Gravity Box and Other Spaces

by Mark Tiedemann

  “What a bitch, huh?” Lora said. She shrugged and made a smile. “It’s still a kind of immortality.”

  Audry frowned. “No, it’s not. It’s a cheat. Time dilation is not the same as living forever.”

  “Of course,” Lora said, stepping away, “it’s not actual immortality for you, either. It’s what? A thousand years?”

  “They don’t know the upper limit yet. And by the time we get there they might have found a new way to extend it.”

  “Well, the first voyage is supposed to take about two hundred years objective. I’ll only experience about nine months or so in subjective time.”

  “But you’ll be gone! You won’t be here!”

  The petulance in Audry’s voice surprised Lora. She had heard it once or twice before, but not with such force. Audry’s face distorted, the effort to hold back tears narrowing her eyes.

  “There’s always—” Audry began, then stepped back. “No, I guess not.”

  “This is better,” Lora said.

  “How do you figure that?”

  “Come on! My genetic make-up isn’t compatible with the longevity process, so if I stay here I get to grow old normally and die. Long before that, we’d fall apart, and you’d go somewhere else—”

  “Stop.”

  “I’d be a burden, unattractive to boot.”

  “That’s enough!”

  “I’m being honest.”

  “You’re wallowing in it!”

  “Hey!” Jeff came into the room. “If we’re going to fight about this, let’s all fight!”

  Lora bit back a sharp response to him. Then she thought of the last argument they had, though she could not remember over what, and how wonderful the reconciliation had been, and how within fifteen or twenty years she would lose her youth and vigor, while he—

  “I need privacy,” she said.

  “You’ve had all morning,” Jeff said. “Much more is self-pity.” He held up the report. “This is one lab. What we do now is get another opinion.”

  Lora felt her control slip. “I don’t think so. Being told once is hard enough.”

  “Jeff—” Audry said, a warning quiet in her voice.

  “What? So on the off-chance these people did something wrong, you die for not finding out?”

  “No, I don’t die. I take the Orion program.”

  “How is that not dying? You won’t be here for a couple of centuries. What do we do, play vids while you’re gone to remind us that you used to be part of this family?”

  Lora laughed, a sarcastic release of dismay, “Well, excuse me for having an option.”

  Lora pushed away from the island and stomped through the side door. She made it to her room before either of the others caught up with her. She slammed the door and threw the bolt.

  Each of them had a room apart, their own private space, to be entered only with permission. Lora suspected Audry used her room the least of the three. Until recently, Jeff tended to be more private than either Audry or Lora. But, the dynamics of the relationship had evolved, shifted, rolled with the waves of uncertain circumstance. Lora had been in a couple of relationships before this one in which that capacity to adapt had been too limited, and things got knocked apart. This one, though, seemed to work.

  Till now.

  Leaning against the door, she was confronted by the contents of her room. A cork bulletin board above a small desk held overlapping snapshots of their lives together—trips, parties, an odd house picture or two, and off-guard portraits of personal silliness. Above her neatly-made bed hung a painting Jeff had done of her when they were still dating. She was looking past his shoulder, at something that had put a smile in her eyes. She was nude, but the cross-hatching of shadows complicated a clear view of her body, revealing it in frustrating segments. There was the hint of perspiration.

  The painting faced an antique chestnut armoire. Within it hung some of Lora’s favorite clothes and a description of the provenance of the armoire Audry had tracked down. She would have to leave it all behind when she left.

  Lora went to the bed and sat down. She rarely used this room to sleep. She could not remember the last time she had slept alone. Time to get used to that again, she thought.

  She stretched out on the double bed, drew her knees up, and groped under the covers for the pillow. Maybe a long sleep, van Winkle style, would change everything. Previous interstellar missions used something like that, but breakthroughs in drive technology—not to mention telemetry and shielding—had rendered all that irrelevant.

  Should I stay and hope for another breakthrough? After all, through normal medicine I might have at least another sixty or seventy years. Without the advent of the new antiagathic treatments, that was near immortality to past generations.

  By any measure it was a long life. And who knew but that within those six decades her condition—the precise matrix of her genes—might turn out to be an obstacle easily overcome.

  But that was not the only consideration.

  She sat up at a knock on her door. She stared at it in silence, thinking she had imagined it. But it came again, followed by the knob turning.

  “Lor?”

  Audry. Stunned, Lora groped for something to say. The rule was, until she emerged on her own, privacy was an absolute. Disturbing it this way violated their mutual understanding.

  “Lor, come on, we need to discuss this.”

  “Privacy!” Lora called.

  “Fuck privacy; brooding won’t fix this. We need to talk.”

  Lora unlocked the door and stepped back. The knob turned again, a moment passed, and Audry entered her room. She took three steps in and folded her arms.

  “Jeff said I should wait—”

  “Jeff knows the rules.”

  “I just think the longer we let this go the worse it will be. Maybe he’s right, maybe another lab—”

  “Wait, wait. Before this whole immortality thing became viable, we talked about going into space. The three of us. We were making plans, if I remember correctly.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “But this came along and now everything’s different?”

  “Part of the reason I wanted to do that was to see the future. I think Jeff felt the same. But now we can see it just by living long enough. I don’t know about you, but I like it here.”

  “I do, too, but it might get just a little bit boring after a few hundred years, don’t you think?”

  “Not if you’re with people you love.”

  “That’s not fair, and it’s not the point.”

  “Well, what is the point? You get one test done, and it’s over? You won’t even consider trying again?”

  “The test is the same. It’s your genome. They map it. They look for certain markers, and that’s it. You’re either suitable or you’re not.”

  “Your mind is made up?”

  “No! It has nothing to do with my mind being made up or unmade or anything! It’s science!”

  Audry grunted sarcastically.

  “You may not think much of science,” Lora said, “but you didn’t hesitate to take advantage of it.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Lora turned away. “Nothing. Look, I need to sort my own head out, all right?”

  “We need—”

  “—to talk, yes, I know. We will. When I’m ready.”

  “Promise?”

  “Of course. Haven’t we always talked things through?”

  Audry nodded. “Okay. I’ll—we’ll—”

  “Out. Please.”

  Audry looked like she was about to hug Lora, but changed her mind, nodded, and left, closing the door quietly. Lora locked her door again. Then she went to her bed, fell across it, and began sobbing.

  Lora had forgotten how large their house was. With three incomes, all of them substantial, they could afford a lot of space. Four bedrooms, a den, a living room, kitchen and dining room, a library, and two fully-equipped offices, one for Jeff and the other for Audr
y. The house formed a cordon around a garden and patio where Lora had spent many a morning with coffee and whatever book she was reading. Audry had taken care of the garden before Lora joined Jeff and her, but over the years, more and more, Lora had tended it. It had become the place where important meetings happened. No one had planned it that way; it simply became that way.

  Now she sat in the middle of it, waiting. She had been gone for a bit more than a year by her reckoning of time. It seemed strange that this place did not feel strange to her, but wonderfully, comfortably familiar. She had changed out of her ship-skinnies into a dress bought at a port shop, a shimmering turquoise wrap that seemed to shift and rearrange of its own accord, contouring her body.

  Through the windows into the house, she kept gazing at a painting hanging on the wall between Jeff’s and Audry’s rooms, a desert landscape with an absurdly twisted cactus in the center, the limbs bending into shapes that seemed simultaneously natural and Escher-esque. It was the only new thing she had found.

  The sliding doors opened. Lora turned her head to see Jeff coming through them wine in hand. He was naked, body almost as perfect as she remembered. He stopped mid-stride when he saw her sitting there.

  “Hey, Lora!” He set down his wine and came toward her, arms wide.

  She stepped happily into the hug. She breathed him in, searching for the familiar in every sensation. He smelled more or less as she remembered, but there was something added, a kind of flat odor underlying the nascent sweat.

  She stepped back to look at his smile. His eyes danced, then shifted left and right. “Can I get you anything? You must be tired.”

  “I—”

  “Lora, hi!” Audry hurried toward her from the patio doors. “I thought I heard your voice!”

  She wore shorts and nothing else. She looked thin. They hugged briefly. Lora enjoyed the soft contours of Audry’s body against hers. She breathed in her familiar scent, sweet and fresh. The embrace was brief. Audry pulled away first.

  “Let me get us drinks and something to eat. I’ll be right back.” A few moments later she reemerged with a tray bearing glasses, a filled decanter, and a cheese plate.

  “Did you tell her?” Audry said.

  “No, I didn’t get a chance yet,” Jeff said.

  “Well, don’t waste time! She’s leaving soon!”

  “Okay, okay—”

  “I’m here a month,” Lora said.

  “Wink of an eye,” Audry said. “We should have sex. Right now.”

  Jeff held up a hand. “News first, right?”

  “Right.” Audry poured drinks. “They refined the technique. You may qualify now. You can be retested.”

  “Oh.” She accepted the glass, sipped. She had been expecting wine, but was some kind of orange drink.

  “I read about—what was it? Thirty years ago? Time—” He waved at the air, fingers flexing, and laughed. “Anyway, yeah, about then, they found a way to rewrite the specific codes blocking the treatment for people like—well, like you.”

  “Thirty years ago?” Lora questioned.

  “Something like that,” Audry replied. “Isn’t that exciting?”

  “I guess it’s a good thing I went with Orion, then.”

  They looked at her blankly.

  “I’d have died before they figured it out.”

  Audry’s face changed. She looked stricken, almost inconsolable.

  “That would have been—” Jeff began. “I guess you did choose right. But we’ve missed you.”

  “I missed you, too.” Audry’s expression softened a little, but she kept looking at Jeff as if waiting for something.

  “Hey,” she said, “maybe we should have sex. I don’t know about you two, but it’s been over a year for me.”

  “A year?” Audry said. “Was there someone before, then?”

  “Yeah. You two.”

  Jeff laughed and Audry, tentatively, smiled. After an awkward pause, she pushed her shorts down.

  “I still don’t qualify.”

  Audry and Jeff stared at the report on the screen, their expressions unreadable. The silence extended, working on Lora’s nerves.

  “Tragic,” Lora said. “But I’m not sure if I can take being told again that I won’t live forever.”

  “So you won’t try again?” Audry said.

  “No.”

  Jeff laughed. “You know, this is interesting. When this all came out, the idea of living to a hundred was not a death sentence. Now suddenly with only six or seven centuries of life left, it is?”

  “Everything’s relative,” Audry said.

  “Sure, but so fast?”

  “What, in your opinion, would be slow enough?”

  Lora’s dread resolved into acute disappointment. They had been fighting. She recognized the signs easily after years of sharing a life with them. Audry was sulking, not yet ready to abandon her anger, and Jeff was trying to be casually reasonable, as if whatever transpired between them that was ugly meant nothing and would evaporate along with the raised voices and accusations.

  Jeff sighed. “The viral recoding that’s supposed to shut off our aging processes is linked to both nucleic DNA and mitochondrial DNA. Certain markers have to be present in both for it to be both a safe procedure and effective.”

  “Do you really know what all that means?” Audry asked. “Or are your just parroting what you’ve read?”

  “Both, really,” Jeff said, still managing a calm voice. “I don’t understand the why of any of it. But it means that a certain set of genes have to be present, in a certain order, so that the treatment works instead of killing you. Loosely, it’s the same kind of thing you find when a virus infects a population and certain people simply aren’t affected. According to our profiles,” he pointed from himself to Audry, “those genes are right where they need to be. But in Lora’s case they aren’t. Which means the treatment would probably be fatal.”

  “Or simply ineffective,” Audry said.

  “In a small percentage of cases,” Jeff said, his voice rising finally. He looked at Lora. “What do you want to do?”

  “I suppose since they had two breakthroughs, I might be lucky enough that a third will happen before too long.”

  “But?”

  Lora looked at them. “You know, I’ve been home now three weeks and neither of you has asked me once what it was like.”

  Audry frowned. “What was what like?”

  “The voyage.”

  Audry looked chagrined. Jeff shrugged. “The whole thing was live on the comm. We watched.”

  “But you couldn’t know what I was feeling.” She sighed. “What am I going to do? Next month another mission is leaving. Longer, this time. I’ve been offered a slot.”

  Jeff nodded.

  “What about us?” Audry said.

  “You’ll be here when I come back.”

  “But—so you’re not going to do another test?”

  Lora stood. “I’m going for a walk.”

  “We need to settle this!” Audry said.

  “I think you just did.”

  “I hope I die first.” Lora mused.

  Audry drew back to study her face in the fragment of light from the hall doorway. Sweat dappled her cheek. Her breath came warm, struggling for control. “Why would you say that?”

  “He loves you. I don’t want to be the one watching him grieve.”

  “Christ, that’s—”

  “Cold? Greedy? I admit it, I’m a greedy bitch.”

  “I’m impressed with your self-possession.” Audry laughed. “It’s not. I’m not. I mean, I don’t have myself. Jeff does.”

  “So why isn’t he here right now?”

  “Man’s gotta sleep sometime.”

  Lora laughed, reached a hand across Audry’s hip, and trailed fingers along it, down her thigh.

  “Soft,” Lora said.

  “What is?”

  “You.”

  “Am I now? So you intend to leave me behind to watch Jeff grieve
for you? Add sadistic to your list of qualities.”

  “At times. But you have to admit, I’m good at this.”

  Motiles worked in the house and the garden outside, maintaining it to a standard of perfection Lora found unsettling. Neither Jeff nor Audry seemed to be home. The air inside had the same smell and consistency older shipboard recycling systems spewed out. Not stale but not fresh, either. She went to the screen in the den and touched the center.

  Audry’s face came on. “Hello. Give me a sec while I scan. Oh! Lora, hi! Make yourself at home, we should be back soon. We took a jaunt to the Antarctic this week. Not sure when you’re seeing this, but our return is scheduled soon. Glad you’re back!” Her face vanished.

  Lora decided to take a walk and headed for the park. She barely noticed the two miles, legs scissoring through the distance, fueled by disappointment mixed with anger at Audry and Jeff for scheduling a trip when they knew she would be home. They had been keeping in touch through an epistolary communication, made slightly easier by a new method of quantum tunneling, but their transmissions kept getting longer and longer about less and less. Lora had stopped responding about a month before deceleration back into the system, which would have been—she was still slow at the calculation—about four years objective time.

  At least they went somewhere, she thought, relieved. They had spent nearly all of Lora’s last voyage in the house, almost three centuries. The atavistic meanderings in their missives reflected off the walls around them, even though they kept tabs on the world through the comm. It was hardly adequate. They seemed to be losing touch or perhaps were being stretched thin, like a lake many miles across but only an inch deep.

  She found the cluster of elms where she liked to sit sometimes to think. The trees could not possibly be the same ones, but the park had been carefully preserved almost exactly as she remembered it. The space was as familiar as her own room.

  Few others were in the park and of those she saw many were, surprisingly, aged. Lora saw gray hair, wrinkles. She wondered if a new cosmetic fad had taken hold, but as she watched one couple she realized that they probably were as old as they looked. She saw no one who might be in the thirty-or-younger profile.