isn't even human, so it feels like just another R&R, another
halting conversation carried on in ugly trade-speak, another bewilderment of
queues and luggage carousels. Outside: another spaceport, surrounded by the
variegated hostels for the variegated tourists, and bipeds are in bare majority.

I can think of it like that.

I can think of it as another spaceport.

I can think of it like another trip.

The thing he can't think of it is, is a homecoming. That's too hard for this
weak vessel.

He's very weak.

#

Look at him. He's eleven, and it's the tencennial of the Ascension of his
homeworld -- dirty blue ball, so unworthy, yet -- inducted into the Galactic
fraternity and the infinite compassion of the bugouts.

The foam, which had been confined to just the newer, Process-enclaves before the
Ascension, has spread, as has the cult of the Process For Lasting Happiness.
Process is, after all, why the dirty blue ball was judged and found barely
adequate for membership. Toronto, which had seen half its inhabitants emigrate
on open-ended tours of the wondrous worlds of the bugout domain, is full again.
Bursting. The whole damn planet is accreting a layer of off-world tourists.

It's a time of plenty. Plenty of cheap food and plenty of cheap foam structures,
built as needed, then dissolved and washed away when the need disappears. Plenty
of healthcare and education. Plenty of toys and distractions and beautiful,
haunting bugout art. Plenty, in fact, of everything, except space.

He lived in a building that is so tall, its top floors are perpetually damp with
clouds. There's a nice name for this building, inscribed on a much-abused foam
sculpture in the central courtyard. No one uses the nice name. They call it by
the name that the tabloids use, that the inhabitants use, that everyone but the
off-world counselors use. They call it the bat-house.

Bats in the belfry. Batty. Batshit.

I hated it when they moved us into the bat-house. My parents gamely tried to
explain why we were going, but they never understood, no more than any human
could. The bugouts had a test, a scifi helmet you wore, and it told you whether
you were normal, or batty. Some of our neighbors were clearly batshit: the woman
who screamed all the time, about the bugs and the little niggers crawling over
her flesh; the couple who ate dogturds off the foam sidewalk with lip-smacking
relish; the guy who thought he was Nicola Tesla.

I don't want to ta