The bionormative majority was the recurring villain in Voxish history. Ester had banned limbic neural collectives soon after the tragedies of Hyum and Loi, and Vox had been forced to raise anchor and set off on its centuries-long pilgrimage to Old Earth. But today, on most planets up the Ring—Ester and Cloud Harbor, especially—the cortical democracies were still thriving. Once we get where we’re going meant, in the long term, one of those prosperous, peaceful Middle Worlds.

I thought about that after sunset, as we traveled north. Turk ate listlessly, alternating his gaze between the barren moon above and the toxic clouds below. His mind had wandered to old griefs. He said, “We fucked up this planet pretty good, didn’t we?”

“Depends on what you mean by ‘we.’”

“People in general. I guess, my generation in particular.”

The view from the forward cabin was ample testimony to human failure. The clouds were oddly beautiful, but the moonlight that reflected from them was tinted a poisonous green. “Maybe so,” I said. “But that’s not the end of the story. What was the population of Earth when you left it? Six, seven billion people?”

“Something like that.”

“But we don’t just live on Earth anymore. We live on all the worlds of the Ring. You know how many people are alive in the Ring of Worlds right now? Almost fifty billion. And that’s not a toxic bloom, like the population on Old Earth. That’s fifty billion people living in a sustainable relationship with their environment—fifty billion reasonably happy human beings. We’re not a failed species. We’re a success story.”

“That’s what Vox was running from? A success story?”

“Well, Vox … Vox wasn’t running away from the Middle Worlds. It was running toward the Hypotheticals.”

“It wasn’t the Hypotheticals who nuked Vox Core.”

“The Middle Worlds aren’t paradise. People are still people—greedy and shortsighted, often enough. But they’ve learned how to make better decisions.”

“By putting wires in their heads?”

His hand stroked the lump at the back of his skull, perhaps unconsciously. “Not exactly,” I said. But it wasn’t the concept of cortical democracy he was struggling with. “Turk—did something happen? After I left you, before you came up to the aircraft docks…”

“No … nothing important.”

I didn’t need to be Networked to know that for a lie. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

“Not now,” he said. “Maybe when we get where we’re going.”

*   *   *

We were still a couple of hours away from the Indian Ocean when the aircraft’s alarm sounded.

I had been asleep. Turk had insisted on standing watch in the forward compartment—he didn’t trust the ship to pilot itself without supervision—but I was too exhausted to keep him company. So I had crawled into a crew cot and closed my eyes, and when I opened them again the alarm was chiming.