“She can’t go to Simopolis yet,” said a Benjamin.
“We’re still adapting them,” said another.
“Fine,” said Mattie. “Then we’ll just bring the society here.” And in through the wall streamed a parade of women. Mattie introduced them as they appeared, “Here’s Georgianna and Randi. Meet Chaka, Sue, Latasha, another Randi, Sue, Sue, and Sue. Mariola. Here’s Trevor — he’s the only one of him. Paula, Dolores, Nancy, and Deb, welcome, girls.” And still they came until they, together with the Bens, more than filled the tiny space. The Bens looked increasingly uncomfortable.
“I think we’re ready now,” the Bens said, and disappeared en masse, taking Benjamin with them.
“Wait,” said Anne, who wasn’t sure she wanted to stay behind. Her new friends surrounded her and peppered her with questions.
“How did you first meet him?”
“What was he like?”
“Was he always so hopeless?”
“Hopeless?” said Anne. “Why do you say hopeless?”
“Did he always snore?”
“Did he always drink?”
“Why’d you do it?” This last question silenced the room. The women all looked nervously about to see who had asked it. “It’s what everyone’s dying to know,” said a woman who elbowed her way through the crowd.
She was another Anne.
“Sister!” cried Anne. “Am I glad to see you!”
“That’s nobody’s sister,” said Mattie. “That’s a doxie, and it doesn’t belong here.”
Indeed, upon closer inspection Anne could see that the woman had her face and hair but otherwise didn’t resemble her at all. She was leggier than Anne and bustier, and she moved with a fluid swivel to her hips.
“Sure I belong here, as much as any of you. I just passed the Lolly test. It was easy. Not only that, but as far as spouses go, I outlasted the bunch of you.” She stood in front of Anne, hands on hips, and looked her up and down. “Love the dress,” she said, and instantly wore a copy. Only hers had a plunging neckline that exposed her breasts, and it was slit up the side to her waist.
“This is too much,” said Mattie. “I insist you leave this jiffy.”
The doxie smirked. “Mattie the doormat, that’s what he always called that one. So tell me, Anne, you had money, a career, a house, a kid — why’d you do it?”
“Do what?” said Anne.
The doxie peered closely at her. “Don’t you know?”
“Know what?”
“What an unexpected pleasure,” said the doxie. “I get to tell her. This is too rich. I get to tell her unless” — she looked around at the others — “unless one of you fine ladies wants to.” No one met her gaze. “Hypocrites,” she chortled.
“You can say that again,” said a new voice. Anne turned and saw Cathy, her oldest and dearest friend, standing at the open door. At least she hoped it was Cathy. The woman was what Cathy would look like in middle age. “Come along, Anne. I’ll tell you everything you need to know.”
“Now you hold on,” said Mattie. “You don’t come waltzing in here and steal our guest of honor.”
“You mean victim, I’m sure,” said Cathy, who waved for Anne to join her. “Really, people, get a clue. There must be a million women whose lives don’t revolve around that man.” She escorted Anne through the door and slammed it shut behind them.
Anne found herself standing on a high bluff, overlooking the confluence of two great rivers in a deep valley. Directly across from her, but several kilometers away, rose a mighty mountain, green with vegetation nearly to its granite dome. Behind it, a range of snow-covered mountains receded to an unbroken ice field on the horizon. In the valley beneath her, a dirt track meandered along the riverbanks. She could see no bridge or buildings of any sort.
“Where are we?”
“Don’t laugh,” said Cathy, “but we call it Cathyland. Turn around.” When she did, Anne saw a picturesque log cabin beside a vegetable garden in the middle of what looked like acres and acres of Cathys. Thousands of Cathys, young, old, and all ages in between. They sat in lotus position on the sedge-and-moss-covered ground. They were packed so tight they overlapped a little, and their eyes were shut in an expression of single-minded concentration. “We know you’re here,” said Cathy, “but we’re very preoccupied with this Simopolis thing.”
“Are we in Simopolis?”
“Kinda. Can’t you see it?” She waved toward the horizon.
“No, all I see are mountains.”
“Sorry, I should know better. We have binaries from your generation here too.” She pointed to a college-aged Cathy. “They didn’t pass the Lolly test, and so are regrettably nonhuman. We haven’t decided what to do with them.” She hesitated and then asked, “Have you been tested yet?”
“I don’t know,” said Anne. “I don’t remember a test.”
Cathy studied her a moment and said, “You’d remember taking the test, just not the test itself. Anyway, to answer your question, we’re in proto-Simopolis, and we’re not. We built this retreat before any of that happened, but we’ve been annexed to it, and it takes all our resources just to hold our own. I don’t know what the World Council was thinking. There’ll never be enough paste to go around, and everyone’s fighting over every nanosynapse. It’s all we can do to keep up. And every time we get a handle on it, proto-Simopolis changes again. It’s gone through a quarter-million complete revisions in the last half hour. It’s war out there, but we refuse to surrender even one cubic centimeter of Cathyland. Look at this.” Cathy stooped and pointed to a tiny, yellow flower in the alpine sedge. “Within a fifty-meter radius of the cabin, we’ve mapped everything down to the cellular level. Watch.” She pinched the bloom from its stem and held it up. Now there were two blooms, the one between her fingers and the real one on the stem. “Neat, eh?” When she dropped it, the bloom fell back into its original. “We’ve even mapped the valley breeze. Can you feel it?”
Anne tried to feel the air, but she couldn’t even feel her own skin. “It doesn’t matter,” Cathy continued. “You can hear it, right?” and pointed to a string of tubular wind chimes hanging from the eaves of the cabin. They stirred in the breeze and produced a silvery cacophony.
“It’s lovely,” said Anne. “But why? Why spend so much effort simulating this place?”
Cathy looked at her dumbly, as though trying to understand the question. “Because Cathy spent her entire life wishing she had a place like this, and now she does, and she has us, and we live here too.”
“You’re not the real Cathy, are you?” She knew she was too young.
Cathy shook her head and smiled. “There’s so much catching up to do, but it’ll have to wait. I gotta go. We need me.” She led Anne to the cabin. The cabin was made of weathered, grey logs, with strips of bark still clinging to them. The roof was covered with living sod and sprinkled with wild flowers. The whole building sagged in the middle. “Cathy found this place five years ago while on vacation in Siberia. She bought it from the village. It’s been occupied for two hundred years. Once we make it livable inside, we plan on enlarging the garden, eventually cultivating all the way to the spruce forest there. We’re going to sink a well, too.” The small garden was bursting with vegetables, mostly of the leafy variety: cabbages, spinach, lettuce. A row of sunflowers, taller than the cabin roof and heavy with seed, lined the path to the cabin door. Over time, the whole cabin had sunk a half-meter into the silty soil, and the walkway was a worn, shallow trench.