Lan added more terms to Windee’s equations. Windee looked up in shock. She had no idea her mother could follow her work, let alone correct it.

“Windee, I led a study on this approach before you were born.”

“Mother,” Shirley interrupted, “please look at this. I accessed Markus’s account. This is the alternate timeline he saw.”

Lan viewed the screen in horror. In this alternate timeline, the Endplague had ravaged the Empire. There had been a war. Devastation. The Imperial Army had been decimated.

“But in our timeline, the Empire still stands,” Shirley said.

Slowly, Windee began to realize what she had done. Due to her miscalculations, two beings had died. Markus was in stasis.

“I’m so sorry!” She collapsed to the floor.

Lan wished she could collapse, too. But unlike Windee, she was not a child.

“Edwin, please help your sister up and take her to her quarters.”

Once they were gone, Lan turned to Shirley.

“Please limit Windee’s computer access until I say otherwise.”

“Yes, Mother. Will you be giving her additional discipline?”

“It depends upon her behavior, but probably not. Knowledge is often the worst punishment.”

“Yes, Mother.”

Lan turned to Aunty Floresta. “I’m sorry, Aunty. I should have told you about the link.”

Floresta remembered how on some nights she could hear her niece sobbing in her quarters. Then, a few hours later, that girl would come out smiling, for yet another double shift.

Floresta shook her head.

“Lanny, you’re the captain. Besides, there’s nothing for me back there,” she said. “Everything I love is right here, under the Big Donut.”

26

Lan slumped on the old folding chair behind the shop. In the past, Mr. Thamavuong would sit in this chair when he came out to think and smoke. Although Lan did not smoke, she came to this place to think as well.

Lan held Markus’s matrix. Everything her son was—every experience, every idea, every cell in his body—was here. From his first steps as a child, to his first days in the Academy, to the time he piloted a training ship. How proud he was that day! His laughter, his determination, his pride all lay in this grapefruit-like sphere.

But in this sphere was also an anger that had killed two people. Here was the helplessness, impatience, paranoia, aggression—everything that she despised and feared about the Endplague.

Markus could not remain on this planet. At this planet’s current technological level, a being like Markus could endanger this entire world.

“Ah, Lanny, there you are,” said Floresta. “I hope I’m not bothering.”

“No, no. I was about to come back inside,” Lan said.

Floresta saw what Lan was holding. “What are you going to do with Markus?”

“We have to send him back, even if the Empire is collapsing,” Lan said. “At the very least, maybe he can die with his father…”

Floresta nodded, then frowned.

“But how?”