“But—but we don’t have to quit. We could…look, we could go to Reb and tell him we want to Graduate early! Right away. We could make him buy it—hell, you’re spaceworthy already, and I know enough to survive long enough to reach the Symbiote mass, I’ve proved that, what more do I really need to know? Whatever it is, I’ll know it as soon as I enter the Starmind! We could pull it off—”
He looked me square in the eye. “Are you ready to take Symbiote? Right now?”
I looked away. “Soon, I mean. A week, say.”
He took my face in his hands and made me look back at him. “Morgan—I am not one hundred percent certain I want to go through with Symbiosis. It scares me silly. But I am one hundred percent sure I do not want to be pressured into it. If it’s a choice between do it within a week and don’t do it, make up your mind, the clock’s ticking…I pass.” He let go of me. “I don’t know about you, but I could use another six months or so to think about it. And besides, I have no way to know we have a week.”
“You think the UN will sell us out that fast?”
“No—but how would you like to go EVA tomorrow and find out you’ve got tanks full of pure nitrogen? The Jihad got to the circulation system: they could get to the tank-charging facilities. Or the Garden. There could be an unfortunate outbreak of botulism, or plague, or rogue replicators from the Safe Lab—all my instincts tell me to get out of here, fast. You mark my words: in twenty-four hours every scheduled seat Earthside will be booked, and they’ll be screaming for special extra flights to handle the overflow. And a lot of people will be suddenly making plans to Graduate ahead of schedule, like you said. But I won’t be one of them. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to risk dying, just at the very verge of life eternal. I’m going home, as fast as I can.”
Damn him for being so intelligent! With anyone else I might have kept that first argument going for hours yet—but he had gone and won the fucking thing. What now? Refuse to concede that, and have us both repeat our lines with minor variations in word choice two or three more times?
No. God damn it. It was time to have the second argument…
“And you don’t care if I come along or not?”
His mouth tightened and his nostrils flared. Again I had stung him. Good.
And again the son of a bitch controlled it and answered reasonably. “Of course I care, Morgan. You must know how much I care. But you’re a free adult: I can’t make your choice for you.”
“The hell you can’t! That’s what you’re trying to do!”
“I am not. I am trying very hard not to. Look, it’s very simple, Morgan. There are two choices: Graduate too early, for the wrong reasons, under the gun, gamble with our lives and our sanity—or fall back and try again later. There’s only one sensible choice. I hope with all my heart that you’ll be sensible. But I can’t make you be.”
“You do, huh? Why do you hope that, Robert?”
He did not answer.
“Why do you hope that, Robert? Say the words. You’ve never said the words.”
“Neither have you.”
“Because I didn’t think we needed to!”
“I didn’t either!” he snapped back, letting anger show in his voice for the first time.
“Well, maybe we were wrong! God damn you, I love you!”
That silly statement hung in the air between us. As if any more irony were needed, the violence of our combined shouting had caused us to start drifting ever so slowly apart. I waved air with my cupped hands to try and cancel it, but he didn’t follow suit, so I stopped.
He seemed to consider several responses. What he finally settled on was, “Do I correctly hear you say that if I loved you, I would be trying to tell you what to do with your life?”
“Of course not!”
“Don’t you see that if you and I hadn’t talked Glenn into staying here, she’d be alive now?”
That hurt. I counterattacked hastily. “And I don’t mean anything more to you than Glenn did?”
“Morgan, for heaven’s sake, be reasonable! I’ve spent thirty years trying to unlearn the idea that women are property, and if you want someone to go twentieth century and start giving you orders like a Muslim or a Fundamentalist…well, I’m afraid you’ll have to get somebody else; it’s just too late for me to start all over again. I don’t want to be any grown-up’s father.”
Is there anything more infuriating than an argument-opponent with impeccable logic? The correct answer was: I don’t want you to give me orders—I want you to be so crazy in love with me that you can’t cut your own marching orders until you know my plans—but I just could not say that out loud…or even to myself.
“Damn you,” I cried, “you leave my father out of this!”
Yes, there is something more infuriating than a logical opponent. A man who is impervious to illogic. He turned and found a handhold, pushed himself over to my terminal. He belted himself in so he could punch keys without ricocheting away, and looked back to me. “May I? I could just go through Teena, but I think you can guess why I’d rather not do that.”
Days ago we had given each other the booting code to our personal terminal…as lovers will, and mere sexers will not. It’s a step more intimate than swapping housekeys, much more intimate than sharing bodily fluids. Someone who can access your personal memory node can drain your financial accounts, read your mail, read your diary if you keep one, send messages in your name. Hands on your keyboard touch you more deeply than hands on your vagina. “Use your own terminal,” I said.
“Certainly,” he said calmly, and unstrapped again. “How many seats shall I reserve?”
“One!” I shouted.
“Morgan—” he began.
“Dammit, you don’t want to be pressured to Graduate, but you’re trying to pressure me into giving it up! Maybe forever—suppose two months from now they blow this place up, and the chance is gone for our lifetime?”
“Then we’ll have a lifetime. That’s the most they promise you when you get born. And we could have it together.”
“But I could never dance again!”
“Then you have to decide whether it’s me you want, or dance. If you stay here, and it happens just as you say…you and I will never see each other again.”
“Not if you don’t run out on me!”
At last I got to him. “I won’t be running out on you if you do the smart thing and leave with me!” he said, raising his voice for the first time.
I had to press the advantage. “Go on, get out of here—you’ve got a plane to catch!”
He drew in breath…and let it out. And took another deep breath, and let that out, a little more slowly. “I’ll reserve two seats. You can always cancel if you choose to.”
I was still in my p-suit; I unsnapped an air bottle and threw it at him. Stupid: he was the only one of our class who had ever beaten Dorothy Gerstenfeld in 3-D handball. He side-stepped like a bullfighter and the tank shattered the monitor screen above my terminal, rebounded with less than half of its original force but spinning crazily. I was spinning myself from having thrown it, and whacked my head on something. The tank swacked into Kirra’s sleepsack and was stopped by it. When I looked around, Robert was gone.
Good riddance, I thought, and doubled over and wept in great racking sobs. My eyes grew tendrils of silvery tears; I smashed them into globular fragments that danced and eddied in the air like little transparent Fireflies before breaking apart and whirling away.