing to wait for god to judge her, but of course this was yet another thing that I could discuss with no-one.

Worse than this, perhaps, was my realisation that I could no longer face Amy Buchanan. Whenever I thought of her, whenever I looked at her picture on my phone, I was confronted by my own worthlessness. I met with her a few times, as the days ticked by, but it became harder and harder to make conversation. She asked me what was wrong; I could not answer.

So far as I know, she never connected the dots between my question about doing the right thing, her promotion, and my change in mood. At least, she never said anything to me, and her mood didn't suggest any recognition. Absent this, I could only linger in my own misery.

Much of the lingering took place at night. Sometimes, I merely recalled my conversation with Adam and Barbara, their clinical voices and their smooth demeanour. Sometimes I saw them carrying out the act, and I awoke with Amy's screams lingering in my ears.

I tried to explain this to Jake Ellis, who was the only person I could really talk to. "I don't know what that says about me," I said. "Were you right? Was the whole thing a joke? The fact that I was in love, the fact that I wanted to settle down with her... Did I make it all up?"

"I don't think so. I think... well, I gather, at least, that your feelings for each other were genuine, weren't they? No, I think it's mostly that you've experienced this trauma, really, and you have nobody to share it with. Nobody to lean on. Well, me. I'm terrible at that, though, Aaron."

"You're good enough," I reassured him. "But alright, then, fine—what do I do? What am I even possibly supposed to do? We've got a week left until the launch. I don't know how to try to reconcile with her. I don't even know how to explain myself."

"Have you asked a therapist?"

"No. I've considered it, but the only ones I know work for the Project, and... word might get back, you know?"

"Perhaps it's best if you and Amy kept your distance?"

In the short term, this would not be a problem. I had snapped at her the previous night, over something completely inconsequential, and stormed from the café. I presumed that we would reconcile, though I hadn't even begun to think of how. "The terrifying thing for me, Jake, is that... I think I want to, you know? Maybe not forever—maybe it'll get better as time goes by. Right now it's like I had invested myself in this and it's just... it's just like it's turned against me. But that's taking the easy way out, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"And I shouldn't do that, right?"

Instead of answering me, he sliced up the reconstituted meatloaf that Ad Int had provided us for lunch, waiting until he was completely finished to answer. "I don't know." He looked up at me for a moment, as if looking through my eyes and into my tortured thoughts. "I don't know, Aaron. You're going to be on the same planet together for the rest of your lives. If what you had—for whatever reason—isn't going to overcome your self-doubt, then you might as well try to end it now, don't you think? It's not going to get better, Aaron, is it? Not soon. You're going to think about what you did, or... what you didn't do... that's going to last for awhile. If she reminds you of that..."

"Perhaps what we need is some time, then..."

He shrugged. "Time or distance, but with a week to go until the launch and being cooped up on those starships after that, it's not like you have all that much of either, is it?"

"What would you do, in my shoes?"

"Walk away," he said. "But that's my personality. I guess I would take a step back from it, try to look what it all meant. I'd tell her that I needed some time to put together my thoughts, and then I'd take it. That's what I'd do."

I nodded my thanks to Jake, and went back to my office to begin writing down my thoughts. Eventually it took the form of a letter; I worked and reworked it until I was satisfied. It didn't say much, although uniquely for my experience over the last few weeks, everything in it was the truth.

I apologised for my abrupt departure the previous night. I told Amy that I loved her, and that the time we had spent together had fundamentally changed my life for the better. I told her that I thought she would finally come into her own on Mars, and that I hoped she would make the best of it regardless of what happened to me. I told her that I needed to think about some things that had happened to me. I told her that I hoped, eventually, we could settle down. In slightly better spirits, I slid the letter into the mail courier slot and started packing up for the night.

I fully planned to follow through on what I'd said. I hoped that my change in mood was temporary—that eventually, I would be able to come to terms with what I'd done, to myself and for her. I sincerely believed what I'd told Jake, that it might get better with time. I told myself that I could wait.

I haven't seen Amy Buchanan since.

*

In the abstract, I rationalised that, whatever it had done to me, getting her the promotion and the ticket was a gift for her—a sacrifice that I had made, I suppose. It was a self-serving way of looking at it, and I admitted as much to myself willingly. But, at least in those first few weeks, it became unbearably painful to even think about her—so I didn't.

I know that she made it to Mars, though I don't know what ever became of her and we embarked on different ships. The Renaissance Project employees were all put on the second ark, which in stencilled letters plainly visible from the gangplank declared itself to be the Columbia. We had individual rooms, which I thought at first to be slightly wasteful until Dezirian told me that they would become the walls of houses and office-spaces when the arks were disassembled on Mars.

We strapped in to four-point harnesses, in a communal area towards the bow of the ship—in theory, if the launch went poorly, it would detach, and float down on massive parachutes. When I asked Jake how likely he considered a safe landing under such circumstances to be, he grinned and simply shook his head.

The launch itself, however, was quite simple. There was a deep rumble from far below us, and then the skyline, visible through the ship's broad portholes, started to move. The acceleration built, until we were being forcefully shoved down into our seats, but all of us remained pointedly fixed on the windows, as the buildings of the Renaissance Complex we had inhabited for five years gave way to the dull grey of the cloud cover, which whitened steadily until it broke away completely into a brilliant, glorious blue. At that moment, I fully apprehended what it meant to be reborn, and I understood why they had given the ship such inexplicably large windows.

Then the blue faded away, deeper and deeper until it became a stark, unforgiving black. The force on our bodies lessened, until it seemed that we might almost be floating, a sensation that lasted only for a few minutes before the stardrive kicked in with a thump that shuddered through the ship.

The Columbia was built like a skyscraper, with its bulkheads representing floors. We accelerated steadily, at a rate of about half of Earth's gravity—low enough to seem peculiar, but high enough to not be entirely uncomfortable. The goal was to prepare us, also, for life on Mars, where gravity would exert an even lessened influence.

It's strange, but I hadn't really thought much about Mars as a planet—instead of just a set of parameters for our simulations. Ad Int had discouraged us from staring too closely at Mars, lest we become disaffected by the magnitude of the task before us—so I didn't, really, even know exactly what it looked like. A series of probes had precisely metered the soil and atmospheric components, which was good enough for our modelling.

Vaguely, I knew that the Adhikari process involved directing asteroids and comets towards the planet. Beyond that, I had no clue how it was supposed to work, although Ad Int's propaganda said that tens of millenia of supercomputer-hours had been spent on precisely calculating the impacts and their results. We had been promised a certain atmosphere—like Earth's, but with an inverted, and imbalanced, ratio of oxygen and carbon dioxide. The fact that we were, even now, hurtling towards the red planet suggested that these promises had been kept.

"When you hit a planet with an asteroid," Jake said, looking over a tablet as we ate a very uninspiring lunch in the ship's galley, "you greatly disturb its internal geology. It would take centuries to restore its equilibrium."

"Alright?" What I was eating described itself, rather optimistically, as chili—which I ate because, with suitable infusions of pepper sauce, it at least had some flavour. Maria and I had been working throughout the voyage—nobody wanted to live inside the prefabricated habitats forever, and correcting this required starting the process of recreating life as early as possible. On the other hand, since the generators and atmospheric regulators for the domes were already operational, Jake's work was essentially done until we reached Mars. He'd been filling his time in studying the planet. "So the planet is out of equilbrium?"

"Well, they mitigated it by timing the various impacts so that they would dampen each other out. It's pretty clever, actually. But the tolerances... Christ, Aaron, you think you had it rough? The final asteroid had a mass of three million tons. They had a margin of error of about five minutes one way or the other before the impact either did nothing, or did more harm than good. They managed to get it within six seconds of its ideal impact time and less than a hundred metres off its optimal impact point. Three million tons! Oof, and we thought we had it bad."

"Are we going to be able to breathe?"

"Of course not. Not until you guys do your job and get the oxygen levels up. But... it's a question of months, now, not years or centuries. It's all pretty amazing. The liquid water component is already forty percent of its planned final level... temperature is... well, you'd need a coat, but it's not that bad. Good god, Aaron. Good god."

Focusing on my work had allowed me to recentre myself, and I was able to take Jake's enthusiasm in stride. It was, after all, quite impressive, what we'd done. We would be living in a massive geodesic, at first—essentially just like the settlements on Earth. But now, they were saying that, if the creation of life went well—and the advanced teams had already started seeding the lakes with bacteria and plankton—we might be able to leave the domes in a matter of months or years, not lifetimes.

Halfway through the journey, the ship flipped over, and after a brief pause we resumed our customary half gravity, applied now to our deceleration as we neared Mars and weakening steadily to lessen the shock when we finally landed. Everyone on the ark was counting the days—myself included. We watched on the monitors, or from the rearward viewports, as the planet drew closer—orange, darkened in places where water had turned the plains into shallow lakes. As we got closer, the barest hint of an atmosphere emerged. Finally they sounded the alarm for us to take our seats; Jake clapped me on the back and we strapped in, waiting for our descent.

It was rough, but otherwise uneventful. The ship's parachutes and rockets brought us to a landing with a solid thud; we skidded a few tens of metres over the Martian regolith, and then that was it: we were there.

Home.

*

Eden City had  been carefully prepared for our arrival; it was a massive geodesic, three kilometres in radius—though with very thin walls; the pressure differential was virtually nil, and the dome served only to shield us from the occasional dust storm and preserve our oxygen. At first, they set up alarms to go off if the dome's integrity was compromised, but after the first dozen times it became obvious that this did little but needlessly worry people; they turned the alarms off, and the engineers worked in silence.

With the exception of the much-lessened gravity, which at this point we scarcely noticed, life inside the geodesic was much the same as it had been on Earth. Beyond a handful of generators, oxygen was provided from the vast orchards and fields that had been cultivated—the soil was basic, and had required treatment, but the advance teams had done that the year before. Now we had fresh fruit and vegetables, and trees beneath which to stroll—under a blue sky, separated only by the equilateral triangles of the protective dome. It didn't require umbrellas or raincoats—this was maybe an even greater novelty than the gravity, for most of us. Even back in Olympia, the dome had been close enough that one could never forget about it, looking up. Here, it was three kilometers away—it darkened the sky slightly, but this effect was evenly spread, and you could essentially forget about its existence unless you were standing close enough to see it stretching up and out of the ground.

We had only limited contact with the other cities on the planet, which were a few hundred kilometres away; each of the ark fleets had landed near the outskirts of a separate dome. Mars was about a million souls, all told. The bulk of these came from the Asian arks, which had been engineered with the help of the world's largest economy; eighty thousand people from the Eurozone had joined us, with another hundred thousand embarking on the crowded UN arks. News from that city was particularly confusing; one got the impression that they had had less time to plan things than the rest of us had, and the chatter was frequently contradictory or unhelpful.

Not that we had much time to talk. Maria and I were constantly busy, supervising the translation of our plans from computer simulations to reality. We watched the atmospheric and soil conditions like a hawk, day by day, introducing each new plant; every new species of microscopic organism. They would've been completely invisible on Earth, but here the effect was miraculous. An open elevator stretched up to the ceiling of the geodesic dome, where there was a small observation post. From there, we could look out, and watch.

We ignored the vertigo, Wells and I, because the view was so astonishing. To either side of us, the air seemed to take a reddish haze, but above us was a clear blue sky, cloudless and untainted, beneath which the red plains of Mars stretched away. And radiating from the dome began to snake thin lines of green, growing thicker with each passing hour and day as the lichens and mosses started to spread. Wells had brought with her an old bottle of scotch; we opened it, toasting each other when we discovered the first sprout of grass, poking up through the Martian soil.

We were, in fact, up in the observation tower when the alarms went off—it had been some time since this had happened; we looked at each other anxiously as we descended the kilometres-long cable back to solid ground. Had the integrity of the dome been compromised more seriously? Had there been a fight? We could not have even guessed the magnitude of the disaster.

Contact with Earth had been sporadic, and neither Maria nor I had anyone left on the planet we cared about—we tended to ignore the news. On the ground, we discovered that everyone was packed into a dense crowd, surrounding the radio tower. We learned the news through sharp whispers and horrified expressions.

There had been another nuclear exchange.

We had a team with a telescope, monitoring the planet closely to keep track of atmospheric conditions. It had been of sufficiently high resolution that they detected the burst of light, blossoming over Denver. Then there had been others, swiftly, like camera flashbulbs illuminating the world's remaining cities. It had come to a slow, tapering halt, like god's own rainstorm, and then the planet was dark.

We didn't know why it had happened, and I suppose we've never really found out. The official word was that, with the governments having moved to another planet, Earth had become precipitously unstable. Only a few hours of news were transmitted to us after the bombs went off, before rioting closed the transmitters for good.

On Mars, the response was one of shock. We had never been planning on returning to Earth, of course, although a few people were waiting, or hoping, that more of her citizens would come to join us—a conceit I did not indulge, for obvious reasons. Now we became sharply, painfully aware that we were alone. We were self-sufficient, in everything but our souls; the quiet from Earth was overwhelming.

A lot of what we are, as a species, is bound up in the concept of our planet—more than you'd think, I imagine. Even the name terraforming harkens back—"to make something like Earth." Like a child, running away from home, we now found that what we had escaped meant more to us than our initial estimation. Having the rug pulled out from underneath us, then, was devastating. There were a few deaths that night—a couple in fights; the rest self-inflicted. The communal areas, too, were overcrowded; people gathering to drink what they had brought aboard the arks in their personal weight allotment, or partaking of the marijuana that occupied a few rows of the fields underneath the dome.

I found Jake Ellis at a bar near the edge of Eden City. It made its money selling crudely distilled liquor made within the geodesic—they'd planned ahead, Ad Int had, to take care of our more basic needs. The stuff, even heavily diluted, was vile; we settled for water.

"Now what?" I asked. I had to admit to myself that I was shocked; wounded, even. I came to Ellis because I thought he might have a more practical answer.

And indeed, at my question Jake merely shrugged. "I guess we go it alone. Nothing's changed, really, has it?"

I was torn. The easy answer was that, no, nothing had changed—there weren't any more arks coming before, and there weren't now. Something about the stark silence from Earth was still highly disconcerting, and the minimalistic official response from the Martian government—which was still Ad Int, for us; we hadn't yet figured out how to govern ourselves—was not terribly reassuring. "No. It just feels... different. Space feels a lot blacker, you know? The night sky..."

"Is beautiful," Jake said. "The night sky is beautiful. Did you ever think you'd be able to see so many stars?"

"No," I admitted.

"Take the things that life gives you in stride." The cat smiled, very thinly. "What is dwelling going to get you, anyway? There's nothing we can do to change it now."

I looked down at my fingers, at the long, dark claws—the keratin at the tips, which I was now wearing away against the counter of the bar, had come from Earth. As had I. As had Jake. "It's not only that. I've just been trying to think, you know... what happened? I thought all the nuclear arsenal had been locked up, or destroyed. I thought that was part of the agreement, when the Last World War ended. Am I misremembering?"

He shrugged again. "That's what they said, but... you can never be sure. Paranoid generals, maybe they kept a few in reserve. Figured that... governments come and go; treaties come and go. Only thing we have a real good handle on is fighting. Every few decades there's a fool of an inventor, who comes along and says that they've made war obsolete with their new weapon. It's never true—wasn't true with gunpowder, wasn't true with the airplane, wasn't true with the nuclear bomb. So maybe that happened—somebody finally wised up and realised they'd better keep a few atomics on hand to fix what somebody else started."

It was a lengthy rationalisation, and to some degree it made sense—perhaps some enterprising general had decided to squirrel away a few bombs for a rainy day. But then, given what we already knew... "I was just thinking that it's... I wonder if word leaked out about the way they did things... if that's where the riots came from. And if that's where the riots came from, it just seems... convenient."

"Convenient," Jake repeated. He took a long drink of his water, staring over my shoulder and through the window, out into the expanse past the triangles of the geodesic.

"Leaving them behind, with no government, no resources... it was a death sentence anyway, but... maybe there was enough infrastructure left that somebody might've tried to pay us back, you know? Maybe somebody would've rigged up a transmitter, and told everybody up here the truth. Maybe they would've put together another spaceship, with just enough payload for a warhead. So... maybe... maybe Ad Int decided to hurry the process along."

Jake looked at me, now, a long, lingering gaze that ended with a sag of the cat's shoulders. He didn't say anything—but then, the absence of the denial said more than enough.

*

Whether it was true or not, we kept going. This time, my listlessness was joined by the majority of the residents of Eden City. But even this ebbed, as the months drew onwards. Wells and I began to seed the first of the insects, and the larger flowering plants that would support yet more microfauna.

I started to get over my depression, if for no other reason than it seemed that I was the only one so afflicted. Even Jake Ellis, who had been a perpetual cynic on Earth, seemed to be warming up to his new life. He called me over from my office, around eight months after our arrival, a grin writ all over his face.

"Did you see?"

"No?"

His grin widened, and he grabbed my paw, dragging me around to the other side of the building and stretching out a finger to indicate something, off in the distance. "Look!"

For a few seconds, I had no idea what he was trying to get me to notice. Then I saw it—a thin streak of white, almost an afterthought, had threaded its way through the deep blue of the Martian sky. The first cloud. "Son of a gun," I said. It took me a moment or two to realise that I, too, was smiling.

"It's been awhile coming," Jake said. "The atmosphere's been getting more and more saturated—there were some rumours of cloud formation, over by the Indian colony. I think this is probably the first we can verify, though."

"Good." The water vapour content in the atmosphere had continued to rise, as the planet grew warmer and ice from the asteroid impacts and polar ice caps started to melt. It had only been a matter of time before the first cloud. Soon there would be more—and weather, swept up by the Martian winds. The hardest thing to get used to, overall, had been the lack of rain—without that white noise, life seemed difficult to fathom. I'd never thought that I might miss the sound, or the feeling of wet droplets, falling against my nose.

It was already possible to venture outside the geodesic, for short periods of time—the oxygen content was roughly equivalent to ten thousand metres of elevation, higher than Mount Everest back on Earth. Jake was one of the first twenty or thirty to take advantage of this, standing, leaning against the door of the dome and taking slow, measured breaths. Jake said he did this every day—trying to acclimate. Eventually, his lung capacity and the rising oxygen content of the atmosphere would meet in the middle.

Over a dinner of fresh salad—our meals were increasingly prepared entirely from Martian produce—I finally asked him about his change in mood. He had experienced something approaching a complete reversal of his normal cynicism; he was open, cheery, enthusiastic. "Don't take this the wrong way," I said, "but it's a bit of a change, isn't it?"

Jake grinned widely. He had just come back from outside the dome; his muzzle was rusty with blown dust. "It is. You don't even have to say it. I feel happier than I've been in years, you know? I think I'm happier on Mars than I've been... well, anywhere, really. I love it here."

"I'm trying to decide if I do, myself. It's why I'm asking you."

"I think the important thing to do is to figure out what Mars means to you, personally." He stabbed at a tomato, bringing it to his lips and biting down decisively. "Beyond good food, I mean. Beyond that. What does it mean to you?"

The salad was, I had to admit, delicious. Everything about Mars should've buoyed me—the skies were blue, the air was warm inside the geodesic, and our jobs had been going well. It would take years, still, until we could make that apple pie—but there was nothing to suggest that we would not, eventually, triumph. "Back on Earth, I used to be absolutely terrified of the future." I hadn't admitted this to very many people—he was the second, perhaps, I guess. "I used to be certain that the world was going to end at any moment. That was why I worked at Renaissance—'cause it distracted me. The work was so hard that I didn't have a chance to take a step back. It's sort of what I've been doing here."

"You haven't been enjoying this? The food? The new discoveries? Going for a walk and feeling the soil of a completely alien planet beneath your feet? Doesn't that animate you at all?"

"I haven't let it. It's still so functional to me. Sometimes, your damned grin is pretty infectious—like when there was that first cloud, or when you saw the ladybug on the outside of the dome. But the rest of the time I... I'm just trying to keep going. I keep thinking about what it took to get us here, and what we left behind, and..."

Jake put his salad to one side, and leaned forward, folding his paws over and resting his muzzle on them, his elbows braced at the edge of the table. "You want to know what Mars is to me, Aaron? I'll tell you. Mars is exactly what you just described. It's a chance to forget all that. Don't you see that, Aaron? On Mars, we have no past. There are no skeletons in the closet. There is nothing to regret. We have nothing but the present, and what it does for the future. That's it, Aaron. That's it."

"You're saying we just kind of forget Earth?"

"No. Oh, no. I say we cast the bitch off, that's what I say. All this sentimentality about how great Terra was? It was a shithole, Aaron. It was cancerous and grim and rainy and dying, and we were dying with it. And now it's gone, and so what? We'll go back in two thousand years, when the radiation has ebbed a little and maybe the atmosphere has started to clear up. We'll go back, and we'll see what's left, and it'll be like a museum. Boy Scouts will go there on a field trip, to see just how badly a species can fuck up. And, maybe, to learn how to do what it takes so that that never, ever happens again."

"We did some good things, too, on Earth."

For a moment, Jake rested his muzzle on one paw only, while the other pulled his wallet out. "Did I ever show you my ID card? No? Look at it." He passed it across the table.

It was a decent enough hologram; the cat's head marked on it turned in profile as I moved the card around. "What am I looking at?"

"The class. What class am I?"

"Two. Wait. Two slash eight? You're a probational two?"

"Was. And before that, I was just an eight. And before that I was a one. I was in school at Berkeley, studying computer science. Perfect PAAs, perfect grades. I had it made, Aaron. I had it fucking made." The quantity of the swearing, too, was new—he was jocular, relaxed.

"What happened?"

"My folks were... opposed, let's say, to the Ad Interim Democratic Authority. They ran an underground paper, tracking some of the worst excesses of AIDA and, well, they got on somebody's bad side. It was a free speech issue, but nobody cared about free speech. They were too busy just trying to get by. I was home for the summer, and... I was asleep, I remember, when there was the knock at the door. Ad Int goons, wanted to bring 'em in. I don't actually know how it happened—who was right or wrong, I just know that there was shooting. My dad was good with a gun; had an old .45 and some ammunition for it. When I came downstairs, one of the two cops was lying on the floor, wounded; the other was standing over this... this incredibly horrible scene. Just awful. Blood everywhere, all over my dad's notes and my mom's dishes. She'd been knocked back into the shrunk where we kept the fine china. They were already dead. The guy was shocked—he didn't see me creep down the stairs; didn't see me pick up the knife from the kitchen table. His partner tried to warn him, but he couldn't, not before I cut his throat."

"Jesus Christ..."

"The other guy, I just shot—didn't have to take the element of surprise, or anything. He didn't put up a fight. I considered running, anyway, but... wasn't any point in that. They were already starting to close in on the neighbourhood; somebody had called the cops when they heard gunfire. The judge recognised my age and the extenuating circumstances. Thirty years hard time; labour in a mine in western Pennsylvania. I only did a year and a half of that until somebody begged the judge to let me go on parole and work out at McChord. Reinstated to a provo class two."

"I guess I never knew that..."

"You never asked. But. You never wondered why I sat by myself? People find out; word gets around. You were so much a damned workaholic you never had the chance to gossip, and Wells is a pretty good soul so she didn't mind. But they knew. Anybody I ever gave my ID card to knew, as soon as they bothered to look up my file. They judged me. They gave me weird looks. My neighbours never invited me over to any community functions, and they made their kids walk faster past my house. But then I came here. And you know what, Aaron? Nobody cares. Nobody cares who you are—they only care what you do. Nobody asks what class I am. If I need ID, I just show my Project badge. That's what Mars is to me, Aaron—it's a blank slate. It's a chance to start over. It's the ability to have the first day in my life all over again, and to be awake for it. I wouldn't throw that away for anything, and Earth can burn to a cinder for all I care."

He didn't seem especially angry or judgmental; he grinned again, then, when I told him that might make it less attractive to the Boy Scouts. Then, after we finished dinner, he pulled me up, away from the bright lights of the settlement, to the door of the dome, and I stood out in the cold of the Martian twilight, watching a billion stars slowly come to life.

*

We could watch the oxygen content rise, until it was the equivalent of five thousand metres, then four thousand, then three. By a thousand metres, we could spend all day out of doors, and Maria and I did, walking the perimeter of the geodesic to count the number of clovers, and tag the locations of the first anthills.

Eden City rested at the edge of a cliff and, a hundred metres or so below it, water was slowly filling in an ancient Martian plain. This they unimaginatively called Eden Lake; we monitored the alkalinity carefully as we continued to add species into it, like master chefs monitoring a boiling soup. Eleven months after arriving on Mars, we released the first fry into the lake, and six weeks after that we spotted the first fish, snatching what I thought might've been a fly from the surface of the water. There was little shade in the lake—we'd had to go with our second choice of fish on account of this—but the water was all glacial, and it was icy to the touch. We trailed our toes in it anyway, stirring up red clouds in the silt.

Now that it was possible to live outside the geodesic—the geiger counters confirmed that the ambient radiation had dropped, and with the building ratio of oxygen we were growing closer and closer to life back at McChord—they were starting to disassemble the arks, breaking them into their component pieces. The reactors that had driven the stardrive they left—eventually, they would be buried and sealed in glass, to avoid contaminating the groundwater when it started to flow—but every bit of the rest of it was pulled apart.

Columbia became, over the course of a month or so, Columbia Township, a short distance from the geodesic. Enterprising farmers—the agricultural scientists from Cheyenne College, I guess—had started planting crops, in long straight rows; they were the first to move into the town. Next came the engineers, converting the huge photovoltaic sails that had once sprung from the hull; they arranged them to catch the greatest amount of sunlight—in time, as our industry developed, they would be mounted on motors, but for now they formed a great, dark sea.

After that, settlement was made generally open. They turned Columbia into shops and offices and apartments, and people slowly migrated away from the geodesic. A café opened, selling ersatz coffee at first—the Eurozone settlements had the best land for plantations, but we wouldn't have fresh coffee beans for some time yet. All the same I stopped by, and got to know the owner, a young woman from old Florida named Susan, quite well.

The industrial paradigm was completely different. We were small, still—though the first child concieved on Mars was born only ten months into our stay on the planet—and the massive factories that dominated the landscape on Earth had no use. Small mining concerns were exploring the Martian countryside, and found it richly abundant—but they sold their wares to tiny shops, with a handful of employees, who manufactured parts and consumer goods in a nearly artisanal fashion. It was like village life ten thousand years ago, and I thought I could get to enjoying it. So did Jake, who quit his job to start a business doing analytical work for farmers, planning the ideal crops and rotations. He had no competition, and he enjoyed his work—when I saw him, wearing a t-shirt and strolling along an irrigation pipe that ran into the lake, he almost seemed to glow.

It wasn't all happy, of course; there were deaths, a few suicides, still, as people realised that they couldn't completely leave Earth behind. I could never bring myself to find out where Amy had settled, but I still thought of her from time to time—of the way she smiled, and the way she looked when she argued with me, and the way her tail waved, the rings tracing subtle arcs in the air. She had potential, and Jake was right—it didn't matter who you had been, on Earth. If she had been illiterate when we started, I hoped that she'd learned something during our time together. Secretly, indeed, I hoped she might've become a librarian—the first public library opened early on in Eden's history, and moved swiftly to the town of Renaissance. That was the largest settlement, with around seventy percent of the North American fleet's population, and I rarely ventured there.

So sometimes, late at night, I left the dome, and sat at the edge of the cliff, watching the starlight reflecting on the still, calm waters of the lake far below. I thought about everything that might've been—everything I had gambled and lost; everything I had never had the will to try to gain in the first place. I thought about a little café, a haven from the deluge, and a thousand dreams I had indulged within it. I wondered if it was still there, or if it had burned when the rest of the world had seemed to. Would an archaeologist, a thousand years hence, find it? Would he know what it had been? Would he know what it had meant?

Or would it have crumbled away to nothing, as so much that seemed so important so often did?

I wanted to be alone because I had convinced myself that this was the only appropriate result—it was well and good to say that we should gain a second chance on a new planet, but the ghosts of the past are persistent, and I was haunted. I still woke up at night, sometimes, in a cold sweat, with my claws bunching up the sheets in primal terror, and when I thought of love, I saw myself in an empty room, with a bare lightbulb, and I heard a cold voice asking: "I wonder what she'll think about you, Aaron." I knew that I would never find the strength to seek an answer to that question.

Dirt crunched next to me, one night, and in my peripheral vision I saw a pair of legs join mine. "So this is where you've been spending your time, huh?"

I shrugged. "Sometimes it gets too loud, too bright down in Eden, you know? I feel like I have to get away."

Maria nodded. "That's because you're still living there. Have you considered moving out? They're opening up Columbia for general settlement. I'll bet it's a lot quieter, there. I'm sure you could move in if you wanted."

"Oh?"

"There was a notice about it in the office yesterday."

"Oh." I sometimes read the bulletins; more often I did not, for they were full of the banal trappings of a town trying to invent itself—committee meetings, parties, dances.

"I, uh... I've been considering moving out. Right now I still live in Eden, too."

"Columbia?"

"Yeah. I can walk up to Eden, or take the shuttle. The real question is just... where to live, you know? Different neighbourhoods, and... stuff. You don't have any preference, though, do you?"

"I haven't really considered it, I guess."

The shepherdess leaned forward, until she could just make out the buildings of Columbia below us. "I had kind of gathered. Most people are pretty excited about moving. But if you don't care... that much... you know, two-person class one housing in Columbia looks out on the lake. It's supposed to be pretty nice... quiet neighbourhood, at the end of that long walkway they've been building."

"It probably is pretty nice," I admitted. "Though they're pretty adamant about the two person thing, and I don't want to go through the hassle of finding a roommate."

"I figured you wouldn't want to go through all that, yeah. But I was kind of thinking that, well... I mean, if you wanted, I'm looking for a place too now, and..."

I arched an eyebrow up at her. "You really think you want to do that?"

She smiled, in that vaguely tender way she had sometimes. "I mean, it just seems pretty convenient. Are you planning on leaving the department soon?"

"Striking out on my own like Jake? No, I hadn't really planned on it. You're right, it would be pretty convenient. We could take the same shuttle."

"I could make sure you leave work at a reasonable hour." The shepherdess grinned at me, toothily, disarmingly. "And if you wanted to come up to the cliff here sometimes, of course, I wouldn't stop you..."

Jake would've told me to take the chance, I thought. Then I realised that this suspicion itself—that I would be best suited asking someone else for advice—was itself part of the problem. I stepped up and away from the edge of the cliff, giving Maria a paw to help her up. "Sure," I said. "Let's do it."

*

We moved into the apartment—a house, really; it shared only one wall with any neighbours—the following week. I had brought very little with me to Mars—some books, some old paperwork, and an antique Curta calculator Dezirian and I had found in one of the old offices at McChord. I admired the mechanical device for its elegance, and the solid sound it made as I turned it.

Wells, too, had travelled lightly. She had brought a guitar—lamenting, slightly guiltily, the space it had taken up, on the grounds that if any strings broke they could probably not be repaired. All the same she played it, when I asked her to; CPE Bach's Solfeggietto and, sitting on the edge of a rocky outcropping that protruded into the lake, Mauro Giuliani's Andante in C. The sound carried out and over the water, coming back to us in faint echoes off the cliff.

Our apartment was, however, dominated primarily by her mother's mosaic—it must, I realised on seeing it, have taken up all of her weight allowance that the guitar did not occupy. She confirmed this, with a pleased grin: three changes of clothes, the guitar, and the mosaic had been all she'd taken with her.

It was, however, absolutely gorgeous. And now, staring out and across the lake, we could match it up to the sunset on the Red Planet. She bought some clay from an artisan in Renaissance—Martian clay, the colour of rust—and fired it, breaking it into pieces to remake the landscape of the mosaic. At a lower resolution, but perhaps more striking for all that, it was a perfect picture.

As the skies grew ever cloudier, Maria and I continued our work diligently. I found that I retired to the clifftop more and more rarely; that I was increasingly content to spend my evenings in the apartment with Wells, reminiscing or making plans for the future. The plans became more complex as the skies did, until both were heavy, laden with potential.

Dezirian found this terribly amusing. "If I were any better a fortune teller," he said, sticking his tongue out at me, "I could've predicted the lottery numbers and retired early." Dezirian and his husband lived on the next block over; we saw them frequently, and when he retired from Ad Int to open a small store in Columbia's central square we made a point to buy as many of our groceries there as we could.

Still, though he fancied himself a fortune teller, neither Wells nor I were much impressed by his prognostication. If we were a relationship, neither of us knew when it had started. Eighteen months after arriving on Mars, we had yet to say that single, all-powerful word. It was more that we comforted each other; that we each understood the other's needs. And, sure, there was an inexorability to it all—I knew that I would ask her to marry me, in time, or she would ask me, and I knew that we would agree. But it was a slow, languourous affair. There was none of the quick, delirious courtship I had had with Amy; my heart didn't race. But it felt placid and content, and maybe that was really what I needed. I tell myself that, at least.

The sky was thick and grey, and we both felt as though the inevitable might happen at any moment. We hadn't been scheduled to work that day, and were out behind the apartment, tending a small garden—functional and restrained, as matched both our personalities. Herbs planted from seeds we got from Dezirian; sunflowers we borrowed from the Project's stock—being a government employee has to have some perks, after all. We both stopped at the same time—perhaps there was a sound, or a change in the smell of the air. Whatever the reason, we stood up, and I took her paws in a tight squeeze.

We waited.

The first drop, large and imposing, struck Maria between the ears. The second hit the soil with an audible thump, as did the third. Then the sky opened. It churned the dust into thick red mud and struck our ears so that they bowed under the weight. It drenched our clothes and our fur, and I wrapped my arm behind Maria's back, pulling her into a giddy, impulsive kiss. It was rain, cold rain; rain we had fled a thousand times before. Now it was music; all around us, doors opened as people stepped out, disbelieving.

I turned my muzzle upwards, into the downpour, and laughed.

---

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