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 cafés 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 café 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 façade 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.