Everybody in Newhome is defined as Engineering or Policy track for the sake of voting. A person with a sufficiently ambiguous job, such as demographics analyst, has to choose one or the other and stay with it. A new pair of leaders, one for each track, is chosen every two years. For both of them, it’s a six-year term: two as Coordinator-elect, two as Coordinator, and two as Senior Coordinator. The actual Coordinator has three votes; the others have two each.

The Coordinators’ most visible function is to decide which problems can be resolved at the committee/Cabinet level, and which must be put to a general referendum. But most of their day-today work is budget-arguing and keeping the peace among the various special interests represented by the Cabinet members and outside groups.

That’s the official story. The unofficial is much more interesting, but I’m sworn to secrecy—even to you generations yet unborn. Though I’m sure the secret will be out long before we get to Epsilon. Too many people know; too many others suspect.

In fact, the secret—that the referendum process was a cynical sham—lasted until it was irrelevant. O’Hara hated the deception but accepted it as a condition for employment, and even grudgingly admitted that there had been times in the past when the electorate had been disastrously wrong, and had to be lied to for their own survival.

That O’Hara was allowed into the Cabinet at all was a testimony to the accuracy of the Evaluation Board’s psychometrics, and the assessments of Sandra Berrigan and Harry Purcell. Ten years younger, she would have reacted to the truth with indignation, and gone disastrously public with it. Repeated exposure to human nature had reduced her confidence in people’s ability to control their own destiny.

Still, she was no cynic; like Berrigan (and unlike Purcell) she saw the fakery as a temporary necessity that would be abandoned on Epsilon. Life aboard ’Home, like life in New New, had the illusion of comfort, stability, and safety, but only by virtue of hundreds of complicated inter-relating systems. It could no more be run by democratic consensus than a floater could be driven by committee. Dangerous things happen too fast. Planets were more forgiving.

(Whether leaders would be willing to radically change a system that had worked for generations was another matter.)

Ever since childhood, O’Hara had been conscious of a sense of “destiny” that she knew most other people didn’t have. Remarkable things happened to her on Earth and afterward that did seem to be setting her up as a sort of pivot, a historical nexus. Daniel tried to convince her that it was irrational foolishness, superstition, a small cognitive defect in a brain that was otherwise more than adequate.