A second example is Newhome itself. Only thirty-nine percent were in favor of building it; a solid majority felt the money would be better spent in rebuilding the Worlds.
The executive decision was that Newhome was necessary for several reasons. One was spiritual, or I suppose you would rather say “emotional”: we had to direct people’s aspirations outward. If we spent twenty years just licking our wounds and glaring resentfully down at the Earth, we might never regain anything like normal relations with them again. Even now, there’s a strong isolationist sentiment, as you surely know.
O’HARA: Especially the Devonites.
IMAGE: Another reason, as we discussed openly, is simple insurance for the human race. If there’s another war it will probably be the last one.
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.