Most of the men who go into Civil Service of the Empire come from Earth,
or from the close-in planets of Proxima and Alpha Centaurus. They go out
unmarried, and they stay that way, or marry women native to the planets
where they are sent.
But Joanna Magnusson was one of the rare Earth women who had come out
with her husband, twenty years ago. There are two kinds of Earthwomen
like that. They make their quarterings a little bit of home, or a little
bit of hell. Joanna had made their house look like a transported corner
of Earth.
I never knew quite what to think of the Magnusson household. It seemed
to me almost madness to live under a red sun, yet come inside to yellow
light, to live on a world with the wild beauty of Wolf and yet live as
they might have lived on their home planet. Or maybe I was the one who
was out of step. I had done the reprehensible thing they called "going
native." Possibly I had done just that, and in absorbing myself into the
new world, had lost the ability to fit into the old.
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