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silence along the path that ran past the cluster of low white buildings and down the shoulder of the hillside on which the village was built. The tan-bricked path wound around the lake at the bottom of the ridge and out into a pleasant meadow. A bicyclist passed them, coasting down the gentle slope. Leafy young trees spread dappled shade along the path. Susan heard insects humming in the bushes and birds chirping. A complete ecology, painstakingly established and maintained. Looking at the grassy field and the clumps of taller trees standing farther along the gently curving path, she found it hard to believe that they were inside a huge, man-made cylinder that was hanging in empty space a few hundred kilometers above the surface of the Moon. Until she glanced up and saw that the land curved completely around, overhead.
    "Holly?"
    She snapped her attention back to Eberly. "I-I'm sorry," she stuttered, embarrassed. "I guess I wasn't listening."
    He nodded, as if accepting her apology. "Yes, I forget how beautiful this is. You're absolutely right, none of us should take all this for granted."
    "What were you saying?" she asked.
    "It wasn't important." He raised his arm and swept it around dramatically. "This is the important thing, Holly. This world that you will create for yourselves."
    My name is Holly now, she reminded herself. You can remember everything that happens to you, remember your new name, for jeep's sake.
    Still, she asked, "Why'd you want me to change my name?"
    Eberly tilted his head to one side, thinking before he answered. "I've suggested to every new recruit that they change their names. You are entering a new world, starting new lives. A new name is appropriate, don't you agree?"
    "Oh, right! F'sure."
    "Yet," he sighed, "very few actually follow my suggestion. They cling to the past."
    "It's like baptism, isn't it?" Holly said.
    He looked at her and she saw something like respect in his piercing blue eyes. "Baptism, yes. Born again. Beginning a new life."
    "This'll be my third life," she told him.
    Eberly nodded.
    "I don't remember my first life," Holly said. "Ear's I can remember, my life started seven years ago."
    "No," Eberly said firmly. "Your life began two weeks ago, when you arrived here."
    "F'sure. Right."
    "That's why you changed your name, isn't it?"
    "Right," she repeated, thinking, He's so bugging serious about everything! I wish I could make him smile.
    Eberly stopped walking and slowly turned a full circle, taking in the world that stretched all around them and climbed up over their heads to completely encircle them.
    "I was born in deep poverty," he said, his voice low, almost a whisper. "I was born prematurely, very sick; they didn't think I would live. My father ran away when I was still a baby and my mother took up with a migrant laborer, a Mexican. He wanted me to die. If it weren't for the New Morality I would have died before I was six months old. They took me into their hospital, they put me through their schools. They saved me, body and soul."
    "I'm glad," Holly said.
    "The New Morality saved America," Eberly explained. "When the greenhouse warming flooded all the coastal areas and the food riots started, it was the New Morality that brought order and decency back into our lives."
    "I don't remember the States at all," she said. "Just Selene. Nothing before that."
    He chuckled. "You certainly seem to have no trouble remembering anything that's happened to you since. I've never seen anyone with such a steel trap of a mind."
    With a careless shrug, Holly replied, "That's just the RNA treatments they gave me."
    "Oh, yes, of course." He started walking again, slowly. "Well, Holly, here we are. Both of us. And ten thousand others."
    "Nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-eight," she corrected, with an impish grin.
    He dipped his chin slightly in acknowledgment of her arithmetic, totally serious, oblivious to her attempt at humor.
    "You have the opportunity to create a new world here," Eberly