Worlds Enough and Time w-3, Page 5

  Whether we would then deserve to survive is still open to debate.

  I’m afraid we can’t risk discussing this even on a private, scrambled beam. By the time Harry gives this to you, we’ll be several light-months apart, anyhow. Hard to hold a conversation.

  You may have suspected something like this was going on. I did, long before I was elected and Marcus enlightened me. A lot of people grouse about the government pulling strings behind everyone’s collective back. They don’t know half of it.

  It feels funny to be saying good-bye when I’ll be seeing you in the office tomorrow. This is July eighteenth, ’97. You won’t be leaving for a couple of months. I miss you already.

  I didn’t try too hard to talk you out of this. Someday you’ll… well, you already… you know I feel closer to you than to either of my sons.

  Good-bye.

  The image flickers and blinks out.

  O’HARA: (voice quavering) Can you still hear me?

  There is no response. She wipes away tears and stares at the corner for more than a minute, finishing the rest of the glass. Then she ejects the slide and bends it back and forth until it breaks, and puts the pieces in the recycle tray.

  She takes the box of wine out of the cabinet, along with a bath towel, picks up her purse, and leaves.

  6. THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT

  I was tired but knew I wouldn’t sleep unless I had some exercise. It had been a long day of sitting around and listening to people tell me things I didn’t especially want to hear.

  I took a long way to the pool so as to walk through the near-dark quietness of the ag level. The darkness intensified the smell of things growing. (Do plants actually grow in the dark, or do they rest?) Once away from the lifts, the only light is the dim glow of the pathway tiles; when other people pass by, they’re only shadowy blurs from the knees up. You murmur good evening and drift away, feeling mysterious. As always, sounds of lovemaking from a couple of the unlit crosspaths. And as always, I wondered whether they could be strangers who brushed in passing and felt something suddenly happen, stopped, and moved into the darkness to appease that something. And perhaps then part in silence, and wonder for a while about every man you met who was the right size and shape. Were you my succubus?

  They’re probably all garden-variety, so to speak, adulterers. “Meet me between the cabbage and potatoes at 2330 tonight.”

  Out of some obscure impulse I turned down a crosspath myself, and stood for several minutes a few meters into the darkness, watching the disembodied feet. Remembered the wine and took a quiet sip. The taste didn’t go well with the damp foliage smell. It occurred to me that if I stood there long enough, sooner or later a giggling couple would come charging into the darkness and in their reckless passion knock me into the broccoli tank. So I continued on to the pool, rather than stand in the path of true love.

  I had to go up to Level 5 to detour around the yeast farm. The ag offices were bright and busy, which for some reason depressed me. Farmers ought to go to bed with the sun, get up bright and early to milk the chickens.

  The pool was crowded for the late hour, more people socializing than exercising. I saw Dan in the deep end and called out to him. He didn’t show any sign of hearing, but must have seen me after he made his turn. He came over to the towel shelf while I was undressing.

  “Harry keep you this long?”

  “No, I had to go by the office, check some things. Here.” I handed him the wine.

  “Thanks.” He took a gulp and put it back on the shelf. “So how do you feel?”

  “How am I supposed to feel? You know what he talked to me about?”

  “That’s not what I meant.” He put his hand on mine. “I mean how do you feel?” I slept with John last night, was what he meant.

  “Like a shuttlecock, sometimes, if you want to know the truth. How do you feel?”

  “Well, I put us in for a fuckhut, just in case.” Nobody calls them zero-gee saunas except the Entertainment Director.

  “Thanks for asking me.”

  “Just in case.”

  “I’m not in the mood, Dan. I’m in a mood, but not the mood.”

  “Okay, okay.” He found his clothes and stepped into his pants. “So what did you and your favorite professor talk about?”

  “Can’t say.” I finished undressing. Funny that I didn’t want to take my pants off until he had his on. With fifty other men I wasn’t married to in the same room.

  “Oh. I think I see.”

  “You probably do.” I tried to keep the frost out of my voice. If our positions had been reversed, I would have kept it secret from him. “I’m not supposed to discuss it with anyone until I talk to him again Thursday. Presumably that’s when I’ll get the secret handshake.”

  He smiled and gave me a neutral pat on the small of the back. “I’ll be up in the room.”

  “I’ll be up after a few laps. Take the wine.” Maybe he’d be asleep when I got there.

  It’s interesting to watch eye movements as you approach the pool. Most women look directly at your face, and so do some men—the shy, the gentlemanly, and presumably those more interested in males. Most men’s eyes do a little dance: crotch, then past the knees to about shin-level, then back up past the center to pause at the breast-and-shoulder level, and then a concentrated stare at the face. I noticed other people staring before I realized I did it, too. Otherwise you can walk right by somebody you work with every day and not recognize him or her. Faces look different on top of a pile of clothes.

  I said hello to a couple of casual acquaintances and shook my head “no” to a stranger who made the thumb-through-circled-thumb-and-finger query. You didn’t see that as often as when I was a girl—or maybe it was just I who didn’t see it as often. (There were places on Earth, like Magreb, where you could be killed for making a gesture like that at another man’s wife. I had hated that place, forced to wear heavy robes in the desert heat, just your eyes showing—and my memory, unbidden, supplied the smell, when we rounded the corner in Tangier and came up to the public square, the smell of the previous rent-a-robe customer’s rancid sweat mingling with the sudden stench of putrid flesh, the hands and heads of thieves and adulterers rotting on spikes.)

  “Marianne. You okay?”

  “Oh, hi, Sam. Just tired.” Samuel Wasserman, historian and kosher loverboy.

  “You looked right through me.”

  “Brain’s someplace else. Swim?” I took his elbow and steered him toward the shallow end.

  The water was too warm, as usual. I could make it cooler, by executive fiat, but I knew that this was what most people preferred. Maybe I could have a new poll commissioned, and fake the results. We started off slowly, side by side.

  “How about Purcell’s little surprise?”

  I hadn’t talked to Sam after the meeting. “He does have a flair for the dramatic, in his own way,” I said. “Ever have him for economics?”

  “No, Biondi and Walpole.”

  “Lucky.”

  “I have to go talk to him tomorrow. I’m not sure how to act.”

  I felt unexpectedly chagrined at that; less special. “Don’t say anything about his being sick, dying. That’s sincere, I think. Just treat him with the deference due an aging academic who could have you shoveling goatshit tomorrow if you cross him.”

  “You’re a big help.”

  “He’s not so bad outside the classroom. I think there’s a real nice man deep down inside, under about seventy years of intellectual scar tissue. New New wasn’t exactly a hotbed of laissez-faire capitalism.”

  “You have to wonder how he got so high up.”

  “Personality.” We reached the other end and I kicked off. “Race!” Sam wasn’t much of a swimmer, but twelve fewer years and long arms and legs can make up for lack of skill. At midpool he churned by me like a badly designed kitchen implement.

  We swam a few more laps and then sat drying, talking about Purcell and other absent colleagues. I guess I was h
alf expecting, half hoping for, a sexual proposition, which I could gracefully decline or at least postpone. But he was just passing time. Maybe waiting for me to leave, it finally occurred to me, so he could go express his interest in someone else. I told him Dan was probably waiting up and went off to get dressed.

  It would have been fastest to take the lift up to Level 4 and walk straight to Dan’s place, but I went back around the yeast farm to the dark anonymity of the ag-level pathway. It cheered me up for some reason.

  I could feel his eyes on me as I walked away, and was acutely conscious of having gained a kilogram, more or less, for every year since we had been lovers, all of it settling below the center of gravity. He had probably gained as much, himself, but all upper-body muscle, which made him look prettier than ever. I had a momentary flash of loathing for men in general and young ones in particular.

  Dan was lying in bed but still awake, watching a man and woman ice-skate in the cube. I couldn’t identify the music accompanying them, vaguely Germanic. Maybe a polka.

  “Old one?”

  He nodded. “Winter Olympics 2012, I think it said.”

  “Random Walk?”

  “Uh huh.” That was an entertainment program that would give you a five- or ten-second introduction to a show, then skip at random to another, out of an assortment of about a million programs whose only common denominator was that you didn’t need any special knowledge to appreciate them. It was kind of fun to let it run on and on, creating a slow mosaic of sports, arts, drama, sex, and gameshows. He clicked it to change. “Good swim?”

  “Okay. I’ve got to lose some weight.”

  “What, nobody propositioned you?”

  “Nobody you’d want me to bring home.” I shook the wine box and was moderately surprised to find it still half full. I got my glass from the sink. “Actually, a guy I didn’t recognize gave me the thumb. Sort of a middle-aged Buddha. Shaved bald all over.”

  “Yeah, that’s Radi-something, Radimacher… don’t remember. John knows him; he’s in Materials.”

  “I could’ve kissed him. But he might have misinterpreted it.”

  “What?” Dan was distracted by the current five seconds, an old-fashioned car bursting into flames.

  “I mean, at least he showed some interest. Most of the men there didn’t. Boys.”

  “Pool turns into a teenage meat market after about ten. You didn’t know that?”

  “So that’s where you go at night. All this week I thought you were actually working.”

  The cube switched to an oddly appropriate scene, young people playing volleyball on a beach. Dan turned down the volume. “You can’t talk about what Harry said? Or don’t want to.”

  “Can’t. He… didn’t have time to finish, wanted me to hold off talking to anyone else until I had the whole picture.”

  “That’s his prerogative, under the circumstances.” He poured me some wine and filled his own glass. “Damned shame. Surprise, too. Total.”

  “You didn’t know he was sick?”

  “Nobody but Tania Seven, I guess; some doctors. He didn’t even tell Eliot.” He took a healthy gulp and then swirled the wine around in the glass, staring into it. “A lot of secrets. Did he tell you enough so you can understand why I’ve never discussed… certain things with you? John and I?”

  I was tempted to say no and watch his reaction. “I guess so.”

  “Good. That’s what I was hoping.” He finished his glass and slid down under the covers. “Early one tomorrow.”

  “New New?”

  “Got to meet with Civil first.”

  “Sybil? Who’s she?”

  “Civil. Civil Engineering, I.C.E. Architects, too. You need the light?”

  “No.” I turned it off. “Watch a little cube.” I left it on Random Walk with no sound while I sipped the wine. My night for solitary drinking. There were a few seconds each of guitar playing, gymnastics, copulation, a periodcostume fencing scene, more copulation, and then a dramatic shot of a swamp by moonlight. I remembered the question that had occurred to me on the ag level. “Dan? Do plants grow in the dark?”

  “Some. I’ve seen phytoplankton glowing blue-green in a boat’s wake.”

  “Grow, not glow. We really aren’t hearing each other tonight. Do plants grow in the dark?”

  “Most plants, yeah. Darkstage photosynthesis. That’s when they turn carbon dioxide into carbohydrates.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Anytime.” After a minute, he slid over and pressed himself against me. “Lots of things grow in the dark.”

  “God, Daniel.” I had asked for it, though. “At least let me get my clothes off.”

  7. MANEUVERING

  PRIME

  Most of O’Hara’s second meeting with Purcell, those parts that had to do with Berrigan’s revelations, O’Hara never mentioned to anyone, except cryptically—and although everything that went on in Room 4404 was automatically recorded, those records were closed to human inspection for two hundred years. That is not a problem for us.

  Room 4404, the Cabinet Room, was the only “inside” room on the craft that had its own airlock. It was isolated from the rest of Newhome by four centimeters of vacuum, whenever occupied. It contained its own power source; fully half that power was drained by sophisticated watchdog devices.

  30 September 2097 [16 Bobrovnikov 290]—Purcell is seated alone at the horseshoeshaped table that dominates the semicircular room. The table seats twenty-four; its open end points toward a lectern. Uniform cold white light glows down from the ceiling, a little too bright to be comfortable. Holo windows show a dim starscape.

  Purcell is reading a small book, an old-fashioned one with paper pages and red leather binding. He looks up as O’Hara enters.

  O’HARA: Good morning, Harry.

  She looks over her shoulder, startled, as the door snaps shut and the airlock pump whines.

  O’HARA: Something new every day.

  PURCELL: Vacuum seal. Security. They just turned it on yesterday.

  O’HARA: Oh. That’s why I had to leave my ring.

  PURCELL: Not that metal detectors would stop some of the engineers. I understand they can make a recorder that only has a few micrograms of metal in it.

  You left yours behind?

  O’HARA: The recorder? Yes… and I erased our earlier conversation. After listening to it a couple of times.

  PURCELL: Good. Then I take it you are willing to embrace our, shall we say, institutionalized tradition of duplicity?

  O’HARA: Not embrace it. I will keep your secret, of course. Whether I can become part of it, I’m not sure.

  PURCELL: How could you not? That’s like reaching puberty and deciding against it. You can’t go back.

  O’HARA: I can go sideways.

  PURCELL: Get out of politics?

  O’HARA: There are a few other things I can do.

  PURCELL: That would surprise me. Surprise the Evaluation Board, too.

  O’HARA: The Board makes mistakes. The one in New New did, and they had ten times as many people to choose from.

  PURCELL: Granted.

  Is there anything I can clear up for you, then? Anything to put your mind at ease about this… unpleasant reality?

  O’HARA: You could satisfy my curiosity about some things.

  Purcell nods almost imperceptibly. O’Hara sits down across from him, stiff.

  O’HARA: Does everyone in the Cabinet know about your little… tradition?

  PURCELL: Not yet. As you just said, we’ve had to draw candidates from a limited pool. Some are still being evaluated.

  O’HARA: But my husbands do know.

  PURCELL: And have for some time, of course. Both of them have argued your case since well before Launch. I, among others, wanted to see how well you handled that particular stress, first.

  O’HARA: It’s far from being the most stressful thing that’s ever happened to me.

  PURCELL: Granted. But I wasn’t there for the others.

  O
’Hara leans back a few degrees, which makes her look even less relaxed. She can’t hide the anger in her voice.

  O’HARA: Sandra’s image couldn’t tell me how long it’s been going on, in New New. It said to ask you.

  PURCELL: I’m not sure, either. One may assume we had rather more of a pure democracy in the beginning.

  O’HARA: Fewer people.

  PURCELL: And a select crowd. Autoselected. They all decided to live in orbit—to start life over, most of them—and most of them had a more or less passionate interest in their own governance.

  The first person born in orbit, by comparison, was an unwilling immigrant. That was five generations ago.

  O’HARA: So you’re saying we’ve become less competent to govern ourselves? As individuals? Or is it just greater numbers, watering down the democratic process.

  PURCELL: Both. Out of New New’s eighty-one-thousand potential voters, ten or fifteen thousand—conservatively!—weren’t competent to make decisions regarding even their own welfare, let alone the welfare of others—

  O’HARA: That seems awfully high.

  PURCELL: And perhaps twice that number were either uninterested or so contemptuous of government that they had no positive input into the process.

  You think that’s high, too, but it’s not. Together those percentages would say, well, more than half of New New is made up of intelligent, responsible voters. That wasn’t true before the war and it’s less true now.

  I know Sandra told you about the plague referendum.

  O’HARA: Yes. It’s… terrible.

  PURCELL: You would have said “unbelievable” if it had been I who told you. The message was Sandra’s idea. I think she knew you very well.

  O’HARA: She did.

  PURCELL: I don’t have any great love for groundhogs, either, and I understand the primitive desire to punish them. Let them stew in their own juices, die out. But I don’t vote according to what my ductless glands say. Most people do.

  O’HARA: So the solution is a benign dictatorship by committee?