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There were hundreds of the dark plastic rectangles, and they held the future of Tau Ceti Four.
    Sylvia sighed, shucked her backpack onto a wall hanger and pulled herself over to a rack of Velcro slippers. She handed him a pair. "One size fits all."
    "I was hoping for something in a wing tip."
    She led him to the nearest bank of cases. "Look," she said contentedly, triggering one of the dark panels into translucence. Within, barely discernible as canine, were dozens of dog embryos. Their dark eyes were filmed with transparent lids, tiny naked paws drawn up to their gauzy bodies in peaceful cryosleep. Each hung in its individual sack, connected by its umbilical to an artificial placenta.
    "So." She studied the temperature and pressure gauges on the door of a sealed cabinet, nodded and opened it. "Alfalfa seeds. Check. Swiss chard. Check. Tomatoes. Check." She closed the cabinet. "Now for the embryos. The carriers are in that case over there. Inflate three for me, will you?"
    "Sure."
    She busied herself at the cryosleep carrier console.
    "You don't trust the computer?" Cadmann asked.
    "Not anymore. Not since Ernst. Not since eight of us never woke up. Barney says it's fine, but I'm a woman of little faith these days."
    "Good thinking."
    She typed in the last commands. "There. So we lost one of the dogs.
    We've got over a hundred more."
    "And thousands of chickens, I suppose?" His voice was too flat, too distanced from his feelings.
    "Look, Cad-I don't care what anyone says, it's not your fault. Sheena got loose a week ago. So-she came back last night and broke into one of the chicken cages. Fine. We'll either catch her or kill her. Nothing to worry about."
    He heard her words, but his mind was still on the chicken cage as they had found it that morning, its wire mesh ripped out and mangled, the wooden frame shattered, blood and feathers and little clotted chunks of raw chicken littering the ground like the aftermath of a ghoulish picnic.
    "That is what you're worried about, isn't it?"
    Annoyed with himself, Cadmann derailed the morbid train of thought.
    "Sure. That's it."
    Although he had worked the biolab before, she gave him the grand tour. There was a complete assortment of dairy and work animals, as well as millions of earthworms, ladybugs and "friendly" insect eggs. "We have to have quadruplication of any needed form. There are going to be failures," Sylvia said bluntly. "The alfalfa crop, for instance. We don't know why yet." Her eyes glittered, and the sudden determination in her face cubed her attractiveness. Cadmann's chest tightened.
    "But I guarantee you we'll know. And soon. We're going to lose more animals, and we've got to be ready for that, too. That's where you'll come in. Routine checks. Cad-any emergencies, and we'll hustle up Marnie or her husband, Jerry. We've got to be ready for anything."
    She darkened the panels and took his hand, leading him to the other side of the room. The vaults were identical to those opposite, but he could feel her increased excitement. "Look," she whispered, and illumined the panels. "Our children."
    They hung in rows, lost in endless dream. (Cadmann was startled at the thought. Were there dreams in cryosleep? The neurologists said no, but his memory said yes. Perhaps it was only that before the drugs took hold and the blood chilled there was one final thought that remained locked in a frozen brain, a thought that unthawed along with the body. Just a wisp of dream at the beginning of sleep and one at the end, linked by decades of silence and darkness.)
    One of Sylvia's hands strayed unconsciously to her own belly, its roundness barely noticeable beneath her jumpsuit.
    There were hundreds of the embryos, frozen at ten weeks of age. They were thumb-sized and milky pale, heads as large as their bodies, with their fluid-filled amniotic sacs billowing about them.
    Cadmann came up close to the glass, counting the tiny fingers and toes, gazing at the gently lowered eyelids, the amber