So she traded the possibility of her own death, and the certainty of months of suffering, to spare herself the burden of a small guilt. The evaluator was not impressed.

The eveloi and I concluded our business and it went off to wherever it is they go. I found the experience immensely clarifying, and wished that O’Hara had lived long enough to share it.

I must tread carefully here, and not judge. I am human, after all, even if inorganic, and O’Hara’s response to that crisis has always seemed to me consistent with what I know about love, courage, self-sacrifice—and fear and guilt. I perforce had to admire her for it, especially after learning that she generated the terrible experience herself, as her own personal hell, but have always recognized that my approval was largely self-congratulation, and therefore trivial.

But the sacrifice was not illogical. O’Hara was never unaware of the ambiguity in simply rational terms, of her action. She had gone through it once before, with her daughter, and understood that surrendering to the pain was ultimately selfish, the way many or even most courageous acts must be: facing death or pain rather than face the prospect of living with the memory of your own cowardice.

I don’t suppose a race that effects social homeostasis via the planetwide extermination of species can afford this sort of moral delicacy, ambiguity. They can never be wrong. So their “evaluation” of O’Hara’s propriety, no matter how important to the survival of the human race, does not weigh heavily on me as her sister, or daughter, or only living relative. I have to agree with O’Hara: she was, later in life, both amused and appalled by the eveloi, because they were such a literal personification, almost a cartoon, of the gods that graced six thousand years of human history: omnipotent, capricious, bloodthirsty. And thickheaded.

It was belief that had destroyed the earth, the collision of incompatible political faiths, and a specific kind of religious fanaticism that strangled New New and thus almost destroyed Newhome en route. (A clan called the Devonites precipitated a “Ten-Minute War” that left half the population dead and systematically destroyed all of the satellite’s technology that was not related to life support.) Neither catastrophe was inconsistent with O’Hara’s sentiments about religious belief.

O’Hara had been brought up indifferent to religion, but experimented with its comforts when young. By menarche, sixteen, she was impatient with it, and was actively hostile to it by the time she got her first degree, four years later. Her senior thesis, “Public and Private Religions of the American ‘Founding Fathers,’” was cynical and pragmatic, and incidentally gave her a start in politics. Sandra Berrigan read it and asked her to be a Privy Council intern. That experience did nothing to mellow her. Most of New New’s administrative class saw religion as something between a nuisance and a weakness to be exploited.