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.”

Freya and Badim went with him. Aram led them down to a public building by Long Pond, into a pub and up the stairs to a big room with a window overlooking the water.

There were four people there. Aram introduced Freya and Badim to them—“Doris, Khetsun, Tao, and Hester”—then led them over to a table and invited them to sit. When they were seated, Aram sat beside Freya and leaned over to prop a screen on the table, where Badim could see it also.

“The referendum was too close,” Aram said. “The most votes were cast for our preferred option, but we’ll need to convince more people to join us. Convincing them might be easier if we make it clear that the ship can be made as strong as it was when it left the solar system.”

Aram brought up charts on the table screen. Badim got out his reading glasses and leaned closer to read it. He said, “What about our basic power supply, that would be my first question.”