I had been abhorrent in my own eyes more often than he could have guessed, but I raised a slightly different question: “What if the consensus is wrong? Conscience isn’t infallible even if you count hands.”

“Perhaps not infallible, certainly less likely to be wrong.”

“I’m new here, Oscar, and it’s not my place to criticize, but I saw a lot of Farmers killed in the rebellion. You folks didn’t bother taking prisoners, either. You left the survivors out to die. Is your collective conscience okay with that?”

“That decision was taken when the Network had ceased to function. Had the Coryphaeus been active we might have behaved differently.”

“What about keeping Farmers as bonded serfs? You’ve been doing that for centuries, according to the history books.”

“I won’t debate the historical reasons for doing what was done. I’ll grant you it’s an uneasy compromise. And you’re right, of course, we’re not morally infallible. We don’t claim to be. But compare our history with that of any other nation or culture, death for death, injustice for injustice—compare.”

“I’m not sure that’s a claim you want to make, given that we’re sitting next to a bomb crater.”

“That was the result of a cortical republic enacting its own radical bionormative ideology. Reason breeds more monsters than conscience, Mr. Findley.”

Maybe so. I let a few moments pass.

“About Allison,” I said. “That is, Treya. If she replaced her node, would the suffering stop?”

“It might take time for her to adjust,” Oscar said, giving me an evaluative stare. “But the conflicts that are troubling her would quickly be resolved.”

White plumes of dust lofted up from the crater, drawn toward filters in the artificial sky. There was the sound of distant hammering. It occurred to me that I was constructing a deception as systematically as those machines were constructing new tiers and terraces. And I had come to the central pillar of that deception.

“I want to help her,” I said.

Oscar nodded encouragingly.

I said, “This isn’t easy for me. But I’ve come to a couple of conclusions since what happened out in the wasteland.”

“Yes?”

“I didn’t choose to come to Vox. And to be honest? Knowing what I know now, I might have preferred to travel up the Ring, maybe see what those Middle Worlds are like.”

“I understand,” Oscar said cautiously.

“But I can’t do that. I can’t undo what’s been done and I can’t change the future. This is where I’m going to live and die.”

His eyes narrowed.

“And if I’m going to live here, I want to live with Allison. But I don’t want to watch her suffer.”

“There’s only one way to relieve her suffering.”

“She has to accept the implant.”

“Yes. Can you convince her to do that?”