Meanwhile, the Earth’s various economic and political systems were trying to deal with the mixed blessing of free energy. It wasn’t quite literally free, since someone had to pay for the manufacture of an outlet. But there were dozens of factories, then hundreds, then one on every block, popping them out for pocket change. A black box with a knob and a place to plug in, for alternating current, or a couple of terminals, for DC. There were other ways to access different kinds of power—like the direct matter-to-energy inferno that would power ad Astra.

The consortium that had built the Space Elevator, which put things in orbit cheaply and made endeavors like the Martian colony possible, had grown into an enterprise that had an annual cash flow greater than all but the two wealthiest countries. It had a lot of influence on matters like whether or not to build a fleet of starships and go kick some alien butt. It could have made the largest profit in the history of commerce if it had decided to encourage that, but a version of sanity prevailed: it would only make a small fleet of warships, and leave it here in the solar system. And before it did anything aggressive, it would send a peace-seeking delegation to Wolf 25. Sacrificial lambs, some said, and of course its best- known public representative, “The Mars Girl” Carmen Dula, would be one of them. She was not thrilled by the idea.

6

EARTH AND MARS AND IN BETWEEN

None of us who had set foot in Mars was allowed to return to Earth. The logic was clear: until we knew why everyone of my generation and younger simultaneously came down with the Martian lung crap, there was no telling what other strange bugs we might harbor. So we’re all Typhoid Marys, until proven otherwise.

We could live in Earth orbit, though, inside a quarantined satellite, Little Mars. I commuted back and forth, Little Mars to Mars, on the one-gee shuttle, which (without spending months in free fall) took between two and five days. I was happier in Mars, and would have settled down there if the Corporation would have left me alone. See my kids often enough for them to remember my face.

In Little Mars, I could don a virtual-reality avatar and electronically walk around on Earth without infecting anyone. Usually my avatar looked like a twelve-year-old girl in shiny white tights who staggered a lot and ran into things, with my face and voice, kind of. When I visited Starhope, though, the spaceship factory, for some reason they gave me a male avatar. Six feet tall, broad-shouldered, glossy black. Still clumsy and a little dangerous to be around.

It was even more clumsy than the girlish avatar I was used to, because everything I did and said went through a censoring delay, in case I inadvertently said, “Hey, how are those warships coming along? The ones we’re going to use against the Others?”