“Why us?” Ann replied tartly. “It’s you who will have to do something about it, if you ask me. You’re the ones responsible now. We’re just a couple of old issei.”

Their dinner companions looked startled, uncertain how to take her. One laughed. The host who had spoken shook his head. “That’s not true. But you’re right, we will be watching, and talking with the other townships about how to respond. We’ll do our part. I was just saying that people will be looking to you, to both of you, to see what you do. That isn’t so true for us.”

Ann was silenced by this. Sax returned to his meal, thinking furiously. He found he wanted to talk to Maya.

The evening continued, the sun fell; the dinner limped on, as they all tried to return to some sense of normality. Sax repressed a little smile; there might be an interplanetary crisis and there might not, but meanwhile dinner had to be gotten through in style. And these seafarers were not the kind of people who looked inclined to worry about the solar system at large. So the mood rallied, and they partied over their dessert, still very pleased to have Clayborne and Russell visiting them. And then in the last light the two of them made their excuses, and were escorted down to sea level and their boat. The waves on Chryse Gulf were a lot larger than they had seemed from up above.

• • •

Sax and Ann sailed off in silence, wrapped in their own thoughts. Sax looked back up at the township, thinking about what they had seen that day. It looked like a good life. But something about . . . he chased the thought, and then at the end of the rapid steeplechase he caught it, and still held it all: no blank-outs these days. Which was a great satisfaction, although the content of this particular train of thought was quite melancholy. Should he even try to share it with Ann? Was it possible to say it?

He said, “Sometimes I regret— when I see those seafarers, and the lives they lead— it seems ironic that we— that we stand on the brink of a— of a kind of golden age—” There, he had said it; and felt foolish; “— which will only come to pass when our generation has died. We’ve worked for it all our lives, and then we have to die before it will come.”

“Like Moses outside Israel.”