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this, Laura Shemzak. I love you, and I shall always love you. I’m learning in my classes that time and space can just be an illusion, if you want them to be. Let the Friendhood and all its bureaucratic cubbyholes keep its illusions that just because you’re going off to be a starship pilot and I’m staying here to juggle numbers and symbols, we’re going to be apart where it counts … ”
    Holo-Laura went to hug holo-Cal, and the real Cal Shemzak had to turn away from the interplay of colored light because a pang was forming in his throat and his eyes smarted with tears.
    “What are you doing to me, you assholes?” he screamed up at the ceiling clouds. But Cal Shemzak knew full well what they were doing, and he did not like it at all. The Jaxdron were somehow futzing about in his brainbox, tapping into his memories.
    “Get out of my head,” he yelled, offended to the core of his being at the invasion. “You bastards hear me? Get out of my head!”
    He couldn’t feel it, but they were somehow dissecting his mind. The Jaxdron paid no attention to Cal’s loud complaints, so eventually he just shut up.
    Cal and Laura Shemzak might have been whelped from the same womb, he would always tease her, but you could have fooled me! They had different approaches to life. Laura fought things tooth and nail, whereas Cal simply cruised blithely through things. If you’re getting raped, he would tell her, you might as well lie back and enjoy it. Laura hated that particular tease, and Cal secretly felt sorry for anyone who tried to rape his sister.
    He pulled himself up onto his slab, folded his arms over his chest, and watched the show.
    He knew it all, of course, but some of it he had forgotten in recent years; so the significant scenes that began to play across the chamber floor like a ten-ring circus were interesting, the course of his life in bright images and soft sounds.
    He chuckled as he watched a particularly cherished memory: the time he had flummoxed the Dayfriends at country school with tales of what the Nightfriends would gossip about them. Cal had always been a playful character, and his jokes were more often practical than verbal. If the heart of Earth society had been the nuclear family, he might have had problems. But since the individuals who cared for the broodgroups did so in shifts, it was child’s play to raise hell, and Cal Shemzak, with his sister’s help, did just that.
    Summerhome; tripschool; winterspill: the scenes from this variety of government raiseplaces continued for some time, forming a fascinating mosaic.
    “Trying to figure it all out, huh?” Cal said, addressing the ceiling. “Well, good luck.”
    Then a particular scene caught his attention, a moment in his past that he did not particularly care to remember; yet he could not turn away.
    A boy of seven—himself—was sitting beside a pretty young woman. Her image made Cal’s heart leap. It was his favorite Dayfriend, Mirg Lifta.
    “Now, Cal,” the woman was saying, “you know that this is the way it has to be.”
    “But why?” The little boy’s voice was close to a sob.
    “I don’t want you to leave. You all leave!”
    “Now, don’t cry. You’re much too old to cry. If you can’t control that emotionsphere, Cal, I’m going to have to report it to the Overfriends, and they’ll give you medication again.”
    “No,” the little boy said. “I’m not crying!” His voice was angry.
    “Good. Anger is power, but remember, power needs control. Now, as to my departure: why does it trouble you so, Cal? You know it’s part of the rules, and the Overfriends made the rules for the good of their children and for the good of the state. So if we obey those rules, then that makes my leaving good, makes us all good. Don’t you want to be good, Cal?”
    “No.”
    “It’s not good to be attached. The only true commitment anyone has is to the Microstate of Earth and the Macrostate of the Human Federation. ”
    “Can’t you stay