"Inactive. Not conscious or subject to change in any way. But they have entered the queue, so at some point they will begin to be woken. Exactly when is unpredictable, but not likely to be in the next thousand years."

"In my domain. I interfere as little as possible in the activities and interactions of residents."

"What are they like without your interference?"

"It is pleasingly infrequent that any of them bothers me about anything."

"That's not what I asked."

"Perhaps you could rephrase, then."

"What is the society that these people are going to wake up into like in - organization and standard of living, or whatever it's customary to call it besides 'living'?"

"There is a residence system that provides everyone with a home," she says. "Other material needs are supplied somewhat more haphazardly by a regular semirandom accumulation of instances of previously destroyed objects - food appears in kitchens, toiletries appear in bathrooms, miscellaneous items appear in other rooms. I don't concern myself with their social structures, except that I split the area into two levels and assigned a small staff to sort those who are very unlikely to make trouble for each other into one level and everyone else into the other. At last report, perhaps half a million years ago, the upper level was doing very well and the lower level had ceased to complain."

"What were they complaining about before?" asks Keo.

"The tendency of residents to cause trouble for one another."

"How do you sort these people, anyway?"

"The judges evaluate the contents of their lives."

"They are the staff I mentioned whose job it is to sort arrivals."

"Are you being deliberately unhelpful?" wonders Keo.

"No."

"It appears that billions of Elcenians can now expect to wind up in your domain. I want to know what they will find if they wake up in it instead of being summoned back."

"I have told you several things about that," she says. "It is not obvious to me what more you want to know. There is a further staff whose job it is to answer the questions of new arrivals; perhaps you would like to visit and speak with one."

"Perhaps. You could also let me look, since you don't seem to have strong opinions about that."

"The type of information you seek may not be readily available, depending on what exactly you are looking for. I have very little personal contact with residents."

"Maybe I'll visit, then. Where would be a good place to land?"

"The guide office in the upper base level of the tower."