He drew his head back, dismayed, “Family?”

“We need to make more red rabbits, right? To offset Earth’s billions? A policy matter.”

“Casseia!” he said. “You deliberately misunderstand — ”

I cut him off. “I hadn’t planned on procreating so early, but if it serves policy, I suppose I must.” Wit or not, I forged ahead. I put on a stoic face, lifted my hand to my brow, and said, “Bithras, all that can be asked of any red doe, in this life, is to lie back and think of Mars.”

He made a face of sharp distaste. “That is not funny, Casseia. I am discussing serious difficulties in our personal lives.”

“I’ll have to update my medical nano,” I said. “Bichemistry is different in pregnant women.”

“You miss my meaning completely.” He stretched out his arms and again one hand touched my shoulder, moved to my upper breast, while his eyes held me, tried to convince me that this was not what it might seem. “Am I not attractive?”

I lifted my eyebrows and removed his hand again. “You should talk to my father. He understands family politics and proprieties better than I. Certainly in the matter of liaisons and alliances… and children.”

Bithras slumped his shoulders and waved his hand weakly. “I’ll transfer the docs to your slate. Alice already has them,” he said. Then he shook his head with genuine sadness and perhaps regret.

Guiltless, I did not feel at all sorry.

I left his cabin with a dizzy sense of lightness. Forewarned was forearmed. The lightness reverted to anger once I was in my own cabin, and I sat on the bed, pounding the fabric so hard I lifted my bottom several centimeters. Then I lay back and counted backwards, eyes closed, teeth clenched. He has no more control than a baby wetting his diapers, said a calm, cold voice in my head, the part of me that still thought clearly when I was upset. “He has no more technique than a tunnel bore,” I said out loud. “He’s inept.”

I sat up, rubbed my eyes, and took a deep breath.

Voice or vid communication between Tuamotu and Mars was too expensive to be indulged in lightly. I sent text letters instead, addressing Father, Mother, and Stan; but the last letter I sent, in the beginning of our eighth month, before he slowed for Earth orbit, I addressed to Mother alone.

Dear Mom,

I’ve survived this far, and even enjoyed most of the trip, but I’m afraid the letters I’ve been sending haven’t been completely open. Being away from Mars, talking with Terries, watching Bithras at work, I’ve become more and more aware every day how outmatched we Martians are. We are blinded by our traditions and conservatism. We are crippled by our innocence. Poor Bithras! He bumped me, as you said he would — only once so far, thank God — and he was so crude, so direct and unsophisticated — a man of his travels and broadness of mind, of his importance! A friend once told me that Martians don’t educate their children for the most important things in life — courtship, relations, love — relying instead on individual discovery, which is hit-or-miss, mostly miss. On Earth, Bithras would get social-grade therapy, spend some time practicing in sims, clear his mind and improve his skills. Why does our sense of individuality prevent us from correcting our weaknesses?

I’m spending a lot of time with a young woman from Earth. She is sharp and witty, she is a thousand years old compared to me — yet she’s only seventeen Earth years. On her eighteenth birthday, I’m going to go into a sim with her and explore wise old Earth through its fantasies. I don’t know exactly what the sim is, but I suspect it won’t make me comfortable. She will hardly think anything of it, but I’m terrified. Terrie-fied. You might be shocked, reading this, but don’t think I’ll be any less shocked, doing it. I have always thought myself to be stable and imperturbable, but my innocence — my ignorance — is simply appalling.

And Alice suggested I try something of this sort. I hope that legitimizes it a little in your eyes, but if not… As Orianna — that’s the young woman’s name — as she says, I’m no longer a cutlet.

I sent the letter coded to our family, and before Mother had a chance to reply, on Orianna’s eighteenth birthday, two days away from our transfer from the Tuamotu to a shuttle to Earth, we dived into her smuggled fantasy sim.

“Better late than never,” Orianna said as we hooked our slates on a private channel, through the ship’s broadband, and linked with each other and with Alice, who was willing and even eager to conduct.

“You haven’t told me what it’s about.”

“It’s a forty-character novel.”

“Text?”

“Calling it a novel means it has a plot, instead of just being landscape. You’re part of a flow. You can move from character to character, but the character imposes — you won’t think like yourself in character, but you can watch. In other words, part of you will know you’re still you. It’s not a whole-life sim.”

“Oh.”

“You can pull out any time, and you can jump, as well.”

“You’ve done this sim before?”

“No,” Orianna said. “That’s why I didn’t want to just slate it. Alice can give us more protection and more detail. If there’s a bug, she can pull us out gently rather than just disconnecting. A discon always gives me a headache.”

It sounded worse and worse. I seriously considered backing out, but looking at Orianna, at her bright-eyed eagerness as she arranged the nano plugs, I felt a sudden burst of youthful shame. If she could do it, I could, too.

“You’ll go into the staging faster than I will,” she said, handing me my cable. “My cable will have to deactivate enhancements and set up cooperation links.”

I placed the cable next to my temple. The tip spread to several centimeters and seized my skin, snaking to get in a position to support its own weight. My arm-hair prickled. This was very like the arrangements for major therapy. Something tickled in my temple: the nano links going in through skin, skull, and cortex, pushing their leads into the proper main lines within the brain.

“What happens if this is jerked loose?” I asked, pushing the cable with a fingertip.

“Nothing. The links dissolve. Abso safe. Old old tech.”

“And if there’s a bug Alice can’t handle?”

“She can reprogram anything in the sim. You just spend a few seconds with Alice while she figures it out.”

That’s right, actually, Alice said within my head.

“Wow,” I said, startled. I had done LitVids with Alice , of course, but a direct link was a very different sensation.

Try talking to me without moving your lips or making a sound.

“Is this — ” Is this right?

Very good. Relax.

Do you approve of this sort of thing?

My entire existence is rather like a sim, Casseia.

I told my mother we’d do this. I don’t know what she’ll think.

I still saw through my eyes. Orianna had put on her cables and closed her eyes. A muscle in her cheek twitched.

“Ready,” she said out loud.

Sim will begin in three seconds.

I closed my eyes. For the first time in my life, I had the sensation of closing my ears, my fingers, my body, as well.

A creator credit icon — three parallel red knife slashes rising from a black ground, representing no artist or corporation I was familiar with — then total darkness.

When I opened my eyes again, I had a new set of memories. In medias res, along with the memories came a new set of concerns, worries, things I knew I had to do.

It was so smooth I hardly felt the shift.

I became Budhara, daughter of the Wahabi Arabian Alliance family Sa’ud, heir to old Earth resource fortunes. I knew somewhere that Budhara had never lived — this was fiction — but it didn’t matter. Her world was real — more real than my own, with the intensity possible in exaggerated art. My part in her life began fifty years in the past, and moved with un-diminished vividness through seven episodes, ending on her deathbed ten years in the future.