The long line of exclaiming and sickeningly gullible tourists, either too young and wide-eyed to know better, or too old and desperate to admit the phoniness, ooohhhed and ahhhhed, and the rickshaws and camels, plus a few hardy adventurers on foot, turned with him as Don twisted his own beast toward Martian Haven.
Even the Ruins, she thought—they were like imported props lying in the sand, like old abandoned bits of a set for a TV production.
"Madeleine," her father said, still trying to be a big brother after years of failure. "I really don't understand this at all. Coming all the way to Mars, and you act like—well—like we'd just stepped around the corner in Chicago to some ridiculous carnival!"
"I am cursed," she whispered. "I'm tortured."
"What?" her mother said, and stared, with that child-like curiosity with which she had greeted Madeleine's advent into the world, and which she had never lost.
"Tortured by the insight that both enables and compels me to see through the sham and pretense."
Her father grunted and blinked twice. He almost always blinked twice when she began sounding pedantic like that. He suspected that she did it deliberately to show off his ignorance.
"Funny," she said, mostly to herself, "that I allowed myself to be sold this—Mars—the biggest piece of ersatz junk of all!"
"Madeleine!" her mother exclaimed.
"The advertisers got here first," Madeleine said, glancing at Don. "The hucksters." She stopped talking. Mars offered none of itself, but the others didn't understand. Mars was only what the hucksters wanted it to be.