by John Kessel
Eva was currently on Mars at the annual meeting of the Interplanetary Union for Pure and Applied Physics and would not be involved in the counter-memorial. She left that sort of thing to Roz and Mira now.
Six years ago, Carey and Val had asked to come back into the Green family. There was a lot of debate about it. In the end the family deferred to Roz, and Roz talked with Mira. Mira’s heart pulled her in six directions. Eventually, not without trepidation, Roz told Val and Carey they could come back.
So here they were, each forty-five years old. Despite his initial fame, Val had not devoted the energy required to become a serious artist. For his part, Carey had vowed not to live the life that his older version had lived. He abandoned athletic competition. After he read Lune et l’autre he decided never to write anything. Carey’s charm was intact, as was Val’s. Sex was easy; friends were easy. They dabbled in politics, they dabbled in business, and they accomplished nothing. Until coming home they had lived on the largess of Cyrus. Now Carey worked in the aquaculture plant of Nguyen Agriculture.
Mira stopped outside of Carey’s door. She knocked.
“Go away, Roz,” Carey said.
Mira studied the Cassatt painting in the hall. The surface was crazed with fine cracks. Freeze-drying an oil painting was not a good idea. “It’s me,” she said. “We need to talk.”
“Go away, Mira.”
She entered the room.
He was over by the wardrobe, shirt off. He didn’t look like the Ruăn tā master that she remembered. His eyes met hers. “I didn’t say you could come in.”
“Yet here I am. Tragic miscarriage of justice.”
“What do you want?”
Mira’s reputation for abrasiveness had faded with the years, but that didn’t mean she didn’t still feel it. “I want you to fucking grow up,” she said. “Life is hard enough—why do you have to make everything harder?”
He pulled a shirt on over his head, tugged it down over his belly. “I am grown-up,” he said. “I’ve held up my end of every deal I have ever made with this family—even the ones I didn’t choose.”
“On the other end of those deals are people who didn’t have a choice either. Roz doesn’t deserve the contempt you radiate toward her.”
Carey sat on the sill of his open window. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have said what I said. I’ll apologize. But please don’t tell me about something he did, or what he told you, or whatever about him.”
“I don’t do that. I never do that.”
“You’re the only one. If I never hear another word about him I’ll be a happy man.”
“You think so? I don’t think that has much to do with why you aren’t happy.”
“And you’re such a paragon of good spirits.”
“I’ve been better at it than you. What do you think we can do about that?”
He didn’t speak for a moment. He leaned against the frame and looked at her. “I can’t tell you, Mira. I don’t know. I hate being like this. I only know how hard it is to go through life being compared to another version of yourself—and found lacking.”
“I never tried to make you feel that way.”
“You never intended to. But sometimes when you look at me it’s not me that you see.”
Mira’s first instinct was to argue, but she held it back. “Maybe I see you better than you see yourself,” she said. “There’s nothing lacking in you—no more than anyone else.”
Carey smiled ruefully. “Nice equivocation.”
His self-pity was hard to take. Mira sat on the bed, an arm’s length away from him. Three years earlier they’d spent quite a few nights together in this bed. Faces inches apart, talking in the darkness. She’d watch the glint of his eyes, rest her hand on his chest. He had let her in on his frustrations, and she’d told him how lonely she felt sometimes.
Mira had told him a great deal—but not everything. She never talked about the Carey she had known. She’d prided herself on her maturity, how she’d done it for his sake. In retrospect, she couldn’t say which of them she was protecting by not speaking. Their relationship was—ought to have been—settled long before, when she realized that she didn’t love him.
She put her hand on his knee. “You’ve had to deal with things that nobody else has experienced, but you’ve been privileged in ways that most people could only imagine.”
“Please don’t talk down to me. I really don’t have—”
It was more than she could take, his self-involvement. She drew her hand away; she stood up. “Let me tell you what I don’t have, Carey. I don’t have the patience anymore to put up with this. Don’t worry, I won’t measure you against him, because in every way that’s meaningful, you lose. Unless you start doing something to prove to me that judgment is wrong, I don’t want anything more to do with you.”
In the stunned silence that followed, Mira could hear her own breathing.
Carey’s grip on the windowsill tightened. Mira had said the thing that he most feared, but she didn’t regret it. She prepared herself for his comeback.
Instead, he said, “All right.”
He sat very still. “I make the same mistakes all the time,” he said. “Thirty years of the mistakes of a teenager—at forty-five.”
“That’s just the way some people react to a life expectancy of one hundred and twenty.”
Carey snorted. “You are funny.”
Mira watched him. “It still doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you.”
Carey laughed. They stared at each other. She couldn’t help herself: She laughed too.
“You want something to drink?” Carey asked.
“Yes.”
He opened the drawer beside his bed and took out two drink bulbs. He gave her one. “Apple juice. Nothing but apple juice.”
She reached out her hand, and he put it into her palm. His thumb brushed her finger.
“Thank you,” she said.
He ran his hand through his hair, a gesture she’d seen Carey make—her Carey—a hundred times. It sent a chill down her spine.
“It’s not easy being us, is it?” he said.
“No, it’s not.” She pulled the tab on the drink bulb. “Sometimes it sucks.”
• • • • •
Erno stood on the pavement outside the Green home, junipers rising on either side of him. Night had fallen while he had wrangled with them. He drew in a deep breath. The air was so much more humid than it had been when he was a boy—another gift from Cyrus, the generous king: abundant water, a new climate.
As soon as Val and Carey had come into the room, Erno had known he was dead. He had tried to keep his temper. They were all so sure of themselves. Not one of them had ever sat across the table from Cyrus Eskander.
Night birds chirped in the trees. In his agitation and bitterness, there was no point in his going home. It would be nice if Amestris tried to call him; she had to know he would be back from Mayer by now. He imagined her in Persepolis in one of the fine restaurants, or at the theater or concert hall with Sam.
He felt his pulse thrum in his body. What he’d just gone through had burned away whatever remained of the drugs he’d taken earlier. He vibrated with anger, face flushed from the dressing down, and his effort not to shout back at them, and the burden of the truth they’d laid on him. He carried baggage? Yes, he did.
Nobody expected him anywhere tonight. Why not go all the way? Don’t hold the memories at bay; no, he should immerse himself in them, let them wash over him until he drowned or was forced to swim. He could use another hit. He needed one of the melancholy teas, that was it. That would set him up just fine. He made his way to a teashop and had a cup of Melanchol, then had another. It was mid-evening by the time he stepped back into the concourse. He was hungry. He set out for the club district.
More than forty years ago he had walked down this same concourse; he imagined his footsteps printed on the pavement, down the nave of the lava tube, seventeen-year-old Erno Rust Pamelasson sneaki
ng off to indulge his latest enthusiasm, the masculinist standup comedian Tyler Durden. That was the night he had discovered Stories for Men.
For all the Society’s reputation for sexual license, the free enterprise zone of his youth could not compare with Dorud or Mayer’s New Pigale or the Blue Lantern quarter in Sabine. You needed vast gulfs between the rich and the poor to generate a really imaginative red light district.
Since then, however, this lack at Fowler had been remedied. Hustlers in the concourses offered to sell passersby every pleasure they might want to buy. The odor of trash rolled from alleys, spices from the restaurants. One thing that had improved immensely in Fowler over the last thirty years, Erno had to admit, was the food. Persepolis had brought with it its cuisine. Among the little restaurants and clubs here you could sample Iranian, Turkish, Indian, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Ethiopian, and classic American food. There was more music now, too. You could buy sex, something that would have been unthinkable to the Founders. There was crime. Black market tech. Illegal biomods. There were even murders.
The Evasson occupied the space that had been the Oxygen Warehouse. He could remember vividly the things he had seen and felt when he was seventeen. The synthetic silk suit he’d been so absurdly proud of—the jacket he wore now was worth ten times as much. His mother coming into his room to plead with him not to take risks. He’d thought he had been putting only himself at risk; he didn’t know she would pay the price for his idiocy.
That boy was so far away now. He wished he could go back and talk to him. Here’s a bitter joke, he would tell young Erno: You are going to spend thirty years trying and failing to preserve those things that, at age seventeen, you would throw away in a minute.
But what business was it of his to criticize that boy for being angry when at this very minute the anger burned as hot inside him as it had forty years ago?
The bar was modeled after the old clubs back on Earth, serving actual alcohol. Erno ordered a bourbon on the rocks. He tossed off the sweet, aromatic liquor, burning his throat on the way down, and had another. Alcohol was a depressant. Layering it over the Melanchol already in his system was not wise, but he was tired beyond endurance with feigning wisdom. He needed escape.
No escape possible. On the walls of the restaurant were myriad images of Carey Evasson. Carey at twenty-five in the Olympic Ruăn tā finals. Carey at sixteen after writing Lune et l’autre. Carey at thirty-six at a Reform Party rally.
“You want to see a menu?” the bartender said. He had dark brown eyes and a trim beard. Erno could get drunk and the man wouldn’t care, as long as he caused no trouble.
Erno looked at the menu. He ordered eggplant sautéed in tomato sauce, basil, and cheese.
If he couldn’t rightfully challenge Young Erno’s anger, what could he tell him? What story had he lived?
Here’s a story: When he was young he reveled in his righteousness, how he was honest, not ridden by compromise like his elders who had allowed the world to become so twisted that good things went unappreciated and bad dominated everywhere. It was a sick society. Young women and men like Erno, they all saw it, even if their parents did not, and when they got old enough, with one glorious gesture they would sweep all of the rot away. If people’s minds could be enlightened, the Society could be made well again in a day.
He’d followed that fantasy right into exile.
Then he’d seen the more powerful injustices of the outside world. He’d come back. Yes, the change they were fighting for was necessary, but they didn’t realize how much worse the world was out there, how the things they fought for, if their cost was the destruction of the Society, were not worth that price.
He’d seen farther and better than those who had never been outside. He knew the risks, he knew Cyrus and at least had a fighting chance to deal with him. Standing up to the patriarchies and the OLS would not save the Society, only destroy it faster.
He had taken the offer from Cyrus with full knowledge that Cyrus would try to steer him, thwart him, make Erno his agent. Erno had his eyes open. The choice he had was to risk getting his hands dirty in order to preserve what was good and change what needed changing. Sitting it out was not an option.
The Shahnameh was preoccupied with stories where a champion struggles with his own king. The king makes an unethical decision; the warrior knows it is wrong, but how does he deal with it? Reluctantly acquiesce? Refuse to have anything to do with the matter? Try to dissuade the king? Undermine his efforts secretly? Openly oppose him?
Erno had done all of these things with Cyrus. He had gotten his hands dirty, and his mind and his soul, too. So here he was, drinking booze in the same room where that angry boy had toted up his bill of injustices, an angry middle-aged man who had nothing he could rightfully complain about.
The young were in the streets seeking a revolution. They didn’t care what Erno or anyone else had accomplished. The Society had been betrayed, and they wanted to go back to its roots. They wanted to be Cousins the way the Founders had been Cousins. Erno saw himself in them, yet they wanted nothing to do with him.
By the time a woman came over and sat next to him, he was thoroughly drunk. “Hello,” she said brightly.
He looked at her blue eyes, her brown skin. Orange hair. Even in the low light he could tell that her clothing was shabby.
“Hello,” he said.
“Will you buy me a drink?”
“I can do that.” Erno signaled the bartender.
“Some tea,” she told the bartender. “Some Affection, a little Contact.”
The bartender went off to his synthesizer.
“Affection and contact,” Erno said. “We all want that.”
“It’s available,” she said.
“If you’re looking for that from me, I’m afraid you will be disappointed. Fresh out of affection; not worth the contact.”
“Don’t close off any avenues yet,” the woman said. She put her hand on his, and despite his swimming head he saw immediately that she was on the edge of despair, and that beneath her coolly modulated voice was a repressed scream.
He snatched his hand away. Her eyes showed a moment’s panic.
“You need money?” he asked. Her lips twitched. “You’re headed for the freezers?”
“It’s that obvious,” she said. Her voice was flat.
“What’s your name?”
“Carrie. Carrie Britasdaughter.”
“No family?”
“No one I can count on.”
The man came back with her tea. She looked at him, looked at it. She took a sip.
Erno took out his wallet. “Your wristward,” he said to her. She reached out her slender arm. He touched his wallet to it and downloaded three thousand ducats.
When she saw the figure on the screen, she looked at him in astonishment.
“You have nothing to thank me for,” he said.
She slid from the seat and left the club.
Five minutes later, as he drank another bourbon, a young man took her seat. “Something to brighten me up,” he told the bartender. “A Joy Blast, if you’ve got. Make it so it will knock every fucking trouble out of my brain.”
“Coming up,” the bartender said.
The man sat there, forearms on the bar, staring at his hands. He noticed Erno watching him. “What are you looking at?” he said.
“Nothing,” Erno said. “I’m not looking at anything.”
• • • • •
He went home. His head throbbed from the alcohol and the place where he’d hit his head on a chair when the guy at the bar shoved him. The mirror showed a bruise near the old scar on his temple. He held a cold cloth to it, took three painkillers, and went to his study. He considered calling the organizers of the memorial ceremony and cancelling his appearance, but he didn’t have the spirit for that right now. Time enough to decide later. Maybe he would give the same speech regardless, and let the Renewalists figure out a way to disavow him.
He called up the sent
ence that was all he had so far. “. . . change becomes treason.” He was fifty-eight. If the actuarial tables were right, he had another sixty years. He was far from finished, and yet that was not how he felt.
He brewed up another glass of Melanchol and sat in the living room on the bench in front of the piano. The walnut case of the Kazedi grand was evidence of at least one success: He had presented Sam with the forest he needed to realize his dream of the complete lunar piano. Erno opened the fall board and touched the keys. He had not heard Amestris play in months.
After ten minutes he went back to his study and called her. She answered immediately, and her image came up on the wall. She was dressed for the evening. Elegant, desirable.
The minute she saw him her brow knit. “What happened to your forehead?”
He touched his fingers to the bruise. “It’s nothing.”
She looked skeptical.
“I was just thinking of you,” he said.
“I’m glad you called.”
He gestured at her clothes. “You’ve been out?”
“Sam and I were at a concert. Nadezhda Vasnetsov is here. She did a great performance of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2. You would have loved it.”
“I’m sure I would have,” Erno said.
“How was the trip to Mayer?”
“I didn’t find anything I didn’t already know.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. Her dark eyes were very different from those of the woman in the club. “I know how much it troubles you. But maybe you should let it go.”
From outside the opened window came the call of a whippoorwill in the trees. “I’m working on my speech.”
“That’s good.” Amestris looked guilty. “Erno, I—I won’t be back for the memorial. In fact”—she sighed—“I’m not coming back for a while.”