Finally Fulbreech closed his eyes, as if trying to recall a distant memory. Then, in a low voice, he said, “The planet itself is beautiful. There’s a place I particularly like, not far from here. We call it the Glass Sea. There’s no snow, just ice—ice of all colors. The ground looks like one of those shards of green bottles you’d find in the ocean back home.”

Park waited. Fulbreech continued, eyes still closed: “Out in the distance you can see the white horizon—we think it might be a salt plain—and then huge pillars of ice jutting up into the sky. Bigger than Everest; bigger than anything back on Earth. Some of the pillars are pink and purple, like rock candy. A lot of light blue, which turns to gray when the light goes down.”

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.