O’Hara probably knew better than any other ’Home official what the population of the Church of the Eternal Now, the “Nowers,” had grown to at any given time. She had to physically remove each of them from the VR machines—but usually only once. In their new enlightenment, they found virtual reality confusing, even more so than normal reality, and didn’t come back for more.

Sometimes she had to call Howard Bell, all 120 muscle-bound kilograms of him, to help wrestle the slack lumps out of their couches. Some of them had put on a lot of weight, eating three meals a day and spending the rest of their time and energy keeping their eyes unfocused. By the last day of 2107, they had dragged eighty-eight of the faithful from the dream room.

Newhome’s charter allowed complete freedom of religious expression so long as that expression did not violate civil law. There was no law against being a useless consumer. The police could incarcerate a Nower for being a “public nuisance,” if he or she did something particularly outrageous, but the faithful didn’t mind jail. It just meant that somebody else brought them their meals. Trials were an exasperating farce.

Actually, the ones who sat around vegetating, communing with their inner truth, weren’t as much of a problem as the proselytizers. One of O’Hara’s helpers, Julio Eberhara, fell for the church’s arguments. His sphere of influence was limited to the Game Room door, but for a while everybody who wanted to check out a game had to take a ration of inane theology along with it. Then he stopped answering the door with any reliability, sitting at his table humming, staring at an unfinished jigsaw puzzle of an idyllic mountain scene. O’Hara moved him and the puzzle to the storeroom, where at least his humming wouldn’t bother anybody.

She tried to explain this business to Sandra, without much success. Sandra had had a little careful religious instruction in Creche—this is what some people believe, this is what others believe, and you will develop your own beliefs as you grow—but at third form, they hadn’t yet been exposed to the excesses of religion. To Sandra and most other children, the Nowers were scary. A lot of what adults did was enigmatic or even silly, but in general they followed reassuringly predictable patterns. The Nowers were adults whose behavior was mysteriously infantile, and this regressiveness threatened the security of the children’s world.