There was intrigue, double-dealing, betrayal, sex — though very discreet and not very informative — and there was a great deal of detail about the life of latter-day Wahabis in a world full of doubters. Budhara was not a doubter, but neither did she conform. Her life was not easy. It did not feel easy, and the intensity of her misery at times was mitigated only by my awareness that it would have an end.

Her death was startling in its violence — she was strangled by her lover in a fit of inferiority — but it was no more revelatory than the sex. My body knew it was not dead, just as it knew it was not really having sex.

After, my mind floated in endspace, gray and potent, and I felt Orianna there. She said, “Anybody you saw, you can become. Up to four per session, with a thinker driving.”

“How long have we been in sim?” I asked.

“An hour.”

It had seemed much longer. I could not really guess how long. But I thought we had not met in the sim, and all I could think to say, in the grayness, was, “I thought we were sharing.”

“We did. I was your last husband.”

“Oh.” The flush began. She had switched sexes — she had known me. I found that intensely unsettling. It called so many of my basics into question.

“We can switch to another location, as well… connect with Budhara through western channels. She can become a minor character.”

“I’d like to be her parrot,” I joked.

“That’s outer,” Orianna said, meaning beyond the sim.

“Then I’d like to go Up,” I said, not using the correct term, but it seemed right.

“Surface coming,” Orianna said, guiding me out of the gray. We opened our eyes to the cabin. Being tens of millions of kilometers between worlds seemed boring compared to Budhara’s life.

I whistled softly and rubbed my hands together to assure me this was reality. “I’m not sure I ever want to do that again,” I said.

“Yeah. It’s something sacred the first time, isn’t it? You want to go back so bad. Real seems fake. It gets easier to pull out later, more perspective, otherwise these would have been negged by law years ago. I don’t do lawneg sims.”

“Lawn-egg?” I asked.

“Outlaw. Illegal.”

“Oh.” I still wasn’t thinking clearly. “I didn’t learn much about Earth.”

“The Sa’ud dynasty is pretty withdrawn, isn’t it? Down fortune fanatics, nobody needs their last drops of oil, really top for sim fiction. Budhara’s my favorite, though. I’ve been through two dozen episodes with her. She’s strong, but she knows how to bend. I really enjoy the part where she petitions the Majlis to let her absorb her brothers’ fortunes… after their death in Basra .”

“Admirable,” I said.

“You don’t look happy?”

“I’m just stunned, Orianna.”

“Wrong choice?”

“No,” I said, though it had been an obtuse choice, to say the least. Orianna, despite her sophistication, was still very young, and I had to be reminded of this now and again. “But I was hoping to learn more about mainstream Earth, not the fringes.”

“Maybe next time,” she said. “I have some straightforward stories, even travelogs, but you can get those on Mars…”

“Maybe,” I said. But I had no intention of trying another.

On Earth, billions of people devoured sims every day, and yet I could not rise clear-headed from a cheap romance.

Allen and I stood in Bithras’s cabin. “I hate this time,” Bithras told us, staring at himself in mirror projection. “In a few days it won’t be exercise. It will be a damned ball and chain. And I don’t mean just the weight, though that will be bad enough. They expect so much out of us. They watch us. I am always afraid some new technology will let them peek into my head while I sleep. I will not feel comfortable until we are on our way home again.”

“You don’t like Earth,” Allen said.

Bithras glared at him. “I loathe it,” he said. “Terries are so cheerful and polite, and so filled with machinery. Machinery for the heart, for the lungs, nano for this, refit for that — ”

“Doesn’t sound so different from Mars,” I said.

Bithras ignored me. His basic conservatism was surfacing, and he had to let it out; better this way, I thought, than that he should bump me again. “They never let a thing alone. Not life, not health, not a thought. They worry it, view it from so many perspectives… I swear, not one of the people we talk to is an individual. Each is a crowd, with the judgment of the crowd, ruled by a benevolent dictator called the self, unsure it is really in charge, so cautious, so very bright.”

“We have people like that on Mars,” Allen said.

“I don’t have to negotiate with them,” Bithras said. “You’ve chosen your immunizations?”

Allen made a face and I laughed.

“You rejected them all?”

“Well,” Allen said, “I was considering letting in the virus that gives me language and persuasion…”

Bithras stared at us, aghast. “Persuasion?”

“The gift of gab,” Allen said.

“You are fooling with me,” Bithras said, pushing back the mirror. “I will look awful. But that matters little, considering they will look so good, even at my best I would look awful. They expect it of Martians. Do you know what they call us, when they are not so polite?”

“What?” I asked. I had heard several names from Orianna: claytoes, tunnel mice, Tharks.

“Colonists,” Bithras said, accent on the middle syllable.

Allen didn’t smile. It was one word never heard on Mars even in its correct pronunciation. Settlers, settlements; never colonies, colonists.“

“A colony, they say,” Bithras continued, “is where you keep your colons.”

I shook my head.

“Believe it,” Bithras said. “You have listened to Alice , you have listened to the people on this ship. Now listen to the voice of true experience. Earth is very together, Earth is very sane, but that does not mean Earth is nice, or that they like us, or even respect us.”

I thought he might be exaggerating. I still had that much idealism and naivete. Orianna, after all, was a friend; and she was not much like her parents.

She gave me some hope.

The cylinders were pulled in and stowed along the hull. The spinning universe became stable. Much of our acquired velocity spilled quickly at two million kilometers from Earth; we lay abed in that time under the persistent press of two g’s deceleration.

This far from Earth, home planet and moon were clearly visible in one sweep of the eye, and as the days passed, they became lovely indeed.

The Moon hung clean silver beside the Earth’s lapis and quartz. There is no more beautiful a world in the Solar System than Earth. I might have been looking down on the planet billions of years ago. Even the faint sparks of tethered platforms around the equator, sucking electric power from the Mother’s magnetic field, could not remove my sense of awe; here was where it all began.

For a moment — not very long, but long enough — I shared the Terracentric view. Mars was tiny and insignificant in history. We shipped little to Earth, contributed little, purchased little; we were more a political than a geographic power, and damned small at that: a persistent itch to the mighty Mother, who had long since drawn a prodigal daughter Moon back to her bosom.

Orianna and I spent as much time staring at the Earth and Moon as we could spare from going through customs interviews. I finished filling out my immunization requests, to block the friendly educations of tailored microbes that floated in Earth’s air.

I was excited. Allen was excited. Bithras was dour and said little.

Five days later, we passed through the main low-orbit space station, Peace III, and made our way on a liner through thick air and a beautiful sunset, downward to the Earth.

Even now, at a distance of sixty years and ten thousand light-years, my heart beats faster and my eyes flow with tears at the memory of my first day on Earth.