“What’s justice? What exactly happened?”
“Loi and Jessie happened. While I was playing my usual Sunday gig down in Freeport.”
“Oh-ho.”
“Which means?”
“Which means I could have seen that one coming.”
“This makes sense to you?”
“Sure,” Keith said. “My moms were closer to each other than to either of my dads. Same thing happened with Brenda and Jo. As far as I can tell, if there’s two women in the house, they either form the strongest bond in the family or they split the family apart scratching at each other. Mostly the former.”
“I don’t have the benefit of your experience,” Christopher said. “My only other trine was two men and a woman.”
“What about your own family?”
Christopher shook his head. “My mother died three years before I was born—”
“Excuse me?”
“Frozen embryo. They took some eggs when my mother took sick, just in case.”
“Huh,” Keith said. “Interesting. Right out of the soaps.”
Tight-lipped, Christopher nodded and said, “Anyway, Deryn—she was my host and my nurture-mother both—was the only woman in the house when I was growing up.”
“You have a sister, don’t you?”
“Doesn’t count.”
“I suppose not,” Keith said. “Look, did you bring this business up hoping for some free advice?”
“Did I bring it up?” Christopher asked. “Never mind. You can play relationship technologist if you want, Doctor Keith.”
Keith smiled. “It’s nothing brilliant. It just seems to me that what happened was still inside the family, even if it was kind of a rude surprise. And along the lines of what I said earlier, you’ve probably got to take it as a good thing.”
“You’re talking to the guy up here,” Christopher said glumly, tapping his temple. “And he knows all that.” He touched the center of his chest. “It’s this guy that’s having the trouble.”
“Evict him,” Keith said with mock solemnity.
“I tried. He’s got a long-term lease.”
“Bribe him, then. See if you can buy him off with the erotic possibilities of two women together.”
“No chance. We were playing three-in-a-bed the first week Jessie moved in. He just feels left out.” Christopher shook his head. “I really love both of them.”
“Try ‘loving’ them a little less and trusting them a little more,” Keith said wisely. “It’s a better mix in the long run.”
“Yeah,” Christopher agreed. “Fine. But how do you do it, Daniel? How the hell do you get from here to there?”
Keith smiled, chewing. “I only do theoretical, Chris. Practical’s up to you.”
Though music was playing throughout the house when Christopher McCutcheon arrived home, he seemed to be alone there. But Jessica quickly appeared as he entered, her body tucked into black slacks and blouse, her long hair pulled together at the back of her neck into a golden waterfall.
“Hello, Chris,” she said cheerily, intercepting him near the door with a hug.
The hug lasted until it triggered recent memories, and Christopher stepped away. “Where’s Loi?”
“With a client, previewing a commissioned piece. Barring disaster, she’ll be home at seven or so. Can you survive without dinner until then?”
He shrugged. “I guess so.”
“I haven’t seen you to talk to since Sunday morning. How did your set at Alec’s go?”
“Not too badly, I guess,” he said, continuing past her. “Alec seemed happy, anyway. Of course, all he cares about is that he does more business with me there than he was before I started.”
“Did you do ‘Caravan to Antares’?” she asked, following.
“Yeah. Last song of the night. Just me and the hard-core.”
“And?”
“I don’t think they quite knew how to take it.”
“It’s a terrific song,” she said earnestly.
A crooked smile, thrown back over one shoulder. “So long as no one from Allied hears it. I’m going to check mail, okay?”
She stopped following and let him escape. “Okay, Chris.” Her poignant expression was wasted; he did not see it as he settled in front of the housecom.
“Mail,” he said, absently noting Jessica’s footsteps on the stairs behind him as the sole message came up.
“Hello, Christopher,” said William McCutcheon, looking out at him from the display.
His father’s face was not a friendly one—eyes too piercing, jaw too stern and angular. But his voice, warm and cultured, moderated the effect.
“I’m sure you won’t be surprised to hear that Allied was in the news today,” the senior McCutcheon continued. “This business with Homeworld reminded me that you haven’t been up to visit since you started there—what, six months, seven months ago? Why don’t you come up this weekend.” Not a question. Something closer to a command. “You can tube up Friday night and leave early enough Sunday not to disappoint your followers. Don’t bother with a rental. I’ll pick you up in Portland.”
The display dimmed, and Christopher sat back in the chair, thoughtful. The break had been more complete than his father had acknowledged. There had been no meaningful contact in nearly three months. Moreover, it was not mere neglect, but a conscious choice not to risk an open fight, not to face his father’s fury.
Even at twenty-seven, on his own for a dozen years, Christopher dreaded his father’s disapproval. When he decided, after much agonizing, to come to Allied, Christopher had not sought either his father’s permission or his approval. Permission was not required, and approval was not likely. Not from the man who had made Christopher refuse the selection option won in a tenth-grade cybernetics contest. Not from the man who had spent Ur’s sailing day climbing Saddle Mountain, safely out of touch with the net and out of the reach of any Diaspora zealots.
Christopher had sent the news wrapped in a tissue of justification, and his father responded with an acknowledgment empty of both criticism and congratulation. The rules of the compact seemed clear: You are my son and I love you, but I cannot love this choice you’ve made.
But now his father had broken the contract of silence with an invitation. A summons, couched in the civilities of family. The confrontation Christopher had thought he had avoided loomed before him.
“Chris?” Jessie’s voice, timid and tentative, intruded on his thoughts.
He twisted in the seat to see her sitting on the stairs, halfway between floors. “What’s the matter?”
“That’s what I was wondering. Are you mad at me?”
“Why would I be mad?” he asked, delaying an answer.
“About last night.”
He pursed his lips, polled his feelings. “Nah,” he said, and shrugged.
“I could use just the littlest bit more reassurance than that,” she said.
“Like?”
She stood up, a far more flattering pose for her figure. “Will you come upstairs and make love with me?”
He hesitated, polling another set of readings. “With pleasure,” he said, bounding out of the chair wearing a playful smile.
It wasn’t too difficult to see that they were still involved when Loi and seven o’clock arrived.
CHAPTER 4
—AUC—
“… the bandits of Allied Transcon…”
It was called the Director’s Residence, but it might as well have been called the Director’s Refuge. Located on the western edge of the compound, three kilometers from the cluster of towers and pyramids which housed the Diaspora staff, the small white Minano-designed bungalow was off-limits except at the explicit invitation of its sole occupant, and such invitations were rare. No more than a half dozen of Prainha’s 35,000 residents and employees—including those whose task it was to clean the bungalow—knew how Hiroko Sasaki lived.
Sasaki had no kin or roots on Earth, no purpose but the Project, no life ou
tside of Prainha. Anything else that might be, that might be desired or desirable, was on hold, tabled until that which must be, was. For now, she was what she did. She spent as many hours as she could in the warren, driving herself and the Project staff toward efficiency, toward excellence, demonstrating by example the level of commitment she expected, the Project demanded. When she felt herself reaching her limit of patience or energy, she withdrew, retreating to the bungalow to rest and restore.
To serve effectively in that role, the bungalow was, as it must necessarily be, a world apart. Her world, private and personal. Its thick soundproofed walls closed out the sound of the multi-gigawatt laser lifting the T-ships skyward. Its only windows, a broad expanse of sloping plex across the face of the overthrust second story, faced the jungle, as though denying that the entire Prainha compound existed.
But that was as close as Sasaki cared to get to what remained of the great Amazonian wildlands. Born in the first of the satlands nearly half a century ago, Sasaki had never learned how to live with or in large spaces. Even the bungalow was uncomfortably, embarrassingly spacious. She used only three rooms of the bungalow’s fourteen, and spent most of her time in just one, the second-floor greatroom behind the wall of plex.
Sasaki had filled the spaces she did claim with objects she loved, with as much beauty as could harmoniously coexist there. From the Sorayama original on the north wall, a chrome dolphin gracefully leaping from the sea, to the pastel rice-paper bunjinga by Gyokudo which filled the south, the greatroom was a living museum. The Imari porcelain, the bronze of the Galloping Horse of Kansu, the pre-Revolution Valenciennes lace—each image, each piece, vibrated with life. Each was one breath of the yearning, one thread in the weave. She touched them, and they touched her. And the touch helped make her whole.
So, too, did the touch of Lujisa, one of the few who were not only permitted but invited to enter the Director’s Residence. Sasaki had an ageless body, supple and sleek. But at the end of a sixteen-hour day filled with Jeremiah and the Homeworld, negotiations with Beijing to lease the Memphis hyperlibrary and with the astronauts’ union to avoid a threatened strike, and conferences on six of the six thousand suits pending against Allied Transcon, enough stress had penetrated through her meditative calm to knot muscles and snarl the flow of energies through her body.
Sasaki stood at the window, gazing out at the fading purple-red glow of what had been a disappointingly banal sunset, waiting. The colors in her Kanja silk robe were more vivid even in the waning light than the sky colors had been at their peak. A hint of the simple dish of shrimp and rice which she had prepared for herself still hung in the air.
When the housecom announced Lujisa’s arrival, Sasaki let the robe slip from her shoulders. Unselfconsciously nude, she crossed the room to the raised futon as Lujisa appeared at the top of the stairs. Sasaki offered no greeting, nor did Lujisa expect one. She followed Sasaki wordlessly to the tablelike bed; while the Director stretched full length, facedown on its unyielding surface, the masseuse opened her small bag and retrieved oil and a thick soft towel.
The massage began with Lujisa’s hands passing slowly over Sasaki’s body as though floating on a cushion of air, as though feeling for the shape of her body rather than the substance. Whatever Lujisa was touching, she learned from it. Her hands hovered, hesitated, probed.
“Heat here,” she said. “And here.”
“Yes,” Sasaki acknowledged.
Then, her hands slick with fragrant skin-warmed oil, Lujisa began her magic. She worked the muscles and the chakras at once, relaxing the former, clearing the latter, opening the channel from root to crown with a touch which shaped and molded the energy of Sasaki’s body as skillfully as it shaped her flesh and muscle.
Sasaki surrendered herself to the invasion, opening and releasing, until it seemed as though she, too, were floating on a cushion of air. The pain of shiatsu, Lujisa’s strong fingers knowingly savage on the soles of Sasaki’s feet, the palms and joints of her hands, was transmuted by that surrender into bliss and balm elsewhere in her body. She was clay, without will, with Lujisa as sculptor.
When it was over, Sasaki lay on her back, eyes closed, savoring the balance and clarity in her body, the world reduced to that space encompassed by self. It was in this state that Lujisa would leave her, quietly collecting her kit and absenting herself.
But this time, Sasaki called her back with a single word, half whispered.
“More.”
Lujisa turned and wordlessly returned to the table. This time the hands were gentle, though just as knowing. Oil-slick fingertips slipped between sweet-slick labia, found and caressed the swelling nub concealed within. Sasaki lay with eyes closed, legs together, her only response at first a slight quickening of her breath, the rise and fall of her boyish breasts.
Floating upward, mind still clear, body still calm, she allowed the warming wave to spread outward from her center, to rock all of her being to a single rhythm. She was egoless and empty. She was all and alive. Her legs parted, a wordless invitation. Her lips parted, a wordless exultation.
But Sasaki’s cries were measured, polite, bare hints of the soaring of her soul. Her pleasure was her own. She did not share it with Lujisa, did not invite her within. Though she craved the release, shame kept her inside herself, rejecting intimacy.
She told Lujisa only in the silent signs of her body’s own language, in tensed hands and flushed skin, in quicksilver wetness, of the spiraling energy within. Lujisa read the messages and answered in kind, her touch faster, firmer, more insistent. And at last Sasaki’s body arched, seized, gasping, grasping the white light at the top of the spiral. There was a long moment of unity, of focus, and then she was floating downward, tranquil, content.
Her eyes flicked open, and she found Lujisa’s face. “Thank you,” she said.
Lujisa showed a small smile, then quietly left her.
It was only what Sasaki needed, not all she wanted. She wanted more—more of laughter, more of love, more of self, more of silence. She wanted empty days in which to rediscover what she wanted. But there was no time. And there would be no time for such indulgences until the starship Memphis broke orbit and was on its way at last.
CHAPTER 5
—GCC—
“… our gentle mother.”
Friday found Christopher McCutcheon a reluctant traveler, Oregon-bound.
The New Orleans-Houston-San Antonio feeder loop of the tube was still a year from completion, so he was obliged to make the 200-mile-plus run to DFW in his skimmer. By the time he reached the transplex, it was after seven o’clock, late enough to escape the commuter bulge, though not enough to dispel the air of chaos.
But then, it was never really quiet at the Dallas-Fort Worth transplex. Not with the confluence of the third busiest airport in the world, the ninth busiest spaceport, a mainline station for the primary southern tube, the metroplex’s own double-line tramway, plus flyer and surface traffic to boot. DFW was a traveler’s rite of passage, a nightmare despite the load cycling and smart-guides. Locals avoided DFW whenever possible; survivors asserted blackly that its initials stood for “Don’t Forget to Write.”
Humor was a good weapon, patience a better one. Christopher ran into a ten-minute hang at the flyer storage stack, a twenty-minute backlog at the security checkpoint. On escaping those lines, he found that the slidewalk to the tube station was out of service, obliging him to walk the half-mile connecting corridor.
It was like running a gauntlet. Seven years in San Francisco had given Christopher a don’t-bother-I’m-not-buying look which discouraged most ordinary panhandlers and deadweight. But DFW’s parasites were bred for persistence. Discouraging look or not, Christopher was accosted four times—by a Mormon revivalist, by two canvassers for the Greens, and twice by joybirds working N Corridor’s bed-box hotel. The revivalist was the hardest to brush off; the whores were the most entertaining, offering to perform acts Christopher suspected were physically impossible in the confines
of a sleep capsule.
The final hurdle was the annoyingly slow-moving line at the tube fare machine, where an attempted cut-in precipitated a shoving match violent enough to attract the rentacops. But once inside the station, matters proceeded more smoothly. An escalator carried him down to a half-filled lounge; five minutes later, his train was called, and he continued down to the chutes.
One moment the track was empty, the red and green lights above each boarding chute marking the number of seats available on the approaching train. Then the great interlock separating the station from the evacuated stone tunnel opened, and the massive red and white cylinder slid through the aperture, its entry almost silent save for the rushing air. Boarding was swift and efficient. Christopher took the last seat in compartment 11, tucking his night bag in the underseat basket. In less than two minutes, the train continued on its way.
The cities flew by like subway stops: El Paso-Juarez, Phoenix-Tucson, the San Diego-Los Angeles sprawl. Christopher’s compartment emptied, filled, and emptied again. From outside San Diego north to the California border the trains ran on the surface, at half their underground speed—no one wanted to have to rebore a five-meter tunnel after an earthquake. But the scattering of lights glimpsed at high speed through tiny windows was little distraction from his thoughts.
Christopher tried to concentrate on the unfinished lyric of a new song, tried to interest himself in an odd little book on neoteny, halfheartedly tried to engage the jet-eyed Filipino woman who boarded at Sacramento in conversation. He was successful at none of those efforts, which left him sitting half curled in the half-darkness, thinking about Oregon. Thinking about William McCutcheon.
It had always been a mystery to Christopher how he could feel so uncomfortable in the presence of someone he loved so much. He had found it difficult living in the Vernonia house with his father, the more so as he left childhood behind. William McCutcheon was a magnet toward which everything turned. When he was home, it was clearly his home, and he filled it with his unequivocal expectations—expectations of excellence and, less nakedly stated, of obedience. Lines of force, radiating outward to bind everything in their reach to he who stood at the center.
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