HARE (processors whirring): I will procure an auxiliary oxygen tank and medical supplies from the ship: designation Wyvern.

Taban: Yes! Do that! I shouldn’t take his helmet off for him, should I? He’s trying to take it off!

HARE (scuttling rapidly toward the ship): That would be inadvisable.

Taban (in the distance): Oh my God, Daley, please don’t die.

8.

In her early teens Park acquired, inexplicably, a sudden and irrational phobia of snakes. The affliction, as her uncle jokingly called it, came out of nowhere: not once in her entire life had Park encountered a real snake. Except for the heavily regulated dog-and-cat trade, there was no animal life at all in the New Diego biodome. No serpents to lash at her ankles in the dismal square of grass that amounted to the city’s only park. Certainly none in her sanitized cube of an apartment. Snakes were a common problem for the Dryads camped out in makeshift villages along the coast—but not for Park.

“Maybe,” her uncle said around a mouthful of rationed corn, “maybe it’s a fear of phalluses.”

Park ignored him. He was making a rare reappearance after a long stint in the field; he’d been gone so long that they’d both silently agreed to treat each other with cordial indifference, like two guests staying separately in the same hotel. Glenn, Park’s android chaperone, stood in the kitchen and methodically wiped down plates as they ate.

“Maybe you experienced a nightmare about a snake,” he told her from the sink. “It could have created a phobia in your subconscious.”

“Maybe,” Park said unhappily. She hadn’t had a dream she could remember in years.

“Or it could have been your reading,” Glenn continued—then fell silent when she threw him a glare. Park had downloaded a few books on zoology months ago, it was true, in an attempt to have something to talk about with her uncle upon his imminent return—but such overtures had already failed, and this was not something she wanted him to know. Wisely, Glenn shut up.

“Snakes ought to be the least of your worries,” Park’s uncle said then. He had the glazed look in his eye that told Park he was downloading the news into his teletooth—the microscopic receiver installed into his back molar, an old-fashioned thing. “It’s the goddamn carbon pirates you should be scared of.”