Not ready? What did that mean? I strained against the gentle lion, tried to read digital eyes. Not ready? Are their preparations incomplete? There had been plenty of time. I knew Apollo’s plan. Stock Luna City with everything life requires: samples, soils, fuel. The Moon will be the backup world, a second home, ready if human folly destroys the first. This world may burn, but on the safe and distant Moon Utopia will wait for Earth to cool and Mars to warm, and there will still be humans. Luna City can’t hold all of Utopia, not a tenth, not a hundredth of its current Membership, but it can hold a precious few, enough. The rest would stay on Earth, lie low, the smallest Power doing its best to be invisible as the great Leviathans make war. If Earth survives, Utopia survives; if not, Utopia survives still on the Moon, and guards our Second Chance. But instead you attack the Leviathans? You have pulled out their deadliest fangs, but now the remaining fangs will seek your throat. They can destroy you! Rip you down, so there will be no exodus! No seeds to fly! No vanguard of the Great Project! Utopia could die! Why do this? Did the lunar preparations take longer than expected? Has our cruel Maker made the fledgling not quite strong enough to fly yet, as He sets the nest afire? No. There was time. The Moon is ready. The failure is Utopia itself, kind, weak Utopia. You have a conscience. You are ready, but not willing, to abandon Earth.

Apollo: “I want to drink with you, and live with Seine, and stand on Mars, and breathe the air we made, but I’d go mad, I know it, I’d go mad living on, knowing I left them to go through this alone.”