Michel nodded. It was as he had said from the start, Maya thought; on Mars it would finally become clear that they were all little gods and goddesses, and should live life in a sacred joyfulness. . . . Gender, however, remained clear at first glance. Although she too came from the old species; maybe it was just her. But that runner over there . . . ah. A woman, but with short powerful legs, narrow hips, flat chest. And that one next to her? Again female— no, male! A high jumper, as graceful as a dancer, though all the high jumpers were having trouble: Sax muttered something about plants. Well, still; even if some of them were a bit androgynous, for most it was the usual matter of instant recognition.

“You see what I mean,” Michel said, observing her silence.

“Sort of. I wonder if these youngsters really think about it differently, though. If they have ended patriarchy, then there must necessarily be a new social balance of the sexes. . . .”

“That’s certainly what the Dorsa Brevians would claim.”

“Then I wonder if that’s not the problem with Terran immigration. Not the numbers themselves, but the fact that so many people arriving from Earth are coming from older cultures. It’s like they’re arriving out of a time machine from the Middle Ages, and suddenly here are all these huge Minoans, women and men much the same—”

“And a new collective unconscious.”

“Yes, I suppose. And so the newcomers can’t cope. They cluster in immigrant ghettos, or new towns entire, and keep their traditions and their ties to home, and hate everything here, and all the xenophobia and misogyny in those old cultures breaks out again, against both their own women and the native girls.” She had heard of problems in the cities, in fact, in Sheffield and all over east Tharsis. Sometimes young native women beat the shit out of surprised immigrant assailants; sometimes the opposite occurred. “And the young natives don’t like it. They feel like they’re letting monsters into their midst.”

Michel grimaced. “Terran cultures were all neurotic at their core, and when the neurotic is confronted with the sane, it usually gets more neurotic than ever. And the sane don’t know what to do.”

“So they press to stop immigration. And put us at risk of another war.”