It took her a whole day to do it, but her mother didn't mind. She said Rotor was perfectly safe. ‘Not like Earth,’ she would say, but she wouldn't say why Earth was not safe. ‘Never mind,’ she would say.

It was the people Marlene liked least. The new census, they said, would show sixty thousand of them on Rotor. Too many. Far too many. Every one of them showing a false face. Marlene hated seeing those false faces and knowing there was something different inside. Nor could she say anything about it. She had tried sometimes when she had been younger, but her mother had grown angry and told her she must never say things like that.

As she got older, she could see the falseness more clearly, but it bothered her less. She had learned to take it for granted and spend as much time as possible with herself and her own thoughts.

Lately, her thoughts were often on Erythro, the planet they had been orbiting almost all her life. She didn't know why these thoughts were coming to her, but she would skim to the observation deck at odd hours and just stare at the planet hungrily, wanting to be there - right there on Erythro.

Her mother would ask her, impatiently, why she should want to be on an empty barren planet, but she never had an answer for that. She didn't know. ‘I just want to,’ she would say.

She was watching it now, alone on the observation deck. Rotorians hardly ever came here. They had seen it all, Marlene guessed, and for some reason they didn't have her interest in Erythro.

There it was; partly in light, partly dark. She had a dim memory of being held to watch it swim into view, seeing it every once in a while, always larger, as Rotor slowly approached all those years ago.