Clarke raises one pre-emptive had. "Heard it, Pat. The little people can't see the Big Picture. Joe Citizen can't handle the truth. The peasants are too eeegnorant to vote." She shakes her head, disgusted. "It's been five years and you're still patting us on the head."

"Are you saying that Gene Erickson is a more qualified diagnostician than our Chief of Medicine?"

"I'm saying he has the right to be wrong." Clarke waves an arm down the corridor. "Look, maybe you're right. Maybe he'll come down with gangrene and come crawling back to Jerry inside a week. Or maybe he'd rather die. But it's his decision."

"This isn't about gangrene," Rowan says softly. "And it isn't about some common low-grade infection. And you know it."

"And I still don't see what difference it makes."

"I told you."

"You told me about a bunch of frightened children who can't believe that their own defenses will hold. Well, Pat, the defenses will hold. I'm living proof. We could be drinking ßehemoth in pure culture and it wouldn't hurt us."

"We've lost—"

"You've lost one more layer of denial. That's all. ßehemoth's here, Pat. I don't know how, but there's nothing you can do about it and why should you even bother? It's not going to do anything except rub your noses in something you'd rather not think about, and you'll adapt to that soon enough. You've done it before. A month from now you'll have forgotten about it all over again."

"Then please—" Rowan begins, and stops herself.

Clarke waits while the other woman braces herself, yet again, for the subordinate role.

"Give us that month," Rowan whispers at last.

Nemesis

Clarke doesn't often go into the residential quarter. She doesn't remember ever having been in this particular section. The corridor here is sheathed in lattice paint and wired up to a mural generator. A forest of antlered coral crowds the port bulkhead; surgeonfish school and swirl to starboard, like the nodes of some abstract and diffuse neural net. A mesh of fractured sunlight dances across everything. Clarke can't tell whether the illusion is purely synthetic, or powered by archived footage of a real coral reef. She wouldn't even know how to tell the difference; of all the sea creatures which have made her acquaintance over the years, none have lived in sunlight.

A lot of families along here, Clarke figures. Adults don't go in for evocations of the wild kingdom as a rule; it's kind of hard to retain that aesthetic once you've grasped the concept of irony.

Here it is: D-18. She taps the doorbell. A muffled musical chime drifts through the closed hatch; a reedy thread of music, a faint voice, the sounds of motion.

The hatch swings open. A stocky girl of about ten looks out at her from under spiky blond bangs. The music wafts around her from the interior of the compartment—Lex's flute, Clarke realizes.