The first time around, my application for a syndic apprenticeship was turned down. I switched from Durrey back to UMS and resumed studies at the much-reduced govmanagement school. I applied for the apprenticeship again six months later, and was rejected again.

Bithras Majumdar, syndic of Majumdar BM and my third uncle, had been summoned to Earth in late 2172, M.Y. 53, to testify before the Senate of the United States of the Western Hemisphere . Bithras’s testimony could have been transmitted and saved us all a lot of money. Politicians and syndics seldom do much unrehearsed talking in public. But the arrogance of Earth was legendary.

GEWA — the Greater East-West Alliance — had emerged as the greatest economic and political power on Earth. Within GEWA, the United States had kept its position as first among equals. Still, it was generally accepted on Mars that GEWA was using the United States to express its strong disappointment with Mars’s lack of progress toward unification. Thus, the United States wanted to hold direct talks with, and take direct testimony from, an influential Martian.

It seemed in a perverse way all very romantic and adventurous; and if everybody had been practical, I probably would never have been offered the chance to go to Earth. Even the most dedicated red rabbit looked upon Earth with awe. Whatever our opinions of her heavy-handed politics, her feverish love of overwhelming technology, her smothering welter of biological experiment, her incredible worldliness, on Earth you could walk naked in the open air, and that was something we all wanted to try at least once.

So, having failed twice, I applied again, and this time, I believe — though she never confessed — that my mother pulled strings. My application went further than it had ever gone, my level of interviewing rose several ranks — and finally I was led to understand that I was being seriously considered.

The last time Charles and I saw each other, in that decade, was in 2173. While waiting for a decision on my application, I served a quarter as a Council page at Ulysses and worked in the office of Bette Irvine Sharpe, mediator for Greater Tharsis. Working for Sharpe was great experience; being given that job, my mother thought, was a sign of high BM favor.

I attended a barn dance held to raise funds for Tharsis Research University , newly established and already the bright spot for Martian theoretical science, as well as the center of Martian thinker research.

Charles was there, in the company of a young woman whose looks I did not approve of. We saw each other under the beribboned transparent dome erected for the occasion on a fallow rope field.

I wore a deliberately provocative gown, emphasizing what did not need emphasizing. Charles wore university drab, a green turtleneck and dark gray pants. Charles managed to separate from the clutches of his friend, and we faced each other over a table covered with fresh, newly-designed vegetables. He told me I looked wonderful. I complimented his clothes, not honestly; they were dreadful. He seemed calm, but I was nervous. I still felt guilt over what had happened between us; guilt, and something else. Being near him made me uncomfortable, but I still thought of him as a friend.

“I’ve applied for a syndic apprenticeship. I’d like to go to Earth,” I said. “There’s a good chance I’ll get it. I might go to Earth with my Uncle Bithras.”

Charles said he was pleased for me, but added glumly, “If you get it, you’ll be gone for two years. A Martian year.”

“It’ll flash,” I said.

He looked dubious. “I told you I’d always be willing to be your partner,” he said.

“You haven’t exactly been waiting,” I said, a sudden wash of anger and embarrassment coloring my face, sharpening my tone.

Charles was quicker on his feet now and more experienced with people. “You haven’t been very encouraging.”

“You never called,” I said.

He shook his head. “You were the one who said good-bye, remember? I have a few tatters of pride. If you changed your mind, I figured you would call me.”

“That’s pretty arrogant,” I said. “Relationships are mutual.”

He braced himself to say something he didn’t want to say and looked away. “Your world has grown too large for me. Waiting doesn’t seem practical.”

I just stared at him.

“You’ve matured, you’re becoming everything I knew you would be. I wish you all the best. I will love you always.”

He bowed, turned, and walked away, leaving me totally flustered. I had approached him as an old friend, and he had brought up this uncomfortable thing that I thought we had both left behind, just as I told him about what promised to be the greatest accomplishment of my young life. Such pure emotional blackmail deserved my deepest contempt.

I walked briskly across the tarp-covered field and palmed into a rest kiosk. There I stood by a gently flowing resink and stared into the single round mirror, angrily asking why I felt so terrible, so sad. “Good riddance,” I tried to convince myself.

I never disliked Charles, never found in him anything I did not admire. Yet even now, with a century of living between me and her, I can’t bring myself to call that young woman a fool.

I tell all this as trivial prelude to things neither Charles nor I could imagine. I look back now and see the relentless roll of events, building across the next seven Martian years to the greatest event in human history.

Trivial pain, trivial lives. The shiver of specks of dust ramping to the storm.

You can go home again, but it will cost you.

In the late twenty-second century, travel between Mars and Earth remained a corporate or government luxury, or a jape of the very rich. A passenger of average mass traveling from Earth to Mars, or Mars to Earth, would pay some two million Triple dollars for the privilege.

The rest had to settle for sending their messages by light-speed dataflow, and that put a natural wall between one-on-one conversations.

From Earth to the Moon, reply delay is about two and two-thirds seconds, just enough to catch your breath and not quite enough to lose your chain of thought. To Mars, delay varied with the planetary dance from forty-four minutes to just under seven.

The art of conversation lapsed early between Earth and Mars.

As soon as I heard I was a finalist for the apprenticeship, I began furiously re-studying Earth politics and cultural history. I had already gone far beyond what most Martians are taught in the course of normal education; I had become, somewhat unusually on Mars, a Terraphile. Now I needed to be an expert.

I had some idea of the kinds of questions I would be asked; I knew there would be interviews and tough scrutiny; but I did not know who would be conducting the examinations. When I learned, I couldn’t decide whether to be relieved or nervous. Ultimately, I think I was relieved. The first interview would be with Alice, Majumdar’s chief thinker.

The interview was conducted in Ylla, in an office reserved for more formal, inter-family business meetings. I dressed slowly that morning, taking extra care with the fresh clothes as they formed beneath the mat on my bed. I scrutinized myself in a mirror and in vid projection, looking for flaws inside and out.

I tried to calm myself on the hundred-meter walk to the business chambers, deliberately choosing a longer route through family display gardens, offset from the main tunnels, filled with flowers and vegetables and small trees growing beneath sheets of artificial sun.

Thinkers were invariably polite, infinitely patient, with pleasant personalities. Also smarter than humans and faster by a considerable margin. I had never spoken with Alice before, but I knew my uncle had established a specific set of criteria for his apprentice. I had little doubt that she would speck me soundly and fairly. But taking into account my age and lack of experience, that little doubt quickly magnified into a bad case of nerves.