I tried to give him the sense of total surround, the way Earth’s spirit, you have to say spirit, quietly dominates you, not at all like Newhome or even New New York. These are just rocks that men and women carved into houses. A planet sits patiently for billions of years, and people come by for the flicker of a moment. You don’t have to be a mystic to feel it.

We had sex while I was trying to get this across, the first extramarital sex I’ve had since thawing out, though I’m not sure it’s adultery when you’re separated by several meters, just connected by wires and thoughts. Whatever it was, it was very agreeable and very confusing. He’s less than a year older than Sandra, one of the Old Guard, gray hair and all. They’d certainly met, but he didn’t remember her particularly. He wasn’t all that interested in women. Not that he had many boyfriends, either—you communicate the most embarrassing things in VR—usually he had sex with himself, with a cybernetic image of himself, here in VR. He could flicker back and forth between the active and passive roles, postures. He gave me a ghost of a memory of that, but it doesn’t really come across well. When I have a penis in VR I’m “wearing” it, like a funny hat. The other part was familiar, of course.

So the template we came up with was about what you would experience on Earth if you were sitting in a room with unadorned white walls, open to the outside, near a beach. We kept the sultry Guam air, since Epsilon is mostly water, but I suspect it won’t be accurate. People describe that as “salt” air, but salt doesn’t have any smell. I think it’s a whiff of decomposing marine vegetation, how romantic, and I don’t know whether it’s likely that Epsilon’s seaweed will resemble Earth’s.

Dznowski probably won’t like it. I think she had in mind something fantastic but specific, like a disney. That would have exactly the wrong effect. I think she’s kind of thick, and I think we aren’t going to get along, and I wonder who she had to suck to become Coordinator. Probably the whole Cabinet. My assessment is not affected by her youth and beauty—I don’t even think she’s all that pretty, with the overdeveloped breasts and big innocent eyes and phony hair. Some men fall for that, or rise to it. Daniel turned into a preening erection the moment she walked into the conference room. Put that thing away, Dan. She’s young enough to be your granddaughter.