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me. “We can’t do it without you.”
    “Why should I?”
    Pär stared at me. “Because it’s the right thing to do,” he finally said. “We all have rights, every person on this ship. Or we should . Downsiders have no rights. We should have the right to make this decision ourselves, to leave the ship or stay, as we choose . But we don’t.”
    “Why should I risk helping you?” I asked.
    He snorted then. “You mean, how would it be to your advantage?”
    “Something like that.” I didn’t like it put so crudely, but I couldn’t argue his point.
    Pär nodded; not in agreement, it seemed to me, but rather as if he’d expected as much.
    “Your captain is in trouble. If he goes down, you go down with him. And he is almost certainly going down, no matter what we find. This is your way out.”
    “How?”
    “You go with us.”
    “And if I don’t want to leave?”
    “Will you really want to stay when the captain has been deposed? The way everyone on the Planning Committee and Executive Council, in fact nearly everyone in the upper levels, despises you?”
    “Despises? Isn’t that a little harsh?”
    “Harsh?” And here Pär smiled. “Yes. But it’s accurate. You must know that. You’ll have no power, no influence, and my guess is that all access will be cut off, all authority canceled. You’ll be nothing.” He pushed off from the tree and walked away. “Think about it,” he said without turning back.
    I watched him walk deeper into the skeletal woods, watched my own breath form and dissipate over and over. Yes, I would think about his proposal. I had no choice.
     
    T HE downsiders did all the scut work on the ship, just as Pär said. Although most of the ship’s systems were automated, and most of the machinery was self-maintaining and self-repairing, nothing was completely trouble-free, and much manual labor was needed to keep everything running. Cleaning, servicing, other kinds of maintenance. Also to run the manufacturing and fabrication equipment, the ag rooms, and countless other jobs. And more needed to be done each year as systems gradually faltered and broke down.
    Costino and his staff were in charge of production and schedules, coordinating all the downsider work crews. I’d never been interested in the details, but I knew that much of the labor was exhausting, and some of it dangerous. People were occasionally killed. But someone had to do it. I did not make judgments one way or the other.
    According to the ship’s history, as recorded by Toller and his predecessors, there had been periodic attempts by downsiders to change the way things were done. I had even heard vague stories of a massive revolt, called the Repudiation, associated with some kind of plague three or four centuries earlier. Such efforts had never been successful. I had been through one attempted insurrection myself, six years earlier. It did not last long.
    At that time, the downsiders began negotiations reasonably enough—they asked that all the work be shared equally by those on all levels. This request was of course refused. So the downsiders threatened to cease all work. In response, we (and I’m afraid I must include myself, whether or not I agreed with the actions taken; I was a part of the upper-level society, no matter how much of an outsider I was to most of them) simply cut off all the food and water conduits to the lower levels, secured the ag rooms so they could not get at our food, and shut down their recycling systems.
    They held out for six days. Arne Gronvold tried to restore all the lifelines for them, and when he was unsuccessful he tried to cut off all of ours. That, too, failed. When the insurrection was over, Arne was banished for life to the lower levels.
    So I understood why the downsiders would want to leave, and I understood why the upper levels would never agree. And Pär was asking me to risk sharing Arne Gronvold’s fate.
    He was asking too much.

7
    A S we neared Antioch, the exploration