His lab door was locked, but Miri’s retina print was in the authorized file and the STERILE ENVIRONMENT light was off. She placed her right eye to the scanner and pushed open the door.
Tony lay on the floor, twitching and jerking, on top of Christina Demetrios. Over his thrusting body Miri saw Christy’s eyes widen, then darken. “Oh!” Christy said. Tony said nothing; possibly he hadn’t heard Miri, or even Christina. His naked buttocks contracted powerfully and his whole body shuddered with orgasm. Miri backed out of the lab, closed the door, and ran to her own lab.
She sat with her hands clasped, twitching, on her desk, her head bowed. Tony hadn’t told her—well, why should he tell her? It was his business, not hers; she was only his sister. Not his lover—his sister. Strings formed and reformed in her head: For the first time, various ancient and obscure stories, which she had remembered only because she remembered everything, made sense to her. Hera and Io. Othello and Desdemona. She knew the entire physiology of sex—hormone-influenced secretions, vascular engorgement, pheromone triggers. She knew everything. She knew nothing.
Jealousy. One of the most community-destroying emotions there was. A beggar emotion.
Miri stood up and paced distractedly. No. She would not give in to the degradation of jealousy. She was better than that. Tony deserved better than that of his sister. Idealism. (Stoicism, Epicureanism “We are shaped and fashioned by what we love,” Tony’s butt pumping away in Christina…) She would solve this problem her own way (darkness, fullness, the throbbing ache, gravitational pressure to ignite gases into thermonuclear reactions, cepheid variables…).
Miri washed her face and hands. She put on a clean pair of white shorts and tied a red ribbon in her dark hair. Her lips, despite their constant twitching, set together hard. She didn’t have to think whom to approach; she already knew, and knew that she knew, and knew all the implications of already knowing (darkness, fullness, lying on her belly on her lab floor or under the genemod soy plants that met in a concealing arc, her hands between her legs).
His name was David Aronson. He was three years older than she, a Norm but fairly intelligent, an intense believer in the Sanctuary Oath and in her grandmother’s leadership. He had dark curling hair, as dark as Miri’s own, but very light eyes of clear, black-lashed gray. His legs were long, his shoulders at eighteen were as broad and powerful as a grown man’s. His mouth was generous, wide mobile lips of an almost molded firmness. Miri had spent the past six months looking at David’s mouth.
She found him where she expected to: at the orbital’s shuttle port, poring over CAD displays of machinery. In two months he would leave for a doctoral program in engineering at Stanford, his first trip to Earth.
“Hello, Miri.” He had a deep voice, a little rough. Miri liked the roughness. She could find no reason why.
“D-D-David. I w-w-w-want t-to ask you s-s-something.”
He looked slightly to one side of her, at the CAD holo. “What?”
She had no trouble being direct; all her life, the trouble in communication had come from the difficulty and simplicity of speech compared to the enormous complexity of her thoughts. She was used to simplifying things for Norms as much as possible. This was already a simple thing; it seemed to her to fit admirably, as almost nothing else did, to the limitations of language.
“W-w-will y-you have s-s-s-sex with m-m-m-me?”
David straightened. Color mounted in his cheeks. He continued to look past her. “I’m sorry. Miri, but that’s not possible.”
“Wh-wh-why n-not?”
“I already have a lover.”
“Wh-wh-who?”
“Don’t you think that’s my business?”
He sounded cold; Miri couldn’t see why. Noncommercial information, surely, was for community use, and what information could be more public? She was used to having questions answered. If they were not, she was used to exploring why not. “Wh-wh-why w-w-won’t you t-t-tell me who?”
David bent ostentatiously closer to his screen. His beautiful mouth set. “I think this conversation is over, Miri.”
“Wh-wh-why?”
He didn’t answer her. The strings of her thoughts suddenly tangled, tightened around her like a noose. “B-b-bec-c-cause I’m ugly? I t-tt-t-twitch?”
“I said I didn’t have anything else to say!” Frustration, or embarrassment, or anger, overcame courtesy, and he finally looked directly at her before stalking off. Miri recognized the look: She had often seen it on her mother’s face before Hermione turned to fiddling with a screen, or a cup of coffee, or anything handy. Miri recognized, too, that she was the reason for the frustration or embarrassment or anger, and that she had somehow contributed enough of it to justify the discourtesy. He didn’t want her, and she had had no right to press him—but all she’d wanted was answers. By pressing him, she’d only humiliated herself. He didn’t want her. She twitched, her head was too big, she stuttered, she wasn’t pretty like Joan was. No Norm would want her.
She walked carefully, as if she were a chemical compound that shouldn’t be jarred, back to her laboratory. Sitting at her desk, she again clasped her hands—jerking, twitching—and tried to calm herself. To think. To construct orderly, balanced nets of thought that would hold everything useful to the problem, everything relevant—intellectually, emotionally, biochemically—everything productive. After twenty minutes, she got up again and left the lab.
Nikos Demetrios, Christina’s twin, was fascinated by money. Its international flow, fluctuations, uses, changes, symbolism were, he had once told Miri, more complex than any natural Gaea patterns on Earth, just as useful to biological survival, and more interesting. At fourteen, he’d already made suggestions about international trading to the adult Norms with seats on the Sanctuary Exchange. They purchased his suggestions on investment opportunities around the globe: new wind-shear-detection technology under development in Seoul, a catalytic antibody application marketed in Paris, the embryonic Moroccan aerospace industry. Miri found him in the central communications building, in his tiny office ringed with datascreens.
“N-N-N-Nikos…”
“H-h-h-hello, M-M-M-M-Miri.”
“W-w-will you have s-s-s-s-sex with m-me?”
Nikos regarded her steadily. Mottled color swept from his neck to his forehead. Miri saw that, like David Aronson, Nikos was embarrassed, but unlike David he didn’t seem embarrassed by the directness of the question. She could only think of one other reason he could be embarrassed. She turned and stumbled from the office.
Nikos called, “W-w-w-wait! M-Miri!” His voice sounded genuinely distressed; they had been playmates their entire lives. He couldn’t coordinate his movements even as well as she could. She easily outdistanced him.
Back in her lab, door locked and STERILE ENVIRONMENT seal activated, Miri sat, fiercely willing herself not to cry. Her grandmother had been right: There were hard necessities to face. One did not cry.
After that she was courteous and distant with Nikos, who didn’t seem to know what to do about that. Eventually she saw him with a Norm, a pretty fourteen-year-old named Patricia who seemed fascinated by Nikos’s skill with money. Miri had never talked much with Christina; now she talked less. David she never saw. With Tony she was the same as always: he was her workmate, friend, beloved confidant. Her brother. Now there was just this one area where the confiding didn’t extend, was all. It was unimportant. She wouldn’t let it be important. Hard necessity.