"You truly believe that?"
"I can't think of any other reason."
"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.
Orianaa 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 booms, 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.
Somewhere is your teacher, in the Natural Rebirth Clinic. You do not know what he or she or it looks like — it might even be a flower or a tree. But it contains your clue to regaining control . . .
I could
hardly have been more bored. I wanted to smile at Kite and reassure him, this was nothing, not even so bad as Orianna's potboiler sim.
Then my mind jerked. I filled with fear and deep loathing — for the evil Chakra, for loss of my birthright, for the impending end of everything. And mixed with the fear was a primal urge to join forces in every way possible — with Kite, with whoever might be present.
Hack plot, to say the least, but I had never experienced such vivid washes of imposed emotion, even in Orianna's sim. They played my mind like a keyboard.
"I think I know what's going to happen next," Kite said. "Oh?"
Everyone on the Circus Mind floor appeared around us, floating in space.
"It's very drive," Kite assured me.
The golden man faded into view, in the center of our empyrean of several hundred souls. "At last, we have all arrived, and we have a sufficiency," he said. "Teams must join and become families, and trust implicitly. Are we prepared?"
Everybody gave their assent, including me. I had been expertly prepared — my nerves sang with excitement and anticipation.
"Let us join as families."
The golden man encircled groups of twenty with broad glowing red halos. Our clothes vanished. Transforms reshaped to their natural forms, or at least what the controller — a thinker, I presumed, with considerable resources — imagined their natural forms might be. Other than being naked. Kite and I did not change.
We linked arms, floating in a circle, skydivers in freefall.
"The first step," the golden man said, "is to unite. And the best way to do that is to dance, to join your natural energies, your natural sexualities."
It was an orgy.
I had been prepared so well — and part of me truly did want to couple, especially with Kite — that I did not object. The controller played on our sexual instincts expertly, and this time the sex — unlike what I had experienced in Orianna's sim — felt real. My body believed I was having sex, although a disclaimer — discreetly making itself known to my inner self — informed me I was not actually having sex.
The experience grew into something larger, all of our minds working together. The sim prompted us to move our bodies on the floor in a dance that echoed our emotions. While deeply involved in the alternate reality, we were at once aware of the dance, and of our own personal artistry responding. I've never considered myself a dancer, but that didn't matter — I fit. The dance felt lovely.
All of us pooled the resources of our assumed characters — looked down on the Earth, so fragile and threatened — and we loved it with an intensity I had never felt even for family, a dreamlike rush of awed emotion and dependency. I was ready to do anything, sacrifice anything, to save it . . .
Throughout the entire experience, a distant tiny harbor of my individuality wondered idly if this was what Earth wished to do to Mars — use us. Join in a vast, insignificant orgy to save the future. This backwater self tapped its foot impatiently, and suspected the overblown love of Earth to be a kind of propaganda . . .
But it was effective propaganda, and I enjoyed myself hugely. As the group sim drew to a conclusion, and our dance slowed — as the illusion began to break up, and we returned to full body awareness — I felt contented and very tired.
We had saved the future, saved the Earth and the sun, defeated the evil evolvon Chakras, and coincidentally, I had bonded with all my partners. I knew their names, their individual characters, if not the intimate details of their daily lives. We smiled and laughed and hugged on the large floor.
The lights rose and music played, abstract projections suggested by the music swirling around us.
We had been through a lot together. I had no doubt that if I stayed on Earth long enough, I would be welcome in each of their homes, as if we had been lifelong friends, lovers, there wasn't really an appropriate word — more even than husbands and wives. Mates in group sim.
Kite and I rejoined Shrug and Orianna on the street. Reality seemed pale and gray against what we had just experienced. A gentle drizzle softened the night air. Orianna seemed concerned. "Was that okay?" she asked. "I thought too late it might be more than you wanted ..."
"It was interesting," I said.
"They call them amity sims. They're bright fresh," Kite said. "The next drive. More people in sim than ever before — all proprietary tech, but I'm sure there are some major thinkers involved."
Shrug looked dazed. His path along the street wavered, a step this way, a step the other. He grinned over his shoulder at us. "Touchy getting used to the real."
"That was really nice," Kite said, putting an arm around me. "No jealousy, just friendship and affection — and no anxiety, until we met the bad Chakras." I looked up at Kite. We had not been lovers — not physically — but I felt extremely close to him, more than I had to Charles. That bothered me.
"I don't think I've ever been so scared," Shrug said.
"Really social," Orianna said. "Everybody knows everybody else. Could bond all of Earth if it maxes."
Indeed, I thought, it could. "I need to rest," I said. "Get back to Washington."
"It's been wonderful, spending the day together," Orianna said. "You're a good partner, a good friend, and — "
I stopped her with a tight embrace. "Enough," I said, smiling. "You'll puncture my Martian reserve."
"Wouldn't want you to leak reserve," Shrug said, standing apart, arms folded, fingers tapping elbows.
"We'll walk to Penn Station. You can track to DC from there."
We said little as we navigated the crowds and adwalls. The glow of Circus Mind faded. Orianna became sad and a little withdrawn. She turned to me as we neared the station. "I wanted to show you so much, Casseia. You have to know Earth. That's your job now." She spoke almost sternly.
"Right," I said. Already a deep sense of embarrassment had set in — a reaction to the unearned intimacy of the Circus, I presumed. Martian reserve leaking.
"I'd like to get together again. Will there be time?"
"I don't know," I answered honestly. "If there is, I'll call."
"Do," she said. "Don't let the sim shade what we've earned." Her use of that word, echoing my own thoughts, startled me. Orianna could be spookily intuitive.
"Thank you," Kite said, and kissed me. I held back on that kiss — Earth kissing Mars, not all that proper, perhaps, considering.
I entered the station. They stayed outside, waving, farewells as old as time.
Four hours later, I sat in my room overlooking Arlington, the combs, the Potomac, and the distant Mall. Bithras had left the suite. Allen had not returned from Nepal. Alice was deep in broadband net research for Bithras and I did not disturb her.
I focused on the Washington Monument, like an ancient stone rocket ship, and tried to keep my head quiet so I could listen to the most important inner voices.
Mars had nothing that threatened the Earth. We were in every way Earth's inferior. Younger, more divided, our strength lay in our weakness — in diversity of opinion, in foolish reserve that masqueraded as politeness, in the warmth and security of our enclosed spaces, our warrens. We were indeed rabbits.
The fading sim had left a strong impression of Earth's passionate embrace. The patriotism — planetism — felt here was ages old, more than a match for our youthful Martian brand. I shivered.
Wolf Earth could gobble us in an instant. She needed no excuse but the urge.
We received our invitations — instructions, actually — two days later. We would meet secretly with Senators Mendoza and Wang in neutral territory: Richmond, Virginia, away from the intense Beltway atmosphere.
The choice of city seemed meaningful. Richmond had been capitol of the Confederacy during the American Civil War, over three centuries before: a genteel, well-preserved town of three million, for nearly ninety years a center for optimized human design research.
"Are we being sent any subtle messages?" Allen asked as we gathered in the suite's living room. A projection of the Richmond meeting
place, the Thomas Jefferson Hotel, floated above the coffee table, severe gray stone and pseudo-Greek architecture.
Bithras regarded us dourly, eyes weary. He had been up all evening communicating with Mars; the travel time for each signal had been almost eight minutes, a total delay of almost sixteen minutes between sending and receiving a reply. He had not revealed any of the details of his conversations yet. "What messages?" he asked.
Allen nodded to me: you explain.
"Richmond was once a symbol of the failed South," I said.
"South America?" Bithras asked.
"Southern states. They tried to secede from the Union. The North was immensely more powerful. The South suffered for generations after losing a civil war."
"Not a very clear message," Bithras said. "I hope they haven't chosen Richmond just for that reason."
"Probably not," Allen said. "What have you heard from Mars?"
Bithras wrinkled his brow and shook his head. "The limits to my discretion are clear. If the deal we agreed to is inadequate . . . then we agree to nothing. We go home."
"After coming all this way?" I asked.
"My dear Casseia, the first rule of politics, as in medicine, is 'do no harm.' I do not want to act on my own initiative; the Council tells me they will not tolerate any initiative; so, there will be no initiative."
"Why summon us to Earth in the first place?" I asked.
"I don't know," Bithras said. "If I didn't suspect strongly otherwise, I would call it gross incompetence. But when your adversary's incompetence puts you at a disadvantage, it is time to think again.
"The Council will make some decisions and get back to me before we leave for Richmond. So, we have tomorrow to ourselves. I suggest we give Alice a break and set up an appointment with Jill."
"We have a five-minute appointment at twenty-three this evening, broadband ex net, private and encrypted," Allen said. "Alice and I made arrangements with Jill yesterday . . . just in case."
"I'm glad somebody can show initiative," Bithras said.