Free Lightpaths by Howard V. Hendrix

discourse. Jhana had the distinct sense that Seiji knew the woman well, and that they’d also had this conversation before.
    “—and during the whole restoration process we’ll be reintroducing all the species currently being preserved live, or cryogenically, or in the genome banks in the zoos and arks and our own biodiversity park. Once Earth is at last restored, it’ll be a holiday world, a vacation planet where human beings are primarily just tourists, grown children occasionally visiting their mother.”
    Ekwefi threw back her head and laughed.
    “That’s the rosiest scenario I’ve heard in a long time. You know what my sister Denene would say to that? She’d say databits and freeze-dried remnants do not a species make—the animal and its context are fundamentally connected and to truly recreate an animal you have to recreate its entire environment—”
    “And she’d be right,” Seiji agreed quickly.
    “She’d also say this place is a college campus in the sky and we do too much ivory tower theorizing. She’d say we have too much faith in technological progress. She’d start talking about how we’re a rich and privileged elite in the ultimate Big House on the highest hill. She’d say all HOME’s claims of ‘multi-ethnicity’ are bull. She’d launch off about Master Race in Outer Space types fleeing to an orbital suburb of Earth City, a lifeboat for the powerful, another technofascist nonsolution to human problems—”
    Ekwefi took a quick sip of wine, her index finger held up to indicate that she was not done with her say yet and did not want to be interrupted.
    “—and I don’t know if maybe she doesn’t have a point after all. I mean, doesn’t it seem sort of odd that all of us up here who are so dedicated to peace and social justice and world-saving are at the same time so isolated from the world we’re trying to change? A plot to wall off activists and dissidents and idealists in a big isolated holding pen couldn’t have done a better job of getting all of us up here! To the people living in the trashlands down there, an elitist paradise in space must look pretty hollow.”
    Ekwefi took a long pull on her wine. Frowning deeply, Seiji brushed crumbs from his left pant leg while the people around him waited for a response, spectators at a conversational tennis match waiting for the serve to be returned. He put his wine glass down and stared straight at Ekwefi with a frankness that made Jhana suspect they had once been intimate—and not so long ago.
    “Ekwefi, your sister’s still alive. Be glad of it. You know damn well I’ve seen the sacrifice zones outside the cities back on Earth, the areas you call the trashlands. I’ve seen the cities of people living in steaming mountains of rubbish and filth and debris, scavenging from womb to tomb in the garbage. I’ve seen them building their houses of trash, feeding off trash, finally becoming just more trash to be body-bagged and incinerated when they die. That was how my brother was lost. A refugee living in a smoldering wasteland. In an ancient abandoned refrigerator he’d hulled clean and rigged to lock from inside. Coming out only at night, rising in darkness from a white coffin, convinced he had already died or forgotten how to live. One of the living dead, a vampire, a very sallow, failed, shivering Christ.”
    A tension, a trapped feeling began to surround Jhana. Sensing it also in the body language of the other people within range of Seiji’s voice, she wondered if they too were feeling as if the political had suddenly become personal, too personal, as if they’d accidentally walked in on someone else’s very private and particular nightmare.
    “You know I think about all of this a lot, Ekwefi,” Seiji continued in a somewhat different tone. “About how stupid and abstract it seems, trying to save the world when I couldn’t even save my own brother. But I have to because I’m still alive. Up here we can’t take our