“No, but I was hoping so much you’d be right, and we could bring them all together here…forge a bond. It was such a wonderful plan, Suli. How could it have gone so wrong, so quickly? We explained it to them…. They’re acting like children!”

Ram Kikura smiled grimly. “They know what they need better than we, perhaps. I wanted to force things. Like a parent watching a child play with toys…trying to teach them how to grow up more quickly.”

“That’s not fair…” Karen cut herself off, surprised that hearing the delegates compared to children made her angry. She felt close bonds with these Old Natives…was one herself, of course. “They’ve lived through hell, most of them.”

“Maybe they thought of this as a vacation,” Ram Kikura suggested. “And we were tour guides. We disappointed them by being so bossy.”

Despite herself, Karen laughed. She’s a master, really, however naive she is…we’ve been. “So what do we do now?”

“I have just enough stamina to give it one more try. But you, dear Karen, are at the end of your rope.”

“I must be. I want to kick them.”

“So you must take a break. We’ve been in this environment for an objective ten-hour period. Return to your apartment—”

“Back to my body. Out of the dream.”

“Precisely. Out of the nightmare. And get some genuine rest, in your own head, natural rest without city memory’s overtones.”

“How could this be anything but restful?” Karen asked wistfully. The stars were coming out above them, as sharp and real as any she had seen on Earth. The night winds smelled of jasmine and honeysuckle.

“Do you agree?” Ram Kikura asked.

Karen nodded.

“Then go now. I’ll report to you if anything improves. Otherwise, I’ll close this whole charade down and send them all back to their bodies. We’ll escort them back to Earth and start planning all over again.” She lifted her eyebrows and inclined her head, staring levelly at Karen. “All right?”

“Yes. I…how do I get back?”

“Ruby slippers, my dear. Remember the code.”

Karen looked down at her feet. Instead of soft doeskin boots, she now wore ruby slippers. She tapped them together. “There’s no place like home,” she said. Ram Kikura vanished.

An objective hour later, in her temporary apartment, Karen put on a silk kimono, given to her by a group of survivors in Japan thirty years before, and lay back on a couch with a cool glass of Thistledown Chardonnay, a Haydn quartet playing softly in the background sans pictor accompaniment. The apartment environment had been adapted to resemble an open-air porch looking across a tropical island beach. Across the broad, dazzling blue ocean, a nub of volcano smoked casually, its plume mingling with stacked white anvil-head clouds. Warm, salty breezes played over her wicker chair.