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again to Carol Jeanne. But, having said their goodbyes, neither said another word to the other. They only embraced once more and silently broke apart. Irene raised her fingers in farewell as the rest of us moved away from her and headed for the tram that would take us out to the spacehopper on its extra-long runway.
    Carol Jeanne stoically refused to look back, but that’s what I was for. I sat on her shoulder, my hand in her hair, and watched Irene every moment until she was out of sight. I knew that in a few weeks or months, Carol Jeanne would ask for the memory. I would have long since stored the scene on the Ark’s master computer, exactly as I saw it; she would play it out on the holographic display of her terminal, zooming in for a close-up of her sister’s face. Then she would see what I had seen: Irene smiling, waving, then bringing her hand to cover her eyes as she wept.

CHAPTER TWO
O FF E ARTH
    The shuttle was just like the suborbital space cruisers that ran the one hour intercontinental express routes. The same fetishistic cleanliness. The same simple opulence that made you think you were flying to meet God instead of just going to another conference. Except that this time, instead of rising up out of the thick part of the atmosphere only to descend later over New Delhi or Zanzibar or Porto Alegre, we would go all the way up to Grissom Station.
    People took the shuttle to Grissom Station for only three reasons. Half were tourists with so much money that they thought it was worth the expense of this flight just so they could look down at Earth from a window in space instead of the much larger and clearer view through a two-meter hi-def on the wall at home. They got bored in a few minutes and spent the week till the next shuttle getting drunk or laid or underfoot.
    Most of the others were serious people bound for the moon or Mars or the asteroids—scientists, engineers, or half-crazy high-tech manual laborers who would work in low gravity for five years and come home with enough money to pay cash for a Tokyo apartment or a Pacific island and they’d never have to work again as long as they lived, which might not be all that long after the damage that the time they spent in low gee did to their bodies.
    And then there were the people like us, the craziest of all, collecting ourselves at Grissom so we could take the long voyage out to the Ark, in its perpendicular orbit, now only a few months away from its launch point at its farthest point from the planetary orbits. We arkoids, as they called us on Grissom, were the ones who were going to leave the solar system. If we found a habitable planet and established a colony, we’d never come back. And if we gave up and headed home, relativity would have made centuries pass on Earth—we’d come “home” to a planet that had passed through so many changes we’d probably recognize nothing at all.
    Two hundred years ago Britain was still trying to wipe out the African slave trade, Spain had just lost her American colonies, and Russia and the Ottoman Empire were still maneuvering for control of the Black Sea. Ships were still made of wood, steam was the hot new technology, and no one in the world had yet heard the triumphant sound of a toilet flushing. What would Earth be like two hundred years from now?
    Maybe they would have found a way to give speech to people like me. Maybe, in the name of progress, the world would be filled with mentally-enhanced capuchins, baboons, possums, pigs, and dogs, all eagerly and obediently doing everything their creators demanded of them. All the work of the world being done by brilliant little beasts; all the information creatively stored in our oversized genetically-engineered brains.
    Two more centuries, and humanity would finally have got what they coveted all along: slavery without shame. No, they were enhancing the lives of their little beasty servants.
    But I’m getting ahead of myself. My thoughts didn’t go that far at the