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years.
    â€œSo are we! See? What if I had told you about us back on Mars, and you had said, you’re breaking the law. I couldn’t take the chance. Davydov was against it, and I couldn’t take the chance on my own, although believe me I wanted to—”
    â€œDamn you,” I said. “Damn Oleg Davydov—”
    â€œHow were we to know any better?” he asked, his blue eyes unflinching. “I’m sorry, but you asked me why. We thought you were Committee all the way. I was the only one who thought otherwise, and even with me it was just a hope. We couldn’t take the chance. It was too important, we were trying to accomplish something great—”
    â€œYou were pursuing a crackpot scheme that is going to kill sixty people for no reason,” I said harshly, standing up as I spoke. “A stupid plan that takes you off into space and leaves you there with no way to colonize a planet even if you found one—” I shoved my chair back and walked quickly away, my eyes filling with tears so that it was hard to balance. People were watching me; I had shouted.
    I pulled myself furiously through the halls of the living quarters, cursing Swann and Davydov and the entire MSA. He should have known. How could they not have known? I crashed into my room, and happily it was empty. I banged from wall to wall for a time, crying and muttering angrily to myself. Why didn’t he know? Why couldn’t he tell, the idiot?
    For a moment I caught sight of my reflection in my little washstand mirror, and I went over to look at it, floating in midair. I was so upset I had to squeeze my eyes shut as hard as I could, before I could look in the glass at myself: and when I did, I experienced a frightening thing. It seemed that the true three-dimensional world was on the other side of the glass, and that I was looking into it through a window. The person floating in there was looking out. She appeared distraught over something or other.…
    And in this curious state I had the realization, at the moment of seeing that stranger there, that I was a person like everybody else. That I was known by my actions and words, that my internal universe was unavailable for inspection by others.
    They didn’t know.
    They didn’t know, because I never told them. I didn’t tell them that I hated the Mars Development Committee—yes, admit it, I did hate them!—I hated those petty tyrants as much as I hated anything. I hated the way they had treated my foolish father. I hated their lies—that they were taking over power to make a better life on an alien planet, etc., etc. Everyone knew that was a lie. They just wanted power for themselves. But we kept our mouths shut; talk too much and you might get relocated to Texas. Or on Amor. The members of the MSA had compensated with a stupid plan, to escape to the stars in secret—but they resisted, they stole, they subverted, they disbelieved, they resisted! And me? I didn’t even have the guts to tell my friends how I felt. I had thought that cowardice was the norm, and that made it okay. I had thought that resistance necessarily would be like the rash and drunken words of my father, pointless and dangerous. I had been scared of the idea of resistance, and the worst of it was, I had thought that everyone was like me.
    I looked at the stranger in the other room through the glass. There was Emma Weil. You couldn’t read her mind. She looked plain and grim, skinny, dedicated, unhumorous. What was she thinking? You would never know. She sounded pretty self-satisfied. People who sound self-satisfied usually are. But you would never know for sure. You could look in her eyes as hard as you wanted, for an hour and more: nothing there but empty, weightless black pools.…
    *   *   *
    For a couple of days I sat in my room and did nothing. Then one morning when Nadezhda and Marie-Anne were leaving to work on the starship, I