But as the plane labored through the cluttered sky, the girl had turned to gaze out of the obscured window, distracted from her high-technology bubble, and the flawless skin of her brow was slightly furrowed. The girl looked scared — as well she might, Joan thought; all her genriched perfection wouldn’t help her a bit if this plane fell out of the sky. Joan felt an odd touch of meanness, envy wholly inappropriate in a woman of thirty-four. Be an adult, Joan. Everybody needs human contact, genriched or not. Isn’t that the whole point of your conference, that human contact is going to save us all?
Joan leaned forward and reached out her hand. “Are you all right, dear?”
The girl flashed a smile, showing teeth so white they all but glowed. “I’m fine. It’s just, you know, the smoke.” Her accent was nasal U.S. West Coast.
“Forest fires,” Alyce Sigurdardottir said, her leathery face creased into a smile. The primatologist was a slender woman of about sixty, but she looked older than that, her face deeply lined. “That’s all it is. The seasonal fires in Indonesia, and the Australian east coast; they last for months now, every year.”
“Oh,” the girl said, not really reassured. “I thought it might be Rabaul.”
Joan said, “You know about that?”
“Everybody knows about it,” the girl said, a hint of dummy in her intonation. “It’s a huge volcanic caldera in Papua New Guinea. Just to the north of Australia, right? It’s suffered minor earthquakes and eruptions every two years or so for the past century. And in the last couple of weeks there have been Richter one earthquakes like every day.”