He must have one of the oddest-looking rooms in ’Home. For decades he has immersed himself in oriental arts and crafts. There are about fifty potted dwarf trees, bonsai, in a miniature forest that takes up all of the floor space except for narrow paths. The bunk where Muhammed sat was littered with worn paper folded and refolded into origami shapes. Set in the wall where most people would have a console and cube, he had an open square painted solid white. A vase with four flowers stood artfully offcenter, balanced in the space by a smooth stone, the size of a fist, mottled pink and gray.

“It’s beautiful,” I said. “The stone’s from Earth?”

He nodded. “Very perceptive. Japan. A friend has loaned it to me.” The rocks we used for landscaping in the park were from a carbonaceous chondrite asteroid; I didn’t remember ever seeing a pink one. “Let me demonstrate my own prescience: you have come to me because people are quite reasonably not doing what you want them to do. You want my skills to help you subvert them. For the good of the community of course.”

“Yes. But I would have come to you to see the trees, if I’d known about them.”

“You’ve been in crypto, or you would have known.” He pointed. “I place you. You served a term as Policy Coordinator.”

“Just shy of a hundred years ago. Epsilon years.”

“Of course.” He nodded thoughtfully. “And before that, in New New York, you were some sort of enfant terrible in Project Start-up. O’Casey, no, O’Hara, Marianne. You wrote a book. They put you in charge of Demographics for Newhome, a female Saint Peter at the Gate. Deciding who will ascend to the heavens.”

“You have a remarkable memory. I didn’t have the only say in Demographics, of course.”

“And you also worked with that terrible personality template machine. The one that puts wires through the eyeballs.”

“Not wires. Little sensors you can hardly feel.”

“And a tiny little probe up the rectum, one can hardly feel, I’m sure. Cozy catheters. And a comfortable tube down one’s throat. Exquisitely pleasing needles stuck in the arms. I have a feeling that this is what you want me to help you sell.”

“At least I’m not asking you to volunteer for the process yourself. Though I’m not sure whether we have templates for bonsai and origami.”

“There are books.”

“We’re mostly interested in less subtle talents, anyhow. Running heavy machinery, masonry, carpentry, metalworking. Skills that will condemn a person to a lifetime of hard labor on Epsilon.”

“Ah. ‘Skills that will reward a person with a lifetime of solid satisfaction, rebuilding civilization from the ground up.’ Or ‘Let the lazybones who stay in orbit live out their lives in a four-walled prison—give yourself a job that will give you freedom!’”

I had to laugh. “Did you just make those up?”