For a moment it hung in the balance.
His large brown eyes widened in shock, then it looked like he would be offended. But his lips twitched upwards, the corners struggling to pull upward, and finally, finally, drawing up into a broad smile. “Thanks,” he said. “And you look like you’re a spacer.”
“Just arrived through the tunnel. Does it show that much?”
He grinned and waved his hand, mid-air, from side to side, in a so-so gesture. “There are very few pure blondes left on Earth. Only small, closed colonies manage that. So, which one produced you?”
“Marstown.”
“Ah,” he said. “Swede.”
She laughed, charmed, having forgotten all the stories she’d heard before leaving Marstown, all the stories about how Earth was a backward pot of seething violence, where no man—there and no woman either—would be safe.
Her walk from the tunnel arrival terminal to the art gallery had been pleasant, unencumbered, a walk along a normal street of small shops and automated eating establishments that could have taken place in Marstown itself. The mix of small restaurants and smaller shops could have existed anywhere at all.
And this man seemed safe enough, sane enough, intelligent enough.
Ingrid, whom all friends swore was the original ice virgin, looked up at the soft brown eyes and melted. “My name is Ingrid Illesen.”
He put his hand forward, a large hand that engulfed her small, thin one. “I’m Joseph Michaels. Welcome to Earth.”
Joseph Michaels was the author of the nymphs and satyrs, the amazing, light sculptures all around, sculptures that seemed on the verge of flight. The style and some of the sculptures themselves were known to Ingrid. She’d seen them in Marstown.
“You’re Joseph Michaels?” she asked, all out of breath. “You’re—”
“Call me Joe,” he said.
Joe smiled at her again, bathing her in the unavoidable light of his approval, as he looked her slowly from head to toe. “So, want to go out for something to eat? Maybe I can show you the town,” he said.
She felt underdressed in her dark green travel suit of shorts and loose tunic. She thought he was attracted to her, but it was hard to see why.
She smiled and nodded, inanely. “Yes, yes, I’d love to.”
“Any minute now, dear,” Dotty said, and sniffled, and looked at Ingrid, sort of sideways, with a quick glance at Ingrid’s stomach and then away. “I wish.... It doesn’t seem right to send you out like this, again, but....”
But Dotty had got news, over the computer, that the government had been raiding the safe houses of the Daughters of Rachel, the Catholic organization that protected women whose babies were slated—for whatever reason—for abortion. And on that rumor, the white rabbit that Dotty was at heart had fled to its safe hole—calling Joe, making him come and remove his very pregnant wife.
Ingrid shifted from foot to foot and sighed, hoping Joe would get here quickly.
Dotty’s living room was no more tastefully decorated than her guest room.
Lump-like sofas and armchairs in some molded pink material halfway between rubber and sponge took up most of the space, on the baby-blue carpet.
Statues of saints—Saint Theresa holding the baby Jesus, St. Anthony with the same baby incongruously perched atop a book, St. Joseph gazing in wonder at his flowering staff—stared out from many little, oddly shaped glass tables.
The walls continued the theme, with pictures of the Virgin being surprised by the archangel Gabriel, a painting of St. Rita in her nun’s habit staring at a palm leaf as if it held the answers to the questions of the universe.
Though not a Catholic herself, Ingrid had been introduced to the pantheon by Joe’s personal devotion.
Of course, Joe’s devotion didn’t translate itself to plaster and poorly applied paint. Or at least not in such a facile way. Joe had never been one for facile forms or simple anything.
That first day they met, he took her to dinner at a small downtown restaurant in Goldport.
At the edge of the area that Joe described as prettied up for the tourists from out world, it was pretty enough an establishment—with its tiny tables with checkered cloth coverings, and lit candles—for Ingrid to exclaim over it.
“I thought Earth was all grime and despair,” she said, halfway through the first course Joe had ordered: a broiled fresh-stream fish, something she couldn’t get on Mars.
And Joe, who’d been prattling facilely about art and the balance of masses and light, looked up from his dinner, with a sudden, wounded stare as though she’d slapped him.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry. It’s what one sees in the news holos, though. I mean....”
He shook his head. His face looked all serious, the big, velvet eyes appeared to have shaded themselves, as though darkness had descended upon Joe’s thoughts. “Nothing to be sorry for,” he said. “Nothing to be sorry for. It’s true. What you read, what you see in the holos, is pretty much true. This,” he waved his hand to include the small tables with their individual candles and the couples sitting at them, leaning over to each other in intimate conversation. “This is for tourists. For the spacers. We want them to feel happy and welcome. The rest.... The rest is where the real people live. It took me years of working in the rest of Earth to make it to the near-tunnel galleries. Years.”
His veiled eyes shaded further and a soft seriousness covered his face, making him look suddenly much younger and lost, like a child with a secret sadness that no mother can kiss away.
The doorbell rang and Dotty rushed to open it, with the same half-eager rush that a rabbit might display in escaping from a bird of prey.
Joe stood there—Joe, looking gaunter than he’d been three months ago, and somehow worn down, polished down, like a pebble beaten long and hard by the tide.
His soft-velvet eyes lit up when he looked at Ingrid and he smiled. “Hi, babe.”
She didn’t know she would do it, until she found herself wrapped around him, her belly between them, with the baby turning and turning and kicking.
Joe kissed her hair, her eyes, her mouth. “I missed you too, babe,” he said. “I missed you, too.”
Still, Ingrid couldn’t help noticing that Dotty turned her head away from their kissing.
Dotty had made it clear early on that though she disapproved of abortion, she disapproved of miscegenation also.
Earth was like that—a diminished pool of resources upon which various groups pulled and picked like vultures over one meager meal, each in hatred and seclusion of all others.
On that first day they’d met, they’d driven around after dinner in Joe’s dilapidated little fly car, looking at neighborhoods, flying over empty space.
Earth had a lot of empty, ruined areas.
“Population has been falling since the migrations started,” Joe said. “A lot of areas are just closed off, fenced off. Some of them are polluted beyond recovery and some....” He shrugged. “There’s not enough people left to care for. The people who cared have long since gone to space.”
Used to the tiny, bustling cities of terraformed Mars, and to tourism in the tunnels of the moon, the warrens of the asteroid belt, Ingrid felt lost in these huge empty spaces, so lost it was hard to conceive, hard to believe that a world as large, as strong as Earth could be dying. Dying at last, irretrievably.
She looked at Joe.
He had the car on automatic as they flew over the deserted and ruined areas of Earth. He looked out the window and something that might be tears sparkled in his velvet-soft eyes.
“Why don’t you emigrate?” she asked. “Do you love Earth that much? Why don’t you go to Mars? Your work is loved there.”
He looked at her, surprised, as if the idea had never occurred to him, and stared at her as if he doubted her sanity. Then his eyes softened, and his laughter rippled through, like a curtain being opened. A laughter of half-relief, half-loss. “Oh, babe. The spacer colonies wouldn’t have me. I’m a black m
an.”
Joe took her by the hand and led her to the door, mumbling stiff little correct thanks to Dotty.
Only the pressure of his hand on hers, only the slight trembling at the edges of his voice told Ingrid that he felt some deep emotion. What the emotion was—happiness to see her, fear for her, relief that she was well, as was the baby—Ingrid couldn’t tell.
Joe took her suitcase, and led her to his fly—the same small, dilapidated purple fly in which they’d gone on their first date.
It wasn’t until she was inside, strapped into the seat—Joe having checked over the seatbelt, ensuring it didn’t unduly constrict the baby—that Joe broke down and knelt on the floor beside her, and put his head in her lap and whispered, “Oh, babe, babe, what are we going to do?”
“That’s not true,” Ingrid had said, in that flycar, all those years ago, while Joe took her on her first flying tour of the non-tourist areas near the tunnel from the space. “That’s not true.” She remembered priming her lips, and hearing her own voice all edgy, civics-class prissy. “Mars doesn’t discriminate on the basis of race or religion, or origin.”
Joe had looked at her with his soft-sad look, the one that she was starting to recognize as his look of despair, when he couldn’t explain things to her. Then he’d smiled, ruefully, and said, “You’re right. But, at any rate, they don’t want me.”
He’d taken her to her touristy hotel and refused to come in for a nightcap, and she thought that was the last she’d see of Joe Michaels, sculptor extraordinaire and, obviously, a confused Earthling.
But the next morning he had called her and they’d spent most of her three months on Earth together. Together every minute.
Ingrid put her hand on the back of Joe’s head, and patted him distractedly.
He wore his hair very short and, though she’d have sworn it had been pitch black just three months ago, it was now entwined with silver hairs. Had he worried that much?
“What’s wrong?” she asked. “What’s wrong, love?”
“The visa,” he said. He sniffled and it was a strong, unmistakable sniffle, nothing like Dotty’s lady-like whiffs. “They denied me a visa again. And you. Because you’re pregnant. Pregnant by an Earther.”
“I see,” Ingrid said. She felt very tired and the baby kicked within her, but she tried to make her voice strong. Joe had always been the strong one, but now she must support him.
She saw many things she’d never been able to see, never been able to understand when they’d first got together.
And suddenly, suddenly, like a fire burning within her, she felt very happy that she had hidden with Dotty for those three long months, that the baby was still alive and strong within her. “Then we’ll have to find a place to hide until the baby is born,” she said.
Six months after returning to Marstown, six months of daily calls to Joe to hear his soft, low voice, his laughter, his comments full of that cutting wit that reached something deep within her, something no other man, no other human being had ever reached, Ingrid had decided to go back to Earth.
This time, she’d had to ask for a visa from Earth—a resident visa.
It had come together in no time at all—unlike Joe’s visa to Mars, which had been blocked again and again and again, with the vague excuse that Joe had undesirable characteristics.
They’d never told Ingrid what the characteristics were.
She suspected it was his lack of respect for authority.
As they sat in the fly, in the driveway of Dotty’s little rounded workmen’s cottage in the outskirts of Goldport, a voice sounded, out of nowhere, surrounding them: Warning, the voice blared. You are the subject of suspicion by the peace keepers of Earth. Do not attempt to take off or make any sudden moves. We will be searching your fly for the presence of a woman with an unauthorized condition.
Ingrid didn’t know what to make of it.
But the voice galvanized Joe into action. Jumping up, muttering who knew what under his breath, he programmed a take-off route, his fingers fast and assured on the keyboard of the flycar.
As they took off almost vertically and Ingrid, pushed into her seat, tasting bile risen to her throat, she managed to ask, “What?”
“Peacekeepers,” Joe said. His fingers danced on the keyboard. “They’ve been following me around. They’ve been raiding safehouses.”
And while they took off, the viewport showing them narrowly missing the steel-blue side of a hovering police fly, Ingrid thought that at least Dotty’s feelings had been justified.
They’d been married for three years, and living together in their studio apartment at the edge of the tourist section of Goldport.
Just a vast room with broad windows. The bed took up a little corner of it, as did the miniscule, outdated cooker, and the rope on which they hung their changes of clothes.
Most of the space was taken up by rock and chisels, clay, paint, unfinished canvas.
Ingrid’s own work was becoming known, but nothing like Joe’s, which was bought in every corner of the human worlds.
And though Ingrid realized this was not the best place to bring up a child, she couldn’t understand why Joe’s face closed so when she told him she was pregnant.
“I thought you liked children,” she said, defensively, feeling a little offended that he didn’t want this, the product of their love—as much a joint work as their art.
“I love children,” he said. “And I would love your child.” But his eyes had gone that veiled, shaded softness she’d come to recognize, and he whispered, “I just hope it’s a girl.”
“Where are we going?” Ingrid asked, out of breath, pressed into the seat, the baby kicking frantically within her as though looking around for a way to escape the added pressure of acceleration. “Where are we going?”
“To the tunnel,” he said.
Twisting her head by an effort of will, Ingrid looked out the rear viewport of the fly and saw the steel blue police cruiser still in pursuit.
“I thought we didn’t have a visa,” she said.
“We don’t,” Joe said.
Ingrid stood in the medical center, three months pregnant and cursing Earth’s slowness to do this. The medical center itself seemed designed to drive an ill person to the grave: a large, cavernous space with no chairs to sit on, and a long, long counter separating the ill from the medtechs, as nurses and medical assistants were uniformly known on Earth.
Sick people sat on the floor, in whichever pattern and waited, waited, waited.
Every once in a while a name was called and either a medtech cautiously opened the door at the end of the counter to admit a patient to the sancto sanctorum of the inner rooms where tests were run by de-facto med machines, or test results were announced to a patient, in a hushed voice, by a medtech leaning earnestly over the counter.
Ingrid had already been in and been scanned by the med machines. So, now, she stood at the counter and waited for her test results.
On Mars, she would have been tested months ago—she and the baby. She would have known by now if anything at all was likely to go wrong with the pregnancy.
But Earth’s health care was slow and slapdash, working—if it could be said to work—on the principle that the more serious the illness the longer the line, the more painful the waiting period.
The young man who finally came up to the counter and said, “Mrs Michaels, we have your results,” was a grave young man—light brown color, with slick black hair, and a serious, intent expression on his oval face. He spoke very quickly, as if he didn’t want to hear what he said. “This is the result.” He handed her over an electro paper imprinted with tiny black characters. “As you can see, your baby would display antisocial characteristics, and we advise you to have it aborted. The list of abortion centers is at the bottom and your insurance will cover it fully.”
“What?” Ingrid’s head swam. She felt sick, and smelled the sweat of the other patients suddenly, too sharply, too strongly. “What?”
&n
bsp; “Your baby displays antisocial characteristics and we....”
“How can it be antisocial?. It’s a three-month-old fetus.” Her voice rang out loud, like a scream in her own ears. No one, she noticed, turned to look.
The young man sighed. He looked all around, his eyes darting, darting, then looked at the paper. He opened his hands. “Look, Mrs. Michaels. You’re pregnant with a boy.”
“And...?” Was this everyone’s obsession, that she should only have girls?
“Well,” the young man licked his lips and stepped back, as if afraid she would slug him across the counter. “Well... your husband is of African ancestry, see, and if you look at statistics, there is a genetic tendency for black men to commit more crimes.”
“What?” Her head felt as if it swam on the end of her neck, like a ball ill-balanced on a straw. “But—”
“Look, it’s a fact of life, that’s all. And with such statistics, we can’t really expect the government of Earth to support your baby. So, so as not to impose on the commonwealth, not to make us support the costs of violence later in life, we’re asking you to abort this fetus. If you do not comply, a court order can be pursued.”
Ingrid didn’t hear the rest of it. Her dizziness, the revulsion at such naked, unimpeded racism, colluded with the queasiness she’d felt ever since she’d first got pregnant, and Ingrid threw up on the floor, next to the counter, before the horrified eyes of the med tech. How could strangers decide the life and death of her baby before he was even fully formed?
“We can’t go to the tunnel,” she said. The tunnel was the popular name to the wormhole that connected to the outer planets. “Not without a visa. The guards—”
“Watch me,” Joe said, his teeth clenched, making his voice sound funny. “Just watch me.”
“Genocide is what it’s called, babe,” Joe said. He sat on their bed, and looked at her with his softest, saddest gaze. “It’s been going on for the last twenty years.”
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