by John Kessel
The Green family had colonized the picnic area. The ones who had been at Val’s glassblowing exam were the core of a group that must number thirty or more, ranging in age from toddlers to people in their second century. Mira knew hardly any of them. Though you could count on the Greens to faithfully do their six hours weekly of mita service, if it could be said that there were classes in the Society, then they were in the highest. The Greens were influential in a dozen areas: teachers, a couple of university professors, technicians, bureaucrats, scientists like Eva, engineers like Roz, athletes like Carey. They were a little light on artists, maybe, but Eva’s cousin Rydell Green Marlenesson published short stories and Zöe Green Sarasdaughter had taught Mira’s film production class in the university.
Two young men lay on the grass face to face, touching each other, a hand to a hip, fingers brushing hair away from the other’s cheek. Nearby some girls and boys had turned off their Aides and were playing blind man’s buff. The girl who was the blind man had her eyes covered with spex and stumbled around with her arms stretched out in front of her, a grin on her face.
Carey and another man were juggling three children, little ones curled tightly into balls with their arms wrapped around their knees, throwing them high into the air, catching them, tossing them up again. The children screamed and spun. When the jugglers stopped, caught the kids, and let them go, they staggered dizzily around on the grass.
“Me, me!” one of the girls said, arms out to Carey.
“Okay, but you’re the last,” Carey said. “You’re wearing me out.”
Mira nodded at him and walked past. Last night’s awkwardness lingered in her mind. She was troubled by the fact that he’d felt free to tell Hypatia she was Looker. Worse, he was right that Mira would never have told Hypatia herself, and that what he’d done had given her something she’d wanted. He was right about keeping Val out of the public eye.
Mira had felt off balance from the moment Hypatia had answered the door at Carey’s apartment. She wasn’t exactly surprised, but she had felt wrong footed. Not Hypatia, though. Hypatia acted as if there were no emotional consequences to their romantic triangle, as if the very thought of consequences was at best an unfortunate ideological error, at worst a sign of a grave character flaw. She’d told Mira, as she dressed, that Carey had gone off somewhere to meet Val, and then glided out of the apartment as if she were passing the two of them off to Mira for the rest of the night.
And then Mira had acted as if Carey were passed off to her. The bad sex stuck with her, as did the feeling that it was her fault that instead of getting closer she and Carey were drifting apart.
Mira spotted Eva talking with a trim old man. She looked up, smiled, and gestured Mira over.
She kissed Mira on the cheek. “I’m glad you came,” she said. “This is Hal Lizsson.”
“Hello,” Hal said, wrapping her in a hug. He had a big beak of a nose and a tiny mouth with parentheses of smile lines. “You’re Mira.”
“That’s right,” Mira said.
“Very pleased to meet you.”
“Let me introduce you to some of the family,” Eva said.
Eva took Mira around to her sister, some cousins, a couple of uncles, young women and their boyfriends. Mira tabbed her Aide to keep track of their names. Some asked her about her work in Eva’s lab; they casually alluded to her relationship with Carey and Val. If the ongoing conflict over Val was a matter of dissention among the Greens, they had put it aside for the duration of the picnic. Everybody was civilized and respectful, as if there were not a court case on the horizon.
Val and Roz were helping a woman set food out on a table. The woman moved with grace, but the curve of her shoulders and the tightness of her skin gave her away as one of the very old.
“Mira, this is Liz—she’s Hal’s mother. Aunt Liz, this is Mira Hannasdaughter, one of the interns in Materials. We’re hoping that she will take a permanent job with us after she finishes her degree.”
Aunt Liz’s hug was perfunctory. “Trying to join this family?” she said bluntly.
“I’m just here for the picnic,” Mira said.
“You look tense. Have some tea.” Aunt Liz held out a purple bulb. “I’ve already got a buzz on, myself. Only way I get through these things.”
Mira took the bulb. “Thanks.”
“Come, on Auntie, let’s get these ready,” Roz said, moving to one of the hampers.
Eva drew Mira away. “Aunt Liz was born in California one hundred twenty years ago. “Nora Sobieski was her elementary school teacher.” Eva gestured at the bulb Mira carried. “That’s her special blend. Don’t drink it unless you want to spend the afternoon high.”
They passed a circle of Greens sitting on the grass around two middle-aged men and a woman playing a banjo, guitar, and fiddle. Eva led Mira to a bench beneath a silver maple.
“I’m a little surprised you came,” she said.
Mira was not interested in niceties. “Why did you ask me, then?”
“For one, because this is a situation I gather you seldom encounter.”
“What situation?”
“A family. Alliances. Personal history, for better or worse, that people can’t run away from.”
“I run away?”
“I don’t know you well enough to say that.” Eva picked up a fallen leaf and twirled it by the stem. One side glossy green, the other whitish. “I think you could use more friends. Your work on the fullerene scrubbing is credible, but I don’t see you as a physicist. I don’t know how committed you are to a career in science; seems to me your heart lies elsewhere. You keep your own counsel. You’re very strong—in some ways.”
Mira considered taking Aunt Liz’s advice and drinking the tea. “Are you trying to recruit me into the Greens or just insult me?”
“It takes a majority vote to get into the family. I couldn’t get you in if I wanted to.”
“If you wanted to. That’s pretty blunt.”
“I’m only being straight with you. If you did want into this family, you’d have to earn it.”
“I don’t think I would fit in.”
Eva smiled. “That’s one definition of a family: the place where you don’t fit in. We Cousins tried to redefine it, but still it can be stifling.”
“You seem to have made a lot of judgments about me already. The colony is filled with judgmental women. I don’t like being judged.”
“Nobody does. But I don’t think people can reserve judgment, in large numbers, for very long. Regardless, the Society works.”
“Not for everybody.”
“It doesn’t work for you?”
“It doesn’t work for me,” said Mira. “It didn’t for my mother.”
“It’s my feeling that it’s produced a greater degree of happiness, more evenly distributed, than any in history.”
“With some individual exceptions,” Mira said. The fiddle and banjo music drifted over the park. She looked at the kids climbing trees, the food laid out on the table, the lovers in every gender combination lying together, the old ones talking, the women and men teasing one another. “Besides, you’re wrong—I do have friends.”
“Hypatia and her crew. That’s another reason I asked you. I’ve known her a long time. She calls me a supporter of the status quo, and I guess I am. Where we disagree, I’m happy to negotiate, but in the end it’s not politics that separates us—it’s what she does to people.”
“She hasn’t done anything to people.”
“She’s not interested in reducing alienation. She exploits it.”
“Hypatia’s not going to paper over the chasm between where we are and where we ought to be. If she’s alienated—if I’m alienated, Eva—the reasons come directly out of your glorious system.”
“It’s easy to see the flaws in a society when it’s failed you. But think about it: The patriarchies call us an ‘existential’ threat. It’s existential, all right—it’s our very existence that scares them.”
“T
o them we’re a joke,” Mira said.
“Not to all of them. Some of them look at us and say, ‘Well, at least the things that are destroying me here are not destroying people there.’ ”
“People are getting destroyed here.”
“To what degree? In what numbers?”
Mira was sick of this. “It’s all so simple. ‘If it harms no one, do what you will.’ How many times have I been told that?”
Eva let the maple leaf fall to the ground. “Too many, I’m sure.”
“People die here every day.” Mira looked down toward the big cottonwood by the pond. A breeze rippled the surface of the water, breaking and reforming the reflections of the buildings on the other side.
Eva said, “ ‘Someone asked Vladimir Lenin once, ‘In your socialist utopia, will children no longer be run over by streetcars?’ ”
Mira looked back at Eva. “What did he say?”
“He had no answer.”
Carey was approaching them across the lawn.
“He should have paid less attention to utopia and more to streetcar management,” Mira said. She set her untouched bulb of tea down on the bench and stood.
Carey’s embrace was brief. He looked tired.
“Time to eat,” he said. He noticed the tea. “Ah, you’ve met Aunt Liz. You should drink that. It will change your life.”
“I don’t need my life changed,” Mira said.
They joined the family gathered around the picnic table. Val climbed onto a bench and helped Aunt Liz up after him. She whispered something into his ear and he stepped down. Liz lifted her hand until the family quieted.
“Well, here we are again, one more time around the sun,” she started, voice strong. “Let’s take a moment to remember the ones who didn’t make it all the way with us this time: Peter Samanthasson, Gracen Katesdaughter.”
She bowed her head, and the others followed. Mira looked at the sandals of the woman in front of her. After a few seconds, Liz said, “We give thanks to the source of all sustenance, to the people who worked hard so we might have this food, to the plants and animals who die so that we might eat. What you send, returns three times over.”
“Three times over,” the family replied.
“So let’s eat, then,” Liz said.
Val helped her down and kissed the old woman on her cheek. The family passed around bowls of fruit salad, cinnamon bread, stew, platters of cucumbers and oil, hummus, beans.
It was more than Mira could tolerate, this forced togetherness. She saw the tensions beneath the surface. Roz and Carey carefully avoided each other. The elders eyed Val’s every move, while the younger women cast suspicious glances at Carey—and at Mira. She overheard one of Carey’s aunts tell him, “Settle this custody foolishness without going to a hearing.”
Mira took a plate and sat by herself. She had to admit, the eggplant stew was mouth-watering. Carey stayed away, but a couple of women close to her age sat with her. They asked her what she thought of the Reform Party’s chances to take over the Board of Matrons. Mira would not hold up her end of the conversation, and the talk ended in uncomfortable silence.
What had Eva hoped to accomplish by bringing her here? She knew Mira had encouraged Carey to take Val. She knew Hypatia had taken an interest in Mira. Maybe Carey had even told her that Mira had asked about the quantum scanner. Any one of these things might move her to try to get Mira on her side.
Instead Eva had given her a lecture on Cousins 101. And Carey was ignoring her, and they had tricked her into coming to Sobieski Park, and one after another flyers glided over the woods to come to a landing on the field a couple of hundred meters away.
Mira stared at the old cottonwood. It was huge, maybe twenty-five meters tall. Anyone unfamiliar with it would never spot where a limb had been snapped off a decade earlier, but Mira could see the hole that it had left.
Abandoning her plate and the Green family, she crossed the lawn to the tree. She laid her cheek against the deeply fissured, whitish bark, rough and cool. She listened to the rustling of its leaves. Love was just a feeling.
• • • • •
“I’m glad Eva asked you,” Hypatia said when Mira told her about the picnic. “Keep playing her. You may learn some useful things—at the very least you’ll see how she works.” Hypatia enjoyed listening to Mira’s deconstruction of the Green family. She most definitely didn’t seek Mira’s opinion of her quoting Ulrike Meinhof as a role model.
It was election night. Mira put on tights, a loose blouse, and a wig. She found her dancing shoes, turned her bracelet pink, and moved it to her left wrist. She needed a vacation from men, and every kind of player would be at the party. She caught the metro to the university.
In the last days the debate on the public boards, in the amphitheater, in dining halls and workplaces had gotten more heated than during any election since the time when Tyler Durden had shaken the Society. Guerilla theater took over the colony’s largest refectory. Three different Looker videos were posted, only one of which Mira had created. Some men and women in the fusion plant threatened to work-to-rule if the male franchise proposition failed. There were even a couple of incidents of men coming to blows with one another.
Charges that Hypatia was a sociopath crossed charges that the election was being rigged against the reformers. Rumors of agents from the patriarchies swept the boards, but whenever anyone asked those spreading these rumors to point to a single example of agents provocateurs, silence ensued. The closest anyone came was to say that Looker must be a plant by outsiders, or at the very least in league with them.
On the metro three loud adolescent boys swaggered up and down the car, leaning over seated women to look out the windows. The instant a constable entered from the next car they sat down and acted like the meekest sons in the colony. At the university two constables patrolled the station and several monitored the plaza.
Over the entrance to Mark Janisson Hall a glowing sign read “Reform Party Party.” Young people packed the dance floor and mezzanine, even though they could get the results just as well by Aide—this sort of rally was an archaism that Hypatia had resurrected. Mira cruised the crowd. The walls sported images from the campaign. Some women with purple bracelets—trans women looking for boys—sat with another group wearing green—trans women looking for girls.
In conversation pits speculation about canvassing numbers went on, but on the floor the music blared and people danced. A tea bar offered every variety of libido enhancer, as if they were necessary. Mira danced with a woman she had seen at some of the rallies; she didn’t know her name. A big girl with an expressive face and fine lips. She moved smoothly in her tight dress, her hips swaying.
“I’m Cleo,” the woman said as they headed from the dance floor to the bar.
“Miranda.”
Cleo stopped. “You’re Mira Hannasdaughter! I knew I recognized you.”
“Do I know you?”
“I was in a Philosophy of Gender class with you years ago. I used to crack up at the questions you asked, so simple, but you were sticking the knife in. The prof didn’t even know he was being gored.” Cleo kept her eyes on Mira as she slipped the nipple of her bulb between her lips.
“I guess I should have remembered you.”
“I was male then. Cleon Small Liviasson?” Cleo’s openness was guilelessly attractive.
Mira sucked on her drink. Was Cleo one of those guys who changed sex in order to pursue a political career? “After we lose this election, I may have to fuck you.”
Cleo touched Mira’s forearm. “And when we win, I’ll fuck you.”
The polls wouldn’t close until midnight. In the past the results would have been available instantly, but because of rumors that the voting might be hacked there was going to be a closed analysis with representatives of all factions. Once all sides were satisfied, the results would be announced some time between midnight and morning.
Hot and sweaty, Mira and Cleo fell onto the banquette at the s
ide of the hall. Cleo leaned in to Mira. Mira slid her hand up the inside of Cleo’s leg and kissed her neck, her cheek, her lips. This went on for a while. Faint perfume and a dew of sweat.
The pixwall at one end of the room ran an image from some news show in one of the patriarchies: A black dog wearing a vest was talking to a woman, but their words were drowned out by the music. Cleo pulled Mira back onto the dance floor. Head buzzing, Mira could almost see the music surrounding the dancers like a living cloud.
She shouted into Cleo’s ear. “Hypatia has a private party. Want to go?”
“You can get us in?’
Mira held up her palm. “I’m invited.”
They ran out, bouncing off each other, and took an elevator down to Seven Underground, a neighborhood popular with university faculty and the politically connected. As they neared the apartment of Charlene Wandasdaughter, a lawyer and one of Hypatia’s former wives, they could hear voices. On the concourse outside the apartment, people trying to crash the party jousted with anti-reformers.
Mira pulled Cleo toward the door, past a woman arguing with another: “Even on Earth, a transgendered person has more rights than here!”
“Not a great argument,” the other said, “that Earth-as-an-example thing.”
The first woman grabbed the collar of the other. She yelped, knocking Mira sideways.
“Use your indoor voice,” Mira chided, imitating the most earnest of Matrons. Laughing, she held her palm up to the door and she and Cleo slipped in.
A couple of dozen people filled the apartment. Here it was not so much a party, though some people were lit and social babble punctuated the political talk. Hypatia, in black suit and brilliant smile, stood at the room’s focus. She locked eyes with Mira, nodded infinitesimally, then turned back to Daquani Jeffersdaughter.
Val lounged in a pit with a very beautiful young man and woman. Nearby, Carey leaned over slightly while Juliette, her hand touching his shoulder, spoke with him, their heads centimeters apart.