Most of them did not return to space for the starship’s departure; they had said their good-byes already, made their break into their new lives. They did not even know the people going back very well anymore.

But some came up to say good-bye. They had relatives who were leaving, people to see one last time. They wanted to say good-bye, farewell.

There was one last gathering in the plaza of San Jose, scene of so many meetings, so much trauma.

They mingled. Speeches were made. People hugged. Tears were shed. They would never see each other again. It was as if each group were dying to the other.

Anytime people do something consciously for the last time, Samuel Johnson is reported to have remarked, they feel sad. So it appeared now.

Freya wandered the crowd shaking hands, hugging people, nodding at people. She did not shed tears. “Good luck to you,” she said. “And good luck to us.”

She came upon Speller, and they stopped and faced each other. Slowly they reached out and held each other’s hands, as if forming a bridge between them, or a barrier. As they conversed, their clenched hands turned white between them. Neither of them shed tears.

“So you’re really going to go?” Speller asked. “I still can’t believe it.”

“Yes. And you’re really going to stay?”

“Yes.”

“But what about zoo devolution? How will you get around that?”

Speller looked around briefly at Costa Rica. “It’s one zoo or another, as far as I can tell. And, you know. Since you’ve got to go sometime, I figure you might as well do something with your time. So, we’ll try to finesse the problem. Figure out a way to get something going here. Life is robust. So we’ll see if we can get past the choke point and make it last. It’ll either work or it won’t, right?”

“I guess so.”

“Either way, you’re dead after a while. So, might as well try.”

Freya shook her head. She didn’t say anything.

Speller regarded her. “You don’t think it will work.”

Freya shook her head again.

Speller shrugged. “You’re in the same boat, you know. The same old boat.”

“Maybe so.”

“We just barely got it here. If it weren’t for your mom, we might not even have made the last few years.”

“But we did. So with the same stuff to start with, we should be able to get back.”

“Your great-great-great-grandchildren, you mean.”

“Yes, of course. That’s all right. Just so long as someone makes it.”

Again they regarded each other in silence.

Speller said, “So it’s good, really. This split, I mean. If we manage it here, then we’ve got a foothold. Humanity in the stars. The first step out. And if we die out here, and you make it back, someone has made it out of this situation alive. And if we both survive, all good. If either one succeeds, then someone has survived, one way or the other. If we both go down, we gave it our best. We tried to survive every way we could think of.”

“Yes.” Freya smiled a little. “I’ll miss you. I’ll miss the way you think about things. I will.”

“We can write each other letters. People used to do that.”

“Yes, I suppose.”

“It’s better than nothing.”

“I suppose. Yes, of course. Let’s write.”

And together they scratched onto the flagstones of the plaza, the traditional saying for this moment, whenever it came to people parting ways, people who cared for each other:

Wherever you go, there we are.

Now the time had come for the stayers to leave the ship, enter their ferry, descend to Iris. As only a few score had come up to say good-bye, it was possible for them all to leave together.

A silence descended over them. The stayers looked back at the backers, as they passed through the lock door to the ferry; or didn’t. Some waved, other hunched their heads. Weeping or not.

Those who remained stood and watched, weeping or not. A peaceable schism was being enacted. It was an unusual achievement, as far as we could judge from the historical record; and maybe it was partly our achievement; but it appeared that it came at the cost of some kind of pain, a quite considerable pain, social rather than physical, and yet fully felt, quite real. Social animals, in distress. This was what we saw at this moment of parting. Divorce. A successful failure.

When Speller came to the lock door and looked back, Freya raised her hand and waved good-bye. It was the same wave as the one she had made when they were youths, and she had left Olympia for the first time. The same gesture, separated by thirty years. A persistence of bodily memory. Whether Speller remembered it or not was not possible to determine.

Soon the stayers were in their ferry, and the ferry detached and began its descent to Iris.

Those remaining in the ship were left on their own. They looked around at each other. Almost everyone aboard was in the plaza: 727 people, with a few elsewhere in the ship maintaining various functions, or avoiding the parting of the ways. It was quite visible now, how much smaller a population the ship now had. Of course ship itself was smaller now, with Ring A and about a third of the spine removed, and orbiting now on the other side of Iris.

Some looked heartened in this moment of schism, others frightened. There was a general silence. A new moment in history had come on them. It was time to head home.

We began burning the new stock of fuel, and soon left the orbit of Iris, left F’s gravity well; not that long after, we left the Tau Ceti system. Sol was a small yellow star in the constellation Boötes.

As the communications feed from the solar system had never ceased, it was straightforward to lock on to this signal and use it to calculate our proper course back, at an angle that would aim us where Sol would be in two centuries. The resupply of deuterium and helium 3 would burn at a rate that would accelerate the ship for twenty years, at which point we would be moving toward Sol at one-tenth the speed of light, just as we had left it. Most of the fuel would then have been burned, but we would save some for maneuvering when we closed in on our destination.

We transmitted a message from our people, sent back to Sol:

We’re coming back. We’ll be approaching in about one hundred and thirty years. In seventy-eight years from your reception of this message, we’ll need a laser beam similar to the one that accelerated us from 2545 to 2605 to be aimed at our capture plate, to slow us down as we return to the solar system. Please reply as soon as possible to acknowledge receipt of this message. We will be in continuous communication as we approach. Thank you.

We would hear back in a little under twenty-four years, therefore around our year 214, depending, of course, on how quickly our correspondents or interlocutors replied.

Meanwhile, it was time to accelerate.

5 HOMESICK

On the first night after ignition, all but thirty-three of the 727 aboard the ship gathered in the Pampas, just outside Plata, and danced around a bonfire. The fire was a one-time indulgence, and mostly burned clean gases. Laughter, drumming, and dancing, the glossy reflective brilliance in their firelit eyes: they were off again! And back to Earth at that! It was as if they were drunk. Indeed many of them were drunk. Some of those who were not drunk remarked that the fire reminded them of the time of rioting. Not everyone approved of it.