Park closed her eyes, too. She felt Fulbreech shift, as if to take her hand, and before he could she said, “What do you mean when you say ‘the planet itself’? What else is there?”

Fulbreech paused. When Park opened her eyes, she saw that he had turned away from her, his shoulders rounded as if expecting an assault. “I don’t think,” he said, “that humans can live here, Park.”

“So why are we still here?”

Fulbreech looked at her, and for a moment he looked like a stranger, his face was so grave and changed. The light shifted, and it seemed to Park that the walls shrank inward, tensing up as if the room were holding its breath. All around them was the dim roar of the ship—the bombardment of ice and stone and the fragments of stars.

“Fulbreech?” she repeated. “Why are we still here?”

“I couldn’t tell you,” Fulbreech said miserably.

And that, she finally believed.

9.

There was a short period in Park’s life where she had to choose whether or not to go to school. It was the year that the city finally decided to implement android teachers, laying off most of the human ones. In retaliation, the dismissed teachers and concerned parents held protests in front of the school, the teachers waving primitive hand-printed signs that embarrassed Park, the parents refusing to let their children go to class. Park’s uncle was away from the biodome at this time—“out in the field,” as he called it, and generally unreachable—and so Park had the choice of staying home and pretending he was one of these upset parents, or going to school as usual.

She went to school. She had nothing better to do at home, other than watching Glenn do the chores, and no friends to play truant with around the dome. And besides, she approved of the switchover to android instructors: they were objectively better at teaching than humans were. They had the state-of-the-art educational programs; they never grew tired or overworked; they didn’t play favorites or throw books at gum-chewing mouth-offs. Plus, they made students too afraid to cheat: their eyes had the infrared sensors, the cameras. They could ruin your life if they wanted to, or if anyone got ahold of the footage in their heads—so their presence kept students on the straight and narrow. Delinquency decreased around the biodome. It was a general improvement for everybody—except the fired teachers.

Park wanted to show her support for the change, so she kept going to class, Glenn in tow as always. In those days it was still considered childish for a girl of her age to walk to school with her android chaperone, to be picked up by him. Such a thing was for small children, who were bound to get lost or kidnapped by flesh-traders, but by now Park was tall and light-boned, and she was beginning to develop breasts. Still, she hardly cared what her classmates thought of her, their stares as she walked past them with Glenn carrying her schoolbag. She pretended not to notice their tiny smirks. Once, Glenn commented seriously, “It seems that you amuse your peers.”