For what, I didn’t want to say. We took a long trip to talk with the enemy, and they sent us back without even saying a word. But at least the Earth wasn’t destroyed. Something to be grateful for.

So we were each given fifty million dollars to spend, in a world where Namir’s New York City penthouse could be bought for ten million.

The only thing I really wanted was a hamburger.

My mother and father were dead, no surprise, though she had made it to 101, waiting for me, and left behind a brave, wistful note that made me cry.

My children were still on Mars as well, but were not speaking to each other, the girl a total humanist and the boy a total nerd realist. I spent over an hour in difficult conversation with both of them, difficult for the twelve-minute delay as well as emotional factors. I signed off promising to visit both of them as soon as I could get to Mars. Though with the realist I’d have to communicate electronically, no matter what planet I was on. He’d sold his organic body for parts.

That gave me a flash of irrational anger, but it passed. He actually only had half of one cell of mine.

My brother, Card, was also a realist, but he had not yet become bodiless. He lived on Earth now, in Los Angeles, and promised he’d put on his formal body (he had three) and come see me when we landed. I waited while he made a few calls, then called back and said he’d gotten all the vouchers and permissions to make the trip.

I wondered how free the Land of the Free was nowadays. But I guessed I could always go back to Mars.

Chapter 16 - MOONBOY SPEAKS

16

MOONBOY SPEAKS

I put the two balalaikas in the padded boxes I’d made for them, and set the Vermeer book, and the Shakespeare and Amachai and cummings poems, into the titanium suitcase. I’d done a laundry in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, and padded the books with clean folded clothes I would never want to wear again.

What were the actual odds that we were about to become dead heroes rather than inconvenient witnesses? Small but finite, as a mathematician would say. We really knew nothing about current politics. When President Gold had been Professor Gold, Paul said he taught medieval history—Machiavelli and the Medici. The Borgias. He could make them seem like current events, Paul said. Maybe current events, then and now, were not so far removed from those good old days.

We hadn’t been publicly interviewed yet. That was disturbing. But they had let us talk to relatives. So they couldn’t be claiming that we didn’t make it back.

(Assuming people did talk to their relatives, and not to VR constructions. Cesare Borgia would have liked that little tool.)