“My dear, your planet — your culture — may depend on what happens in the next few years. You have a responsibility I don’t envy.”

“I’m doing my very best,” I said.

Muir hooded her gray eyes. I realized that she had asked me questions as one politician to another, and I had given her inadequate answers.

Orianna regarded me sadly, as if she had also discovered the weaknesses of a friend.

“I don’t mean to offend,” Muir said. “I thought we were dealing with a political problem.”

“I’m not offended,” I lied. “Orianna took me all over New York today, and I’m a little stunned. I need to rest and absorb it all.”

“Of course,” Muir said. “Ori, give your mother and father my best wishes. It’s grand to see you again. Good-bye.” Abruptly, we sat facing the blank white wall.

Orianna stood: Her mouth was set in a firm line and her eyes were determined not to meet mine. Finally, she said, “Everybody here acts a little… abrupt at times. It’s the way they experience time, I think. Casseia, we didn’t come here to make you feel inferior. That was the farthest thing from my mind.”

“She chewed on me a little, don’t you agree?” I said quietly. “Mars is not useless.”

“Please don’t let patriotism blind you, Casseia.”

I clamped my mouth shut. No eighteen-year-old Earth child was going to talk down to me that way.

“Listen to what she was asking. She’s very sharp. You have to find out where you might be strong.”

“Our strength is so much more — ” I cut myself off. Than Earth can imagine. Our spiritual strength. I was about to launch into a patriotic defense that even I did not believe. In truth, they were right.

Mars did not breed great politicians; it bred hateful little insects like Dauble and Connor, or silly headstrong youths like Sean and Gretyl. I hated having my face ground into the unpleasant truth. Mars was a petty world, a spiteful and grumbling world. How could it possibly be any danger to vigorous, wise, together Earth?

Orianna glanced at the blank wall and sighed. “I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable. I should have talked to you about it first.”

“It’s an honor,” I said. “I just wasn’t prepared.”

“Let’s find Kite and Shrug,” she suggested. “I can’t imagine living here.” She shivered delicately. “But then, maybe I’m old-fashioned.”

We rejoined Kite and Shrug and spent several hours shopping in Old New York, real shops with nothing but real merchandise. I felt doubly old-fashioned — dismayed and disoriented by a district that was itself supposed to be a historical recreation. Kite and Shrug entered an early twenty-one haberdashery, and we followed. An officious clerk placed them in sample booths, snapped their images with a quaint 3-D digitizer, then showed them how they might look in this season’s fashions. The clerk made noises of approval over several outfits. “We can have them for you in ten minutes, if you care to wait.”

Kite ordered a formal socializing suit and asked them to deliver it to a cover address. Shrug declined to purchase anything. We were heading out the door when the clerk called to us, “Oh! Excuse me — I almost forgot. Free tickets to Circus Mind for customers… and their friends.”

Kite accepted the tickets and handed them to us. He stuffed his in his mouth and chewed thoughtfully. “Are we all going?” he asked.

“What is it?” Orianna asked.

“Ori doesn’t know something!” Shrug exclaimed, amused.

“It must be really new,” she said, irritated.

“Oh, it is,” the clerk said. “Very drive.”

“Power live sim,” Kite said. “It’s abso fresh. All free until it draws a nightly crowd. Would you like to try, Casseia?”

“It could be too much,” Orianna cautioned.

I took that as a challenge. Although tired and a little depressed from my meeting with Muir, I wasn’t about to look less than drive — certainly not to Kite.

“Let’s go,” I said.

Kite handed us our tickets. I stared at mine. “Chew,” he said. “Checks you out, sees if you’re clear for the experience, and you print up a pass on the back of your hand.”

I inserted the ticket slowly and chewed. It tasted like the scent of a sun-warmed flower garden, with a tickle in the nose. I sneezed.

The clerk smiled. “Have fun,” he said cheerfully.

Circus Mind occupied the fifth and sixth floors of a twentieth-century skyscraper, the Empire State Building . I consulted my slate and learned that I was not far from Penn Station — in case I wanted to escape and my friends were locked in their amusements. Kite took my arm and Orianna ran interference with a group of LitVid arbeiters looking for society interest. Kite projected a confusion around me — multiple images, all false, as if four or five women accompanied him — and we made it through to the front desk. A thin black woman over two and a half meters tall, her auburn hair brushing the star-patterned ceiling, checked our hands for passes and we entered the waiting area.

“Next flight, five minutes,” a sepulchral voice announced. Cartoonish faces popped out of the walls, leering at us — lurid villains from a pop LitVid.

“Abso brain neg,” Shrug commented. “I was hoping for a challenge.”

“I’ve been here twice,” said a woman with skin of flexible coppery plates. “It’s strong inside.”

Orianna glanced at me, Okay?

I nodded, but I was not happy. Kite, I noticed, had assumed a blank air, neither expectant nor bored. After a five-minute wait, the faces on the walls looked sad and vanished, a door opened, and we entered a wide, open dance floor, already covered with patrons.

Projectors in the ceiling and floor created a hall of mirrors. The floor controller decided Kite and I were a couple and isolated us between our own reflections. We could not see Shrug or Orianna or any of the other patrons, though I heard them faintly. Kite grinned at me. “Maybe this replaces murder,” he said.

I had no idea what he meant. I felt more than a little apprehensive.

But that, I decided — and I squared my shoulders to physically strengthen my resolve — was simple backwater fright. This was nothing more than a mental roller coaster.

A slender golden man appeared on a stage a few steps away. “Friends, I need your help,” he said earnestly. “A million years from now, something will go drastically wrong, and the human race will be extinguished. What you do here and now can save the planet and the Solar System against forces too vast to precisely describe. Will you accompany me into the near future?”

“Sure,” Kite said, putting his hand on my shoulder.

The golden man and the hall of mirrors vanished. We floated in starry space. The golden man’s voice preceded us. “Please prepare for transit.”

Kite let go of my shoulder and took my hand. The stars zipped past in the expected way, and Earth rastered into view in front of us. Background information flooded into my head.

In this future, all instrumentality is controlled by deep molecular Chakras, beings installed in every human at birth as guardians and teachers. Your first Chakra is a good friend, but there has been a malicious error — an evolvon has been loosed in the child-treatment centers. A malicious Chakra has invaded an entire generation. You have been isolated from your high birthright, cut loose of energy and nutrition. A generation lives in the midst of plenty, yet starves. You must now find a Natural Rebirth Clinic on an Earth filled with menace, eliminate all Chakras, find the roots of your new soul, and prevent those controlled by their Evil Masters from forcing the sun to go super-nova.

“Sounds pretty lame,” I whispered to Kite.

“Wait a bit,” he said.

I learned more about this future Earth than I wanted to. There were no cities, as such — expanses of wilderness covered the continents. This, I knew, was because I could not call forth my Chakra of instrumentality.