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  Home Again, Home Again======================

  The kids in my local bat-house breathe heavy metals, and their gelatinous bodiesquiver nauseously during our counseling sessions, and for all that, they reactedjust like I had when I told them I was going away for a while -- with hurt andbetrayal, and they aroused palpable guilt in me.

  It goes in circles. When I was sixteen, and The Amazing Robotron told me heneeded to go away for a while, but he'd be back, I did everything I could tomake him guilty. Now it's me, on a world far from home, and a pack of snot-nosedjellyfish kids have so twisted my psyche that they're all I can think of when Idebark the shuttle at Aristide Interplanetary, just outside my dirty oleToronto.

  The customs officer isn't even human, so it feels like just another R&R, anotherhalting conversation carried on in ugly trade-speak, another bewilderment ofqueues and luggage carousels. Outside: another spaceport, surrounded by thevariegated 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 thisweak vessel.

  He's very weak.

  #

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

  The foam, which had been confined to just the newer, Process-enclaves before theAscension, 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 barelyadequate for membership. Toronto, which had seen half its inhabitants emigrateon open-ended tours of the wondrou
s 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. Plentyof 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 withclouds. There's a nice name for this building, inscribed on a much-abused foamsculpture in the central courtyard. No one uses the nice name. They call it bythe name that the tabloids use, that the inhabitants use, that everyone but theoff-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 toexplain why we were going, but they never understood, no more than any humancould. The bugouts had a test, a scifi helmet you wore, and it told you