She squeezed her eyelids shut, and tried not to think for the rest of her seventy-minute ride. The train fell through the bowels of the earth at nearly orbital speed. Its silence was broken only by the thunder of her heartbeat as it returned, stroke by slow stroke, to its resting pace of forty-six beats a minute.

The Denver station was a honeycomb of concrete and stainless steel, so like the Pittsburgh depot that it was disorienting. The price of standardization. Transportation had built the depot, and the Council liked uniformity.

She looked out across the crowd, searching for a familiar face. Only strangers were to be seen, but in an odd way, they were family. In whatever city, whatever country, at whatever craft they toiled, more than at any other period in history, the citizens of Earth were one united people. These folk had never known the specter of war. Famine and pestilence were distant memories for most of them. These were the children of a new time, the first generation with the power to make a perfect world.

Most specifically, a world in which friction between its component parts was being reduced to something approaching zero.

By the time the Council had formed, less than 30 percent of American adults were registered to vote, and less than 45 percent of those used the privilege. The nations of Earth were dying institutions, impotent relics of a more primitive age. And who really cared?

A cardboard placard held by pale slender fingers caught her attention. It said: JILLIAN.

She squirmed her way through the crowd.

The man holding the placard was thin-marathonthin, his posture like a question mark, his facial bones too prominent. An age ago his bright boyish good looks had reached through a TV set to capture a young Jillian’s heart. There wasn’t much left of that. He had huge hands, their skin stretched so tight that they seemed amphibian. She pretended not to notice.