The crowd groaned. Ajima did not move.

Rachel felt the world shift away. She could not seem to breathe. Murmurs and sobs worked through the crowd but she was frozen, letting the talk pass by her. Then, as if from far away, she felt her heart tripping hard and fast. The world came rushing back. She exhaled.

Silence. The Prefect said in a booming call, “Determine what agenda that Miner was working upon.” All eyes turned to him, but no one said anything. Rachel felt a trickle of unease as the Prefect’s gaze passed by her, returned, focused. Intently. She looked away.

She knew she was rattled, so she went to her favorite place.

The side Vault was a replica from a famous farback novel: Captain Nemo’s library aboard the Nautilus in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, from 1870. Tall, black-rosewood bookcases, inlaid with copperwork, held on their wide shelves twelve thousand uniformly bound books. Huge couches upholstered in maroon leather and curved for maximum comfort. Light, movable reading stands, which could be pushed away or pulled near as desired, allowed books to be positioned on them for easy study. In the center stood a huge table covered with pamphlets, among which some ancient newspapers of filmy paper. Dim electric-filament light flooded this whole harmonious totality, falling from four frosted half globes set in the scrollwork of the ceiling. Books!

The Prefects had installed this as a reminder of libraries past, and thus that the Minds were also ancient stores of knowledge. Of course, everything here was made or grown on Luna, but the leathery scent of the carefully flavored air evoked mystery and history. Rachel sat and opened an old text, a novel from the TwenCen set on Luna by a man named Varley. She let the first chapter wrap her into its tale. He got some of Luna right, even the underground vaults of water, but… quick and easy sex changes, complete transformation between men and women? She saw that the vexations of the TwenCen had warped the story. It implied people would want to and that it would be easy. Neither had proved so. But it was a story, so… She could feel her world fall away and a better, farback world envelop her.

An hour later she went forth in a better mood and strode along the viewwalk. Luna was a grand liberation for disabled people, because with simple means they could move and work in the low grav. A mother with a newborn made her way on graceful, gliding slimlegs, smiling and ramrod straight. Rachel turned to see the view and felt the familiar feelings well up in her. Maybe it was the death she had just seen? Yes—she felt them.

They often came in dreams. Babies hovering there waiting to descend, waiting to be asked, waiting to choose, waiting for their chance to be born. The sensation that babies connected mothers to the ineffable—not just upward, but also downward, to an unnamed space below. So much propaganda saw that space as a well, a hell. Because mother and child would be in the steaming press of the Megaopolis Earthside.