Hearing no objection, she continued: “Oh, let me be clear. If it’s a real disease—something on the books, defined in the medical literature as such—then I will fix it. With no distinctions made between physical and mental disorders. No matter how many of those conditions each of you may be suffering from, I will fix them all before taking any other action. However.” And she smiled, and held up an index finger. “Once all that is done, each of us gets a free one.”

“Free what?” Tekla asked.

“One alteration—one improvement—of your choice, applied to the genome of the fertilized ovum that will grow into your child. And your child only. You cannot force it on any of the others. So, Camila, if you think it would improve the human race to get rid of its aggression, why then, I will search through the scientific literature for a way to reach toward your goal genetically. And likewise for the rest of you, and whatever changes you happen to think will improve the human condition. Your child, your choice.”

They all considered it, glancing at one another from time to time, each trying to gauge the others’ reactions.

Ivy glanced at the timer outside. “Are there any questions? We have eight minutes remaining.”

Luisa said, “I don’t think we need eight minutes.”

Ivy looked each of them in the eye, then turned toward the window and gave a thumbs-up.

Dinah’s eyes, seen through the glass of the window and the dome of her space suit’s helmet, pivoted to focus on that. She nodded.

Moira smiled and put her thumb up. This too was noted by Dinah.

Then Tekla. Then Luisa, Camila, Julia.

All eyes were on Aïda. She would not look back at them. She was, at bottom, very shy. “Whatever,” she mumbled.

“She needs to see your vote,” Ivy said.

“Really? You mean that I could single-handedly destroy the entire human race, simply by not putting my thumb up in the next seven minutes?”

Tekla pulled a folding knife from a pocket on her coverall and flicked the blade open. She kept it low, down in her lap, and pretended to clean a fingernail with it. “Either that,” Tekla said, “or population of human race suddenly goes from eight to seven, and we have unanimous decision.”

Smiling, Aïda thrust her hand out, thumb down.

“I pronounce a curse,” she said.

Luisa let out an exasperated sigh.

“This is not a curse that I create. It is not a curse on your children. No. I have never been as bad as you all think that I am. This is a curse that you have created, by doing this thing that you are about to do. And it is a curse upon my children. Because I know. I see how it is to be. I am the evil one. The cannibal. The one who would not go along. My children, no matter what decision I make, will forever be different from your children. Because make no mistake. What you have decided to do is to create new races. Seven new races. They will be separate and distinct forever, as much as you, Moira, are from Ivy. They will never merge into a single human race again, because that is not the way of humanity. Thousands of years from now, the descendants of you six will look at my descendants and say, ‘Ah, look, there is a child of Aïda, the cannibal, the evil one, the cursed one.’ They will cross the street to avoid my children; they will spit on the ground. This is the thing that you have done by making this decision. I will shape my child—my children, for I shall have many—to bear up under this curse. To survive it. And to prevail.”

Aïda swept her gaze around the room, staring with her deep black eyes into the face of each of the other women in turn, then looked into the window and locked eyes with Dinah.

“I pronounce it,” she said, then slowly rotated her hand until her thumb was pointed up.

DINAH PEELED THE DEMOLITION CHARGE AWAY FROM THE WINDOW. She had no idea what Aïda had just said. Nor did she especially care. It would be the usual histrionic Aïda stuff.

Several minutes remained on the countdown timer. She could have simply turned it off. But she felt like going for a walk. Whatever had just happened in the Banana looked unpleasant. She was tired of being cooped up with these people—even the ones she loved. She felt no great compulsion to rejoin them.

She unclipped the carabiner and let go of the lazily spinning torus. Her momentum carried her toward the wall of the crevasse. Long accustomed to movement in zero gee, she timed a slow somersault and planted her feet on the wall to kill her speed, then turned on the magnets in her boots and began hiking up the crevasse wall. The weak gravity made directions arbitrary. Walking “vertically up” a cliff was little different from walking “horizontally along” the canyon floor.

A tone sounded from the speakers in her helmet, alerting her that a voice connection had been made.

It was Ivy. “Going for a stroll?”

“Yeah.”

“Look, we just realized something.”

“Oh?”

“We all voted—except for you.”

“Mmm, good point.” Dinah glanced down at the countdown timer. The screen was getting more difficult to read, since she was nearing the terminator—the knife-sharp line between sunlight and shadow—and the bright canyon wall above her was reflecting from the screen. Tilting it for a better view, she saw that it was just about to drop through the sixty-second mark. “It’s okay, I still have a minute to make my decision.”

“Well, do you want to know what the rest of us agreed on?”

“I trust you. But sure.”

“We’re all going to try to have babies just like you, Dinah.”

“Very funny.” Dinah crossed over the terminator, and the sun rose. She raised her free hand and flipped down the sun visor on her helmet.

“Moira’s working on it now.”

“Is that why Aïda was being such a drama queen about it?”

“Exactly.”

Thirty-five seconds.

“What did you really decide?”

“One free gene change for each mommy.”

“Oh yeah? So what are you going to do? Make really smart little straight arrow bitches?”

“How’d you guess?”

“Just an intuition.”

“What about you, Dinah?” Dinah could hear the beginnings of anxiety in her friend’s voice. She looked down into the crevasse, saw humanity’s cradle welded helplessly into place, imagined for a moment throwing the demolition charge down on it, like a vindictive goddess hurling a lightning bolt.

She was thinking of Markus. Of the kids she should have had with him. What would they have been like?

Markus had been kind of a jerk in some ways, but he knew how to control it.

Really—she now understood—what had prompted her to slam the table and get up and storm out of the Banana a few minutes ago had not been Aïda at all. Aïda was provocative, yes. But more infuriating had been a slow burn that had started with Camila, and her remarks about aggression. Remarks that Dinah now saw as aimed not so much at Dinah as at Markus. She wished she could grab Camila by the scruff of the neck and sit her down in front of a display and make her watch the way Markus had spent the last minutes of his life.

Markus was a hero. It seemed to Dinah that Camila wanted to strip humanity of its heroes. She’d couched what she’d said in terms of aggression. But by doing so, Camila was just being aggressive in a different way—a passive-aggressive way that Dinah, raised as she’d been raised, couldn’t help seeing as sneaky. More destructive, in the end, than the overt kind of aggression.

It was this that had made her so flustered that she’d had to leave the meeting.

“Dinah?” Ivy said.

“I’m going to breed a race of heroes,” Dinah said. “Fuck Camila.”

“It’s going to be . . . interesting . . . sharing confined spaces with a race of heroes for hundreds of years.”

“Markus knew how to do it,” Dinah said. “He was a jerk, but he had a code. It’s called chivalry.”