by John Kessel
“That’s an equivocation,” Erno said.
“Oh, my—alert the constabulary.” Mira kept her eyes on the photograph. “If Earth physicists couldn’t build one, maybe Eva couldn’t either.”
“Cyrus’s sources say it was constructed, and used.”
“How would they know?”
Erno didn’t know. “This would be a large project. There’d be an assembler along with the scanner to instantiate objects after they were scanned. It would require a huge amount of energy. Is there anywhere in this complex that could house such a lab?”
“And keep it secret? No.”
“What facilities do you have?”
Mira spun the ring again. “You never answered my other question: Why should I help you?”
Erno put his finger on the ring, pinning it to the desktop. He slid it toward her. “Cyrus suggested I take advantage of the fact that you testified against me at my trial. He says if I play that right, I can get you to help me.”
“You must not have been paying attention this morning. Selling people out is my specialty.”
“You didn’t sell me out. I deserved what I got.”
“So now I give you cred for honesty, and you reverse psych me into betraying Eva.”
“Read it any way you like. You don’t need to try so hard to say no. Just say no, and I’ll go away.”
“You assume a more intimate connection between Eva and me than exists. Anyway, Cyrus should just wait. I don’t think the embargo will hide any secrets much longer.”
“Then it doesn’t matter if you help me.”
A fleeting, sardonic smile passed over Mira’s face. “No, it doesn’t.” She slipped the ring into her pocket and stood. “Come with me.”
Mira led him through a maze of hallways, past the large double doors of the Materials warehouse, and down an elevator. The elevator opened onto another hall, at the end of which was another double door. The sign beside it read “Fusion Lab.” Mira typed in a security code and the door locks snapped open.
“This is our biggest dormant facility—a stacked-pinch test reactor. The last time they used it was to evaluate a method to increase the efficiency of the 3He-3He reaction.”
Mira turned on half the interior lights. The cavernous room was ten meters high, maybe forty across, with a windowed control room on the opposite side. The air tasted stale.
The reactor was set into a circular pit, three meters deep and twenty in diameter, in the center of the room. Magnetic field generators surrounded a vacuum torus hedged in by proton detectors and shielding. Overhead, between heavy electricity cables, grapples dangled from a moving crane. At one end of the room stood a flatbed cargo truck with a closed cab. Along the wall ran a series of metal cabinets.
They circled the reactor pit.
“Do they use this to power the lab?”
“The lab is on the colony grid. It doesn’t need supplementary power.”
Erno was no physicist; he would have to take Mira’s word that there was nothing here of any special interest, but it seemed like a lot of lab space to leave unused. They entered the control room and looked around. Nothing.
Erno circled the reactor. Lights glinted off the milled steel fittings. “This device I’m talking about would need a large energy source like this,” he said. “Are any facilities connected to it?”
“Nothing I’ve ever seen. Wait. I have a copy of a colony architectural survey from twenty years ago in my Aide. I’ll call it up on augmentation.” She held her head still for a moment, then turned to survey the room. “Everything looks the same—” She began walking around the reactor to get a view of the far side. She stopped and pointed to a bank of cabinets. “There,” she said.
“What?”
Mira walked over. “In the blueprint, instead of these cabinets, there’s a door.”
The cabinet she indicated was massive: four meters tall, six wide, two deep. Erno opened the doors to reveal shelves of equipment. He tugged out a box, set it on the floor, and leaned in to lay his hand against the back wall. He closed his eyes. His hand felt uncomfortable, nervous, as if he were suffering from restless muscle syndrome. After a second he left the cabinet, moved down a few steps, and placed his hand on the wall beside it.
He had the feeling there was a large, deep space lying beyond the wall.
“What are you doing?” Mira asked.
“My hand is artificial. I can tell—”
From the corridor came the sound of voices. Mira took three quick steps, turned off the lights, and closed the lab doors.
She started for the control room but Erno grabbed her sleeve and pulled her toward the truck. They climbed in and crouched on the floor of the cramped cab.
“Who is it?” he asked
“I don’t know.”
They were almost on top of each other. In the faint light of the lab’s emergency lights he saw Mira frown. Knees drawn up, she took up very little space. Square shoulders, small hands. He thought he could make out a mole on her throat. He had never been this close to her.
They kept an uncomfortable silence, listening. All Erno could hear was their own breathing.
“The constables wouldn’t normally come down here, would they?” Erno said. “Is there extra security?”
“No,” Mira said. “Nobody.”
“Somebody must have seen me.”
“They could just as easily be looking for me.”
There was no way they could hear anyone in the corridor from in here. Minutes passed.
Mira said, “Is it any better out there? The other colonies? I mean, if I do get exiled, what are my options?”
“It’s not easy if you’re not a citizen. I thought, since I was a man, I’d have an advantage. And in a lot of places that’s true, but until I got to Persepolis I was struggling. I was struggling even after I got there.”
She didn’t say anything. Erno was very aware of her beside him.
“But you won’t be exiled,” he said. “I don’t believe you had anything to do with BYD.”
“You can’t possibly know that.”
He shifted, trying to find an easier position, his leg up against hers. “I know what a lie is.” He remembered her at his trial, responding in monosyllables to the questions of the tribunal. He hadn’t really known her; she’d been Alicia’s friend, and even then, despite his own obsessions, he could tell she was trouble.
Maybe trouble was spun in your DNA, a product of brain chemistry, neurology, parental programming—whatever. In the end you struggled against yourself as much as against circumstances. It weighed on Erno. Your desires and those of others inevitably clashed. You might find moments of connection, places where you ran in parallel, but in the end was any peace, justice, or equanimity to be found in the human world?
Another memory came to him, of Mira running across a soccer field with her brother. “If they make you leave, you’re going to have a hard time without Marco.”
“Please shut up,” she said. “Marco—”
Outside the cab the lab doors opened and the lights came on. Erno put his hand over Mira’s mouth. Her body went rigid.
The precise temperature of Mira’s lips came to him: thirty-seven degrees.
A woman’s voice called, “Check the control room.”
Mira took Erno’s wrist and moved his hand from her face. They huddled against each other. Erno listened to Mira’s shallow breathing, smelled the slightly sour but not unpleasant scent of her skin. Her dark eyes, very close, looked tired.
A metallic clang sounded just outside the truck.
The woman’s voice again: “Why don’t you just announce that we’re here?”
“Shut up, I just dropped it.” A man.
“Was she sure she saw Pamelasson?”
“That’s what she said.”
“What would he be doing here? This is a waste of time.”
“Check the warehouse, she said. Well, we’ve checked the warehouse. Now we’ve checked the lab. Nobody ever co
mes down here. Let’s go.”
“All right.”
Steps, retreating.
Erno realized how close he was to Mira; his hand lay on her shoulder. He slowly let it fall. Her body was warm, and she didn’t draw back. Her face was very close.
• • • • •
Carey’s interview on Here’s the Point! was shot three days after the hearing, in a little public garden with a backdrop of woods running down to the Fowler farmland, the gleaming Diana Tower in the distance. Carey sat on a bench and Sirius, wearing a blinding white suit with a midnight blue tie, reclined in his own special chair. The cameras and the lights were managed remotely. Some Cousins who’d gathered at the garden cheered when Carey showed up, but they were kept back so viewers would get only the picturesque backdrop and the conversation.
The accusations against Erno had taken some of the attention off Carey. He ignored calls from the Reform Party. He avoided the gym and concentrated on work. He’d applied to be moved to a citizen’s co-op, explaining that since Val was gone he had no justification for an apartment. “Just me, now,” he told them.
Sirius’s assistant, the capuchin monkey Gracie, fussed with the dog’s jacket, making sure his collar lay flat. She took two capsules from her belt pouch and held them up for Sirius to swallow. Carey had never had much contact with uplifted animals, and the uncanny difference between them and, say, his mother’s cat, Hector, was unnerving. For the first time in his life he wondered how the minds of the uplifted differed from those of humans. But what did he know about the mind of anyone?
Gracie whispered something into Sirius’s ear, the dog nodded, and she scampered away.
Ten seconds, Carey’s Aide told him.
“Here we go,” said Sirius.
Sirius began with the obligatory review of Carey’s athletic career, shifting into a brief recap for viewers of the issues involved in and the result of the custody hearing. He commiserated with Carey.
“I’ve read your memoir, Lune et l’autre,” Sirius said. “As someone who has been ‘othered’ all of my life, your account of a boyhood spent in a place where, though you might be petted—and I can relate to that—you are seldom taken seriously, aroused my deepest sympathies. Yet you wrote, at age sixteen, with a joie de vivre that bespeaks a spirit open to the almost infinite possibilities of life in our expanding solar community. Have your experiences in the twenty years since dampened that enthusiasm, Carey?”
The sarcastic dog was noted for the number of techniques he used to get under the skin of his guests. “I’m twenty years older now,” Carey said. “Some of the things that were funny to me then carry more weight than I thought at the time. Injustices still exist.”
“How could injustice not exist in a place that considers biology to be destiny?”
“Isn’t biology destiny? Your biology, I would imagine, has determined much of your life.”
“My biology has been altered extensively by human intervention. Shouldn’t Cousins culture be at least as flexible?”
“When I wrote Lune et l’autre we boys and girls used to stay up late and talk about such things. And I do think that the Society could not exist if we were simple biological determinists. The Society was supposed to offer as much opportunity to escape biology as any in history. Men, for instance, were supposed to be freed from the necessity to be soldiers and workers. Still, assumptions are made about human nature, male and female, about gender and sex, that shape what we’re allowed to be.”
Sirius perked up, his tongue visible between his lips.
“Nonetheless, aren’t Cousins men allowed the utmost privilege? And you are a prince among them. Many of our viewers remember you from your silver medal in the last Lunar Olympics.”
“That career is over,” Carey said. “I don’t wish to be defined solely by sport.”
“The leaders of the Society point out that you could pursue any one of a number of careers, and be supported in your choice as you have been in your athletic career. But I understand that you have renounced this male privilege and are working in colony agriculture. You are a voter now. Do you contemplate a political career?”
“No. Assuming I don’t get exiled, I contemplate a career raising fish.”
“That seems like a waste of your talents.”
“I’m trying to figure out what my talents are.”
“You’re one of the most celebrated of Cousins. How can you give that up?”
“I don’t want to be a celebrity. I’ve been as much a celebrity as the Society has.”
“What do you do at the aquaculture facility?”
“I manage the growth of ragworm to feed salmon in tanks, I see to the transformation of fish waste into fertilizer, and several other jobs essential to the welfare of the Society.”
“That seems a bit of a comedown.”
“It depends on your point of view.”
Sirius grinned into the camera. “Yes. And now you’ll get the view from the bottom instead of the top. But here’s the point . . . you might have gained the vote without having to muck about in fish waste, if, in your recent election, the proposition to extend the franchise to all males had gained a majority. It failed. Among our OLS viewers, and I think among Cousins as well, many believe that not all votes were counted.”
“I think it was a fair election,” Carey said.
“Your ally and lover, Dr. Camillesdaughter of the Society’s university, is planning a rally. She will petition the Board of Matrons to extend the vote by executive order.”
“I wish that effort well.”
“But you won’t take part in it?”
“I don’t plan to at present.”
“I don’t wonder, when it seems that your political activities were one of the reasons you were denied custody of your son Valentin. Let’s talk about the hearing, then. What about Val? How do you feel about having him taken from you?”
“His mother and I are on good terms. I will still see him. He’s still my son, and always will be.”
“You seem remarkably sanguine about the result. There’s no need for you to hide your emotions, Carey. All of us in the lunar community sympathize. And we have reports that in the aftermath of the judgment, your immediate reaction was rage—some would say a quite justifiable rage. Isn’t it true that on the evening of the hearing, in a meeting of the Reform Party, you got into a shouting fight with Dr. Camillesdaughter?”
“There was no shouting.”
“So we were misinformed? You and Dr. Camillesdaughter are still allies?”
“I’ll say this: Dr. Camillesdaughter is a serious advocate for positions I agree with, but sometimes she represents an exhausting damage control problem. I lost my temper with her. Anger won’t get us anywhere. Cousins culture has to accept the idea of a man as a custodial father, and that won’t happen overnight. It’ll take a redefinition of Cousins manhood. That’s what I’m interested in now.”
“That sounds like Tyler Durden’s project—to redefine manhood for the Society of Cousins.”
“Marysson’s program was just another version of the toxic masculinity the Society was founded to escape. Plus proving his dick was bigger than anybody else’s.”
“I hope our viewers will pardon your blunt speech.” Sirius grinned, showing his very pink tongue. “For a man who has legitimate grievances, Carey, you are surprisingly at home with the status quo.”
“Far from it. But I won’t be used anymore, not by the Matrons, and not by Professor Camillesdaughter. And I won’t be used by the patriarchal power brokers who sent you here.”
Sirius grinned wider still. “I’ll pass that along to our producers,” he said. “To our viewers, too, seventy percent of whom are women—those supporters of the tyrannical patriarchy.” He winked at the camera. Carey had never seen a dog wink. Something about it seemed very wrong.
“Let’s talk about how you are going to manage this retreat from the public eye, Carey. You are a beloved person in the Society. Your mother is a former
Chair of the Board of Matrons. You have had many lovers. I have visited the homes of ordinary Cousins, and I cannot tell you how many times I saw a young woman with an image of you as a wallpaper. You face is known, thanks to this custody dispute, by most of the people on the moon. People like you.”
“Yes, Sirius, people like me. I’m the completely unthreatening version of the alpha male. I’m available for any purpose. I have a dazzling smile.”
“And, it seems, a talent for mockery. But completely unthreatening? I think that reputation is at this point decidedly in the past tense, Carey—though it must have stood you in good stead when you were manufacturing these subversive videos with your lover Mira Hannasdaughter. And helping her hack the dome video system to produce the BYD hoax that resulted in injuries to dozens of people. By most definitions this was a act of terrorism.”
“You’ll have to speak with Mira about that. I was not involved in BYD.”
“So, you didn’t help her in her career as Looker?”
This was the one question that Carey had most expected to be asked. “Yes, I helped her.”
“And she repaid you by betraying you at the hearing. How do you feel about that?”
He’d spent much of the last three days trying to figure out the answer to that one. Why had she chosen to betray him by revealing she was Looker, when she could simply have, for instance, told about how he didn’t know where Val was on the afternoon of BYD? He often thought of her offer to marry him. He felt ashamed of how easily he’d rejected her; at the same time the offer itself still made him mad.
“I was dismayed,” Carey said. “But Mira is not the problem.”
“So her destroying your chance to be with your son, setting back the cause of reform for all men, is just an unfortunate happenstance. Your own role in setting back reform is something other Cousins should simply accept, now that you’ve abandoned the struggle and prefer to spend your time with ragworms.”
Carey drew a deep breath. “You’re good at what you do, Sirius.”
“Thank you. I am highly evolved. Though I think I have yet to attain the ability to ignore contradiction that comes so easily to the human mind.”