“He should be able to see that. All those thousands of people working to reconstruct things. Why ask for stuff we already know?”
“Eliot sees what he wants to see.” Daniel finished off his drink and went around to fix another.
“That’s the problem. You and Eliot have different world views. He’s basically a cheerful pessimist.”
Dan laughed. “And I’m a morose optimist.”
“In a way. Eliot knows in his heart that we’ll never get back on line with New New. They’re all dead. Whereas you think—”
“What do you think?”
“Me? About New New?”
“Yeah. Am I wasting my time, and everybody else’s? Waiting for ghosts to come on line?”
“No. Even if it were only a thousand-to-one chance. We have to be prepared.”
“Thanks. Somebody else thinks I’m not useless.” He looked at the glass of boo and poured it back into the bottle. “Look, I’ve got to… go do something. See you at John’s.”
“Okay.” She watched him hurry off. Dan was truly upset, for him not to drink. Or maybe he was headed for a woman, which didn’t seem likely. But who could figure out men? She picked out a simple melody over and over and recalled what they had said. Maybe she could’ve broken it to him more gently. No. Maybe she should have asked him to stay, and talk it out. No. Don’t push him. Maybe she should have said nothing; waited until they were all together tonight. No, he’d say why didn’t you tell me earlier? Hush little baby, don’t say a word. Papa gonna buy you a mockin’ bird. If that mockin’ bird don’t sing, Papa gonna buy you a diamond ring…
6. TWO PARTS DISCORD
16 August 99 [27 Muhammed 295]—It was the worst thing I could do, emotionally, but she drew me like a magnet. Before I went to talk Sam over with everybody, I went down to Creche and watched the baby. From behind glass, invisible.
I understand the rationale for not touching; you can only touch the baby while she’s also in contact with the creche mother. So as not to confuse her bonding. But part of me needs bonding, too.
It would be different if I hadn’t had the miscarriage. With him I had worked out the whole emotional scenario. He would grow in my body and grow, until I was ready to burst, and then I would push him out in blood and pain and they would cut the cord, but the connection would still be there, and as he grew into boy and man he would still be me, flesh of my flesh as they say. This one and I have only two cells in common, one of them altered and one of them fooled, but in genetic terms she is more me than any natural child could be, and so how am I supposed to feel toward her? I love her with an irrational intensity. I know a lot of the love is referred pain, for the boy who died without a name, with only a hint of life, more or less reverently recycled. They asked me whether I wanted a ceremony and in my stupid rage I said no. It might have put him to rest. Given me some peace.
Night before last I sat down by the herb garden in the darkness, and I realized that with every breath I was breathing him. A few molecules of him, cycling through the air, and I tried to take some comfort in that, but you follow it to its logical conclusion and it becomes grotesque. Next season I’ll eat a piece of cabbage or goat and it will be partly him, which is to say partly me, and it will pass through and become soil again, or nutrient solution, and I realized that he and I and all of us aboard this can are trivially immortal, through the noble agency of shit. In and out of these temporary bodies.
I was late, having gone back to the office for the button recorder. The three of them were halfway through their meal, a pasta primavera. I opened my box and it was still warm.
“What do you think?” I said.
“Sam is fine with me,” Evelyn said. “I don’t know him all that well, but I’ve always thought he was nice. Trust your judgment anyhow.”
“I don’t know whether to trust my own judgment. Dan? You’ve had some time to think about it.”
He pushed the food around on his plate. “I wouldn’t object. Anything that makes you happy.” John nodded without saying anything.
“Thanks.” I took a bite. “Pasta with guilt sauce.”
“I do mean it. This is a hard time for you.”
“Let me be the devil’s advocate,” Evy said. “Why do you want to marry him? Why can’t you just be like me and Larry? Or Dan and what’s-her-name.”
“I forget,” Daniel said. “Changes every week.”
“It wasn’t my idea. He’s the one who wants to get married; I’d just as soon keep it informal.”
“That might be a good reason for you to say no,” John said. “You, not us.”
“But I love him.” I pushed the food away too hard; some of it drifted off the plate in lazy spirals, toward my lap. “I love him.”
“Of course you do,” John said. “But look at it with some detachment. You gave each other emotional support at a time of almost unimaginable stress. Hopes crushed, helpless children dying left and right, all your work and caring gone to nothing; worse than nothing. You needed each other—or someone, at least—more than you needed oxygen.”
“I’ll concede that.” Not to mention the stress, twelve days earlier, of my husbands taking another wife.
“So is it possible that what you love is not Sam himself, but what Sam did for you?”
“This isn’t a Cabinet meeting, John. Let’s leave analysis out of it for a minute. How does it make you feel?”
“I don’t know enough to know how to feel. If you’re asking whether I’m jealous, the answer is no. Hurt, maybe; guilty, maybe. If you want Sam because of something we should be giving you.”
“It’s not that.” I guess I said that fast enough for them, or at least him, to know it wasn’t completely true. Give me some of what you’re giving Evelyn.
“There’s one thing I thought of,” Daniel said. “It is analytical, though.”
“I can handle it.”
“It doesn’t have to do with you or us, but with other people’s perceptions: if Sam joins the line, we’re going to have four Cabinet members in one five-person family.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” O’Hara admitted, and laughed nervously. “Ten percent of the Cabinet in bed together.”
“With a spy from the working class,” Evy said.
“At least we’d be evenly split between Engineering and Policy,” John said, smiling. “Not a voting bloc. There are a lot more significant coalitions around.”
We looked at each other in silence. I guess I knew all along that they’d throw the ball back to me. I resolved the problem with typical Alexandrian decisiveness: “Well… I’ll tell Sam we just have to wait. It’s too sudden; we have to think about it, talk about it. If he wants to be my lover in the meantime, that’s fine; if not… it won’t be the end of the world.”
“We should all talk to him tomorrow,” Evy said. “Make sure he knows he’s welcome.”
John and Dan agreed, but an interesting look passed between them.
YEAR 3.21
1. LEAVINGS
O’Hara and Sam Wasserman were lovers for about sixteen months, though their relationship was only occasionally sexual. They listened to music together, and sometimes played simple duets (Sam could read music on fourteen different instruments, but was proficient with none of them). They argued about history and politics, swam together four times a week, usually met for breakfast or lunch. Sometimes he shared her cot in Uchūden, taking up less than half. They often reminisced about Earth. Along with Charity Lee Boyle, they were compiling an encyclopedia of dirty jokes, arranged by subject.