by Chris Adrian
I should be on my honeymoon, Jemma thought as she listened to the days of debate on how they should organize themselves. There must be a hundred different patches of tropical water she and Rob could have visited. Or they might have floated behind the hospital in a romantic dinghy, a houseboat big enough just for the two of them with an automated crank to pay out the line, farther and farther until the hospital was only a smudge against the horizon, and conspirators with sharp knives might depose her with a single cut. Where is the resolution, she wondered, that would have built me a honey-boat? She was in meetings the next day. “It wasn’t really a wedding,” Vivian noted, “so you shouldn’t really get a honeymoon, right?”
People had cleaved together from the first into pairs and even the occasional much-whispered about ménage, or the more innocent but no less frequently discussed situations of two-timers or men and women who dated the same three people, one then two then three then back again to one, in serial but evanescent monogamy. True multiple-partnerships were extremely rare, but Jordan Sasscock had acquired eight wives, though none of them called themselves that. There’d been no ceremony, private or public, and Dr. Sasscock certainly never described them that way. In fact, when someone called them wives he’d become uncharacteristically upset, his suave jovial affect lifting off of him in a second. As serious and furious as Dr. Snood in a snit, he’d say, “We are all together, but it’s not like that.” There was something derogatory about wives that rubbed all nine of them the wrong way, though when he was drunk you might get him to agree that he was in some sense husband to all of them. But he pointed out to people who were curious enough to ask at length about the arrangement that he was no bigamist or powerful fuck-lord presiding over a harem. It was all more equitable and more mysterious than that. “I am lost in them,” he would say finally, dreamily.
There were only two of them at first, girls he had unwisely tried to date simultaneously in a world that was only two-hundred meters across. It was not surprising that the two outraged women became friends, but no one ever understood how they made a collective decision to receive the miscreant back into their beds and their lives—there were rumors that Sasscock, who’d proved himself a very capable replicator engineer, had made a potion to addle them with, but too many people had tried something similar and failed for anyone to believe that the angel would do that, and anyone who spent time with the threesome could tell right away that the women, though in love, were not love-slaves.
Jemma had imagined it, feeling a little dirty even though it was only on one occasion that she diagrammed all the sexual possibilities, arranging them like groaning Lincoln Logs in her head to make structures of ecstasy and lust. It was more work, and more interesting, to imagine the comforts they found, these refugee women, in the many-armed other, and what words they whispered over their gigantic pillow in Sasscock’s room, now all bed except for the little alcove for the replicator and the sink. Sometimes she had envied them, and imagined herself stepping into a groaning mass that petted and stroked itself not to orgasm but to solace, and she thought she could understand the appeal, entirely separate from the prospect of owning a share of handsome Jordan Sasscock, of entering into such a compact.
Conclaves were just shaping up, associations of sentiment—a preponderance of Baptists on the third floor, the fifteen Mormons moving one night, en masse, to the fifth, separate lesbian and gay ghettos in the rehab unit, but they were voluntary and amorphous congregations, and seemed to denote little in terms of either a grander plan, or a deeper meaning; no matter where people lived, or what creed they professed, everybody mixed in Father Jane’s huge Sunday Services, only Dr. Sundae and her snake handlers, the Jews, and the Coptics holding anything like regularly separate services yet. The Council looked for other patterns of condensation, wondering if there was a plan in which they participated unaware, that might guide them when it came time to assign the children, but there was no pattern anyone could make out. People were dating across the borders of race and class and profession and age and religion, across floors and specialties, across vast disparities of height and weight and attractiveness. How best, then, to decide which child should go where when the crèches were disbanded and every hospital room turned into a home?
“The family is dead!” Anika proclaimed, speaking in one of the crowded meetings—they became increasingly public forums with every passing day, until they had to be moved from the conference room to the lobby, where Jemma’s table was set up under the shadow of the toy—for the most radical contingent of the population. It would be not just futile but dangerous to imitate the old pattern. In fact, these people urged the Council to consider that they may all have been placed here for the very purpose of formulating and implementing a new order. The absolute minimum number of parental units needed for each child was five—they’d done the calculations, and this was a number that guaranteed every child at least two good parental units without crossing a threshold of confusion beyond which the mixture of opinions and styles would do as much harm as good. “There’s always a bad mother,” Anika said, “and there’s always a bad father. The molester is always lurking, somebody’s always waiting to tell you that you look fat in your prom dress. There’s always somebody who will hate the child that they should love, and half the time or more it’s the same person, isn’t it? If you do the math you discover that you hated a fourth of your mother and half of your father and they loved perhaps one-seventh of the person that you became. This is the misery of two. But with five you get perfection, because even if each parent only loves 20 percent of the child each child is totally loved, and every child can pick and choose among the smorgasborg to construct the parent they love totally.”
Jemma nodded and put on a thoughtful face while Anika was speaking, but made an unnecessary note to herself on the big yellow pad that sat in front of her during every meeting: V-E-T-0. Over the hours and days of deliberations they heard other ideas. There were staunch traditionalists, represented not unexpectedly by Dr. Sundae, who wanted to keep the present arrangement until every last two citizens of the hospital had been partnered in an officially recognized marriage, and offered Rob and Jemma as an example of a partnership insufficiently formalized, what with the unusual permutations of the ceremony and the insistence of the lesbian priestess and deacon-prophet as they married them that they were not in fact marrying them. There should be a mass ceremony presided over by Father Jane in her strictest and most formal Unitarian capacity, in which every male and female of marrying age (described as being so low as fourteen and as high as twenty-one) were joined together based on whatever natural (but not unnatural) affinities were already in play among the population but also, and more importantly, on a subcommittee of the Council, newly to be formed, which would study files to be prepared by an entirely separate subcommittee and make incontrovertible matches, the last of them to be completed no more than forty days from the adoption of the authorizing resolution. A week after the ceremony, the children would be distributed, these matches made based on the work of yet another heroic subcommittee.
“We are all still thinking,” said Karen, “in the terms of the old system. Didn’t Ishmael say it many weeks ago? If we are all a big family, then aren’t these, each of them and all of them, our children? Each of us shares somehow in their care now, why shouldn’t that continue? Why not make ourselves formally what we already are informally?” She went on to suggest that every child begin to circulate among the adult citizens in such a way that every last child would rotate with every last possible parent. They would build a clock in the lobby that would chime whenever it was time to switch, and slowly, by means of deceptively transient-appearing relationships (and wasn’t every family relationship transient anyway, disappointment or suppressed hatred or mortality counting the time as surely as any giant clock?), individual transience becoming collective permanence, they would become a giant family in truth, where every boy or girl was son or daughter to every man and woman, and every man and woman
parent to every boy and girl. Jemma tried to mouth veto reassuringly to Jeri Vega’s mother, who was clenching her fists while Karen told her that Jeri would rotate away from her, but rotate back, like all good things joining in an ebbing, flowing cycle of departure and return. “But she’s my daughter,” Jessie’s mother said, and Karen said, “She is my daughter, too.”
Jemma’s suggestion, delivered on the third day of deliberations that seemed likely to go on forever, combined elements that had already been put forward by others. The heavy duty of researching and defining affinities she delegated to the angel, who would work based on what she already knew of everyone on board and what they would tell her in interviews or questionnaires. Requests for specific individuals would be accepted but not encouraged. Children who already had one parent or more in the hospital would stay with them and not be rotated way or shared except through the usual media of school and play. Individuals could submit themselves to the Match as individuals or in groups of up to two; same sex couples must not be discriminated against. Siblings would not be separated, and if the thing were going to happen there was no reason for it not to happen soon. They should do it within the week.
This didn’t end the debate. A whole parade of people were still waiting to tell their ideas, but after every third or fourth crazy scheme the Council would talk again about Jemma’s suggestion and as people delineated the benefits of robot nannies upon a nascent civilization, or made calls for inverted families where the children would discipline their parents and teach them how to live in the new world, it became obvious that her plan possessed more than all the others the attractive qualities of being both feasible and not too loony. The Council retired back to its chamber and after a short discussion with the angel passed a resolution which Jemma signed into law. This time she really did say, “So let it be written, so let it be done,” but quiet enough that only Vivian and Ishmael heard her.
The angel preferred interviews; these were conducted. Some relationships were fortified or even inaugurated by the stimulus of the Match, a few fell apart. Those who wanted to make requests made them, and the angel held the algorithm in abeyance until such time as the Council wished it activated. It would take about eight hours to run. Why that long and not seven or nine, or why not instantaneously, she would not say. She manufactured a big red button—eminently pressable—which Jemma wanted to hit right away, but Ishmael had the idea of waiting until the following day, taking advantage of a previously scheduled talent show to distract people from the waiting. So Jemma awoke that day about a half hour after Kidney had made her mark on her door and not half a second after Pickie Beecher laid his eyes upon me. Before she opened her eyes she considered her schedule, picturing it in her head, thick blue letters on a yellow pad as big as the bed. There was only a single item on it today: 12:00 p.m.—Press button.
She opened her eyes, stared at the ceiling for a while, stared at the window for a while, stared at the door for a while, hoping that Rob might come through it and lie down beside her. She was not yet so far removed from sleep that she couldn’t go right back to it, and it would have been very pleasant to put her head on his chest, murmur, “I’ve got a big day ahead of me,” and sleep for three hours and forty-five minutes. Her eyes closed, she drifted back toward sleep and she had a small, swift dream in which not Rob but the big red button walked through the door and lay down beside her, and she tried unsuccessfully to snuggle up to it. Careful, it said to her. Don’t make me pop yet.
It was not a usual morning, though she went about her usual business. She got out of bed and did the chair-assisted yoga poses that Vivian had taught her. She hated them, though less than the exercises she was supposed to do on odd days. The room was almost too small to do them, but she wouldn’t be caught dead stretching and lotusing in public, or any place that she might be seen. She dragged a chair to the middle of the room, pushed the table up against the bathroom door, and did the downward-facing dog, leaning forward from her hips and grabbing the lower edge of the seat. “Watch your head,” said the angel.
“Leave me alone,” Jemma said. “Who said you could watch?”
“I am always watching,” she said, but shut up. Vivian had cautioned her not to lower her head too far, and said that she must be extremely careful once she got to the third trimester. “If you lower your head below your heart in the third trimester,” she said, “you will die instantly.”
Eight breaths later, she was done with that one, and then it was time for the modified dancer and warrior two and warrior three and the pony on the table and the squatting palm, eight breaths for every pose. She spent ten minutes, exactly the requisite time, in a lotus on her mat—now was the time she was supposed to be visualizing her healthy pregnancy. She managed it for a minute, imagining it, a foot long now, wrapped in transparent skin, and then it was laid out beside any number of other approximately foot-long objects: Rob’s hairy foot, a submarine sandwich, the first dildo she had ever met, a really big hot dog. This was the exhausting part, to turn her thought on her baby, and dive into the black whole in her belly.
Hello? she said, into the blackness.
Go away, said the baby, the voice as fully imaginary as the body that she saw, an upside-down fetus hanging in a field of stars.
I promised Vivian I would look at you every day. It’s supposed to be good for us.
How can I sleep with you staring at me like that, all creepy. You look crazy. Are you crazy? Am I crazy?
Sometimes I am. A little. Or more than a little. It’s Match Day! she said, trying to change the subject.
Maybe I can get a better family, he said. Would I not be crazy, if I went to live with someone else? Would I still die, if you loved me from far away, instead of from up close?
All that is past. You’re safe.
But I think I would prefer to live with someone else. It’s not personal. I just want to live. I just want to get away from the long reach of your parents’ hands. And I don’t want to have to watch your brother burn every night, or hear the story from you when you sit up drunk all night, regretting everything that ever happened to you.
Well, Jemma said.
I’m glad you understand. I’m glad we had this little talk.
But…
You’re a very good listener. Has anyone ever told you that before? Jordan Sasscock. Put me with him. He’s cute.
But I’m your mother.
Exactly! And before she could ask her baby and herself what that meant, or argue that nothing was ever going to be the same for her, that everyone was going to be happy in the new world, and that she held in her hands the mysterious green remedy for sickness and death, the chime sounded, her exercises were done, and their time was over.
* * *
She wanted to go back to bed. She went downstairs, instead, to Karen’s coffee bar, part of the ER complex, not far from Connie’s more traditional sort of bar. Behind the same series of windows where crabby triage nurses had instructed the wounded and the panicked and the soon-to-be dead on the virtues of waiting one’s proper turn, Karen pumped espresso from a manual machine as tall as she was, made of golden brass and covered in relief with eagles and oxen and calves. Rob was sure it had once been the ark of the covenant, but Karen said it looked just like one she had seen in Italy. During a brief vacation, the two weeks she’d had away from her eighty-hour weeks as an intern, she’d fled Florence and her fiancé and, after a hike and some hitchhiking and a mysterious process of emancipation (“I slept in a field and when I woke up the next day I was sopping wet and my throat hurt like hell but I was so free I cannot even describe it!”) she shacked up with a man who reeked perpetually of dark roasted coffee, hardly able to talk with him but enjoying the first satisfactions of her ten years of sexual activity and serving a brief apprenticeship in his café before going back to her fiancé, in many ways, she insisted, a new woman. She wasn’t the only person for whom an interlude of non-medical happiness had formed the basis of a career—Dr. Neder was throwing potter
y on the seventh floor; Dr. Pudding was blowing glass on the second—and like the others she quickly surpassed her lover/teacher, assisted by the angelic technology in the replicators.
Dr. Chandra, Helena Dufresne, and Carla were already all lined up at the bar, Chandra staring morosely into his huge bowl of coffee, Tir’s mom having a discussion with Carla. Karen was drying a tall mug—not actually something she had to do, since used dishes could be thrown, like any other sort of garbage, into the gullet of the replicators, but she said it made her feel authentic, and she liked to meditate while she did her dishes, her best ideas, like the concept of eternally rotating children and the Over-Family, coming to her as she washed and dried.
“I figured it out,” she said to Jemma. “Truly caffeine-free espresso.”
“What’s the point of that?” Jemma asked.