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out in ten-second bursts of sudden intimacy. Some might even be genuine if you had time to stop and let all the others fall away and just talk to this one real person.
    “No moment goes unrecorded, even down to the farts getting up onstage and the nose-blowing when you have a cold. The camera lenses follow you into the men’s room. You get advice shouted at you on the street, most of it hopelessly vague (‘Get more funding for Mars!’) or uselessly narrow (‘Get behind mission profile redesign at Huntsville’). You’re the boy in the bubble and the walls are always transparent.”
    She took the letter out and read it to Viktor every few months. It worked wonders when their morale was low.
4.

VENT R
    J ULIA TRIED TO FORGET the whole hour with Praknor, which had seemed like a day, by tending to the rabbits. She fed them, petted them, and tried not to think.
    In the last two decades they had mined ice, inflated high-tech greenhouses, and grown crops, and were never in danger of lean diets. But sending meat 100 million kilometers was pricey, so early on they asked for rabbits. The vegetarian movement had continued to grow Earthside, so there were demonstrations, some violent, against shipping rabbits or any other living, high-protein source.
    In reply Viktor made a video showing how much grunt work they did in a day, with his voice-over saying, “Hard labor needs solid food.”
    It worked. Omaha Steaks won the bidding to ship big canisters of beef and the fish Julia preferred to Mars, at their expense. Axelrod actually made a profit on the deal. The rabbits mated avidly, leaping about, giving them both pets and a long-term meat source.
    Julia saw no contradiction between caring for the animals and later slaughtering them, but then, she was a biologist. Which wasn’t a lot different from being a farmer. And while she had longed for a cat as a pet, she knew the price in meat to feed it.
    Viktor came in and sat beside her while she stroked a big white female named Roberta. “Forget her,” he said, rubbing her neck.
    “Hard to do.”
    “She got nowhere.”
    “Just like the other ideas, yeah,” Julia said, grinning with false cheer.
    This wasn’t the first weird marketing attempt. Years back there was the idea the Consortium had flirted with for a while: send small interest groups to Mars. The “high concept” was that members of the newest Earthside social movement, polyamory—multiple loving partners, with few strings attached—were just the sort to colonize. They were “high-novelty-seeking individuals,” so they needed alternative sexual hijinks over the long journeys, or so the argument went. And many of them were wealthy, some from Hollywood, and so could buy their own passage. Further evidence of a society with far too much time on its hands, Viktor had remarked. But there was some sanity left Earthside. The media got wind of the Consortium’s marketing research and headlined this as the “sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll in space agenda,” and the marketing director got fired. Mercifully.
    “I been thinking,” Viktor said softly, his way of introducing a new idea. He stroked a big male rabbit thoughtfully. Julia realized it was the one they had named Andy.
    “You want to get away,” she guessed.
    He chuckled. “Wife always knows what husband is thinking, before he does.”
    She twisted her mouth. “Um. Tell Praknor?”
    “She is busy talking to Earthside. We should not bother her.”
    “I heard there’s a big solar storm on the way, too. It might cut off some of the low-frequency bands to Earthside, the data streams.” She grinned. “Praknor will be busy with that, too.”
    “So…let her show up for our meeting, find us gone.”
    Happily she said, “I like that.”
    The Vent R team of eight was ready, details delegated. Viktor quietly mustered them and got a liftoff time, 0600 the next day. Julia and Viktor were nominally in charge, but they had picked a young biologist, Daphne