Freya's voice came through the speakers clearly, even loudly. "We should resupply the ship and fly it back to Earth. If we succeed, our descendants will survive. There's no other option we have now where you can say that. It's too bad, but it's true."

The people on the plaza in Yangtze looked around at each other, silenced.

Her idea, which she explained in the days that followed, had originated with Euan. It was also something Devi used to mention, she said. It was a good idea, she said. A workable plan.

Clearly it shocked people. In all that was going on, it seemed too much to take in.

Freya herself spent most of her time cajoling, and in certain cases physically threatening, people to get out of the spokes and stay in the biomes. Teams organized by the security council took over at every spoke lock, and began to work like one-way valves, allowing people to leave the spokes but not to enter them. Eventually a point came where it was possible to persuade or coerce everyone still in the spine and spokes to descend into the biomes. People then gradually dispersed to their hometowns, or gathered with like-minded people to make further plans. The individuals responsible for the deaths of the settlers in the dock slipped among their supporters, and those groups resisted any calls for a further investigation of what had happened. Clearly no one had wanted people to die, it was often said. It had been an accident, a disaster. Time to move on. Time to figure out what to do next.

Thus in a continuing tumult of the spirit, with many still grief-stricken, still furious, all actions possible to them at this point were in effect dumped on the table and inspected at length. It did not seem like the right time for this, but there was no stopping it either. It was the only thing worth talking about, given their situation.

Freya's proposal was one of the actions discussed. That it was Devi's daughter proposing the idea gave it a certain weight that it might not have had otherwise. Devi was missed, her death a wound that had not healed; often people wondered what she would have done in the situations they now found themselves in. There was a kind of slippage in which since Freya had suggested the plan, it seemed to be Devi's plan. And though Freya was the first to speak the idea out loud, she hadn't been the first to think it. They had to do something, go somewhere. And it was undeniable that the solar system was at least a destination they could trust to sustain them, if they could get there.

Still, this was only one plan among several now discussed.

One faction, including their old friend Song, argued for sterilizing Aurora and proceeding there as originally planned. As the pathogen on Aurora was so poorly understood (Aram was coming to feel that Jochi had not actually identified it), this group was small, and its arguments seemed not to persuade many, especially among those who had been involved with the deaths of the returning settlers. Part of their justification for the dock disaster now lay in claiming that Aurora was irredeemably poisonous.

Speller and his faction continued to argue for going on in the ship to RR Prime. Heloise and a large group advocated inhabiting F's second moon. And quite a few began to assert that they could simply stay on the ship and use the various planetary bodies of the Tau Ceti system to resupply whatever they might lack, filling the metabolic rifts as they occurred. From the ship they could consider their options, and perhaps work on both Aurora and F's second moon.

In all the arguing, there were some people attempting to model the options. Unfortunately, their modeling work led most of the modelers to conclude that no plan available to them was likely to succeed. They had very few options; and none were good; and for the most part, they were mutually exclusive.

Bitterness and anger grew in people as the modelers' conclusions became known. The spine was emptied now, and under guard by people who had agreed to enforce the security council's edicts. The stern dock was physically sealed off. Jochi was sequestered in his ferry, held magnetically inside Inner Ring A. On one level the situation seemed calm; people had returned to their biomes and resumed their lives there, and were dealing with crops that had been neglected, and now had to be planted or harvested. Animals had to be cared for, machines had to be tended. But things were not well with them. Now more than ever before in the history of the ship, their isolation began to press on them. No one could help them govern themselves, nor make the decisions they now had to make. They were alone with all that. It was up to them.

Freya wandered the biomes as she had in her wandering years. She did not speak in the meetings she attended, or in the cafes where she had worked just a few years previously, but merely listened. She stood at the back of a room like the figurehead of a sailing ship, or sat in a corner, looking at each speaker mutely.

As she wandered, she inspected each biome with a close regard. How was it doing? she asked the inhabitants. What had it been good for, during the voyage out? Could it continue to help them to survive another 170 years of enclosure, if they decided to go back?

She found that some of the biomes that were doing the best in ecosystem terms were in fact the least useful to the ship's humans during a voyage. These biomes had been brought along to convey their species to the new world, to help terraform the planet they were to have established. As farms they were less useful. But it occurred to Freya that they could be altered to make them better farms. Going back to the solar system, they would not be needed as seed banks or arks.

Song's idea was this: proceed with the inhabitation of Aurora, by introducing to it their Terran bacteria and viruses, in the hope that after a war of microbiota, Aurora would end up habitable by humans. Some of their ecologists and bacteriologists thought that might work.

The group centered on Heloise and Bao called for them to inhabit and terraform F's second moon, the best of the remaining candidates for inhabitation in the Tau Ceti system. It was a Mars analog and had been their previous second option, and there was no reason it wouldn't work.

Speller continued to lead those who said they should move on, that they should refuel and resupply the ship and head to the star RR Prime. They would cross interstellar space for another eighty years, and try again in that system, which in many ways looked so promising.

Or they could stay in the ship and live in it in perpetuity.

Or they could go back to the solar system.

All these ideas were discussed endlessly, in every possible iteration.

As they talked, there grew a sense among many of them that if they stayed in the Tau Ceti system, they could combine some of these options, which were not in the deepest sense mutually exclusive. They could try again on Aurora, with test inoculations of bacteria and so on, while proceeding on F's second moon; and refurbish the ship while living on it; and inspect and explore F's first moon.

Options, yes; just no good ones, others said. Different ways of running out the string; different ways of going extinct, after a long, fruitless struggle, trapped in chambers even smaller than the ship's biomes.

But they could live in the biomes!

But they couldn't live in the biomes!

Freya spoke very little in public, but in private she continued to assert that their best chance would be to resupply the ship and head back to Earth. It was the one destination they had where they knew their descendants could survive.

"But of course," Speller said, dropping by the little cafe in Olympia where Freya was staying the night. "But what's the point of that? Why did we ever leave? Why have we gone through all this, we and all our ancestors and descendants, if not to make it work here?"

Freya shook her head at her old friend and said, "They never should have left."

They talked and talked and talked. Twenty-four biomes, ten thousand conversations. Talk talk talk. As they talked, it began to come clear to them that they had no very effective method of governance, when it came to making decisions as a group. Had humans ever had such a thing, they asked themselves, since leaving the savannah? Since congregating in cities? They could not be sure. The histories suggested maybe not.

In the ship, ever since the troubles of Year 68, the four generations that followed had been careful to work within the system established after that upheaval, always deliberating peacefully toward consensus on all important decisions. Now even the definition of consensus was contested, and they came to realize that their political system, simple as it was, had never faced a crisis. Suspended in their voyage as they had been, there had never been anything to choose, except methods of homeostasis.

Now the test was upon them, and very quickly cracks in their facade of civility began to appear. Where there is faction, there is conflict; where there is conflict, there is anger. And anger distorts judgment. So now they were getting angry with each other, and thus scared of each other. And anger and fear were not the right emotions for the situation facing them.

In the wake of the events of Year 68, the survivors had settled on a government of representative democracy, based on a constitution setting out their political first principles. The first principles were to be upheld in everything they decided to do. More than anything else, the survivors understood that they needed to behave in ways that kept a balanced flow of elements going in their closed life-support system. To do this, their population had to be capped at no more than 2,152 people. There were also population caps for all the rest of the mammals on board. Within these carrying capacities, a maximum amount of individual human autonomy was to be maintained. But this necessarily did not include the right to reproduce; nor did it include free movement around the ship, at least in terms of residency. Each biome had its own particular carrying capacities. Nor could certain jobs and functions be neglected by the totality of the group. Any number of jobs simply had to be performed, or the ship would not remain in working balance, able to support them over the long haul of interstellar solitude.

So habitation, reproduction, education, work: all expressed ecological necessities. They had to attend to these or go extinct; that was just the way it was, that was reality. Everyone was taught that in childhood. There were limits, there were needs. Every person in the ship was part of the team, integral to society, necessary to the survival of the group. Everyone was equal in that respect, and had to be treated the same as everyone else.

Only within that set of first principles, after fulfilling the necessities, could they find and exercise what liberties were still left. Some said that what remained was trivial. But no one had any suggestions as to how to give themselves more liberties than what they had, given their constraints. Duty first.

So, now each biome's population met in a town meeting. Anyone who wanted to speak, spoke.

This lasted for two weeks, after which a series of polls and votes were held. They polled themselves to get an accurate count on the questions at hand. Who preferred what course of action? How many for each, and how strongly did they feel about it?

Then in most biomes there was a vote for representatives, one representative for every hundred people. In most towns there was no campaigning. People voted anonymously. Those elected who also agreed to serve then spoke to their neighbors about what they should say in the general assembly. In other biomes they chose representatives by lottery, and those selected had to promise to speak for the majority opinion in their biome; or, in some, merely to do what they thought right.

These representatives then met in Costa Rica, in the town of San Jose, and discussed matters in a general conference. This was an open-ended conference, the idea being that when everyone had discussed matters thoroughly, a poll would be taken of the entire population and then the representatives would be tasked with executing the will of the majority of the people. If it turned out to be close to a split decision, which they decided meant any minority vote larger than 33 percent, then they would work on ways to ameliorate the situation by finding some kind of middle ground, if they could. Successive votes would be taken, until a supermajority of 67 percent, or hopefully more, agreed on a course of action. At that point the minority would have to accept the judgment of the majority.

That was the theory.

While trying to come to a decision, they agreed to ask the ship to relocate itself to Tau Ceti's Planet F, and enter into orbit around F's second moon. This was to make a reconnaissance, to judge that moon better for habitability.

As ship made this transfer, which took seven months following a Hohmann path of least energy expenditure and used 2.4 percent of ship's remaining fuel supply, the policy discussion raged on.

Meanwhile, many biologists on board studied samples of the Auroran pathogen, which Jochi kept in a sealed room in his ferry, a room that he had turned into a clean lab, tele-operated by him. There were still those who supported Song's idea that they could learn to live with this Auroran thing if they could understand it better. So the studying of the pathogen went on, even though they never settled on what to call it. Vector, disease, pathogen, invasive species, bug; these were all Earthly terms, and Aram for one regarded them as various kinds of category error. "The best we can do in terms of terminology," he said, "is to call it the alien."

That it definitely was. The individual proteinlike samples Jochi had isolated, and put into an electron microscope that was sent over to him, were so small that it was hard to understand how they could be alive. They were certainly alive in some senses of the term, since they reproduced, but it was hard to tell how, or what else they did. In this they shared qualities with viruses and their viris, prions, and RNA; but in other ways they did not seem similar to any of these entities. Processes were happening within them at nanometer scale, even picometer scale, but what was small enough for them to eat? How could they eat? Or to put it more simply, where did they get their energy? How did they grow? Why did they grow so quickly when they got inside a human?

These were unsolved mysteries, and might remain so for a long time.

Meanwhile F's second moon, now named Iris by the proponents of settling there, proved to be an almost completely water-free rock ball, as suspected. Iron core, magnetic field; dry except for a little frozen comet debris on its surface, which was heavily cratered, also indented by two long, straight canyons, possibly the result of early fractures. Somewhat of a big Mercury by analog, appearance, and possibly history; its heavy core testified, perhaps, to a collision in its early days that had stripped off a lighter outer shell of rock, which had subsequently fallen onto F rather than be completely recollected out of orbit by Iris. This anyway was the best originary model to explain the data. Its 1.23 g was rather discouraging, but it had a little rotation, and it was not completely tidally locked to F, which fact also supported the idea of an early collision. It thus had a day that was 30 days long; a month orbiting F that was 20 days long; and F's year was 650 days long. F's orbit was 1.36 AU from Tau Ceti, its insolation from Tau Ceti 28.5 percent that of Earth's. Truly it was at the very outer edge of the habitable zone, but still, it had a lot of sunlight to work with.

The lack of water on Iris, which used to be seen as a problem, now reassured people. Water was now felt to be dangerous, as it seemed likelier than ever that liquid water anywhere would harbor life of some kind, and create problems. The sample size of data supporting this conclusion remained very small, consisting as it did of Earth, Europa, Ganymede, Enceladus, and Aurora; but Aurora had been traumatic. It was even suggested that the cometary ice on Iris could be removed if there were any suspicion that it contained the Auroran pathogen.

Others pointed out that the ice some proposed to import to Iris, to give their new world a hydrosphere and atmosphere, would be ice from F's Moon 1, or cometary ice from Tau Ceti's crowded Oort cloud. So if ice anywhere was potentially a home for life, then they could never escape that.

But there was no reason to think that was the case. It was generally agreed that it was liquid water that was likely to hold life, not ice. A lot of ice had condensed out of the original cloud of interstellar dust that had formed Tau Ceti, and there was no reason to think life had ever had a chance to begin in that ice. So it was assumed they would be safe if they ended up giving Iris a little ocean composed of imported cometary ices.

So: hydrate Iris, introduce Terran genomes, occupy. F itself would then be a gorgeous marble in Iris's sky, a gas giant full of volatiles they would surely need. A giant ball of feedstocks right next door, and its huge beauty helping them occupy Iris by way of its reflected sunlight, which would illuminate all of Iris as Iris slowly turned, and not just one hemisphere, as it had been on Aurora. Really, it looked very promising.

But how long would it take to terraform Iris?

Nothing but guesses could answer this question, and the guesses depended on many assumptions one necessarily had to enter as numbers into one's models. The median times calculated by the models was privately judged by the ship to be about 3,200 years, with outlier estimates ranging from 50 to 100,000 years. Obviously the models and parameters chosen made quite a difference. In fact the problem was poorly constrained. Still it seemed fair to assume that the median estimate had some kind of theoretical validity.

Many people in the ship didn't want to wait three thousand years, or however long it might take to terraform Iris. Others didn't think they could last that long. Others didn't think it would take that long. "The models must be wrong," some said. "Surely once life got started on a planet, it would change things fast. Bacteria reproduce very quickly in an empty ecological niche."

"But on Earth it took a billion years."

"But there was only archaea on Earth. With the full suite of bacteria it would go fast."

"Not where there isn't an atmosphere. Bacteria on rock, exposed to the vacuum, doesn't grow very fast. It mostly dies, in fact."

"So we need self-replicating robot machinery to make soil, to make air, to add water."

"But the selfreps need feedstocks. Collecting the necessary materials can only be accomplished by a first generation of robots, and that won't be fast."

"We can print printers and thrive! It can be done. We can do it. Our robots can do it."

"It's going to take too long. In the meantime we'll die out. Evolve at differential rates, and diverge right inside our own bodies. Zoo devolution. Codevolution. Sicken and die and go extinct. Sicken and die and never once leave this ship."

"So that maybe," Freya kept saying, "we need to go back home."

The day came when they tried to make a choice.

Strange, perhaps, to wake up one morning, get dressed, eat breakfast, all the while knowing that one was going off to a meeting that would change the world. Decisions are hard. Everyone has the halting problem. Freya sat next to Badim at their kitchen table, restlessly pushing around cut strawberries with a fork.

"What do you think will happen?" she asked.

Badim smiled at her. He looked unusually cheerful, and was eating heartily, chomping on pieces of buttered toast and washing them down with milk.

"It's interesting, eh?" he said between bites. "Up until today, history was preordained. We were aimed at Tau Ceti, nothing else could happen. We had to do the necessary." He waved his bread in the air. "Now that story is over. We are thrust out of the end of that story. Forced to make up a new one, all on our own."

They walked together to the tram station, then got on a crowded tram car and headed east to Costa Rica. In the biomes along the way the tram stopped and more full cars were linked to it, first in Olympia, then Amazonia. Mostly the people in the tram cars were subdued. People looked pensive. 102,563 conversations had been recorded in the previous month that were about this topic, and there were conflict markers in grammar and semantics in 88 percent of these conversations, which were inevitably held mostly between people well-known to each other.

Now they were done with that. 170.170: the general assembly called for in Costa Rica brought 620 people to the Government House plaza. Most of the rest of the ship's population watched the assembly on screens throughout the ship, but another meeting, called "in opposition to the tyranny of the majority," drew 273 people to the plaza in Kiev, in the Steppes.

San Jose's Government House plaza occupied much of the middle of town. It was surrounded by four-and five-story buildings, all faced with white stone cut to a fussy pattern of interlocking rectangles. The overall impression was of some stage set imitating a European capital, but that could be said of many real European capitals, so it was possibly based on a real square somewhere back on Earth. Ship saw resemblances to Vienna, Moscow, Brasilia.

Now about a third of the population of the ship stood in the plaza, listening to speakers rehash various aspects of the matter at hand. People clumped in cohorts based mostly on home biomes. After the speeches began, the flow between groups was minimal. Some people sat on the smooth flagstones of the plaza; others had brought folding chairs and stools; still others stood. There were some open-walled dining tents to provide food and drink, and what circulation there was in the crowd mostly led to and from these tents.

One sequence of speakers described the plan to shift their efforts to F's second moon, all of them now calling it Iris. They would establish a base on its surface and move down into that base as they built it to full size. They would add water to the surface by way of a comet bombardment, which would also create the beginnings of an atmosphere. The self-replicating robots and factories would build shelters, break volatiles into gases, create an atmosphere and soil, and shape the growing hydrosphere as it fell from the sky. They would introduce their bacteria to this virgin surface, and it would quickly expand to fill this truly empty ecological niche. After the archaea and bacteria and fungi were established on the ground, they would help to bulk up the atmosphere and to create the soil, and soon further plants and animals from the starship could be introduced, in waves of succession similar to what had occurred in Terran evolution, and the planet terraformed thereby in rapid order, at a speed literally a million times faster than it had happened naturally on Earth: meaning three thousand years instead of three billion. With the chance of doing it in three hundred years also very real, if things went faster than expected.

The various components of this plan were described in some detail by Heloise, and in this effort she was joined by Song. They had joined forces, Song having agreed to the Iris plan with the idea that as an extension of it, her plan for returning to Aurora could be pursued. For now, she agreed with Heloise that terraforming Iris was the best plan, whether interim or permanent.

People stood or sat in silence, listening.

Then Aram was invited to the podium. He stood for a moment staring down at the people, then spoke.

"The problem is this: the spaces we have available to live in are too small to survive in for three thousand years. The main problem is the differential rates of evolution between the various orders of life confined to the space. Bacteria generally mutate at a rate far faster than larger species, and the effect of that evolution on the larger species is eventually devastating. This is one cause of the dwarfism and higher rates of extinction seen in island biogeography studies. And we are an island if there ever was one. And this Iris is not an Earth twin, nor an Earth analog. It is a Mars analog.

"There are also chemicals we need that can't be found on a rock planet that has never harbored life. In short, the supraorganism that we all constitute together can't survive over that long a time in the confinement we would be subjected to."

It was Speller who picked up one of the other microphones on the podium. "How can we know anything except by trying it?"

Aram said, "The modeling involved here has been tested, and we can state certain ecological outcomes as very likely, even though the likelihoods decrease if you push them farther out in time. You are very welcome to review the studies involved. We have made them public at every point."

"But some of the scenarios show the terraforming as succeeding, correct?"

Aram nodded. "There are some scenarios that succeed, but they occur at a rate of only about one in a thousand."

"But that's fine!" Speller smiled broadly. "That's the one we'll make happen!"

Grimly Aram faced the crowd. The silence in the plaza was such that one could hear the food orders in the corner, and the children playing, and the skreeling of the seagulls wheeling over the rooftops between the plaza and Costa Rica's salt lake.

Speller and Heloise and Song made more rebuttals to Aram. Those who agreed with Aram formed a separate line to speak, and the organizers of the assembly began to let people from the two lines speak in alternation, until it became clear from the muttering from the crowd, including even short bursts of laughter as each new talk began, that the effect of the alternation was unhelpful. Contemplating two starkly different futures back and forth was perhaps too much like a debating society exercise, but because the topic debated was life or death for them, the back-and-forth engendered first cognitive dissonance, then estrangement: some laughed, others looked sick.

Existential nausea comes from feeling trapped. It is an affect state resulting from the feeling that the future has only bad options. Of course every human faces the fact of individual death, and therefore existential nausea must be to a certain extent a universal experience, and something that must be dealt with by one mental strategy or another. Most people appear to learn to ignore it, as if it were some low chronic pain that has to be endured. Here in this meeting, it began to become clear, for many of those present, that extinction lay at the end of all their possible paths. This was not the same as individual death, but was instead something both more abstract and more profound.

The crowd got restless. New speakers brought forth boos and catcalls, and people began arguing in the crowd. Some began to leak away from the edges of the gathering, and the plaza began to empty, even as the speakers on the central dais talked on. Those who left went away to complain, get drunk, play music, garden, work.

Those organizing the event consulted with each other, and decided not to call for a vote of the assembly at that time. Clearly the time was not right, nor the venue, nor the method of a voice vote or a tally by hands. Something more formal and private would be needed, something like a mandatory vote, using secret ballots. Even this could not be decided at that bad moment, in the waning sun of Costa Rica's hot afternoon, with people streaming away into the streets and toward the trams. In the end they called the meeting short, announcing that another would be held soon.

In the week that followed the meeting, fifteen people committed suicide, a 54,000 percent rise in frequency. Those who left suicide notes often spoke of their despair for the future. Why go on, given such a situation? Why not end it now?

An ancient proverb of Earth's first peoples: every path leads to misfortune.

A proverb from Earth's early modernity: can't go on, must go on.

This was a human moment that never went away. An existential dilemma, a permanent condition. For them, in their particular situation, it came to this: When you discover that you are living in a fantasy that cannot endure, a fantasy that will destroy your world, and your children, what do you do?

People said things like, Fuck it, or Fuck the future. They said things like, The day is warm, or This meal is excellent, or Let's go to the lake and swim.

A plan had to be made, that was clear to all. But plans always concern an absent time, a time that when extended far enough into the future would only be present for others who would come later.

Thus, avoidance. Thus, a focus on the moment.

Still, in every meeting place, in every kitchen, the subject either came up or was avoided and yet still hung there. What to do? They were inside a ship, sailing somewhere. A destination had to be chosen. Somehow.

Freya and Badim spent much of their time in their apartment, waiting for the assembly's executive group to call for a referendum. Aram was again part of the executive group, and so they were hopeful that things would go well and get resolved soon, one way or the other. The security council had been suspended when all its functions were returned to the immediate business of the executive council.

Freya sat looking at her father, his round, brown face, the drooping bags under his eyes. He looked much older than he had just two years before. None of them looked the same now. Ever since the death of the Aurora settlers, or even since Devi's death, they had changed, and now appeared to be aging faster than they had during the voyage out. A certain look was gone from them: possibly a sense of hope. Possibly a feeling that things made sense, had meaning.

Two weeks after the assembly in San Jose, the executive group called for the referendum to be held the following day. Voting was mandatory, and any who refused to vote would be fined by punitive work penalties. In fact this did not look like it was going to be a problem; it seemed as if everyone was anxious to cast a vote.

The ballot had been arranged into three possible choices, with all the possibilities that kept them in the Tau Ceti system bunched as one choice. So the three were Tau Ceti Onward to RR Prime Back to Earth Voting closed at midnight. At 12:02 a.m. the results were posted: Tau Ceti: 44% Onward to RR Prime: 7% Back to Earth: 49% The roar of voices filled the biomes for many hours after that. Comments ranged as widely as could be imagined. In the following day, anything that could be said about the situation was said. It was a pluripotent response, an incoherence.

The next morning Aram dropped by Badim and Freya's apartment and said, "Come with me to a meeting. We've been invited, and I think Freya is the one they really want."

"What kind of meeting?"

"Of people trying to avoid trouble. The referendum has by no means given anyone a mandate. So there could be trouble."