“Another difficult Mind Message, true. Among many.” A sly smile, glittering eyes. “You seem to enjoy difficulty, so I am serving you a healthy dose.”

2.

She decided to stay in for the evening, read a bit, forget life’s vexing turns.

Rachel often read truly old fiction about libraries, to get a feel for what they might have been in the Print Age. Before even that had come meaning laboriously laid into stone, ceramics, sheets of reeds and parchment and leather, until finally the encasement of knowledge into the sheeted bodies of dead trees. Nostalgia for that time was eternal for Librarians. They knew they were often displaced from our origins in print, and carried anxious memories of that lost past. We fear losing our bearings. Then came the Cyber Age and all changed. Information could then fly through the air, even across a galaxy.

By writing of futures that echoed our nostalgias, the farback writer Bradbury reminded her of both what we were and what we could yet be. Like most creative people, Ray—she always thought of him that way, an old friend—was still a child at heart. His stories told her: Hold on to your childhood. You don’t get another one. In so many stories, he gave us his childhood—and it worked for her, too.

Through Ray she had learned that for some hours she was Jane Eyre and Gully Foyle and Mr. Biswas and David Copperfield and millions more. Now she felt her own voice entirely separate from the many voices she had heard, read, and internalized every day. That now included the pseud-voices of the Minds, too. Her world had an alien tilt to it, somehow.

She was also an equal-opportunity voyeur. She wanted to know what it was like to be everybody. From reading she’d picked up how to note facial signals that could pass across in a flick—furrowed brows, jittery eyes, laconic curl of lip. She watched hands to see what they were saying, too. Most people gave away plenty, all unaware: jittery fingers, toe-tapping feet, shrugs and little cringes, and accents. Slow, curling vowels said southern, as she well knew and could disguise. Sharp, curt consonants: northern hemisphere power-speak. Flattened tones, misplaced articles—I’m trying out this language, not a native. Myriad signals, sliding sounds that said more than words. She could read backstory in vowels.

So tonight she looked forward to delicious hours of reading, after a skimpy dinner. She and Cat liked to eat imported food from Earth but were low on money, so ate local, meaning algae. Basically chlorella algae, grown fast in vats, extremely nutritious, literally everything you needed—except taste. All the vitamins, all the proteins, the sugars, everything, and awful. Called gunk for a good reason. Hence all the added flavorants, extracts hypered up, so one could eat gunk like oatmeal or spareribs. Tonight: duckling flambé.

Rachel cleaned up and fetched forth her book for a long sweet read—but Cat would have none of it. “It’s clubbing night!”

Rachel sighed, nodded. They had agreed on a social schedule. Here comes the game, she thought. Gone was her evening of Bradbury or Heinlein—hysterically funny stuff, in its ignorance of the moon, yet endearing, too, at times. All before anybody had even gotten to Luna. She always dressed well for an outing, but she recognized the signs of insecurity here: certitude was inversely proportional to the amount of makeup. Cat’s hands jittered so much Rachel had to put on Cat’s lipstick. As a girl she had hated Charlotte Brontë’s comment that she would have given all her talent to be beautiful. That condemned you always to play somebody else’s game—and, when your looks failed, finally to lose. But makeup was also a mask to hide behind.