It was true, she thought later, after Jimex had left and she had pulled up the program on her inlays for dictation. ISF had never told her when she could expect to return home—colony missions could take years—and she had never particularly cared to know. She had still signed up without objection. Of course, she did feel the occasional pangs for fire, for sunlight, for silence—but those were material longings, trivial concerns. In terms of homesickness, she had no home on Earth to be sick for.

But even Jimex didn’t need to know that.

Her next appointment was with Eric Holt, the expedition’s physicist. At twenty-eight, Holt was one of the youngest people on the ship, and a little insecure about that fact, in Park’s opinion. He was constantly putting on airs, lazily drawling his sentences, trying to blend in with the more cynical and experienced academics. His insecurity was not entirely unfounded, either: the space-born, with their augmented and extended lifespans, tended to believe that adolescence ended around age twenty-five. So to many of them, Holt was just a young buck, brimming with testosterone—despite his two doctorates from Shoemaker University. In response, Holt tried to act as if nothing affected him, as if everything was perpetually just all right. As if it were all part of an interesting story he would tell someday in the future.

But today, he had none of that self-assurance, pretense or otherwise. Before he arrived, Park’s inlays told her that Holt’s heart rate was elevated. And when he came in, his thin decksuit showed dark patches of sweat around the collar.

“Good afternoon, Holt,” Park began. “I was thinking—”

“I’d like to use the MAD,” Holt said rapidly. “Now.”

Park closed her mouth. “Of course,” she said after a moment, her voice neutral, offering no judgment or rebuke. Meanwhile she was thinking: Something’s wrong. Holt was looking at her in a daze, as if he’d been drugged; his eyes were glazed over with fear like a dumb animal’s.

Park reached over to boot up the Mood-Altering Device. Holt’s eyes followed the green spark of its activation sequence greedily. “Can you tell me what’s bothering you?” she asked him as it flashed to life.

The physicist’s hands were shaking. His face had a bony, scraped look. “I was having a nightmare,” he said. His voice was faint and a little muffled.

Park kept her expression pleasantly interested. “And what happened in the nightmare?”