“To tell him what I knew—no, I think you phrased it ‘what I believed’—if ever he should ask.” She looked at Tidwell. “I thought that was a mistake.”
“To keep it from me?”
“To tell you. Even now that it’s done, I’m not sure that it wasn’t a mistake. It’s nothing personal, Doctor. But if this gets out, everything we have planned is in danger.”
“Why is that?”
“You have the degree in sociology, Doctor,” Oker said. “Is it that hard to see? To brand ourselves the elect—”
“Yes,” Tidwell said, recalling the promise she had tried to extract from him. You wouldn’t hurt us, would you? “Yes, of course.”
Sasaki rose from her cushion. “Thank you, Dr. Oker. Would you leave us now?”
Nodding, Oker moved toward the door. “I’m sorry, Dr. Tidwell,” she said, pausing. “I really am. I didn’t enjoy waking you.”
“I know,” he said.
She left, and Sasaki turned to Tidwell. “Thomas, will you sit with me?”
They sank to the cushions together. “I hope that you can understand,” she said. “Karin must believe. I must question. I need to know if I am making decisions for one generation or for all generations.”
“Does it matter?” asked Tidwell. “Can you do anything different for knowing?”
“Yes. I already have,” she said. “Thomas, I know that your pride has been hurt by what you view as deception—”
“Why should she know?” he burst out. “You tell her—you tell a hundred—and keep it from me. I considered you a friend, Hiroko.”
She reached for his hand, covered it with her own cool skin. “Karin is a talent, a gift, in her field. Her work for the Project required that she know. Yours required that you not know. I could not tell you, not if you were to do what I needed you to— what I still need you to do.”
“You presume too much.”
“That is pique speaking,” she said. “Thomas, I asked you to write our history because I knew that if this thread was there, you would find it on your own. That if the history you wrote and the history Karin has built coincided, that I would have my proof.”
“So what do you want?”
“Read your own writing. Ask yourself if reason and hubris and lebensraum and frontier fever are enough to explain it, to carry us from Olduvai Gorge to here. Or whether those are all synonyms for some other cause. Whether what we have done makes more sense or less for what you’ve heard today.”
“You think you know the answer.”
She bobbed her head in disagreement. “You misread me, Thomas. I hope that Karin is wrong.”
“Why?”
A faint smile. “Because I do not know that I am equal to a billion-year burden.”
“One starship has already sailed.”
“One is not enough,” she said. “One is a frail reed. You must help me, Thomas. Reflect. And then come and tell me what you see, so that I will better know what it is that I must do.”
He sighed, covered her hand with his. “You ask a great deal.”
“From you, as from myself.”
Tidwell squeezed her hand and then freed it. “A question?”
“Of course.”
“Do I carry the Chi Sequence?”
Sasaki answered without hesitation. “I do not know,” she said. “You were never tested. Do you wish to be?”
His breath caught and he looked at her wonderingly. He had expected an answer, not a choice. Tell me yes, tell me no, and then I’ll go away to worry about what it means. To look inside myself as well as my history. Then he saw with sudden insight that he had been given a gift. Yes, yes—what song does your body sing, and where did you first hear it? It was not something he should have to be told. He would find out for himself.
“I think not,” Tidwell said. “Not yet.”
He could not decide whether he was pleased or annoyed by Sasaki’s approving smile.
CHAPTER 9
—CUA—
“…look on your works and weep.”
The next time Christopher McCutcheon looked up, August had vanished, leaving very few tracks on his consciousness. It had been a nothing-much month, one day folding unnoticed into the next, time evaporating in the summer Texas sun.
Even the aftertaste of July’s crises had faded into gentle memory. His father, conscience or curiosity satisfied by Christopher’s visit, had pursued no further contact. And Christopher’s brief panic over Loi and Jessie subsided as his worst fear—that of being excluded when all three of them were home together— failed to materialize. The worst crisis at Kenning House that month was the discovery of a nest of Formosan termites in the backyard.
But in the world around him, and in the greater world beyond, August had been a busy, sometimes turbulent month. At work, the new front gate was opened, freeing Christopher from dependence on the tram. Thomas Tidwell, titular head of Christopher’s division, made not one but two visits, events rare enough by all accounts to be a curiosity. One of the center’s archaeolibrarians was picked for Memphis’s staff; two others quit, and one—a woman named Barbara Manly—committed suicide, when they learned they were not.
None of those events had touched Christopher more than tangentially. He recalled them with no sense of involvement or emotional investment, not even that which a witness might feel. Not even for Manly. She was an older woman, a fiction and theater specialist, working in a different project circle in a different part of the building. He was a casual spectator, a passive bystander, the distance between him and her death as great as the distance between him and an image on the multimedia.
He wondered at his own reaction. After the first moment of shock, he could find little more than puzzlement inside. Why had she done it? Building the library was a contribution, a way of taking part. Why was that not enough for Barbara Manly? Daniel Keith had cried for her. Christopher had not. He could not sympathize with the incomprehensible.
Too, part of the distance was numbness. There was too much death to grieve over each departed. All month, the news seemed to cater to a morbid, obsessive fascination with the many and varied ways that people find to die. The running blood in the street, the raglike bodies lying crumpled on the savanna, the burned, the broken, those who went fighting, those taken by surprise—they were all ways to touch the untouchable, to hold in one’s hand the idea of one’s own mortality. How will I die? Like this? Like this? How awful, how sudden, how unfair, how noble, how right. How unready I am—
Death. The world was more peaceful than at any time in a century, and yet there was no end to the dying. The Peace Police were back in West Africa, but not before more than three hundred fell in clashes along the Mauritania-Mali border. A fire in Phobos Station killed three astronauts and left the second largest Martian outpost uninhabitable. One of the Global Environmental Watch’s high-altitude ozonator barges fell out of the sky over the Antarctic, condemning three of its crew to a fiery death and the one who succeeded in ejecting to a slower, icy end. And so on.
Christopher watched the news of the airbarge crash cuddled with Jessica on the huge brown family room couch, with Mobius in turn sprawled on Jessica’s lap in one of the classic boneless-cat positions which had earned him his name. It was the last Saturday of the month. He should have been rehearsing for Sunday’s gig; he could have been at an end-of-summer court party at a residential center just three blocks away. But he had the energy for neither.
Besides, Jessica needed the company. Her left foot was sheathed in an air cast and propped on an ottoman. Inside the cast was a freshly broken ankle, painful trophy of yesterday’s spill down a shopping center escalator. And Loi was in Brussels for the debut of a commissioned sculpture at the Alianti Gallery.
So they cuddled together wordlessly, snacking at crackers and cheese, sipping at a fruity Piesporter that one of Loi’s lovers had sent as congratulations. When the news was over, the screen returned to its normal cycling display, now a Brinwell animate of faces in
a flickering fire.
“Aargh,” she said. “Switch off.”
The screen blacked, and Jessica sighed relievedly.
“Do you want to watch something else?” Christopher asked, kissing the top of her head. “We have that new Mojembe film in the capture queue.”
“Loi wanted to see that most,” she murmured.
“That’s right,” Christopher remembered. “No point in paying for two showings. Well—what about Loi’s Hearkentime? It’s a good lazy-evening kind of timesculpt, and I’ve only done it once.”
“Are you bored with me?”
He kissed her head again. “Heavens, no. I just didn’t want you to be bored.”
“I like cuddling,” she said. “Mobius and me. We just kind of gravitate to warm places and cuddly people.”
“McCutcheon Heat Friction, Ltd.,” he said in an affected voice. “You’ve come to the right place, ma’am. No client too female or too furry.”
“What if they’re female and furry?”
“There’s a surcharge.”
She chuckled and snuggled closer. “Chris?”
“What?”
“Can you get into the library from here?”
“The Memphis library?”
“Um-hmm.”
“No,” he said. “There are no external ports to the system. For security. I wish there were. Some days I’d like to be able to work at home like a normal person.”
“If you could work at home, you two’d have stayed in San Francisco, and then I’d never have met you.”
“True. I’ll try to remember that the next time I trudge off to work feeling like a tradesman instead of a professional.”
“What was that you were doing this morning?” He had spent three hours in Loi’s office after breakfast.
“Logs and mail and such,” he said. “Documentation. That’s different. Different system. Why?”
“I was just wondering if you could look me up.”
“Hmm?”
“In the library. I was just wondering what it said about me.”
“Oh,” he said. “No. I can’t do that from here.”
She twisted her neck to look up at him. “Can you do it Monday? When you go in?”
He looked down into her eyes curiously. “I could. Why does it matter? What made you think of this?”
“I don’t know,” she said, turning away from his scrutiny and resting her cheek on his chest. “I guess I just wondered what they’d know about me, when they’re living out there wherever. Do you think I’m in it?”
“Everyone’s in it.”
“What do you think it says?”
Discomfort stirred McCutcheon’s emotions. “Well—your birth will be in the Vital Records stack, linked to your parents and your brother, at least.”
“That’s all?”
“Could be worse—it could have your death, too,” he said. She did not laugh, and he quickly added, “Seriously, if any of your relatives is chosen, as far out as third cousins, there’ll be at least a short biography and a still picture.”
“Have all the selections been named?”
“About half of them by now, I think. It’s hard to find out.”
She shook her head, a quiver against him. “I guess it doesn’t matter. The only one in my family with an option is my uncle— my mother’s brother. And there isn’t any way that they’ll take him. He doesn’t know how to do anything. All he’s got is a head full of dreams.”
His answer sounded patronizing even to his own ears. “It’s a huge library, Jessie. You might be in it a dozen times. A sound-off in the New York Times—your Clean Teeth Club Award for sixth grade—anything.”
“Loi will be in it. They’ll probably have a whole set of her sculpts.”
“I suppose they’ll have a few.”
Jessica started to cry. She was a quiet crier, not even troubling to wipe away the tears that tracked down her cheeks and dampened his shirt. “I just know I’m not in it. And they’ll never even know I was here.”
“I know you’re here.”
He meant the words to be comforting, but they only cut deeper.
“It’s not fair,” she said fiercely. “Everyone ought to be able to go. Or no one should go.”
“Slow down, Jessie,” he said. “There’s no way that everyone could go. We couldn’t even get everyone as far as the Moon. It’s a seventy-five-year project just to build five ships the size of Angleton or Freeport. Everybody calls Memphis a city in space. It’s just a little town, about to become the ultimate one-stoplight rural Hicksville.”
She straightened up and pulled away from him, sending an indignant Mobius to the floor. “I don’t really want to go,” she said in a little voice. “I just don’t want to be forgotten.”
He reached out and touched her cheek tenderly. “Who knows us in Bangladesh, or even Boston? What does it matter if a few people on a one-way trip don’t have stories to tell about Jessica Alexis Cichuan or Christopher McCutcheon?”
Eyes cast downward, she folded her hands in her lap. “I guess you’re right,” she said. “But I don’t have to like it.”
Christopher smiled and tugged at her hands. “Come here.”
She returned to his embrace with a sigh of sadness and gratitude. “I just want to count for something,” she whispered.
“You count here, with us. With me.”
This time she accepted the comfort of his words. “You count with me, too.”
“One, two, three, four—”
She pinched him, and laughed when he yelped. They settled in comfortably together again like two pieces of molding clay, holding hands, Christopher planting soft kisses wherever he could reach without dislodging their position.
“Maybe we could watch a skinner,” he said presently. “What was the one you liked? Tantric Fusion?’”
“I don’t need to,” she said.
“My apologies, ma’am.”
“But I think I’d like to make love.”
He smiled. “My pleasure, ma’am. Comfort the crippled, I say. They’re so grateful—”
“But I might change my mind if you don’t shut up.”
“Shutting up, ma’am.”
Fingertips lightly grazed bare skin where it could be found, teased and combed hair. Lips met in soft kisses, not yet fired by the impatience of passion. Hands played, locked together. A thumb rubbed the center of a palm. Teeth nibbled an earlobe, the nape of a neck. Their bodies in harmony, riding the rising curve that would soon take them upstairs to the big bed—
“Christopher.”
“Mmm.”
“Will you make a baby with me?”
He felt his body suddenly go rigid, his connection with her break. Children had never been an issue with Loi, ten years past fertility. And they were not supposed to be an issue with Jessie yet. “Now?”
“We could,” she said. “I ovulated yesterday.”
“What happened to your implant?” It almost sounded like an accusation.
“It ran out last month, or went bad,” she said, and snuggled closer. “I didn’t notice until it was too late to replace it.”
Christopher’s emotions were screaming protest, his body recoiling from contact with her. Oh, no, they said, oh, no, you’re not going to turn me into a father for the price of a cuddle-fuck. He did not have time to analyze those responses, so he made an effort to subdue them. “You never talked about wanting a baby now.”
“I’ve been thinking about it,” she said. “I’d love to have someone to take care of. I think we’d be terrific parents.”
“That’s a family decision,” he said, still desperately trying to back away from her proposition. “We can’t make it for Loi.”
“Let’s call her, then. We could call her.”
“Jessie, that’s a fifteen-year contract.”
She finally sat up, pulled away from him. “I didn’t ask you for a contract—”
“There’s an implied contract the minute we’re naked togethe
r with you fertile.”
“—I just asked you to make a baby with me.”
“That’s not something you ask in the middle of a cuddle that’s heating up. It’s something you talk about when the sun’s up and your head’s clear.”
“You don’t want to,” she said accusingly. “All these excuses just mean you don’t want to.”
“I don’t want to,” he said plaintively. “Not this way. Not now. And I don’t understand why you do.”
“A woman who hasn’t had a baby doesn’t count.”
“You’re just taking a hormonal hit—”
“No, I’m not,” she said, struggling to her feet. “I’m not a machine. Even if you wish I was. That’s what you want me to be. A nothing. A fuck-pillow.”
That Jessie, soft-voiced and smiling Jessie, would use such language revealed the depth of the betrayal she felt. “Jessie—”
“No. I don’t want to hear it. I’m going to bed,” she said.
“Jess—”
“And don’t even think about following me. Sleep in your own damned bed.”
It was only after she was gone that, replaying the conversation in his head, he began to wonder if it had been woven from a single thread, if the dead men in Antarctica and the hyperlibrary and the cuddling and the baby they weren’t making that night were somehow all of one piece.
If he said he understood why they were, he would have been lying. But he knew that it was so all the same, and there was no shortage of time alone that night to wonder on it.
The Memphis hyper could be accessed from Christopher’s entry terminal, or even, in a limited way, from an ordinary graphics station—just as DIANNA could be accessed by a lowly DBS phone in a pinch. But it was best accessed from a hyper booth, with its desk-sized flat-table display, wraparound sound, digital holo tank, and full voice command.
The only hyper booths in the complex which were on the Memphis net were those belonging to the Testing Section, on the first floor of Building 16. There were twenty of them, and they were almost always busy. Besides Testing’s own staff of verifiers, the booths served a parade of outsiders recruited to test the hands-off interface or wring out the stacks in their particular specialty.
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