They cheer themselves. They laugh at the craziness of it.

As the train glides with its startling rapidity over this impossibly big world, day turns to night, by way of the most lurid sunset they have yet seen, fuschia clouds blazing in a pale sky that is lemon over the black horizon, bending into green above that, then higher still a blue some say is called cyan blue, and over that an indigo that spreads all the way over their skylight to the east. All these intense transparent colors are there at once, and yet none of their Terran hosts are taking the slightest notice; they are all watching the screens on their wrists, screens that sometimes exhibit tiny images of the voyagers.

They can scroll for themselves on their wristpads and see what people are saying about them. But it’s disturbing to do so, because then they see and hear how much resentment, contempt, anger, and violent hatred is directed at them. Apparently to many people they are cowards and traitors. They have betrayed history, betrayed the human race, betrayed evolution, betrayed the universe itself. How will the universe know itself? How will consciousness expand? They have let down not just humanity, but the universe!

Freya turns off her wristpad. “Why?” she asks Badim. “Why do they hate us so?”

He shrugs. He too is troubled. “People have ideas. They live in their ideas, do you understand? And those ideas, whatever they happen to be, make all the difference.”

“But there’s more than ideas,” she protests. “This world.” She gestures at the fading sunset. “It’s not just our ideas.”

“For some people it is. They don’t have anything else, maybe, so they give everything they have to ideas.”

She shakes her head, still upset. “I would hate that. I would hate to be that way.” She gestures at the tiny angry faces on the other screens, faces still there on the wrists around them, imp faces, literally spitting in the intensity of their bitterness. “I hope they’ll leave us alone.”

“They’ll forget us soon enough. For now we’re the new thing, but another new thing will come. And people like that need fresh fuel for their fire.”

Aram frowns as he overhears this. It isn’t clear he agrees.

In Beijing they are guided to a rectangular building the size of a couple of biomes, a compound they call it, surrounding a central courtyard that is mostly paved but holds also a few short trees. The whole ship’s population can be fitted into rooms clustered at one corner of this compound, which must therefore house four or five thousand people; and it is only one building, in a city that goes to the horizon in all directions, a city in which the train, slowing down as it approached, took four hours to get to this central area.

Next day many of them are taken to Tiananmen Square. Freya does not go. The day after, they are taken on a tour of the Forbidden City, home of the ancient Chinese emperors. Again, Freya cannot face going out. Many are like her. When the others come back, they say the buildings appeared both ancient and shining as if new, so that it was hard to understand them as objects. Freya wishes she had seen that.

Their Chinese hosts speak to them in English, and seem happy to be hosting them, which is reassuring after all the venomous little faces on the screens. The Chinese want the starfarers to like their city, they are proud of their city. Meanwhile clouds and a yellow haze thicken the air, and keep the sky from being too overwhelming to Freya. She stays in rooms and pretends the world outside is a larger room, or that she is in some kind of projection. Possibly she can hold to this feeling all the time. She feels she has faced the worst, perhaps, although she still stays indoors, and away from windows too.

Several of the starfarers (this is what the Chinese call them) nevertheless collapse in the next few days, overwhelmed either physically or mentally, if there is any difference. Their tours are abruptly canceled, and they are all moved to some kind of medical facility, one as big as their compound, either emptied for their arrival or unused, hard to say, not much is ever explained to them, and some of them suspect they are now pawns in a game they don’t understand, but others are not worried about anything but themselves and their shipmates; because people are falling apart. The Chinese want to run tests on all of them, as they are worried for their guests. Four have died since they landed; many are disabled either from their hibernation or the descent from space; many more are not coping with Earth very well, one way or another. Miserable faces, scared faces, all these faces she has known all her life, the only faces she has ever known; her people. It isn’t how Freya imagined it. She herself is miserable.

“What is this?” she says to Badim. “What’s happening to us? We made it.”

He shrugs. “We’re exiles. The ship is gone, and this is not our world. So all we have is each other, and that, we know already, never made us particularly happy or secure. And being outdoors is scary.”

“I know it. I’m the worst of all.” She has to admit it. “But I don’t want to be! I’m going to get used to it!”

“You will,” Badim says. “You will if you want to. I know you will.”

But when she approaches a window, when she nears a door, her heart slams in her chest like a child trying to escape. That vault of sky, those distant clouds! The unbearable sun! She grinds her teeth; she gnashes her teeth! And strides to the windows, and smashes her nose into the glass and looks out, hands on her chest, sweating and gnashing her teeth, to look out at the visible world until her pulse slows. And her pulse never slows.

Days pass, they huddle miserably together.

Aram and Badim, worried though they are about things outside Freya’s ken, continue to sit next to each other and watch the screens, and chat about what they see, and observe their comrades curiously. If it were up to them alone, all would be well; they are having an adventure, their old faces say. They are having the time of their lives. Above all, they remain deeply surprised. Freya takes heart from seeing their faces; she sits at Badim’s feet pressed against his bony shins, looking up at him, trying to relax.

The two old friends often read to each other, as of old during the evenings in the Fetch, that lovely little town. And one day Aram, reading his wrist silently, chuckles and says to Badim, “Here, listen to this; a poem by a Greek who lived in Alexandria, one Cavafy:

“You said, ‘I shall go to another land to another sea

Another city will be found better than this.

My every effort is a written indictment

And my heart—like the dead—is buried.

How long will my mind be in this decay,’

“and so on like that, it’s the same old song we know so well—if only I were somewhere else, I would be happy. Until the poet replies to his poor friend,

“New lands you will not find, you won’t find other seas.

The city will follow you. The streets you roam will be the same.

There is no boat for you, there is no street.

In the same way your life you destroyed here

In this petty corner, you have spoiled it in the entire universe.”

Badim smiles, nods. “I remember this poem! I read it to Devi one time, to remind her not to pin all her hopes on Aurora, not to wait for our arrival before she started to live. We were young at the time, and she was most seriously annoyed with me, I can tell you. But that translation doesn’t sound right to me. I think there is a better one.” And he taps on one of the tablets left for them to use.