The Moon. I didn’t say it; that was my complicity. They’d given away Ecuador, Gabon, and Borneo, so they must be taking Cato to the farthest elevator, Maldive Ridge, almost two hours’ flight from Klamath Marsh. Papadelias or anyone could still catch Cato if they too realized there was only one right path for him now. How long had it been since he last set foot in Luna City? Ockham had forbidden it, fearing defection. Ockham even sent bash’mates as watchdogs when he let Cato go as far as orbit, once or twice a year for a field trip. Cato let me watch by video when it was Bridger’s turn, a club trip up to watch weather patterns, play a game of tag in zero-g, and launch their little handmade satellites. They built them in teams, their own designs but with grown-up guidance, like a kid’s first cake baked from scratch. Bridger’s, I remember, had many little claws like a crustacean, and was designed to gather bits of debris too small for most cleaner satellites, and sort them into useful sacks to deliver to a host station to be reused, “so the old dead satellites can keep helping. They’d want that.” The boy’s face glowed when he and his friends watched the work of their own hands take flight, and something in his eyes brought back my childhood: the first time I cast off in a little boat from the rocky shores of home, and watched the sharp prow carve my ripples into the sea. Cato had never asked me where Bridger came from, or why I was his guardian, or why his club dues were always paid by random donors, and his registration at the museum was obviously fake. Cato didn’t care. If we were bending the law, we served the higher law that kids deserve to learn. I was complicit back then too, wasn’t I? Just like I was here in Cato’s cell. I sent Bridger to Cato. I didn’t send him to Alexandria, or Paris, or Hobbestown, or Tōgenkyō. I didn’t send him to the 2450 Olympics, to play sports, to any of the fun camps offered by Cousins and Brillists, or even to meet the Minor Senators in Romanova. I sent him to Cato. I never chose a Hive for myself, but I chose one for Bridger. I think, reader, that I might be a traitor. I should want Jehovah to have Cato, to have everything that could add to that political prosthesis which substitutes for His rightful omnipotence. Here in His Peer’s realm, my Master is a blind, deaf Paralytic, and I took something which might have been His new thumb, His new eye, and let the ants carry it away. I even gave Achilles over to Jehovah for His war and slaughter, but I wouldn’t take Cato from Utopia, even for Him. I am a traitor. Or is it that I am not enough of a traitor? Am I weaker than Carlyle and Dominic, too weak to commit absolute filial impiety? I tried to turn my back on my Maker’s Plan, to stop thinking of myself as a sailor on His sea, but I still love Apollo’s stars so much that I forget Jehovah is bigger. My dreams are still within this universe, so infinite, so small, so near. I want to smell Mars dust. If I can’t then I want somebody to: Apollo, Cato, you. Don’t tell Achilles, reader. I think I let Utopia take Cato Weeksbooth. I think I might have let them become Troy.