—These are people.—

—Am sorry.—

Sergeov grinned as he said it. Ould-Harrad was hundreds of meters away and couldn’t see the design Jeffers had drawn with instant, practiced ease in the ice.

“I didn’t know you were a Mars-boy, Jeff,” Carl sent.

A female flower enclosed by the Mars symbol—a graphic depiction of a dream. Once comets could be steered into the inner solar system, they could be harvested. Even easier, an artful nudge far out beyond Neptune could smack iceballs into the Martian plains.

Hammering Mars with cometary nuclei would build up an atmosphere, perhaps even get the volcanoes spouting again. Nature’s slow sucking would still. The parching march of aeons put to rout—a Promethean dream. Splitting a hard blue sky, flame-cloaked ice mountains would gouge the lands, rip the permafrost, and release more ancient ice below. Clouds, fog, then rain—weather unknown since the sun’s wan warming had boiled away the last mudflats in the spare Martian river valleys, billions of years back, during that false spring.

In a century or so, a suitably adapted human might be able to breathe on the surface. The idea was old, but some Percells had seized on it. They saw Mars as the one plausible location where genetically altered humans might truly have a place. Even though still dry and cold and roiling with strange storms, Mars could become a world where their descendants, genetically engineered still further, would be the norm, while Orthos would cough out their lungs in minutes.

—What do you think I work for?— Jeffers answered.

“That’s crazy,” Carl sent. “Terraforming’ll take centuries. No solution to our problems.”

—A Percell, he can expect to live in space—what? a hundred years? two hundred?— Sergeov’s broad, sweaty face beamed again with his inevitable smile.

Jeffers sent, —Throw in couple slot sleeps, we could all see it.—

“We’re not here to do that,” Carl said.

—Jeffers is just looking ahead,— Sergeov said simply.

“Too damn far ahead.”

—Don’t be so sure,— Jeffers said evenly.

Sergeov nudged Jeffers.—You be an Uber too? Two ideas not contradict, I think.—

Jeffers eyed Sergeov cautiously.—Maybe. Maybe not.—

Carl frowned. This was all going over short-range close comm, and he was glad of it. Ubers stood for ubernrenschen. Nietzsche’s supermen, evolution’s ordained next step. Planned. Designed. There would now be no slow blind stumbling upward, driven by nature red in tooth and claw. Many Percells thought they were the first step along a long, inevitable road.

Carl had known of Sergeov’s opinions, but it shocked him to see Jeffers flirting with them.

Sergeov persisted. —If Orthos say no to Mars terraforming, I say yes. Simple.—

—It’s right there in the physics and chem simulations, clear as anything,—Jeffers added.—Put mechs to harvestin’ comets out past Neptune, it’ll take a century. We could sleep right through it.—

Carl sent, “Sometimes a man can see clearer if he has his mouth shut.” He gestured at Ould-Harrad, who was jetting their way.

—Okay, let’s break off,— Jeffers sent.

—Is true, though. Think it over. First step to much more, maybe,—Sergeov concluded, launching himself away with a muscular shrug.

Ould-Harrad inspected the layout plans for the mechs, then left. Carl took advantage of the chance to get off and work by himself. He had never liked politics. And their wild talk had been disturbing.

He immersed himself in the sweet gliding grace of Beethoven. Moving through inky shadow and glaring yellow floodlight. pushing and towing, smelling the sour suit air, feeling the rrrrrrtttt of the countertorqued wrench vibrate up his arm, the sweaty pinch of his suit at shoulders and knees—Carl thought of California.

His parents had been driving him up the coast when he told them.

The four years at Caltech had gone by in a blur of golden sunlight and nights of study, weekend pranks and unending problem sets, labs and lectures and precious little love. He’d had no time for it. Sergeov was so sure that Percells were special—well, okay, Sergeov probably had to think that, compensating for what he’d never have. But Carl knew differently.

He had done well because he’d worked, dammit, not because he was smarter. At Caltech he had felt a growing kinship with all the men and women who had ever put in long hours in lonely rooms. Unlike soured drudges or inexperienced kids, he did not believe for a moment that creative people idled away their time and then, when the mystical spirit moved them, knocked out brilliant ideas in bouts of furious, fevered bursts of easy inspiration.

Doing anything well demanded endurance, steadiness, relentless drive.

Those he had. Brilliance, no.

So as his parents drove him up the coast he struggled with that inner truth. He had applied to Berkeley for graduate school in astroengineering and, against all his expectations, got in. They offered no scholarship, not even a teaching assistantship. That meant he was marginal. His father loyally mistook this for another symptom of the growing prejudice against Percell-made children.

Carl knew better. Universities are sluggish beasts unmoved by the tides of public bias. The admissions committee undoubtedly had looked at his 3.3 average and seen that it was attained mostly by good grades in labs and design courses. Math and physics had put him on the ropes more than once, groggy with complex variable integration and quantum electronics.

North of Ventura, his stepmother’s happy chatter bubbled over with enthusiasm he had always found a bit much. He had never been able to forget his mother’s slow death, and adjust to this new woman in his father’s life. So he had sat in the backseat and watched the scenery and tried to think. The tawny August hills fell away, revealing the blue denim of the sea. Route 1 slid by as he tried to explain to them his doubts. His stories of distant, intellectual battlegrounds sounded hollow when contrasted with the solid, enduring world outside. Weathered barns, their wood silvery from sun. Rows of eucalyptus, lush hillside orchards, spindly railroad trestles crossing gorges, minifusion generators sculpted into hillsides, cows standing as still :as statues in the inky shade of live oaks. All the unthinking richness of Earth.

Morro Bay was glassy when they stopped there for the night. His stepmother ooohed and aahhhed at a sleek alabaster yacht that swept by, out beyond the bay’s protecting spit of sand. Pretty, yes. But Carl liked the moored working boats better—oily, rusted, scaly and cluttered with gear. They had argued over chowder at a wharf restaurant, his father so agitated that he drank the chardonnay quickly and ordered another bottle, red-faced.

The next morning he awoke knowing what he had to do. Driving through the grassy foothills, turning inland to San Luis Obispo between stony low mountains, he said it—suddenly, clearly.

And now, remembering, he saw that it was brutal, too.

His father had shouted, You’re going to give up all this? with a sweep of a hand. Meaning Berkeley, graduate school, where Carl knew he would burrow into the books and never emerge alive.

Oh, maybe he’d get a master’s degree, and a reasonable desk job. With incredible luck, a doctorate.

But he’d have been a perpetual second-rate. And he’d have wasted years.

He remembered his father’s hand chopping the air, the outraged gesture taking in the hills beyond. You’re going to give up all this?—and that all had been, in the end, Earth itself.

Carl remembered it in grainy detail, despite the seven crowded years that had passed since. Years of learning how space really worked—not the geometric certainty of math and physics classes, where every problem had a pure solution in an orderly universe. Not the serene world of that distant, unattainable yacht. He had learned what space really was—grubby, tough, with plenty of problems that had no solutions at all.