by John Kessel
“Are you sleeping with Saman?” he asked.
She looked astonished, and then she laughed. “You care about sexual fidelity? A Cousin?”
“I’m not ‘a Cousin.’ I’m your husband.” He held his grimy hand up under her nose. “See? I’m right here, right now.”
She pushed him away. “Get your hand out of my face.”
He stepped back. Trembling, he grabbed the last tree he’d planted and yanked it out of the ground; with the same motion he whirled, swinging it at the end of his arm, and let it go. It arced away into the air, hit twenty meters down the gravel path, bounced, tumbled, and came to rest. His heart beat fast. One of the group of workers in the distance stood up and looked their way.
“You lied to me,” Amestris said. “You lied to Saman. You can’t do it.”
He kept his back to her, to the cold determination in her voice. His anger scared him. “I need help, like any human being. Did you think I was some miracle worker?”
She didn’t answer right away. “No,” she finally said. “I don’t think you are a miracle worker.”
• • • • •
Two hours earlier, Amestris had found Sam in the Kazedi Concert Hall at the conservatory of music. He was on the stage tuning the grand piano. One of his eccentricities was that, since he sponsored the concert series, he got to tune the pianos himself; he was as good at it as anyone on the moon. He leaned over the harp, a wrench on the pin block, a tuning fork in his left hand, completely unaware of her entrance. She watched him strike the fork, then turn the wrench slightly. He tilted his head to the side, his eyes closed, lips compressed so that the lines at the corners of his mouth stood in relief. There were bags under his eyes. She had not noticed this before. She was surprised—he had always been so scrupulous about his cosmetic rejuvenation, trying not to look his age. She stepped up and touched him on his shoulder.
His eyes opened, he saw her, and he smiled. He put down the tuning fork. “How good to see you.”
“It’s good to see you.”
He kissed her on the cheek. She let him. What was a kiss between old lovers? He had first asked her to marry him when she was twenty. She had turned him down. Her parents were very angry with her. When she was thirty he still wanted to marry her. When she was forty. For more than twenty years he had wanted to marry her. He wanted to marry her still.
If Sam was jealous of Erno, he did not show it. He was of her father’s generation, one of those men who had made the great secular business empires, who cared about propriety and appearances. He had watched her career with sadness and a critical eye. Another woman as wild as Amestris would have felt the condemnation of everyone in her social class, but Sam had never said a word to her, nor had she ever heard of him saying anything about her to anyone else. She supposed that meant he did love her. But he still gave obeisance to those social strictures, even if he, out of love, never applied them to her. She was not sure she could forgive him for that.
“Thanks for coming,” Saman said. “I was just tuning up for the Chen Wen Ho concert.”
“Where is she?”
“She’s in her hotel throwing up. She claims it’s gravity sickness, but she throws up before every concert on Earth, too.”
Amestris sat on the piano bench and leaned back against the keyboard. “You’ll get her put together. She’ll think she can conquer the solar system. You’re good at that.”
He sat beside her, facing the piano, played a G chord. “Do you ever play?”
“You know I don’t. I don’t have the skills anymore.”
“Perhaps. You have more heart, though.”
Sam seemed to be putting off something. “What did you want to see me about?” Amestris asked.
He didn’t look at her. “I want to know how the project is going.”
“Erno is enthusiastic. You spoke with him yesterday.”
“I want your opinion.”
“I’m going out there after this. We’ve got a start on the maples, and are beginning with the hornbeam plantings.”
“Yes, I know. I’ve been to the nursery. I’ve seen the crew on the day shift putting in the new seedlings. And, on the off-shifts, I’ve seen the night crew pulling out the old seedlings. The dying ones.”
“Not all of them are going to be robust. Erno wants a successful growth, so he’s culling the weak ones.”
“Is that what he told you?”
It was what Erno had told her. She sat up, and her elbow struck some keys. The tones wavered in the air.
Saman closed the fall board and looked directly at her.
“What?” Amestris asked. “Do you know something I don’t?”
“I don’t know how much you know, my dear. I would hate to think that you would take advantage of me, after all these years.”
“I would never take—”
“Yes,” he said.
She thought of how, in her youth, she had played him along while she slept with any handsome man who fell under her gaze.
He had no right to make her feel bad. “Why don’t you just say what you want to say?”
“I’ve been monitoring Erno’s communications. His modified species are dying, and he doesn’t know how to fix them. He’s begging for help from his mentor back in the Society of Cousins, and not getting it.”
Amestris felt herself color. “Why are you spying on him?”
“This is a large investment. It’s my life’s work. And he has drawn you into it—you’ve alienated your family in order to marry him. If your firm fails, you will be ruined financially. You’re at risk, too.”
“What do you know about genobotany? What do I know? He’s an expert.”
“So he says.”
“So far he’s done exactly what he said he could do.”
“So far.” Sam touched her hand. “He doesn’t have to have bad intentions. He may simply be out of his depth.”
She pulled her hand away. She could see it perhaps—how everything Erno had done might have been conjured out of the air, fueled by desperation. But the entire enterprise had been conjured out of the air.
What was love but something conjured out of the air?
“You have no right to question our marriage,” she said. “You, especially, don’t.”
“I only want to protect you,” Sam said.
“By spying on my husband. Did you think I would approve?”
“I was hoping that you would respect the truth.”
“You don’t know the truth. You only know what you want, what you’ve wanted for twenty-five years. Haven’t you tired of this?”
Saman’s face darkened, and he would not look at her. He picked up the tuning fork, slid his index finger along the gap between the tines. “No,” he said quietly, “I haven’t. I never will.”
“Then I’m sorry for you.”
“Amestris, you have to understand the position you are in.”
“What? Are you canceling the project?”
“No. But I have my limit. I don’t know where it is yet; still, I am not going to throw good money after bad.”
“I wouldn’t expect anything else from a purely business relationship,” she said.
He pushed himself off the piano bench, slowly, turned his big shoulders toward the open soundboard, and picked up the wrench. He ran his hand through his disheveled hair. “You had better go and talk to your husband, then.” His voice was husky.
“Yes. I had better.”
Amestris stepped down from the stage and out of the concert hall.
She rode the tram out to the forest project. Sam didn’t want to throw good money after bad, but for decades he had thrown good love after bad. She felt the pressure of his desire and, as many times before, it made her angry. He had said repeatedly he had no claim over her, but here he was still trying to manage her life.
She shouldn’t have approached him about this project. She had known all along that, with Sam, it could never be just business, yet she had not hesitated. And as the tram
moved through the dark tunnel between districts, the reality that she had given herself to a stranger, a man little more than half her age, grew within her. Whatever Sam’s faults, he had never lied to her. And over the years he had been right about many things that she had ignored.
It was near the end of the work day when she reached the cavern, and the sunlight had been turned down. In the project office she found Gulal and two workers looking over a manifest. Amestris exchanged the briefest of hellos and went out to find Erno. She passed a crew among the already established plantings, and went on for a hundred meters until she saw him, on his knees beside a cart, patting the earth around the base of a seedling. He didn’t notice her until she was standing over him. Startled, he looked up
“Hello,” he said.
There was no point in maintaining the pretense that she had been at lunch with Sima. “I’ve just come from seeing Saman,” Amestris said.
Erno turned away, avoiding her eyes, and pulled another seedling from the cart. “How is he?”
“He’s very happy about his forest.” She surveyed the dozen trees he’d planted. “Should he be?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, is there going to be a forest? Your trees are dying.”
“Those were the first varieties. These new ones—”
“I’ve been reading your mail. I saw your correspondence.”
Erno set down the seedling. “Excuse me,” he said. “I need that shovel.”
When he stooped to pick it up, she put her foot on the blade. The image Amestris had first had of him, on the street after being thrown out of the tavern in Dorud, flashed in her mind.
He finally looked at her. “Are you sleeping with Saman?”
She couldn’t help herself: She laughed. “You care about sexual fidelity? A Cousin?”
“I’m not ‘a Cousin.’ I’m your husband.” He held his grimy hand up under her nose. “See? I’m right here, right now.”
Yes, he was her husband, and looking into his guilty eyes the fact of it washed over her: She’d tied herself to a miserable fake. “Get your hand out of my face.”
For a second she thought he might strike her; instead he yanked up the last tree he’d planted, whirled around, swinging it at the end of his arm, and let it go. It flew away into the twilight, hit twenty meters down the gravel path, bounced, tumbled, and came to rest. Erno’s face was stone. Amestris had never seen him so angry. Another frustrated man, one of the endless series she had slept with over the last three decades.
“You lied to me,” Amestris said. “You lied to Saman. You can’t do it.”
He turned his back on her. “I need help, like any human being. Did you think I was some miracle worker?”
Oh, she was a fool, a fool at twenty, a fool at forty-five. “No,” she said. “I don’t think you are a miracle worker.”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing. It means nothing.” She was being cruel. Out of his depth, Saman had said. It would do no good to tear everything apart. “It means we have to figure out what to do.”
He picked up the shovel and slid it sullenly onto the bed of the truck. “I need a drink,” he said. “You need one, too. Get in.”
She got into the cab and he drove back to the shed. The place had cleared out. She watched him clean his hands, strip off his coveralls, and put on his street clothes. The long muscles in his arms, his muscular legs. His narrow shoulders, big hands that she had enjoyed on her body. He’d told her he loved her hundreds of times, but how much could she trust him to know himself? To him she was a way up, a way out.
Forty-five. If she was lucky she would live another eighty years. She had told herself that she wanted as many of those years as possible to be with him. She still wanted that. But she could not imagine where either of them would be in eighty years.
Rather than go back to the apartment, they rode the tram into the city and went to a tea shop. “Dream of a Blue Age,” the sign above the door said, the words floating over a three-dimensional image of a twilit sea, mountains in the distance. Some years back it had been one of her haunts.
Oh, Lord of Divine Loveliness, we have been
Burned to a crisp. Come now, ask of us
What is it a destitute and beggarly person needs?
The quiet young brewmaster was new. He offered them a menu. There was a long list of religious teas, but the Peace that Passeth All Understanding was not a spur to action. There were erotic teas, teas to wash away depression. Teas to spark hilarity. Melancholy teas. Ironic teas.
She selected Sharp Dealing. Erno had The Flame that Consumes. They sat on cushions at a low table.
“I’m sorry I lied,” Erno said. “My desire for you isn’t a lie.”
“Desire is easy. I need a partner,” she said. “I won’t be used.”
Erno lowered his voice. “Nor will I. You say you like me because I’m not like the men here. You want some cross between what you think a Cousins man is and your father. I can’t be that—I’ll only disappoint you.”
He reached out to touch her hand. “Haven’t I done what I said? In ten months I haven’t lied to you as much as your father lies in a week.”
Amestris wanted to believe him, but the fact that he had fooled her stung. Still, there was no point in recriminations. There was definitely no point in telling him that Saman knew the project was in trouble.
“This information blackout from the Society has made it hard,” Erno said. “If I could only get some gene samples. I know for a fact that Lemmy’s already got a species of ash adapted for accelerated maturity, and was working on birches.”
“He won’t send you samples?”
“He won’t even talk with me. If I could get back there, I could persuade him. Or if I failed at that, I’d steal them. I know the lab, I know the procedures. But I can’t go back. They wouldn’t want to see me, any more than they’d want to see Marysson.”
She took another sip of tea, her eyes narrowed. She couldn’t help herself: She still loved him, her beautiful young liar. Her thoughts felt as sharp as broken glass. Erno had many qualities to recommend him, and she could use them.
“It doesn’t matter what they want,” she said. “It only matters what is politically expedient.”
• • • • •
Tehran Beach was at the end of the Blue Line. Erno followed the crowd from the train to the beach’s vestibule, where he waited among dozens of people in the security queue. He examined the elaborate turquoise and gold tile work of the walls. The floor here was springy moss. Ahead, past the sign warning of the dangers of agoraphobia, the vestibule ended in an arch, through which he could see bright sun, black sand, blue sky. The sound of surf and the squeals and shouts of bathers floated in on a salt breeze.
In front of him three adolescent boys with curly dark hair and smooth faces fidgeted and joked. Ahead of them stood a family—the father chiding the children for their impatience, the mother carrying a beach bag stuffed with towels. A businessman in a suit, likely on his way to one of the hotels, muttered to his Aide. An old man and woman, a group of four girls and their chaperone. A young couple, shyly touching hands. It was a cross section of patriarchal gender roles.
Considering how fully Erno had assimilated, he could hardly criticize. He watched the couple subtly twining their fingers, smiling, silent, in love. He told himself that if it came to a break, he could survive the loss of Amestris; he had lived alone for a decade. They could still be business partners. But he knew that to be bravado. He had felt the grace of her affection, and if he couldn’t win that back, he didn’t see how they could stay together.
The line advanced. Security checked his ID and passed him through into the cavern. He ignored those heading down the steps onto the sand and instead surveyed the esplanade.
Tehran Beach was one of the wonders of the moon. The artificial cavern stretched over five hundred meters long, two hundred wide. Above soared a state-of-the-art false sky, hard blue with dazzling
sun and wisps of cloud. Built into one long side of the cavern were a luxury hotel, shops, cafés, and restaurants with tables under green umbrellas. Groups of palms bordered closely cropped lawns; banks of flowers drew butterflies of yellow, orange, and black. Below the stone railing of the esplanade a broad swath of black sand, dotted with umbrellas and beach chairs, stretched down to the edge of the water.
The faux ocean, forty-five thousand cubic meters of water kept at a constant twenty-eight degrees Celsius, crashed in ponderous, slow surf upon this strand, huge dollops of spray flying through the air. The waves ran in, foam dark with suspended sand, a third of the way up toward the wall of the esplanade before retreating. On the cavern wall opposite the beach the real water merged with a projected image of the sea reaching out to a mathematically flat horizon. The impression was of a vast, breathtaking ocean, the closest thing on the moon to the Earth, the surface of a world so broad and open it could hardly be understood. It was a dream of the Caspian on a beautiful day. All this constructed, free to citizens of Persepolis, through the largess of Cyrus Eskander.
Below the false sun the surface of the false sea glittered and danced. Erno stopped to watch the blue waves run in, rising in rollers until they crested and broke into foam. The break would spread in a white line to either side as each wave tumbled onto the retreating waters of the previous wave. Men and women surfed on their float boards, and children laughed in the shallows.
A matron in a modest bathing suit coaxed a chubby infant into the water; the child lifted its foot high, then lost its balance and sat down in the wet sand. More daring young women wore suits that showed a considerable amount of skin. A team of students were constructing a sand sculpture of a griffin.
After a few minutes of leaning on the stone railing, Erno turned to the public baths. Beyond the men’s entrance he was greeted by a courteous young man and directed to the disrobing room, divided into stalls so the patrons of different rank could have some degree of privacy. All men might be brothers, but until they were unclothed the forms of class still held sway. He wrapped himself in a plush white towel, slipped on the sterilized slippers given him, and moved into the baths to meet Cyrus Eskander.