She and Sol met a week after she transferred to Nightenhelser; it was another three years before he proposed marriage and she accepted. At first she saw nothing in the short graduate student. She was still wearing Web fashions then, involved in Post-Destructionist music theories, reading Obit and Nihil and the most avant-garde magazines from Renaissance Vector and TC2, feigning sophisticated weariness with life and a rebel’s vocabulary—and none of this jelled with the undersized but earnest history major who spilled fruit cocktail on her at Dean Moore’s honors party. Any exotic qualities which might have come from Sol Weintraub’s Jewish legacy were instantly negated by his BW accent, his Crawford Squire Shop wardrobe, and the fact that he had come to the party with a copy of Detresque’s Solitudes in Variance absentmindedly tucked under his arm.
For Sol it was love at first sight. He stared at the laughing, red-cheeked girl and ignored the expensive dress and affected mandarin nails in favor of the personality which blazed like a beacon to the lonely junior. Sol had not known he was lonely until he met Sarai, but after the first time he shook her hand and spilled fruit salad down the front of her dress he knew that his life would be empty forever if they did not marry.
They married the week after the announcement of Sol’s teaching appointment at the college. Their honeymoon was on Maui-Covenant, his first farcast trip abroad, and for three weeks they rented a mobile isle and sailed alone on it through the wonders of the Equatorial Archipelago. Sol never forgot the images from those sundrenched and wind-filled days, and the secret image he would always most cherish was of Sarai rising nude from a nighttime swim, the Core stars blazing above while her own body glowed constellations from the phosphorescence of the island’s wake.
They had wanted a child immediately but it was to be five years before nature agreed.
Sol remembered cradling Sarai in his arms as she curled in pain, a difficult delivery, until finally, incredibly, Rachel Sarah Weintraub was born at 2:01 A.M. in Crawford County Med Center.
The presence of an infant intruded upon Sol’s solipsistic life as a serious academic and Sarai’s profession as music critic for Barnard’s datasphere, but neither minded. The first months were a blend of constant fatigue and joy. Late at night, between feedings, Sol would tiptoe into the nursery just to check on Rachel and to stand and gaze at the baby. More often than not he would find Sarai already there and the two would watch, arm in arm, at the miracle of a baby sleeping on its stomach, rump in the air, head burrowed into the bumper pad at the head of the crib.
Rachel was one of those rare children who managed to be cute without becoming self-consciously precious; by the time she was two standard years old her appearance and personality were striking—her mother’s light brown hair, red cheeks, and broad smile, her father’s large brown eyes. Friends said that the child combined the best portions of Sarai’s sensitivity and Sol’s intellect. Another friend, a child psychologist from the college, once commented that Rachel at age five showed the most reliable indicators of true giftedness in a young person: structured curiosity, empathy for others, compassion, and a fierce sense of fair play.
One day in his office, studying ancient files from Old Earth, Sol was reading about the effect of Beatrice on the world view of Dante Alighieri when he was struck by a passage written by a critic from the twentieth or twenty-first century:
She [Beatrice] alone was still real for him, still implied meaning in the world, and beauty. Her nature became his landmark—what Melville would call, with more sobriety than we can now muster, his Greenwich Standard.…
Sol paused to access the definition of Greenwich Standard, and then he read on. The critic had added a personal note:
Most of us, I hope, have had some child or spouse or friend like Beatrice, someone who by his very nature, his seemingly innate goodness and intelligence, makes us uncomfortably conscious of our lies when we lie.
Sol had shut off the display and gazed out at the black geometries of branches above the common.
Rachel was not insufferably perfect. When she was five standard, she carefully cut the hair of her five favorite dolls and then cut her own hair shortest of all. When she was seven, she decided that the migrant workers staying in their run-down houses on the south end of town lacked a nutritious diet, so she emptied the house’s pantries, cold boxes, freezers, and synthesizer banks, talked three friends into accompanying her, and distributed several hundred marks’ worth of the family’s monthly food budget.
When she was ten, Rachel responded to a dare from Stubby Berkowitz and tried to climb to the top of Crawford’s oldest elm. She was forty meters up, less than five meters from the top, when a branch broke and she fell two thirds of the way to the ground. Sol was paged on his comlog while discussing the moral implications of Earth’s first nuclear disarmament era and he left the class without a word and ran the twelve blocks to the Med Center.
Rachel had broken her left leg, two ribs, punctured a lung, and fractured her jaw. She was floating in a bath of recovery nutrient when Sol burst in, but she managed to look over her mother’s shoulder, smile slightly, and say through the wire cast on her jaw: “Dad, I was fifteen feet from the top. Maybe closer. I’ll make it next time.”
Rachel graduated with honors from secondary tutorials and received scholarship offers from corporate academies on five worlds and three universities, including Harvard on New Earth. She chose Nightenhelser.
It was little surprise to Sol that his daughter chose archaeology as a major. One of his fondest memories of her was the long afternoons she had spent under the front porch when she was about two, digging in the loam, ignoring spiders and googlepeds, rushing into the house to show off every plastic plate and tarnished pfennig she had excavated, demanding to know where it had come from, what were the people like who had left it there?
Rachel received her undergraduate degree when she was nineteen standard, worked that summer on her grandmother’s farm, and farcast away the next fall. She was at Reichs University on Freeholm for twenty-eight local months, and when she returned it was as if color had flowed back into Sol and Sarai’s world.
For two weeks their daughter—an adult now, self-aware and secure in some ways that grown-ups twice her age often failed to be—rested and reveled in being home. One evening, walking across the campus just after sunset, she pressed her father on details of his heritage. “Dad, do you still consider yourself a Jew?”
Sol had run his hand over his thinning hair, surprised by the question. “A Jew? Yes, I suppose so. It doesn’t mean what it once did, though.”
“Am I a Jew?” asked Rachel. Her cheeks glowed in the fragile light.
“If you want to be,” said Sol. “It doesn’t have the same significance with Old Earth gone.”
“If I’d been a boy, would you have had me circumcised?”
Sol had laughed, delighted and embarrassed by the question.
“I’m serious,” said Rachel.
Sol adjusted his glasses. “I guess I would have, kiddo. I never thought about it.”