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She must have given Pepe some consolation, because he held me no grudge. Afterward, in fact, he seemed more amiable than ever, perhaps because of our shared devotion. He got on less well with Arne, who played his endless chess with Dian and roamed the old Earth in his VR cap to study DeFalco's plan for restoring the planet. He wanted to be our leader. That leader, of course, should have been DeFalco's clone, but the robot with his name on the white plate stood dead in its corner of the stock room, grey beneath millennia of Moon dust.

The year we were twenty-five, our robot parents gathered us into the gym. We found our gene parents already there in the big holo tank, all in their most formal images and looking very serious.

"The time has come for your own flight to Earth." My father spoke for them. "Your training is complete. Remote sensors show the ice age is over. The robots have fueled the two-place Moon jumper and loaded it with seed pellets. Two of you can go, taking off when you are ready."

"I am." Glancing at Tanya, Pepe lifted his voice. "Today, if we can."

"You will be the pilot." My father smiled and turned to Arne. "Linder, you're the trained terraformer. You will go to disperse the seed."

Flushing pink, Arne shook his head.

4

Arne stood shaking his head, scowling at our parents in the holo tank. Dian stepped to his side and slid her arm around him.

"Damn DeFalco!" His lip jutted defiantly. "Damn his crazy plan! It doesn't fit the facts. The asteroid was bigger than he ever imagined. It sterilized the planet and shattered a lot of the crust. It's still recovering, the ice caps receding, but there's still alarming seismic instability. I think we ought to let it wait for another generation."

"Arne!" Tanya shook her head in pained reproof. "Its albedo says it's warm enough. Ready for us now."

"If you believe albedos."

Our holo parents stood frozen in the tank, their eyes fixed on Arne as if the master computer had never been programmed for such a rebellion, but Tanya made a face at him.

"Arny Barny!" Mocking him, her voice turned shrill as it was when she was three. "Under all the bluff, you've always been a fraidy cat. Or are you just a coward?"

"Please, Tammy." Pepe touched her arm. "We're all grown up." He turned very soberly to Arne. "And we can't forget why Dr DeFalco put us here."

"DeFalco's dead."

"Given time, we'll all be dead. And dead again." Pepe shrugged. "But really we don't have to care. We can always be replaced."

"Three cheers for Cal DeFalco!" Arne had flushed with emotion, but he shook his head at Tanya with a sort of forced deliberation. "You call me a coward. I'd say prudent. I know geology and the science of terraforming. I've spent thousands of hours surveying the Earth with telescopes and spectroscopes and radar, studying oceans and floodplains and lowlands.

"And I've found nowhere fit for life. The seas are still contaminated with heavy metals from the asteroid, the rivers still leaching more lethal stuff off the continents. We'd find the atmosphere unbreathable. Oxygen depleted.

Carbon dioxide enough to kill you. Sulfur dioxide from constant new eruptions. Climates too severe to let life take root anywhere. If we've got to make some crazy effort in spite of all the odds, at least let's wait for another ten or twenty years—"

"Wait for what?" Tanya cut in more sharply. "If an ice age wasn't long enough to cleanse the planet, what kind of miracle do you expect in ten or twenty years?"

"We can gather data." Arne dropped his voice, appealing to reason. "We can update the plan to fit the Earth as we expect it to be in ten or 20,000 years. We can train for our own mission, if we must finally undertake it."

"We've trained." Pepe waited for Tanya to nod. "We've studied. We're as ready as we'll ever be. We're going. I say now."

"Not me." Arne hugged Dian to him, and she smiled into his face. "Not us."

"We'll miss you." Pepe shrugged and turned to me. "How about it, Dunk?"

I gulped and caught