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age—”
    “And is desired by many women. He is intelligent, rugged, brave, famous—”
    “Ah, is the famous does it.” Viktor grinned.
    Julia kept talking right over them. “—and should not be regarded as a profit margin item on anybody’s budget.”
    Silence. Looking into the other woman’s face, she sensed how disconnected they were from Earthside’s culture. To pay for famous sperm! The very idea curled her lip. Yet Praknor considered it a reasonable business proposition. Praknor finally filled the hush with, “I can see I am not going to get cooperation from you on improving the margin here—which, incidentally, is negative. Quite negative.”
    “We have lost money from beginning,” Viktor said.
    Julia, cooling down, added, “Since we decided to stay on here, and let the nuke take Raoul and Marc back. But Axelrod found a way to keep us resupplied through the lean years. Now he seems to think he has to make a buck.”
    “The stockholders want to see improved profitability,” Praknor said evenly.
    “Why do I sense another agenda here?” Julia spread her hands.
    Praknor looked at them both without blinking. “Perhaps we need to meet again, tomorrow. Give you time to think these ideas through.”
    “We think fast here,” Viktor said.
    “Let’s meet tomorrow, same time, okay?” Praknor said with utterly hollow brightness, tone rising on the last words.
    “Uh, I suppose so,” Julia said dubiously. Another meeting like this was going to be even worse. “I just don’t think we agree on which way the outpost has to go.”
    “We are merely capitalizing on the two most famous people on Earth,” Praknor said in a friendly tone.
    “On Mars,” Viktor corrected.
    Julia and Viktor never regretted staying on Mars; the whole sweaty, frenetic hubbub on Earth repelled them even then; now it was unimaginable.
    She recalled an e-letter from Marc shortly after he’d returned to Earth, sentiments echoed by every other returned Marsnaut.
    “You rush into big halls,” he had written, “and right away there are reporters and legions of devoted waiting, and they want you to talk. You’re there to radiate certitude, and they want lots of that. Even though you’ve become a walking mouth that shakes hands and you don’t really have conversations because everybody wants pronouncements. You are the center of attention of every room you enter and it gets old, old, old. ‘What’s it like out there?’ gets asked a thousand different ways, and it doesn’t help to answer, ‘Read my book,’ because they already have, and yet want more. They want a meta-you, the complexity of your experiences shrunken down to recycled moments and phrases: explorer, adventurer, authority on everything above the atmosphere.
    “You start to notice that as your image swells, the actual you gets smaller, lost. It’s a queen bee life, with handlers and lawyers and worse. Compliments rain down on you and it’s embarrassing. You do ‘events’ at which nothing happens except you talk. You enter to applause and make the same opening jokes and pretend it is all happening for the very first time, because it is for them. Even adulation stops thrilling you after a while. The threshold rises, and routine superlatives wing by you with no effect. You don’t really know whether they’re clapping for you or for the meta-you, enshrined in history yet still walking around, looking for the way offstage.
    “After you run out of talk and the questions run down, too, out come the cameras. Everybody wants a picture taken with you, and your fixed grin doesn’t matter. Celebs move with an aura around them, and to step inside that halo for a moment, get it frozen into digital, is a kind of immortality for them, you suppose, from their excited eyes. They come up to you and flatter you beyond all believability. So many want a precious moment with you, some with whispered theories about alien life and others about God, somehow. So your exit is measured