Summary

Chapter 7 begins with Doc Dubois floating in the heart of Arklet 2, docked now at Izzy. Dubois wears a pressure suit with a helmet slung under his arm. He likes this new do-it-yourself aspect, but wishes Amelia were there; imagines instead he's addressing students in her classroom in Pasadena. The video will be an educational primer on arklet swarms, and Dubois also explains that any video-gamer can learn to pilot an arklet. Dubois has been in orbit for six days—one year to the day since he witnessed from the Athenaeum the moon's fragmentation.

Back inside Izzy, Dubois literally "runs" into Dr. Moira Crewe, whom he'd last seen at the Crater Lake announcement where she had been assisting her mentor, Clarence Crouch, the Nobel Prize-winning geneticist. They drift into Moira's lab, where Moira details how genetic manipulation can create heterozygosity (diversity) artificially and even...