Two months before, one of the shuttles had failed, breaking up in the atmosphere, and there was a moratorium on migration while the other shuttles, one at a time, were taken apart and put back together. There were still regular flights, but not too many people going back and forth, which did make for less liaison work.

Right now it was mostly a matter of constant but more or less civilized argument with our counterparts in orbit, the Epsilon Liaison Committee. They had a starship full of stuff they wanted to keep up there, and we tried to talk them into sending it down here, where it belonged.

Purcell would have loved the situation, the parody of economics. Both ’Home and Hilltop were self-sufficient in terms of life’s necessities, and since we have a common database, there was no information to barter. Both locales had problems, but they weren’t problems that formed a basis for exchange: I’ll trade you two brain-suckers and an aquatic constrictor for two cases of explosive decompression and a botched crypto. So it was mainly a case of us wheedling and them resisting patiently.

We could have indulged in a bit of coercion with a building slow-down, since they did have over a thousand people waiting to come down here, and they were going to need places to stay. With the moratorium, though, we didn’t have any reasonable justification for that. The housing crew was two hundred empty dwellings ahead of the population, and had been temporarily diverted into building an overland road to Riverside, through the hills. (There was already a path along the river, but it was periodically flooded and always plagued with bugs. The overland route would be a third as long.)

The relationship between ’Home and Epsilon had changed, not subtly, and was evolving toward who-knows-where? The psychological distance had widened, as anyone could have predicted: we saw the people in orbit as conservative stay-at-homes, and they saw us as runaways. Maybe we envied them the comforts we had all grown up with; maybe they envied our freedom.

We had started out as an extension of the starship, and became for some time an embryonic gravity-bound copy. The umbilical cord didn’t suddenly one day break, but for more than a year it had been obvious that, barring catastrophe, we could survive without them.

That should translate into a kind of economic, quasi-economic, strength, since they did need us at least as a destination for their restless thousand. But we couldn’t see any practical, ethical way to exploit that. We had to plan for a future when the starship was literally a foreign land—the mother country, with all that implies. We didn’t want a revolution, people joked, not while they could drop things on us, and all we could do is duck.