Bisesa was profoundly sorry to see this disappointment in a daughter who, from her point of view, had been a bright twenty-one-year-old only weeks ago.

She looked out of her window. Something was moving on the far side of the canyon. Camels, this time. “Not everything about this new world seems so bad to me,” she said, trying to lighten the mood.

“I quite like the idea of camels and elephants wandering around North America — though I’m not quite sure why they’re here.”

“We’re in the middle of a Jefferson,” Myra said.

“Named for Jefferson the president?”

“I learned a lot more about the American presidents when I lived with Eugene’s family in Massachusetts,” Myra said dryly. The purposeful re-wilding of the world was an impulse that had come out of the aftermath of the sunstorm. “In fact Linda had something to do with devising the global program. She wrote me about it.”

“My cousin Linda?”

“She’s Dame Linda now.” A student of bioethics, Linda had shared a flat with Bisesa and Myra during the period before the sunstorm. “The point is, long before Columbus the first Stone Age immigrants knocked over most of the large mammals. So you had an ecology that was full of gaps evolution hadn’t had time to fill. ‘A concert in which so many parts are wanting.’ Thoreau said that, I think. Linda used to quote him. When the Spanish brought horses here, their population just exploded. Why? Because modern horses evolved here…”

In the new “Jefferson Parks” there had been a conscious effort to reconstruct the ecology as it had been at the end of the last Ice Age, by importing species that were close equivalents of those that had been lost.

Bisesa nodded. “African and Asian elephants for mammoths and mastodons.”

“Camels for the extinct camelids. More species of horses to flesh out the diversity. Even zebras, I think. For the ground sloths they brought in rhinos, herbivores of a similar mass and diet.”