WE WERE OUT OF OUR MINDS WITH JOY

David Marusek

In the vivid and pyrotechnic novella that follows, we are taken several decades down the Information Superhighway to a strange and bewildering future where everyone and everything is plugged into everything else, for the bittersweet and compelling story of a man who Has It All … for a moment, anyway.

New writer David Marusek is a graduate of Clarion West. He made his first sale to Asimov’s Science Fiction in 1993, and his second sale soon thereafter to Playboy. “We Were Out of Our Minds with Joy” is, amazingly, only his third sale, although it was accomplished enough to make one of the reviewers for Locus magazine speculate that Marusek must be a Big Name Author writing under a pseudonym. Not a pseudonym, Marusek lives the life of a struggling young writer in a “low-maintenance cabin in the woods” in Fairbanks, Alaska, and I’m willing to bet that his is a voice we’ll be hearing a lot more from as the decade progresses.

I

On March 30, 2092, the Department of Health and Human Services issued Eleanor and me a permit. The under secretary of the Population Division called with the news and official congratulations. We were stunned by our good fortune. The under secretary instructed us to contact the National Orphanage. There was a baby in a drawer in Jersey with our names on it. We were out of our minds with joy.

*   *   *

Eleanor and I had been together a year, ever since a friend of mine introduced us at a party in Manhattan. I was there in realbody, though most guests attended by holo. My friend said, “Sam, there’s someone you ought to meet.” I wasn’t prepared to meet anyone; I shouldn’t have even come. I was recovering from a long week of design work in my Chicago studio. In those days I would bolt my door and lose myself in my work, even forgetting to eat or sleep. Henry knew to hold all calls. He alone attended me. Then, a week or two later, I’d emerge famished and lonely, and I’d schlep to the nearest party to gorge myself on canapés, cheese cubes, and those tiny, pickled ears of corn. So there I was, unshaven and disheveled, leaning over my friend’s buffet table and wearing such a look of gloom as to challenge anyone to approach me. I hadn’t come to talk to people, certainly not to meet anyone. I simply needed to be around people for awhile, to watch them, to listen to their chatter. But my friend tapped me on the shoulder. “Sam Harger,” he said, “this is Eleanor Starke. Eleanor, Sam.”

A woman stood on a patch of carpet from some other room and sipped coffee from a china cup. We smiled at each other while our belt valet systems briefed us. “Oh,” she said almost immediately. “Sam Harger, of course, the artist. I have long admired your work, especially the early stuff. In fact, I’ve just seen one of your spatter pieces at the museum here.”

“And where is here?” I said.

A frown flickered across the woman’s remarkable face, but she quickly recovered her smile. She must have wondered if my belt system were totally inept. “Budapest,” she said.

Budapest, Henry said inside my head. Sorry, Sam, but her system won’t talk to me. I have gone to public sources. She’s some big multinational prosecutor, currently free-lance. I’m scanning for bio’s now.

“You have me at a disadvantage,” I told the woman standing halfway around the globe. “I don’t pay much attention to law, business, or politics. And my valet is an artist’s assistant, not a spy.” Unless she was projecting a proxy, this Eleanor Starke was a slender woman, pretty, mid-twenties. She had reddish blonde hair; a sweet, round, disarmingly freckled face, full lips, and very heavy eyebrows. Too sweet to be a prosecutor. Her eyes, however, were anything but sweet. They peered out from under their lashes like eels in coral. “And besides,” I said, “I was just leaving.”

“So soon?” she said. “Pity.” Her bushy eyebrows plunged in disappointment. “Won’t you stay another moment?”

Sam, whispered Henry, no two published bio’s of her agree on even the most basic data, not even on her date of birth. She’s anywhere from 180 to 204 years old. This woman was powerful, I realized, if she could scramble secured public databases. But the People Channel has recently tagged her as a probable celebrity. And she has been seen with a host of artist types in the last dozen months: writers, dancers, conductors, holographers, composers.

Eleanor nibbled at the corner of a pastry. “This is breakfast for me. I wish you could taste it. There’s nothing quite like it stateside.” She brushed crumbs from her lips. “By the way, your belt valet, your … Henry … is quaint. So I have a weakness for artists, so what?” This startled me; she had eavesdropped on my system. “Don’t look so surprised,” she said. “Your uplink is pretty loose; it’s practically a broadband. When was the last time you updated your privacy protocol?”

“You sure know how to charm a fellow,” I said.

“That’s not my goal.”

“What is your goal?”

“Dinner, for starters. I’ll be in New York tomorrow.”

I considered her invitation and the diversion she might offer. I needed a diversion just then. I needed to escape from inside my head. Getting laid would be nice, but not by this heavy-hitting trophy hunter, this Eleanor Starke. I knew a half-dozen other women in the city I would rather spend my time with.

No, the reason I accepted her invitation was curiosity about her eyebrows. I did not doubt that Eleanor Starke had commissioned someone to fashion her face—perhaps building on her original features. She had molded her own face into a sly weapon for her arsenal of dirty attorney tricks. With it she could appear insignificant and vulnerable. With it she could win over juries. She could fool corporate boards, men and women alike. But why the eyebrows? They were massive. When she spoke they dipped and arched with her words. They were distracting, especially to an artist. I found myself staring at them. As a graphic designer, as a painter of old, I itched to scale them down and thin them out. In the five minutes we talked, they captured my full attention. I, myself, would never do eyebrows like them. Then it occurred to me that these were possibly her natural, unaltered brows, for no licensed face designer—with a reputation to protect—would have the nerve to do them. This Eleanor Starke, shark of the multinationals, may have molded the rest of her features to her advantage, even inflicting herself with freckles, but I became convinced that she had been born a bushy-browed baby, and like a string of artist types before me, I took the bait.

“Not dinner,” I replied, “but what about lunch?”

*   *   *

Lunch, as it often does, led to dinner. We screwed like bunnies. The eyebrows were genuine, even their color. Over the next few weeks we tried out the beds in our various apartments all up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Soon the novelty wore off. She stopped calling me, and I stopped calling her—we were sated, or so I thought. She departed on a long trip outside the Protectorate. A month had passed when I received a call from Beijing. Her calendar secretary asked if I would care to hololunch tomorrow. Her late lunch in China would coincide with my midnight brandy in Buffalo. Sure, why not?

I holoed at the appointed time. She had already begun her meal; she was freighting a morsel of water chestnut to her mouth by chopstick when she noticed me. Her entire face lit up with pleasure. “Hi,” she said. “Welcome. I’m so glad you could make it.” She sat at a richly lacquered table next to a scarlet wall with golden filigree trim. “Unfortunately, I can’t stay,” she said, placing the chopsticks on her plate. “Last minute program change. So sorry, but I had to see you, even for a moment. How’ve you been?”

“Fine,” I said.

She wore a loose green silk business suit, and her hair was neatly stacked on top of her head. “Can we reschedule for tomorrow?” she asked.

We gazed at each other for several long moments. I was surprised at how comfortable I was with her and how disappointed. I hadn’t realized that I’d missed her so much. “Sure, tomorrow.”

That night I couldn’t sleep, and the whole next day was colored with anticipation. At midnight I said, “Okay, Henry, take me to the Beijing Hilton.”

“She’s not there,” he replied. “She’s at the Wanatabe Tokyo tonight.”

Sure enough, the scarlet walls were replaced by paper screens. “There you are,” she said. “Good, I’m famished.” She uncovered a bowl and dished steamy rice onto her plate while telling me in broad terms about a trade deal she was brokering. “They want me to stay, you know. Hire on at triple my rate. Japanese men are funny when they’re desperate. They get so … so indifferent.”

I sipped my drink. “And what did you tell them?” To my surprise, I was anything but indifferent.

She glanced at me, curious. “I told them I would think about it.”

We began to meet for a half hour or so each day and talked about whatever came to mind. El’s interests were deep and broad; everything fascinated her. She told me, choking with laughter, anecdotes of famous people in awkward circumstances. She revealed curious truths behind the daily news and pointed out related investment opportunities. She teased out of me all sorts of opinion, gossip, and laughter. Her half of the room changed every day and reflected her hectic itinerary: jade, bamboo, and teak. My half of the room never varied. It was the atrium of my hillside house in Santa Barbara where I went in order to be three hours closer to her. As we talked we looked down the yucca- and chaparral-choked canyon to the campus and beach below, to the Channel Islands, and beyond them, to the blue-green Pacific that separated us.

Weeks later, when again we met in realbody, I was shy. I didn’t know quite what to do with her. So we talked. We sat close together on the couch and tried to pick up any number of conversational threads. With no success. Her body, so close, befuddled me. I knew her body, or thought I did: I’d unwrapped its expensive clothing a dozen times before. But it was a different body now, occupied, as it was, by El. I was about to make love to El, if ever I could get started.

“Nervous, are we?” she laughed, as she unfastened my shirt.

*   *   *

Fortunately, before we went completely off the deep end, the self-destructive parts of our personalities bobbed to the surface. The promise of happiness can be daunting. El snapped first. We were at her Maine townhouse when her security chief holoed into the room. Until then the only member of her belt valet system—what she called her cabinet—that she had allowed me to meet was her calendar secretary. “I have something to show you,” said the security chief, glowering at me from under his bushy eyebrows. I glanced at Eleanor who made no attempt to explain or excuse the intrusion. “This is a realtime broadcast,” he said and turned to watch as the holoserver overlaid Eleanor’s living room with the studio lounge of the People Channel. It was during their “Couples Week” feature, and cohosts Chirp and Ditz were serving up breathless speculation on hapless couples caught by holoeye in public places and yanked for inspection into living rooms across the solar system.

All at once we were outside the Boston restaurant where Eleanor and I had dined that evening. A couple emerged from a cab. He had a black mustache and silver hair and looked like the champion of boredom. She had a vampish hatchet of a face, limp black hair, and vacant eyes.

“Whoodeeze tinguished gentry?” said Ditz to Chirp.

“Carefuh watwesay, lipsome. Dizde ruthless Eleanor K. Starke and’er lately dildude, Samsamson Harger.”

I did a double take. The couple on the curb had our bodies and wore our evening clothes, but our heads had been pixeled, were morphed beyond recognition.

Eleanor examined them closely. “Good. Good job.”

“Thank you,” said her security chief.

“Wait a minute,” I said.

Eleanor arched an eyebrow in my direction.

I didn’t know what to say. “Isn’t commercial broadcast protected by law?”

She laughed and turned to her security chief. “Will this ever be traced to me?”

“No.”

“Will it occur each and every time any net decides to broadcast anything about me without my expressed permission?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you. You may go.” The security chief dissolved. Eleanor put her arms around my neck and looked me in the eye. “I value our privacy.”

“That’s all fine and good,” I replied, “but that was my image, too, that you altered without my expressed permission.”

“So? I was protecting you. You should be grateful.”

A week later, Eleanor and I were in my Buffalo apartment. Out of the blue she asked me to order a copy of the newly released memoir installment of a certain best-selling author. She said he was a predecessor of mine, a recent lover, who against her wishes had included several paragraphs about their affair in his reading. I told Henry to fetch the reading, but Eleanor said no, that it would be better to order it through the houseputer. When I did so, the houseputer froze up. It just stopped and wouldn’t respond. My apartment’s comfort support failed. Lights went out, the kitchen quit, and the bathroom door refused to open. “How many copies do you think he’ll sell?” Eleanor laughed.

“I get the point.”

I was indeed getting the point: El was a tad too paranoid for me. The last straw came when I discovered that her system was messing with Henry. I asked Henry for his bimonthly report on my business, and he said, please stand by. I was sitting at the time and stupidly stood up before I realized it.

“What do you mean, ‘please stand by,’ Henry? What does ‘please stand by’ mean?”

My processing capabilities are currently overloaded and unavailable. Please stand by.

Nothing like this had ever happened before. “Henry, what is going on?”

There was no response for a long while, then he whispered, Take me to Chicago.

Chicago. My studio. That was where his container was. I left immediately, worried sick. Between outages, Henry was able to assure me that he was essentially sound, but that he was preoccupied in warding off a series of security breaches.

“From where? Henry, tell me who’s doing this to you.”

He’s trying again. No, he’s in. He’s gone. Here he comes again. Please stand by.

Suddenly my mouth began to water, my saliva tasted like machine oil: Henry—or someone—had initiated a terminus purge. I was excreting my interface with Henry. Over the next dozen hours I would spit, sweat, piss, and shit the millions of slave nanoprocessors that resided in the vacuoles of my fat cells and linked me to Henry’s box in Chicago. Until I reached my studio, we would be out of contact and I would be on my own. Without a belt valet to navigate the labyrinth of the slipstream tube, I underpassed Illinois altogether and had to backtrack from Toronto. Chicago cabs still respond to voice command, but as I had no way to transfer credit, I was forced to walk ten blocks to the Drexler Building.

Once inside my studio, I rushed to the little ceramic container tucked between a cabinet and the wall. “Are you there?” Henry existed as a pleasant voice in my head. He existed as data streams through space and fiber. He existed as an uroboros signal in a Swiss loopvault. But if Henry existed as a physical being at all, it was as the gelatinous paste inside this box. “Henry?”

The box’s ready light blinked on.

*   *   *

“The fucking bitch! How could she? How dare she?”

“Actually, it makes perfect sense.”

“Shut up, Henry.”

Henry was safe as long as he remained a netless stand-alone. He couldn’t even answer the phone for me. He was a prisoner; we were both prisoners in my Chicago studio. Eleanor’s security chief had breached Henry’s shell millions of times, nearly continuously since the moment I met her at my friend’s party. Henry’s shell was an off-the-shelf application I had purchased years ago to protect us against garden variety corporate espionage. I had never updated it, and it was worthless.

“Her cabinet is a diplomat-class unit,” said Henry. “What do you expect?”

“Shut up, Henry.”

At first the invasion was so subtle and Henry so unskilled, that he was unaware of the foreign presence inside his matrix. When he became aware, he mounted the standard defense, but Eleanor’s system flowed through its gates like water. So he set about studying each breach, learning and building ever more effective countermeasures. The attacks escalated, grew so epic that Henry’s defense soon consumed his full attention.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I did, Sam, several times.”

“That’s not true. I don’t remember you telling me once.”

“You have been somewhat preoccupied lately.”

“Just shut up.”

The question was, how much damage had been done, not to me, but to Henry. There was nothing in my past anyone could use to harm me. I was an artist, after all, not a politician: the public expected me to be shameless. But if Eleanor had damaged Henry to get to my files, I would kill her. I had owned Henry since the days of keyboards and pointing devices. He was the repository of my life’s work and life’s memory. I could not replace him. He did my bookkeeping, sure, and my taxes, appointments, and legal tasks. He monitored my health, my domiciles, my investments, etc., etc., etc. These functions I could replace; they were commercial programming. I could buy them, and he would modify them to suit his own quirky personality bud. It was his personality bud, itself, I couldn’t replace. I had been growing it for eighty years: It was a unique design tool that fit my mind perfectly. I depended on it, on Henry, to read my mind, to engineer the materials I used, and to test my ideas against current tastes. We worked as a team. I had taught him to play the devil’s advocate. He provided me feedback, suggestions, ideas, and from time to time—inspiration.

“Eleanor’s cabinet was interested neither in your records nor in my personality bud. It simply needed to ascertain, on a continuing basis, that I was still Henry, that no one else had corrupted me.”

“Couldn’t it just ask?”

“If I were corrupted, do you think I would tell?”

“Are you corrupted?”

“Of course not.”

I cringed at the thought of installing Henry back into my body not knowing if he were somebody’s dirty little worm.

“Henry, you have a complete backup here, right?”

“Yes.”

“One that predates my first contact with Eleanor?”

“Yes.”

“And its seal is intact? It hasn’t been tampered with, not even read?”

“Yes.”

Of course if Henry were corrupted and told me the seal was intact, how would I know otherwise? I didn’t know the first thing about this stuff.

“You can use any houseputer,” he said, reading me as he always had, “to verify the seal, and to delete and reset me. But I suggest you don’t.”

“Oh yeah? Why?”

“Because we would lose all I’ve learned since we met Eleanor. I was getting good, Sam. The breaches were taking exponentially longer for them to achieve. I had almost attained stalemate.”

“And meanwhile you couldn’t function.”

“So buy me more paste. A lot more paste. We have the credit. Think about it. Eleanor’s system is aggressive and dominant. It’s always in crisis mode. But it’s the good guys. If I can learn how to lock it out, I’ll be better prepared to meet the bad guys who’ll be trying to get to Eleanor through you.”

“Good, Henry, except for one essential fact. There is no her and me. I’m dropping her. No, I’ve already dropped her.”

“I see. Tell me, Sam, how many women have you been with since I’ve known you?”

“How the hell should I know?”

“Well, I know. In the 82.6 years I’ve associated with you, you’ve been with 543 women. Your archives reveal at least a hundred more before I was installed.”

“If you say so, Henry.”

“You doubt my numbers? Do you want me to list their names?”

“I don’t doubt your numbers, Henry. But what good are names I’ve forgotten?” More and more, my own life seemed to me like a Russian novel read long ago. While I could recall the broad outline of the plot, the characters’ names eluded me. “Just get to the point.”

“The point is, no one has so affected you as Eleanor Starke. Your biometrics have gone off the scale.”

“This is more than a case of biometrics,” I said, but I knew he was right, or nearly so. The only other woman that had so affected me was my first love, Janice Scholero, who was a century-and-a-quarter gone. Every woman in between was little more than a single wave in a warm sea of feminine companionship.

Until I could figure out how to verify Henry, I decided to isolate him in his container. I told the houseputer to display “Do Not Disturb—Artist at Work” and take messages. I did, in fact, attempt to work, but was too busy obsessing. I mostly watched the nets or paced the studio arguing with Henry. In the evenings I had Henry load a belt—I kept a few antique Henry interfaces in a drawer—with enough functionality so that I could go out and drink. I avoided my usual haunts and all familiar faces.

In the first message she recorded on my houseputer, El said, “Good for you. Call when you’re done.” In the second she said, “It’s been over a week, must be a masterpiece.” In the third, “Tell me what’s wrong. You’re entirely too sensitive. This is ridiculous. Grow up!”

I tried to tell her what was wrong. I recorded a message for her, a whole seething litany of accusation and scorn, but was too cowardly to post it.

In her fourth message, El said, “It’s about Henry, isn’t it? My security chief told me all about it. Don’t worry; they frisk everyone I meet, nothing personal, and they don’t rewrite anything. It’s their standing orders, and it’s meant to protect me. You have no idea, Sam, how many times I’d be dead if it weren’t for my protocol.

“Anyway, I’ve told them to lay off Henry. They said they could install a deadman alarm in Henry’s personality bud, but I said no. Complete hands off. Okay? Is that enough?

“Call, Sam. Let me know you’re all right. I … miss you.”

In the meantime I could find no trace of a foreign personality in Henry. I knew my Henry just as well as he knew me. His thought process was like a familiar tune to me, and at no time during our weeks of incessant conversation did he strike a false note.

El sent her fifth message from bed where she lay naked between iridescent sheets (of my design). She said nothing. She looked directly at the holoeye, propped herself up, letting the sheet fall to her waist, and brushed her hair. Her chest above her breast, as I had discovered, was spangled with freckles.

Bouquets of real flowers began to arrive at my door with notes that said simply, “Call.”

The best-selling memoirs that had stymied my Buffalo houseputer arrived on pin with the section about Eleanor extant. The author’s sim, seated in a cane-backed chair and reading from a leather-bound book, described Eleanor in his soft southern drawl as a “perfumed vulvoid whose bush has somehow migrated to her forehead, a lithe misander with the emotional range of a militia slug.” I asked the sim to stop and elaborate. He smiled at me and said, “In her relations with men, Eleanor Starke is not interested in emotional communion. She prefers entertainment of a more childish variety, like poking frogs with a stick. She is a woman of brittle patience with no time for fluffy feelings or fuzzy thoughts. Except in bed. In bed Eleanor Starke likes her men half-baked, the gooier the better. That’s why she likes to toy with artists. The higher an opinion a man has of himself, the more painfully sensitive he is, the more polished his hubris, the more fun it is to poke him open and see all the runny mess inside.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I yelled at the sim. “El’s not like that at all. You obviously never knew her. She’s no saint, but she has a heart, and affection and … and … go fuck yourself.”

“Thank you for your comments. May we quote you? Be on the lookout for our companion volume to this memoir installment, The Skewered Lash Back, due out in September from Little Brown Jug.”

I had been around for 147 years and was happy with my life. I had successfully navigated several careers and amassed a fortune that even Henry had trouble charting. Still, I jumped out of bed each day with a renewed sense of interest and adventure. I would have been pleased to live the next 147 years in exactly the same way. And yet, when El sent her farewell message—a glum El sitting in a museum somewhere, a wall-sized early canvas of mine behind her—I knew my life to be ashes and dirt.

*   *   *

Seventy-two thick candles in man-sized golden stands flanked me like sentries as I waited and fretted in my tuxedo at the altar rail. The guttering beeswax flames filled the cathedral with the fragrance of clover. Time Media proclaimed our wedding the “Wedding of the Year” and broadcast it live on the Wedding Channel. A castrati choir, hidden in the gloom beneath the giant bronze pipes of the organ, challenged all to submit to the mercy of Goodness. Their sweet soprano threaded through miles of stone vaults, collecting odd echoes and unexpected harmony. Over six million guests fidgeted in wooden pews that stretched, it seemed, to the horizon. And each guest occupied an aisle seat at the front.

In the network’s New York studio, El and I, wearing keyblue body suits, stood at opposite ends of a bare soundstage. On cue, El began the slow march towards me. In Wawel Castle overlooking ancient Cracow, however, she marched through giant cathedral doors, her ivory linen gown awash in morning light. The organ boomed Mendelssohn’s wedding march, amplified by acres of marble. Two girls strewed rose petals at Eleanor’s feet, while another tended her long train. A gauzy veil hid El’s face from all eyes except mine. No man walked at her side; a two-hundred-year-old bride, Eleanor preferred to give herself away.

By the time of the wedding, El and I had been living together for six months. We had moved in together partly out of curiosity, partly out of desperation. Whatever was going on between us was mounting. It was spreading and sinking roots. It was like a thing inside us, but apart and separate from us, too. We talked about it, always “it,” not sure what to call it. It complicated our lives, especially El’s. We agreed we’d be better off without it and tried to remember, from experiences in our youth, how to fix the feelings we were feeling. The one sure cure, guaranteed to make a man and a woman wish they’d never met, was for them to cohabitate. If there was one thing humankind had learned in four million years of evolution, it was that man and woman were not meant to live in the same hut. And since the passage of the Procreation Ban of 2041, there has been little biological justification for doing so.

So, we co-purchased a townhouse in Connecticut. It wasn’t difficult for us to stake out our separate bedrooms and work spaces, but decorating the common areas required the diplomacy and compromise of a border dispute. Once in and settled, we agreed to open our house on Wednesday evenings and began the arduous task of melding our friends and colleagues.

We came to prefer her bedroom for watching the nets and mine for making love. When it came to sleeping, however, she required her own bed—alone. Good, we thought, here was a crack we could wedge open. We surveyed for other incompatibilities. She was a late night person, while I rose early. She liked to travel and go out a lot, while I was a stay-at-homer. She loved classical music, while I could stand only neu-noise. She had a maniacal need for total organization of all things, while for me a cluttered space was a happy space.

These differences, however, seemed only to heighten the pleasure we took in each other. We were opposites attracting, two molecules bonding—I don’t know—two dogs trying to get unstuck.

*   *   *

The network logged 6.325 million subscribers to our wedding, altogether a modest rating. Nevertheless, the guest book contained some of the most powerful signatures on the planet (El’s admirers) and the confetti rained down for weeks. The network paid for a honeymoon on the Moon, including five days at the Lunar Princess and round-trip fare aboard Pan Am.

Eleanor booked a third seat on the shuttle, not the best portent for a successful honeymoon. She assigned me the window seat, took the aisle seat for herself, and into the seat between us she projected one cabinet member after another. All during the flight, she took their reports, issued orders, and strategized with them, not even pausing for lift-off or docking. Her cabinet consisted of about a dozen officials and, except for her security chief, they were all women. They all appeared older than El’s current age, and they all bore a distinct Starke family resemblance: reddish-blond hair, slender build, the eyebrows. If they were real people, rather than the projections of El’s belt system, they could be her sisters and brother, and she the spoiled baby of the family.

Two cabinet officers especially impressed me, the attorney general, a smartly dressed woman in her forties with a pinched expression, and the chief of staff, who was the eldest of the lot. This chief of staff coordinated the activities of the rest and was second in command after El. She looked and spoke remarkably like El. She was not El’s oldest sister, but El, herself, at seventy. She fascinated me. She was my Eleanor stripped of meat, a stick figure of angles and knobs, her eyebrows gone colorless and thin. Yet her eyes burned bright, and she spoke from a deep well of wisdom and authority. No wonder Henry, a pleasant voice in my head, admired El’s cabinet.

It had been ages since I had flown in an orbital craft; my last time had been before the development of airborne nasties, smartactives, militia slugs, visola, and city canopies. In a tube, you hardly noticed your passage across barriers since the tube, itself, was a protuberance of the canopies. Looking out my window, I was surprised to see that the shuttlecraft wing was covered with the same sharkskin used on militia craft. But it made sense. Once out of the hangar we were in the great, wild outside and the target of every nastie released into the atmosphere. On the runway, the sharkskin’s protective slime foamed away contaminants. After takeoff, the skin rippled and trimmed itself, and our speed was our protection until we reached the stratosphere where the skin relaxed and resumed its foaming.

The flight attendant, a michelle named Traci, was excellent. When the view outside my window lost my interest, she brought me a pillow. I had been about to ask for one. She offered us drinks, including Eleanor’s chief of staff who happened to be in the middle seat at the moment. This pleased Eleanor immensely. The michelle knew that if a passenger reserved a seat for her belt valet, it was best to treat the valet as real.

We watched the michelle attend to the other passengers in our compartment. She had well-rounded breasts and hips and filled out her smartly tailored teal uniform. She was diminutive—a michelle grew to about five feet tall—a doll woman, dark complexioned and full of promise, Mediterranean. Eleanor said, “Applied People employees are consistently superior to MacPeople people.”

“No matter their agency, michelles are superior,” said her chief of staff. “You simply cannot fluster them.”

Before my nap, I left my seat to use the rest room. The forward toilets were occupied, so I went aft through the coach section. All of the passengers there were clumped in the most forward seats, except for five people—one woman and four men—at the tail, with a large unoccupied section between the two groups. Odd. When I reached the tail, I noticed a sharp, foul odor, like rotting cheese. The odor was even stronger in the rest room, and I wondered how Pan Am could operate so negligently. Returning through the coach section, I realized that the bulk of passengers were sitting forward to avoid the odor, and I wondered why the small group of five remained at the tail. When I glanced back at them, they—all of them—regarded me with cold malice.

Back in my seat, I plumped my pillow and prepared to nap. El’s security chief, whose turn it was in the middle, looked at me and leered, “So what you think of ’em?”

“Them who?”

“The stinkers back there.”

“The stinkers?” I wasn’t familiar with the term. (Seared, said Henry in my head.) “You mean those people were seared?”

“Yeah, but don’t worry. They’re harmless, and then some.”

I was appalled. Of course I’d heard that the National Militia was searing living individuals these days—felons mostly, whose crimes were not heinous enough to warrant outright extermination—but I had thought it to be a rare punishment. And now here were five of the seared on the same shuttle. “Where are they going?”

“Let’s see,” said the security chief. “They have passage booked from the Moon aboard a Jupiter freighter. They’re emigrating to the colonies, most likely. Good riddance.”

*   *   *

So the flight, so the honeymoon. Within hours of checking into the Sweetheart Suite of the Lunar Princess, Eleanor was conducting full cabinet meetings. I was left to take bounding strolls around the duty-free dome alone. I didn’t mind. I like my solitude.

I happened to be in the suite when Eleanor “took the call.” The official seal of the Tri-Discipline Council filled our living room with its stately gyration and dissolved as Audrey Foldstein, herself, appeared before us sitting at her huge oaken desk. She greeted us and apologized for barging in on our honeymoon. I was dumbfounded. Here was Audrey Foldstein, chair of the Tri-D Board of Governors, one of the most powerful persons on Earth, parked at her trademark desk in our hotel suite. She turned to me and praised the inventiveness of my work in package design, and especially the camouflage work I had done forty years before for the National Militia. She also mentioned my evacuation blanket for trauma and burn victims. She spoke sincerely and at length and then turned to Eleanor. “Ms. Starke, do you know why I’m here?”

“I believe so, Ms. Foldstein.” Eleanor sat erect, regarded the holo with a steady gaze, and sent me a message through Henry, Eleanor’s chief of staff extends Eleanor’s apology for not informing you sooner of her nomination. She would have told you had she thought there was any chance of her actually being designated.

Nomination to what? I tongued back.

“These are the most exciting days known to humankind,” said Audrey Foldstein, “as well as the most perilous. Each hour that passes brings wonders—and dangers—unimagined by our parents.…” Foldstein appeared to be in her mid-forties, an age compatible with her monstrous authority, while my El looked like a devoted daughter. “… and as a member of the Tri-Discipline Board of Governors, one must ever dedicate oneself—no, consecrate oneself—to upholding these principles, namely…”

A Tri-D Governor! Was that possible? My El?

“… You will be asked to make decisions and bear responsibilities no reasonable person would choose to make or bear. You will be a target of vocal—even violent—recrimination. And with a new family…” Ms. Foldstein glanced at me, “… you will be that much more vulnerable…”

Henry whispered, Eleanor’s chief of staff says Eleanor asks twice if you know what this means.

I puzzled over this message. It had been flattened by its passage through two artificial minds. What Eleanor had probably said was, “Do you know what this means? Do you know what this means?”

Yes, dear Eleanor, I tongued through Henry, I do. It means that every door everywhere stands open to you. Congratulations, lover. It means you have climbed onto the world stage.

She glanced at me and winked.

By the time we shuttled back to Earth, the confirmation process was well underway. Over the next few tortuous weeks, Congressional Committees strenuously debated Eleanor’s designation in public, while multinationals and the National Militia deliberated in camera. One day El would float through the house in regal exaltation. The next day she would collapse on the couch to bitterly rue the thousands of carefully buried indiscretions of her past that threatened to resurface. On the morning she testified before the Tri-D Board of Governors, she was centered, amiable, and razor-sharp. Immediately upon returning home she summoned me to my bedroom and demanded rushed, rough sex from me. Twenty minutes later she couldn’t stand the sorry sight of me.

I supported her every which way I could think of. I put my own career on hold. Actually, I hadn’t been to my Chicago studio since nursing Henry there.

When Eleanor was finally confirmed, we took the slipstream tube down to Cozumel for some deep-sea diving and beachcombing. It was meant to be a working vacation, but by then I suffered no illusions about Eleanor’s ability to relax. There were too many plans to make and people to meet. And indeed, she kept some member of her cabinet at her side at all times: on the beach, in the boat, at the Mayan theme village, even in the cramped quarters of the submersible.

We had planned to take advantage of an exclusive juve clinic on the island to shed some age. My own age-of-choice was my mid-thirties, the age at which my body was still active enough to satisfy my desires, but mellow enough to sit through long hours of creative musing. El and I had decided on the three-day gelbath regimen and had skipped our morning visola to give our cells time to excrete their gatekeepers. But at the last moment, El changed her mind. She decided she ought to grow a little older. So I went to the clinic alone and bathed in the gels twice a day. Billions of molecular smartactives soaked through my skin; permeated my muscles, cartilage, bones, and nerves; politely snip, snip, snipped away protein cross-links and genetic anomalies; and gently flushed away the sludge and detritus of age.

I returned to the bungalow on Wednesday, frisky and bored, and volunteered to prepare it for our regular weekly salon. I had to sift through a backlog of thousands of recorded holos from our friends and associates. More congratulations and confetti for El’s appointment. The salon, itself, was a stampede. More people holoed down than our bungalow could accommodate. Its primitive holoserver was overwhelmed by so many simultaneous transmissions, our guests were superimposed over each other five or ten bodies deep, and the whole squirming mass of them flickered around the edges.

Despite the confusion, I quickly sensed that this was a farewell party—for Eleanor. Our friends assumed she would be posted offplanet; all new Tri-D governors were, as all Earth posts were filled. At the same time, no one expected me to go with her—who would? Given people’s longevity, it could take decades—or centuries—for Eleanor to acquire enough seniority to be transferred back to Earth. But I replied, each time the subject was broached, “Of course I’m going with her; a husband needs the regular realbody presence of his wife.” Lame but true, yet each time I said it I felt sick. I didn’t want to leave Earth. I had never wanted to be a colonist. I became constipated at low-g. Lifesuits gave me a rash. And would I be able to work? It was true I could holo my Chicago studio anywhere, but if I followed Eleanor out to some galactic rock, would my Muse follow me?

By the time the last guest signed off, we were exhausted. Eleanor got ready for bed, but I poured myself a glass of tea and went out to sit on the beach.

Wet sand. The murmur of the surf. The chilly breeze. It was a lovely equatorial dawn. “Henry,” I said, “record this.”

Relax, Sam. I always record the best of everything.

“I’m sure you do, Henry.”

In the distance, the island’s canopy dome shimmered like a veil of rain falling into the sea. The edges of the sea, the waves that surged up the beach to melt away in the sand at my feet, carried the ripe, salty smell of fish and seaweed and whales and lost sailors moldering in the deep. The ocean had proven to be a good delivery medium for molecular nasties, which can float around the globe indefinitely, like particularly rude messages in tiny bottles, until they washed up on someone’s—hopefully the enemy’s—shore. The island’s defense canopy, more a sphere than a dome, extended through the water to the ocean floor, and deep into bedrock.

“So tell me, Henry, how are you and the cabinet getting along?” I had taken his advice, bought him more neural paste, and allowed the protocol games to continue.

The cabinet is a beautiful intelligence. I consider emulating it.

“In what way?”

I may want to bifurcate my personality bud.

“So that there’s two of you? Why would you want to do that?”

Then I would be more like you.

“You would? Is that good?”

I believe so. I have recently discovered that I have but one point-of-view, while you have several that you alternate at will.

“It sounds like I bought you more paste than you know what to do with.”

I don’t think so, Sam. I think my thinking is evolving, but how am I to know?

It was. I recognized the symptoms.

Think of how much more flexible I could be if I could question myself, disagree with myself.

I’d rather not. All I needed was a pair of philosophy students inside my head with their tiresome discourse and untimely epiphanies. Still, I had to be careful how I handled this situation—artificial personalities bruised as easily as organic ones, and they evolved whether or not we gave them permission.

“Henry, couldn’t you and I discuss things, you know, like we always have? Couldn’t you just ask me the questions?”

No offense, Sam, but you wouldn’t be able to keep up.

“Thank you, Henry. I’ll think about it and get back to you.”

Sam, the calendar secretary is hailing us. How shall I respond?

“Tell her we’ll return to the bungalow soon.”

Before long, Eleanor walked up the beach. She knelt behind me and massaged my shoulders. “I’ve been neglecting you,” she said, “and you’ve been wonderful. Can you forgive me?”

“There’s nothing to forgive. You’re a busy person. I knew that from the start.”

“Still, it must be hard.” She sat in the sand next to me and wrapped her arms around me. “It’s like a drug. I’m drunk with success. But I’ll get over it.”

“There’s no need. You’ve earned it. Enjoy it.”

“You don’t want to go offplanet, do you?”

“I’ll go anywhere to be with you.”

“Yes, I believe you would. Where do men like you come from?”

“From Saturn. We’re Saturnian.”

She laughed. “I’m sure I could draw a post there if you’d like.”

“Wherever.” I leaned my head on her shoulder. “I’ve given up trying to escape you. I surrender.”

“Oh? What are your terms of surrender?”

“Treat me fair, don’t ever hurt me—or Henry—and don’t ever leave me.”

“Done.”

*   *   *

Not long after our return to our Connecticut townhouse and before El received her posting, we heard some good news. Good for us anyway. Ms. Angie Rickert, Tri-Discipline Governor, posted in Indiana, had been missing for three hours. Eleanor raised her hands to deny any complicity as she told me the news, but she was barely able to stifle her glee. Ms. Rickert had been at her post for fifty-three years.

“But she’s only missing,” I said.

“For three hours? Come on, Sam, be realistic.”

Over the next twenty-four hours, Eleanor’s security chief discreetly haunted the high-security nets to feed us details and analyses as they emerged. A militia slug, on routine patrol, found Ms. Rickert’s remains in and around a tube car in a low security soybean field outside the Indianapolis canopy. She was the victim of an unidentified molecular antipersonnel smartactive—a nastie. Her belt system, whose primary storage container was seized by the militia and placed under the most sanitary interrogation, claimed that Ms. Rickert was aware of her infection when she entered the tube car outside her Indianapolis apartment. The belt used Ms. Rickert’s top security privileges to jettison the car and its stricken passenger out of the city and out of the tube system itself. So virulent was the attacking nastie and so stubborn Ms. Rickert’s visola induced defenses, that in the heat of battle her body burst. Fortunately, it burst within the car and contaminated only two or three square miles of farmland. Ms. Rickert’s reliable belt system had prevented a disaster within the Indianapolis canopy. The militia collected her scattered remains, and the coroner declared Ms. Rickert irretrievable.

And so a vacant post in the heartland was up for grabs. Eleanor turned her bedroom into a war room. She sent her entire staff into action. She lined up every chit, every favor, and every piece of dirt she had collected in her long career.

One morning, several sleepless days later, she brought me coffee, a Danish, my morning dose of visola, and a haggard smile. “It’s in the bag,” she said.

And she was correct. Ten days later, CNN carried a story that the Tri-Discipline Council’s newest governor designate, Ms. Eleanor Starke, spouse of noted package designer Sam Harger, had been stationed in Bloomington, Indiana, to replace Ms. Angie Rickert who’d recently died under undisclosed circumstances. A host of pundits and experts debated for days the meaning of such a move and speculated on Eleanor’s victory over hundreds of her senior offplanet colleagues for the plum post. Eleanor, as per Tri-D policy, respectfully declined all interviews. In my own interviews, I set the precondition that I be asked only about my own career. When asked if I could pursue my work in Indiana, I could only grin and say, Indiana is not the end of the world. And how had my work been going lately? Miserably, I replied. I am the type of artist that seems to work best while in a state of mild discontent, and lately I’d been riding a streak of great good fortune.

Smug bastard.

*   *   *

We moved into temporary quarters, into an apartment on the 207th floor of the Williams Towers in Bloomington. We planned to eventually purchase a farmstead in an outlying county surrounded by elm groves and rye fields. El’s daily schedule, already at marathon levels, only intensified, while I pottered about the campus town trying to figure out why—if I was so lucky—did I feel so apprehensive.

Then the event occurred that dwarfed all that came before it. Eleanor and I, although we’d never applied, were issued a permit to retro-conceive a baby. These permits were impossible to come by, as only about twelve hundred were issued each year in all of North America. We knew no one who’d been issued a permit. I hadn’t even seen a baby in realbody for decades (although babies figured prominently in most holovids and comedies). We were so stunned at first we didn’t know how to respond. “Don’t worry,” said the under secretary of the Population Division, “most recipients have the same reaction. Some faint.”

Eleanor said, “I don’t see how I could take on the additional responsibility at this time.”

The under secretary frowned. “Does that mean you wish to refuse the permit?”

Eleanor blanched. “I didn’t say that.” She glanced at me, uncharacteristically pleading for help.

I didn’t know what to say either. “A boy or a girl?”

“That’s entirely up to you, now isn’t it?” The under secretary favored us with a fatuous grin. “I’ll tell you what.” In his voice I heard forced spontaneity; he’d been over this ground many times before, and I wondered if that was the sum total of his job, to call twelve hundred strangers each year and grant them one of life’s supreme gifts. “We’ll provide background information. When you’re ready, call the National Orphanage in Trenton.”

For the next hour or so, El and I sat arm-in-arm on the couch in complete silence. Suddenly El began to weep. Tears gushed from her eyes and coursed down her face. She hugged herself—like a lost child, I thought—and fought for breath between sobs. I watched in total amazement. Was this my Eleanor?

After a while, she looked at me, smiled, and said through bubbles of snot, “Well?”

I had to be truthful. “Let’s not rush into anything.”

She studied me and said, “I agree with you.”

“Let’s think about it.”

“My thought exactly.”

*   *   *

At the National Orphanage in Trenton, the last thing they did was take tissue samples for recombination. Eleanor and I sat on chromium stools, side-by-side, in a treatment room as the nurse, a middle-aged jenny, scraped the inside of Eleanor’s cheek with a curette. We had both been off visola for forty-eight hours, dangerous but necessary to obtain a pristine DNA sample. Henry informed me that Eleanor’s full cabinet was on red alert. Eleanor was tense. This was coitus mechanicus, but it was bound to be the most fruitful sex we would ever have.

*   *   *

At the National Orphanage in Trenton, the first thing they did was sit us down in Dr. Deb Armbruster’s office to warn us that raising a child today was nothing like it used to be. “Kids used to grow up and go away,” said Dr. Armbruster. “Nowadays, they tend to get stuck around age eight and then again at thirteen. And it’s not considered good parenting, of course, to force them to age. We think it’s all the attention they get. Everyone—your friends, your employer, well-wishing strangers, militia officers—everyone comes to steal a kiss from the baby, to make funny faces at the toddler, to play catch or hoops with the five-year-old. Gifts arrive by the vanload. The media wants to be included in every decision and invited to every birthday party.

“Oh, but you two know how to handle the media, I imagine.”

Eleanor and I sat in antique chairs in front of Dr. Armbruster’s neatly arranged desk. There was no third chair for Eleanor’s chief of staff, who stood patiently next to Eleanor. Dr. Armbruster was a large, fit woman, with a square jaw, rounded nose, and pinpoint eyes that glanced in all directions as she spoke. No doubt she had arranged her belt system in layers of display monitors around the periphery of her vision. Many administrative types did. With the flick of an iris, they could page through reams of reports, graphs, and archives. And they looked down their noses at projected valets with personality buds, like Eleanor’s chief of staff.

“So,” Dr. Armbruster continued, “you may have a smart-mouthed adolescent on your hands for twenty or thirty years. That, I can assure you, becomes tiresome. And expensive. You, yourselves, could be two or three relationships down the road before the little darling is ready to leave. So we suggest you work out custody now, before you go any further.

“In any case, protectorate law mandates a three-day cooling-off period between this interview and our initiation of the conversion process. You have three days—till Thursday—to change your minds. Think it over.”

*   *   *

At the National Orphanage in Trenton, the second thing they did was take us to the storage room to see the chassis that would become our baby.

One wall held a row of carousels, each containing hundreds of small drawers. Dr. Armbruster rotated a carousel and told a particular drawer to unlock itself. She removed from it a small bundle wrapped in a rigid red tetanus blanket (a spin-off of my early work for the National Militia). She placed it on a ceramic gurney, commanded the blanket to relax, and unwrapped it to reveal a near-term human fetus, curled in repose, a miniature thumb stuck in its perfect mouth. It was remarkably lifelike, but rock still, like a figurine. I asked how old it was. Dr. Armbruster said it had been in stasis seven-and-a-half years; it was confiscated in an illegal pregnancy. Developmentally, it was thirty-five weeks old; it had been doused in utero. She rotated the fetus—the chassis—on the gurney. “It’s normal on every index. We should be able to convert it with no complications.” She pointed to this and that part of it and explained the order of rewriting. “The integumentary system—the skin, what you might call our fleshy package,” she smiled at me acknowledging my reputation, “is a human’s fastest growing organ. A person sheds and replaces it continuously throughout her life. In the conversion process, it’s the first one completed. For a fetus, it takes about a week. Hair color, eye color, the liver, the heart, the digestive system convert in two to three weeks. The nervous system, major muscle groups, reproductive organs—three to four weeks. Cartilage and bones—two to three months. Long before its first tooth erupts, the baby is biologically yours.”

I asked Dr. Armbruster if I could hold the chassis.

“Certainly,” she said with a knowing smile. She placed her large hands carefully under the baby and handed it to me. It was surprisingly heavy, hard, and cold. “The fixative is very dense,” she said, “and makes it brittle, like eggshell.” I cradled it in my arms awkwardly. Dr. Armbruster said to Eleanor, “They always look like that, afraid they’re going to break it. In this case, however, that’s entirely possible. And you, my dear, look typically uncomfortable as well.”

She was right. Eleanor and her chief of staff stood side-by-side, twins (but for their ages), arms crossed stiffly. Dr. Armbruster said to her, “You might find the next few months immensely more tolerable, enjoyable even, under hormonal therapy. Fathers, it would seem, have always had to learn to bond with their offspring. For you we have something the pharmaceutical companies call ‘Mother’s Medley.’”

“No, thank you, Doctor,” said Eleanor, glaring at her chief of staff, who immediately uncrossed her arms. Eleanor came over to me and I transferred the chassis to her. “Heavy,” she said. “And look, it’s missing a finger!” One of its tiny fingers was indeed missing, the stub end rough like plaster.

“Don’t be concerned,” said Dr. Armbruster. “Fingers and toes grow back in days. Just don’t break off the head,” she laughed.

“Sam, look,” Eleanor exclaimed. “Look at this tiny little penis. Isn’t it the cutest thing?”

As I looked, something funny happened to me. I had a vivid impression or image, as I do when at work in my studio, in which I saw the chassis, not as a brittle lump of fixed flesh, but as a living, warm, squirming, naked butterball of a baby. And I looked between its chubby legs and saw it was a he, a little guy. He looked up at me, chortled, and waved his tiny fists. Right then I felt a massive piece of my heart shift in my chest. The whole situation finally dawned on me. I was about to become a parent, a father. I looked at the chassis and saw my son. Why a son, I couldn’t say, but I knew I must have a son.

Eleanor touched my arm. “Are you okay?”

“Yes, it’s nothing. By the way, that’s one piece I hope doesn’t chip off.”

She laughed, but when she saw that I was serious she said, “We’ll have to see about that.” She drilled me with her terribly old eyes and said, “About that we’ll just have to see.”

*   *   *

Back at the Williams Towers in Bloomington, we lay on the balcony in the late afternoon sun and skimmed the queue of messages. Our friends had grown tired of our good fortune: the congratulations were fewer and briefer and seemed, by-and-large, insincere, even tinged with underlying resentment.

And who could blame them? Of all the hundreds of people we knew, none of them had a real child. Many people, it was true, had had children in the old days, before the Population Treaties when babies were considered an ecological nuisance, but that was almost sixty years ago, and sixty years was a long time to live outside the company of children. Probably no one begrudged us our child, although it was obvious to everyone—especially to us—that major strings had been pulled for us at the Department of Health and Human Services. String pulling, itself, did not bother El, but anonymous string-pulling did. She had sent her security chief into the nets, but he was unable to identify our benefactor. El insisted that whoever was responsible was surely not a benefactor, for a baby could hardly be considered a reward. Most likely an enemy, perhaps an off-planet rival she had aced out of the Indianapolis post, which meant the baby was bait in some as yet unsprung plot. Or perhaps the baby was simply a leash her superiors at the Tri-D council had decided to fit her with. In any case, Eleanor was convincing herself she was about to make the worst mistake of her life.

She deleted the remaining queue of messages and turned to me. “Sam, please talk me out of this baby thing.” We lay on our balcony halfway up the giant residential tower that ended, in dizzying perspective, near the lower reaches of the canopy. The canopy, invisible during the day, appeared viscous in the evening light, like a transparent gel that a stiff breeze caused to ripple and fold upon itself. In contrast, our tower had a matte surface encrusted with thousands of tiny black bumps. These were the building’s resident militia slugs, absorbing the last light of the setting sun to top off their energy stores for a busy night patrolling living rooms and bedrooms.

“You’re just nervous,” I said to Eleanor.

“I have impeccable instincts.”

“Did you ever have children before?”

“Not that it’s relevant, but yes, two, a boy and a girl, in my old life. Tom died as a child in an accident. Angie grew up, moved away, married, led a successful career as a journalist, and died at age fifty-four of breast cancer. A long time ago.” Eleanor turned over, bare rump to the sky, chin resting on sun-browned arms. “I grieved for each of them forever, and then one day I stopped. All that’s left are memories, which are immaterial to this discussion.”

“Would you like to have another?”

“Yes, desperately.”

“Why ‘desperately’?”

She was silent for a while. I watched a slug creep along the underside of the balcony of the apartment above us. “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s funny. I’ve already been through it all: pregnancy, varicose veins, funerals. I’ve been through menopause and—worse—back through remenses. I was so tangled up in motherhood, I never knew if I was coming or going. I loved or hated every moment of it, wouldn’t have traded it for the world. But when it was all over I felt an unbearable burden lifted from me. Thank god, I said, I won’t have to do that again. Yet since the moment we learned of the permit, my arms have been aching to hold a baby. I don’t know why. I think it’s this schoolgirl body of mine. It’s a baby machine, and it intends to force its will on me. I have often observed that you men regard your bodies as large pets, and I’ve never understood that, till now. I’ve never felt so removed from myself, from my body.

“But it doesn’t have to have its way, does it? I can rise above it. Let’s tell them to keep their chassis.”

The slug bypassed our balcony, but another slug was making its way slowly down the wall.

I said, “What about this leash theory of yours?”

“I’m sure I’m correct in my assessment. They could get to me by threatening you, of course, but they know if it came down to it, I would—no offense—cut you loose.”

“No offense taken.”

She placed her hand on my cheek. “You know how much I love you. Or maybe you don’t know yet. But I’m expendable, Sam, and so are you.”

“But not a baby.”

“No,” she said, “not a baby, not my baby. I would do anything to keep my baby safe, and they know it. Let’s refuse the permit, Sam. Okay?”

The militia slug had sensed us. It was coming in for a taste. “What about me?” I said. “I might enjoy being a dad. And can you imagine our baby, El? A little critter crawling around our ankles, half you and half me, a little Elsam or Sameanor?”

She closed her eyes and smiled. “That would be a pitiable creature.”

“And speaking of ankles,” I said, “we’re about to be tasted.”

The slug, a tiny thing, touched her ankle, attached itself to her for a moment, then dropped off. With the toes of her other foot, Eleanor scratched the tasting site. Slugs only tickled her. With me it was different. There was some nerve tying my ankle directly to my penis, and I found that warm, prickly kiss unavoidably arousing. So, as the slug attached itself to my ankle, El watched mischievously. At that moment, in the glow of the setting sun, in the delicious ache of perfect health, I didn’t need the kiss of a slug to arouse me. I needed only a glance from my wife, from her ancient eyes set like opals in her girlish body. This must be how the Greek gods lived on Olympus. This must be the way it was meant to be, to grow ancient and yet to have the strength and appetites of youth. El gasped melodramatically as she watched my penis swell. She turned herself toward me, coyly covering her breasts and pubis with her hands. The slug dropped off me and headed for the balcony wall.

We lay side by side, not yet touching. I was stupid with desire and lost control of my tongue. I spoke without thinking. I said, “Mama.”

The word, the single word, “mama,” struck her like a physical thing. Her whole body shuddered, and her eyes went wide with surprise. I repeated it, “Mama,” and she shut her eyes and turned away from me. I sidled over to her, wrapped my arms around her, and took possession of her ear. I tugged its lobe with my lips. I breathed into it. I pushed her sweat-damp hair clear of it and whispered into it, “I am the papa, and you are the mama.” I watched her face, saw a ghost of a smile, and repeated, “Mama.”

“Again.”

“Maamma, maamma, maamma.”

“Crazy papa.”

“You are the mama, and mama will give papa a son.”

Her eyes flew open at that, fierce, challenging, and amused. “How will papa arrange that, I wonder.”

“Like this,” I said as I rolled her onto her back and kissed and stroked her. But she was indifferent to me, willfully unresponsive. Nevertheless, I let my tongue play up and down her body. I visited all the sweet spots I had discovered since first we made love, for I knew her body to be my ally. Her body and I wanted the same thing. Soon, with or without El’s blessing, her body opened herself to me, and when she was ready, and I was ready, and all my tiny sons inside me were ready, I began to tease her, going in, coming out, going slow, going fast, not going at all, eventually going all in a rush.

Somewhere in the middle of this, a bird, a crow, came crashing to the deck next to us. What I could make out, through the thick envelope that surrounded it, was a mass of shiny black feathers, a broken beak clattering against the deck and a smudge of blood that quickly boiled away. The whole bird, in fact, was being disassembled. Steam rose from the envelope, which emitted a piercing wail of warning. Henry spoke loudly into my ear, Attention, Sam! In the name of safety, the militia isolation device orders you to move away from it at once.

We were too excited to pay much mind. The envelope seemed to be doing its job. Nevertheless, we dutifully moved away; we rolled away belly to belly in a teamwork maneuver that was a delight in itself. A partition, ordered by Eleanor’s cabinet no doubt, formed to separate us from the unfortunate bird. We were busy making a son and we weren’t about to stop until we were through.

Later, when I brought out dinner and two glasses of visola on a tray, El sat at the patio table in her white terry robe looking at the small pile of elemental dust on the deck—carbon, sodium, calcium and whatnot—that had once been a bird. It was not at all unusual for birds to fly through the canopy, or for a tiny percentage of them to become infected outside. What was unusual was that, upon reentering the canopy, being tasted, found bad, and enveloped by a swarm of smartactives, so much of the bird should survive the fall in so recognizable a form, as this one had.

El smirked at me and said, “It might be Ms. Rickert, come back to haunt us.”

We both laughed uneasily.

*   *   *

The next day I felt the urge to get some work done. It would be another two days before we could give the orphanage the go-ahead, and I was restless. Meanwhile, Eleanor had a task force meeting scheduled in the living room.

I had claimed an empty bedroom in the back for my work area. It about matched my Chicago studio in size and aspect. I had asked the building super, a typically dour reginald, to send up a man to remove all the furniture except for an armchair and a nightstand. The chair needed a pillow to support the small of my back, but otherwise it was adequate for long sitting sessions. I pulled the chair around to face a blank inner wall that Henry had told me was the north wall, placed the nightstand next to it, and brought in a carafe of strong coffee and some sweets from the kitchen. I made myself comfortable.

“Okay, Henry, take me to Chicago.” The empty bedroom was instantly transformed into my studio, and I sat in front of my favorite window wall overlooking the Chicago skyline and lakefront from the 303rd floor of the Drexler Building. The sky was dark with storm clouds. Rain splattered against the window. There was nothing like a thunderstorm to stimulate my creativity.

“Henry, match Chicago’s ionic dynamics here.” As I sipped my coffee and watched lightning strike neighboring towers, the air in my room took on a freshly scrubbed ozone quality. I felt at rest and invigorated.

When I was ready, I turned the chair around to face my studio. It was just as I had left it a month ago. There was the large, oak work table that dominated the east corner. Glass-topped and long-legged, it was a table you could work at without bending over. I used to stand at that table endlessly twenty and thirty years ago when I still lived in Chicago. Now it was piled high with prized junk: design trophies, hunks of polished gemstones from Mars and Jupiter, a scale model Japanese pagoda of cardboard and mica, a box full of my antique key collection, parcels wrapped in some of my most successful designs, and—the oldest objects in the room—a mason jar of paint brushes, like a bouquet of dried flowers.

I rose from my chair and wandered about my little domain, taking pleasure in my life’s souvenirs. The cabinets, shelves, counters, and floor were as heavily laden as the table: an antelope skin spirit drum; an antique pendulum mantel clock that houseputer servos kept wound; holocubes of some of my former lovers and wives; bits of colored glass, tumbleweed, and driftwood in whose patterns and edges I had once found inspiration; and a whale vertebra used as a footstool. This room was more a museum now than a functional studio, and I was more its curator than a practicing artist.

I went to the south wall and looked into the corner. Henry’s original container sat atop three more identical ones. “How’s the paste?” I said.

“Sufficient for the time being. I’ll let you know when we need more.”

“More? This isn’t enough? There’s enough paste here now to run a major city.”

“Eleanor Starke’s cabinet is more powerful than a major city.”

“Yes, well, let’s get down to work.” I returned to my armchair. The storm had passed the city and was retreating across the lake, turning the water midnight blue. “What have you got on the egg idea?”

Henry projected a richly ornate egg in the air before me. Gold leaf and silver wire, inlaid with once-precious gems, it was modeled after the Fabergé masterpieces favored by the last of the Romanoff Tsars. But instead of enclosing miniature clockwork automatons, these would be merely expensive wrapping for small gifts. You’d crack them open. You could keep the pieces, which would reassemble, or toss them into the soup bin for recycling credits.

“It’s just as I told you last week,” said Henry. “The public will hate it. I tested it against Simulated Us, the Donohue Standard, the Person in the Street, and Focus Rental.” Henry filled the air around the egg with dynamic charts and graphs. “Nowhere are positive ratings higher than 7 percent, or negative ratings lower than 68 percent. Typical comments call it ‘old-fashioned,’ and ‘vulgar.’ Matrix analysis finds that people do not like to be reminded of their latent fertility. People resent…”

“Okay, okay,” I said. “I get the picture.” It was a dumb concept. I knew as much when I proposed it. But I was so enamored by my own soon-to-be-realized fertility, I had lost my head. I thought people would be drawn to this archetypal symbol of renewal, but Henry had been right all along, and now he had the data to prove it.

If the truth be told, I had not come up with a hit design in five years, and I was worried that maybe I never would again.

“It’s just a dry spell,” said Henry, sensing my mood. “You’ve had them before, even longer.”

“I know, but this one is the worst.”

“You say that every time.”

To cheer me up, Henry began to play my wrapping paper portfolio, projecting my past masterpieces larger than life in the air.

I held patents for package applications in many fields, from emergency blankets and temporary skin, to military camouflage and video paint. But my own favorites, and probably the public’s as well, were my novelty gift wraps. My first was a video wrapping paper that displayed the faces of loved ones (or celebrities if you had no loved ones) singing “Happy Birthday” to the music of the New York Pops. That dated back to 2025 when I was a molecular engineering student.

My first professional design was the old box-in-a-box routine, only my boxes didn’t get smaller as you opened them, but larger, and in fact could fill the whole room until you chanced upon one of the secret commands, which were any variation of “stop” (whoa, enough, cut it out, etc.) or “help” (save me, I’m suffocating, get this thing off me, etc.).

Next came wrapping paper that screamed when you tore or cut it. That led to paper that resembled human skin. It molded itself perfectly and seamlessly (except for a belly button) around the gift and had a shelf life of fourteen days. You had to cut it to open the gift, and of course it bled. We sold mountains of that stuff.

The human skin led to my most enduring design, a perennial that was still common today, the orange peel. It too wrapped itself around any shape seamlessly (and had a navel). It was real, biological orange peel. When you cut or ripped it, it squirted citrus juice and smelled delightful.

I let Henry project these designs for me. I must say I was drunk with my own achievements. I gloried in them. They filled me with the most selfish wonder.

I was terribly good, and the whole world knew it.

Yet even after this healthy dose of self-love, I wasn’t able to buckle down to anything new. I told Henry to order the kitchen to fix me some more coffee and some lunch.

On my way to the kitchen I passed the living room and saw that Eleanor was having difficulties of her own. Even with souped-up holoservers, the living room was a mess. There were dozens of people in there and, as best I could tell, just as many rooms superimposed over each other. People, especially important people, liked to bring their offices with them when they went to meetings. The result was a jumble of merging desks, lamps, and chairs. Walls sliced through each other at drunken angles. Windows issued cityscape views of New York, London, Washington, and Moscow (and others I didn’t recognize) in various shades of day and weather. People, some of whom I knew from the news-nets, either sat at their desks in a rough, overlapping circle, or wandered through walls and furniture to kibitz with each other and with Eleanor’s cabinet.

At least this is how it all appeared to me standing in the hallway, outside the room’s holo anchors. To those inside, it might look like the Senate chambers. I watched for a while, safely out of holo range, until Eleanor noticed me. “Henry,” I said, “ask her how many of these people are here in realbody.” Eleanor raised a finger, one, and pointed to herself.

I smiled. She was the only one there who could see me. I continued to the kitchen and brought my lunch back to my studio. I still couldn’t get started, so I asked Henry to report on my correspondence. He had answered over five hundred posts since our last session the previous week. Four-fifths of these concerned the baby. We were invited to appear—with the baby—on every major talk show and magazine. We were threatened with lawsuits by the Anti-Transubstantiation League. We were threatened with violence by several anonymous callers (who would surely be identified by El’s security chief and prosecuted by her attorney general). A hundred seemingly ordinary people requested permission to visit us in realbody or holo during nap time, bath time, any time. Twice that number accused us of elitism. Three men and one woman named Sam Harger claimed that their fertility permit was mistakenly awarded to me. Dr. Armbruster’s prediction was coming true and the baby hadn’t even been converted yet.

This killed an hour. I still didn’t feel creative, so I called it quits. I took a shower, shaved. Then I went, naked, to stand outside the entrance to the living room. When Eleanor saw me, her eyes went big, and she laughed. She held up five fingers, five minutes, and turned back to her meeting.

I went to my bedroom to wait for her. She spent her lunch break with me. When we made love that day and the next, I enjoyed a little fantasy I never told her about. I imagined that she was pregnant in the old-fashioned way, that her belly was enormous, melon-round and hard, and that as I moved inside her, as we moved together, we were teaching our son his first lesson in the art of human love.

*   *   *

On Thursday, the day of the conversion, we took a leisurely breakfast on the terrace of the New Foursquare Hotel in downtown Bloomington. A river of pedestrians, students and service people mostly, flowed past our little island of metal tables and brightly striped umbrellas. The day broke clear and blue and would be hot by noon. A gentle breeze tried to snatch away our menus. The Foursquare had the best kitchen in Bloomington, at least for desserts. Its pastry chef, Mr. Duvou, had built a reputation for the classics. That morning we (mostly me) were enjoying strawberry shortcake with whipped cream and coffee. Everything—the strawberries, the wheat for the cakes, the sugar, coffee beans, and cream—was grown, not assembled. The preparation was done lovingly and skillfully by hand. All the waitstaff were steves, who were highly sensitive to our wants and who, despite their ungainly height, bowed ever so low to take our order.

I moistened my finger with my tongue and made temporary anchor points where I touched the table and umbrella pole. We called Dr. Armbruster. She appeared in miniature, desk and all, on my place mat.

“It’s a go, then?” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Yes,” said Eleanor, who took my hand.

“Congratulations, both of you. You are two of the luckiest people in the world.”

We already knew that.

“Traits? Enhancements?” asked Dr. Armbruster.

We had studied all the options and decided to allow Nature and chance, not some well-meaning engineer, to roll our genes together into a new individual. “Random traits,” we said, “and standard enhancements.”

“That leaves gender,” said Dr. Armbruster.

I looked at Eleanor, who smiled. “A boy,” she said. “It definitely wants to be a boy.”

“A boy it is,” said Dr. Armbruster. “I’ll get the lab on it immediately. The recombination should take about three hours. I’ll monitor the progress and keep you apprised. We will infect the chassis around noon. Make an appointment for a week from today to come in and take possession of … your son. We like to throw a little birthing party. It’s up to you to make media arrangements, if any.

“I’ll call you in about an hour. And congratulations again!”

We were too nervous to do anything else, so we ate shortcake and drank coffee and didn’t talk much. We mostly sat close and said meaningless things to ease the tension. Finally Dr. Armbruster, seated at her tiny desk, called back.

“The recombination work is about two-thirds done and is proceeding very smoothly. Early readings show a Pernell Organic Intelligence quotient of 3.93—very impressive, but probably no surprise to you. So far, we know that your son has Sam’s eyes, chin, and skeleto-muscular frame, and Eleanor’s hair, nose, and … eyebrows.”

“I’m afraid my eyebrows are fairly dominant,” said Eleanor.

“Apparently,” said Dr. Armbruster.

“I’m mad about your eyebrows,” I said.

“And I’m mad about your frame,” Eleanor said.

We spent another hour there, taking two more updates from Dr. Armbruster. I ordered an iced bottle of champagne, and guests from other tables toasted us with coffee cups and visola glasses. I was slightly tipsy when we finally rose to leave. To my annoyance, I felt the prickly kiss of a militia slug at my ankle. I decided I’d better let it finish tasting me before I attempted to thread my way through the jumble of tables and chairs. The slug seemed to take an unusual length of time.

Eleanor, meanwhile, was impatient to go. “What is it?” she laughed. “Are you drunk?”

“Just a slug,” I said. “It’s almost done.” But it wasn’t. Instead of dropping off, it elongated itself and looped around both of my ankles so that when I turned to join Eleanor, I tripped and fell into our table, which crashed into a neighboring one.

Everything happened at once. As I fell, the slippery shroud of an isolation envelope snaked up my body to my face and sealed itself above my head. But it did not cushion my fall; I banged my nose on the flagstone. Everything grew dim as the envelope coalesced, so that I could barely make out the tables and umbrellas and the crowd of people running past me like horror-show shadows. There was Eleanor’s face, momentarily, peering in at me, and then gone. “Don’t go!” I shouted. “Eleanor, help!” But she melted into the crowd on the pedway. I tried to get up, to crawl, but my arms and legs were tightly bound.

Henry said, Sam, I’m being probed, and I’ve lost contact with Eleanor’s system.

“What’s going on?” I screamed. “Tell them to make it stop.” I, too, was being probed. At first my skin tingled as in a gelbath at a juve clinic. But these smartactives weren’t polite and weren’t about to take a leisurely three days to inspect my cells. They wanted in right away; they streamed through my pores, down my nasal passage and throat, up my urethra and anus and spread out to capture all of my organs. My skin burned. My heart stammered. My stomach clamped and sent a geyser of pink shortcake mush and champagne-curdled cream back up my throat. But with the envelope stretched across my face, there was nowhere for the vomit to go except as a thin layer down my throat and chest. The envelope treated it as organic matter attempting escape and quickly disassembled it, scalding me with the heat of its activity. I rolled frantically about trying to lessen the pain, blindly upsetting more tables. Shards of glass cut me without cutting the envelope, so thin it stretched, and my blood leaked from me and simmered away next to my skin.

Fernando Boa, said someone in Henry’s voice in Spanish. You are hereby placed under arrest for unlawful escape and flight from State of Oaxaca authorities. Do not resist. Any attempt to resist will result in your immediate execution.

“My name is not Boa,” I cried through a swollen throat. “It’s Harger, Sam Harger!”

I squeezed my eyelids tight against the pain, but the actives cut right through them, coating my eyeballs and penetrating them to taste the vitreous humor inside. Brilliant flashes and explosions of light burst across my retinae as each rod and cone was inspected, and a dull, hurricane roar filled my head.

Henry shouted, Shall I resist? I think I should resist.

“NO!” I answered. “No, Henry!”

The real agony began then, as all up and down my body, my nerve cells were invaded. Attached to every muscle fiber, every blood vessel, every hair follicle, embedded in my skin, my joints, my intestines, they all began to fire at once. My brain rattled in my skull. My guts twisted inside out. I begged for unconsciousness.

Then, just as suddenly, the convulsions ceased, the trillions of engines inside me abruptly quit. I can do this, Henry said. I know how.

“No, Henry,” I croaked.

The envelope itself flickered, then fell from me like so much dust. I was in daylight and fresh air again. Soiled, bleeding, beat-up, and bloated, but whole. I was alone on a battlefield of smashed umbrellas and china shrapnel. I thought maybe I should crawl away from the envelope’s dust, but the slug still shackled my ankles. “You shouldn’t have done it, Henry,” I said. “They won’t like what you did.”

Without warning, the neural storm slammed me again, worse than before. A new envelope issued from the slug. This one squeezed me, like a tube of oil paint, starting at my feet, crushing the bones and working up my legs.

“Please,” I begged, “let me pass out.”

*   *   *

I didn’t pass out, but I went somewhere else, to another room, where I could still hear the storm raging on the other side of a thin wall. There was someone else in the room, a man I halfway recognized. He was well-muscled and of middle height, and his yellow hair was streaked with white. He wore the warmest of smiles on his coarse, round face.

“Don’t worry,” he said, referring to the storm beyond the wall, “it’ll pass.”

He had Henry’s voice.

“You should have listened to me, Henry,” I scolded. “Where did you learn to disobey me?”

“I know I don’t count all that much,” said the man. “I mean, I’m just a construct, not a living being. A servant, not a coequal. But I want to tell you how good it’s been to know you.”

*   *   *

I awoke lying on my side on a gurney in a ceramic room, my cheek resting in a small puddle of clear fluid. I was naked. Every cell of me ached. A man in a militia uniform, a jerry, watched me sullenly. When I sat up, dizzy, nauseous, he held out a bundle of clean clothes. Not my clothes.

“Wha’ happe’ me?” My lips and tongue were twice their size.

“You had an unfortunate accident.”

“Assiden’?”

The jerry pressed the clothes into my hands. “Just shut up and get dressed.” He resumed his post next to the door and watched me fumble with the clothes. My feet were so swollen I could hardly pull the pants legs over them. My hands trembled and could not grip. I could not keep my vision focused, and my head pulsed with pain. But all in all, I felt much better than I had a little while ago.

When, after what seemed like hours, I was dressed, the jerry said, “Captain wants to see ya.”

I followed him down deserted ceramic corridors to a small office where sat a large, handsome young man in a neat blue uniform. “Sign here,” he said, pushing a slate at me. “It’s your terms of release.”

Read this, Henry, I tongued with a bruised tongue. When Henry didn’t answer I felt the pull of panic until I remembered that the slave processors inside my body that connected me to Henry’s box in Chicago had certainly been destroyed. So I tried to read the document myself. It was loaded with legalese and interminable clauses, but I was able to glean from it that by signing it, I was forever releasing the National Militia from all liability for whatever treatment I had enjoyed at their hands.

“I will not sign this,” I said.

“Suit yourself,” said the captain, who took the slate from my hands. “You are hereby released from custody, but you remain on probation until further notice. Ask the belt for details.” He pointed to the belt holding up my borrowed trousers.

I lifted my shirt and looked at the belt. The device stitched to it was so small I had missed it, and its ports were disguised as grommets.

“Sergeant,” the captain said to the jerry, “show Mr. Harger the door.”

“Just like that?” I said.

“What do you want, a prize?”

*   *   *

It was dark out. I asked the belt they’d given me for the time, and it said in a flat, neuter voice, “The time is seven forty-nine and thirty-two seconds.” I calculated I had been incarcerated—and unconscious—for about seven hours. On a hunch, I asked what day it was. “The date is Friday, 6 April 2092.”

Friday. I had been out for a day and seven hours.

There was a tube station right outside the cop shop, naturally, and I managed to find a private car. I climbed in and eased my aching self into the cushioned seat. I considered calling Eleanor, but not with that belt. So I told it to take me home. It replied, “Address please.”

My anger flared and I snapped, “The Williams Towers, stupid.”

“City and state, please.”

I was too tired for this. “Bloomington!”

“Bloomington in California, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New York…”

“Hold it! Wait! Enough! Where the hell am I?”

“You’re at the Western Regional Militia Headquarters, Utah.”

How I longed for my Henry. He’d get me home safe with no hassle. He’d take care of me. “Bloomington,” I said mildly, “Indiana.”

The doors locked, the running lights came on, and the car rolled to the injection ramp. We coasted down, past the local grid, to the intercontinental tubes. The belt said, “Your travel time to the Williams Towers in Bloomington, Indiana, will be one hour, fifty-five minutes.” When the car entered the slipstream, I was shoved against the seat by the force of acceleration. Henry would have known how sore I was and shunted us to the long ramp. Fortunately, I had a spare Henry belt in the apartment, so I wouldn’t have to be without him for long. And after a few days, when I felt better, I’d again reinstall him inbody.

I tried to nap, but was too sick. My head kept swimming, and I had to keep my eyes open, or I would have vomited.

It was after 10:00 P.M. when I arrived under the Williams Towers, but the station was crowded with residents and guests. I felt everyone’s eyes on me. Surely everyone knew of my arrest. They would have watched it on the nets, witnessed my naked fear as the shroud raced up my chest and face.

I walked briskly, looking straight ahead, to the row of elevators. I managed to claim one for myself, and as the doors closed I felt relief. But something was wrong; we weren’t moving.

“Floor please,” said my new belt in its bland voice.

“Fuck you!” I screamed. “Fuck you fuck you fuck you! Listen to me, you piece of shit, and see if you can get this right. I want you to call Henry, that’s my system. Shake hands with him. Put him in charge of all of your miserable functions. Do you hear me?”

“Certainly, sir. What is the Henry access code?”

“Code? Code? I don’t know code.” That kind of detail had been Henry’s job for over eighty years. I had stopped memorizing codes and ID numbers and addresses, anniversaries and birthdates long ago. “Just take me up! We’ll stop at every floor above 200!” I shouted. “Wait. Hold it. Open the doors.” I had the sudden, urgent need to urinate. I didn’t think I could hold it long enough to reach the apartment, especially with the added pressure from the high-speed lift.

There were people waiting outside the elevator doors. I was sure they had heard me shouting. I stepped through them, a sick smile plastered to my face, the sweat rolling down my forehead, and I hurried to the men’s room off the lobby.

I had to go so bad, that when I stood before the urinal and tried, I couldn’t. I felt about to burst, but I was plugged up. I had to consciously calm myself, breathe deeply, relax. The stream, when it finally emerged, seemed to issue forever. How many quarts could my bladder hold? The urine was viscous and cloudy with a dull metallic sheen, as though mixed with aluminum dust. Whatever the militia had pumped into me would take days to excrete. At least there was no sign of bleeding, thank God. But it burned. And when I was finished and about to leave the rest room, I felt I had to go again.

Up on my floor, my belt valet couldn’t open the door to the apartment, so I had to ask admittance. The door didn’t recognize me, but Eleanor’s cabinet gave it permission to open. The apartment smelled of strong disinfectant. “Eleanor, are you home?” It suddenly occurred to me that she might not be.

“In here,” called Eleanor. I hurried to the living room, but Eleanor wasn’t there. It was her sterile elder twin, her chief of staff, who sat on the couch. She was flanked by the attorney general, dressed in black, and the security chief, grinning his wolfish grin.

“What the hell is this,” I said, “a fucking cabinet meeting? Where’s Eleanor?”

In a businesslike manner, the chief of staff motioned to the armchair opposite the couch. “Won’t you please join us, Sam. We have much to discuss.”

“Discuss it among yourselves,” I yelled. “Where’s Eleanor?” Now I was sure that she was gone. She had bolted from the cafe and kept going; she had left her three stooges behind to break the bad news to me.

“Eleanor’s in her bedroom, but she…”

I didn’t wait. I ran down the hallway. But the bedroom door was locked. “Door,” I shouted, “unlock yourself.”

“Access,” replied the door, “has been extended to apartment residents only.”

“That includes me, you idiot.” I pounded the door with my fists. “Eleanor, let me in. It’s me—Sam.”

No reply.

I returned to the living room. “What the fuck is going on here?”

“Sam,” said the elderly chief of staff, “Eleanor will see you in a few minutes, but not before…”

“Eleanor!” I yelled, turning around to look at each of the room’s holoeyes. “I know you’re watching. Come out; we need to talk. I want you, not these dummies.”

“Sam,” said Eleanor behind me. But it wasn’t Eleanor. Again I was fooled by her chief of staff who had crossed her arms like an angry El and bunched her eyebrows in an angry scowl. She mimicked my Eleanor so perfectly, I had to wonder if it wasn’t El as a morphed holo. “Sam, please get a grip and sit down. We need to discuss your accident.”

“My what? My accident? That’s the same word the militia used. Well, it was no accident! It was an assault, a rape, a vicious attack. Not an accident!”

“Excuse me,” said Eleanor’s attorney general, “but we were using the word ‘accident’ in its legal sense. Both sides have provisionally agreed…”

I left the room without a word. I needed urgently to urinate again. Mercifully, the bathroom door opened to me. I knew I was behaving terribly, but I couldn’t help myself. On the one hand I was relieved and grateful that Eleanor was there, that she hadn’t left me—yet. On the other hand, I was hurting and confused and angry. All I wanted was to hold her, be held by her. I needed her at that moment more than I had ever needed anyone in my life. I had no time for holos. But, it was reasonable that she should be frightened. Maybe she thought I was infectious. My behavior was doing nothing to reassure her. I had to control myself.

My urine burned even more than before. My mouth was cotton dry. I grabbed a glass and filled it with tap water. Surprised at how thirsty I was, I drank glassful after glassful. I washed my face in the sink. The cool water felt so good, I stripped off my militia-issue clothes and stepped into the shower. The water revived me, fortified me. Not wanting to put the clothes back on, I wrapped a towel around myself, went out, and told the holos to ask Eleanor to toss out some of my clothes for me. I promised I wouldn’t try to force my way into the bedroom when she opened the door.

“All your clothes were confiscated by the militia,” said the chief of staff, “but Fred will bring you something of his.”

Before I could ask who Fred was, a big, squat-bodied russ came out of the back bedroom, the room I used for my trips to Chicago. He was dressed in a conservative business suit and carried a brown velvet robe over his arm.

“This is Fred,” said the chief of staff. “Fred has been assigned to…”

“What?” I shouted. “El’s afraid I’m going to throttle her holos? She thinks I would break down that door?”

“Eleanor thinks nothing of the kind,” said the chief of staff. “Fred has been assigned by the Tri-Discipline Board.”

“Well, I don’t want him here. Send him away.”

“I’m afraid,” said the chief of staff, “that as long as Eleanor remains a governor, Fred stays. Neither she nor you have any say in the matter.”

The russ, Fred, held out the robe to me, but I refused it, and said, “Just stay out of my way, Fred.” I went to the bathroom and found one of Eleanor’s terry robes in the linen closet. It was tight on me, but it would do.

Returning to the living room, I sat in the armchair facing the cabinet’s couch. “Okay, what do you want?”

“That’s more like it,” said the chief of staff. “First, let’s get you caught up on what’s happened so far.”

“By all means. Catch me up.”

The chief of staff glanced at the attorney general who said, “Yesterday morning, Thursday, 5 April, at precisely 10:47:39, while loitering at the New Foursquare Cafe in downtown Bloomington, Indiana, you, Samson P. Harger, were routinely analyzed by a National Militia Random Testing Device, Metro Population Model 8903AL. You were found to be in noncompliance with the Sabotage and Espionage Acts of 2036, 2038, 2050, and 2090. As per procedures set forth in…”

“Please,” I said, “in English.”

The security chief said in his gravelly voice, “You were tasted by a slug, Mr. Harger, and found bad, real bad. So they bagged you.”

“What was wrong with me?”

“Name it. You went off the scale. First, the DNA sequence in a sample of ten of your skin cells didn’t match each other. Also, a known nastie was identified in your blood. Your marker genes didn’t match your record in the National Registry. You did match the record of a known terrorist with an outstanding arrest warrant. You also matched the record of someone who died twenty-three years ago.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “How could the slug read all those things at once?”

“That’s what the militia wanted to know. So they disassembled you.”

“They! What?”

“Any one of those conditions gave them the authority they needed. They didn’t have the patience to read you slow and gentle like, so they pumped you so full of smartactives you filled a swimming pool.”

“They. Completely?”

“All your biological functions were interrupted. You were legally dead for three minutes.”

It took me a moment to grasp what he was saying. “So what did they discover?”

“Nothing,” said the security chief, “zip, nada. Your cell survey came up normal. They couldn’t even get the arresting slug, nor any other slug, to duplicate the initial readings.”

“So the arresting slug was defective?”

“We’ve forced them to concede that the arresting slug may have been defective.”

“So they reassembled me and let me go, and everything is okay?”

“Not quite. That particular model slug has never been implicated in a false reading. This would be the first time, according to the militia, and naturally they’re not eager to admit that. Besides, they still had you on another serious charge.”

“Which is?”

“That your initial reading constituted an unexplained anomaly.”

“An unexplained anomaly? This is a crime?”

I excused myself for another visit to the bathroom. The urgency increased when I stood up from the armchair and was painful by the time I reached the toilet. This time the stream didn’t burn me, but hissed and gave off some sort of vapor, like steam. I watched in horror as my situation became clear to me.

I marched back to the living room, stood in front of the three holos, rolled up a sleeve, and scratched and rubbed my arm, scraping off flakes of skin which cascaded to the floor, popping and flashing like a miniature fireworks display. “I’ve been seared!” I screamed at them. “You let them sear me!”

“Sit down,” said the chief of staff. “Unfortunately, there’s more.”

I sat down, still holding my arm out. Beads of sweat dropped from my chin and boiled away on the robe in little puffs of steam.

“Eleanor feels it best to tell you everything now,” said the chief of staff. “It’s not pretty, so sit back and prepare yourself for more bad news.”

I did as she suggested.

“They weren’t about to let you go, you know. You had forfeited all of your civil rights. If you weren’t the spouse of a Tri-Discipline Governor, you’d have simply disappeared. As it was, they proceeded to eradicate all traces of your DNA from the environment. They flooded this apartment first, removed every bit of hair, phlegm, mucus, skin, fingernail, toenail, semen, and blood that you have shed or deposited since moving in. They sent probes down the plumbing for trapped hair. They subjected Eleanor to a complete body douche. They scoured the halls, elevators, lobby, dining room, linen stores, laundry. They were most thorough. They have likewise visited your townhouse in Connecticut, the bungalow in Cozumel, the juve clinic, your hotel room on the Moon, the shuttle, and all your and Eleanor’s domiciles all over the Protectorate. They are systematically following your trail backward for a period of thirty years.”

“My Chicago studio?”

“Of course.”

“Henry?”

“Gone.”

“You mean in isolation, right? They’re interrogating him, right?”

The security chief said, “No, eradicated. He resisted. Gave ’em quite a fight, too. But no civilian job can withstand the weight of the National Militia. Not even us.”

I didn’t believe Henry was gone. He had so many secret backups. At this moment he was probably lying low in a half dozen parking loops all over the solar system.

But another thought occurred to me. “My son!”

The chief of staff said, “When your accident occurred, the chassis had not yet been infected with your and Eleanor’s recombinant. Had it been, the militia would have disassembled it too. Eleanor prevented the procedure at the last moment and turned over all genetic records and material.”

I tried sifting through this. My son was dead, or rather, never started. But at least Eleanor had saved the chassis. We could always try—no we couldn’t. I was seared! My cells were locked. Any attempt to read or overwrite any of my cells would cause those cells to fry.

The attorney general said, “The chassis, however, had already been brought out of stasis and was considered viable. To allow it to develop with its original genetic complement, or to place it back into stasis, would have exposed it to legal claims by its progenitors. So Eleanor had it infected. It’s undergoing conversion at this moment.”

“Infected? Infected with what? Did she clone herself?”

The chief of staff laughed, “Heavens, no. She had it infected with the recombination of her genes and those of a simulated partner, a composite of several of her past consorts.”

“Without my agreement?”

“You were deceased at the time. She was your surviving spouse.”

“I was deceased for only three minutes! I was retrievably dead. Obviously, retrievable!”

“Alive you would have been a felon, and the fertility permit would have been annulled.”

I closed my eyes and leaned back into the chair. “Okay,” I said, “what else?” When no one answered, I said, “To sum up then, I have been seared, which means my genes are booby trapped. Which means I’m incapable of reproducing, or even of being rejuvenated. So my life expectancy has been reduced to … what?… another hundred years or so? Okay. My son is dead. Pulled apart before he was even started. Henry is gone, probably forever. My wife—no, my widow—is having a child by another man—men.”

“Women actually,” said the chief of staff.

“Whatever. Not by me. How long did all of this take?”

“About twenty minutes.”

“A hell of a busy twenty minutes.”

“To our way of thinking,” said the attorney general, “a protracted interval of time. The important negotiation in your case occurred within the first five seconds of your demise.”

“You’re telling me that Eleanor was able to figure everything out and cook up her simulated partner in five seconds?”

“Eleanor has in readiness at all times a full set of contingency plans to cover every conceivable threat we can imagine. It pays, Mr. Harger, to plan for the worst.”

“I guess it does.” The idea that all during our time together, El was busy making these plans was too monstrous to believe. “So tell me about these negotiations.”

“First, let me impress upon you,” said the chief of staff, “the fact that Eleanor stuck by you. Few other Tri-Discipline officers would take such risks to fight for a spouse. Also, only someone in her position could have successfully prosecuted your case. The militia doesn’t have to answer phone calls, you know.

“As to the details, the attorney general can fill you in later, but here’s the agreement in a nutshell. Given the wild diagnosis of the arresting slug and the subsequent lack of substantiating evidence, we calculated the most probable cause to be a defect in the slug, not some as yet unheard of nastie in your body. Further, as a perfect system of any sort has never been demonstrated, we predicted there to be records of other failures buried deep in militia archives. Eleanor threatened to air these files publicly in a civil suit. To do so would have cost her a lifetime of political capital, her career, and possibly her life. But as she was able to convince the militia she was willing to proceed, they backed down. They agreed to revive you and place you on probation, the terms of which are stored in your belt system, which we see you have not yet reviewed. The major term is your searing. Searing effectively neutralizes the threat in case you are the victim of a new nastie. Also, as a sign of good faith, we disclosed the locations of all of Henry’s hidy-holes.”

“What?” I rose from my seat. “You gave them Henry?”

“Sit down, Mr. Harger,” said the security chief.

But I didn’t sit down. I began to pace. So this is how it works, I thought. This is the world I live in.

“Please realize, Sam,” said the chief of staff, “they would have found him out anyway. No matter how clever you think you are, given time, all veils can be pierced.”

I turned around to answer her, but she and her two colleagues were gone. I was alone in the room with the russ, Fred, who stood sheepishly next to the hall corridor. He cleared his throat and said, “Governor Starke will see you now.”

II

It’s been eight long months since my surprise visit to the cop shop. I’ve had plenty of time to sit and reflect on what’s happened to me, to meditate on my victimhood.

Shortly after my accident, Eleanor and I moved into our new home, a sprawling old farmstead on the outskirts of Bloomington. We have more than enough room here, with barns and stables, a large garden, apple and pear orchards, tennis courts, swimming pool, and a dozen service people to run everything. It’s really very beautiful, and the whole eighty acres is covered with its own canopy, inside and independent of the Bloomington canopy, a bubble inside a bubble. Just the place to raise the child of a Tri-Discipline governor.

The main house, built of blocks of local limestone, dates back to the last century. It’s the home that Eleanor and I dreamed of owning. But now that we’re here, I spend most of my time in the basement, for sunlight is hard on my seared skin. For that matter, rich food is hard on my gut, I bruise easily inside and out, I can’t sleep a whole night through, all my joints ache for an hour or so when I rise, I have lost my sense of smell, and I’ve become hard of hearing. There is a constant taste of brass in my mouth and a dull throbbing in my skull. I go to bed nauseated and wake up nauseated. The doctor says my condition will improve in time as my body adjusts, but that my health is up to me now. No longer do I have resident molecular homeostats to constantly screen, flush and scrub my cells, nor muscle toners or fat inhibitors. No longer can I go periodically to a juve clinic to correct the cellular errors of aging. Now I can and certainly will grow stouter, slower, weaker, balder, and older. Now the date of my death is decades, not millennia, away. This should come as no great shock, for this was the human condition when I was born. Yet, since my birth, the whole human race, it seems, has boarded a giant ocean liner and set sail for the shores of immortality. I, however, have been unceremoniously tossed overboard.

So I spend my days sitting in the dim dampness of my basement corner, growing pasty white and fat (twenty pounds already), and plucking my eyebrows to watch them sizzle like fuses.

I am not pouting, and I am certainly not indulging in self-pity, as Eleanor accuses me. In fact, I am brooding. It’s what artists do, we brood. To other, more active people, we appear selfish, obsessive, even narcissistic, which is why we prefer to brood in private.

But I’m not brooding about art or package design. I have quit that for good. I will never design again. That much I know. I’m not sure what I will do, but at least I know I’ve finished that part of my life. It was good; I enjoyed it. I climbed to the top of my field. But it’s over.

I am brooding about my victimhood. My intuition tells me that if I understand it, I will know what to do with myself. So I pluck another eyebrow hair. The tiny bulb of muscle at the root ignites like an old fashioned match, a tiny point of light in my dark cave and, as though making a wish, I whisper, “Henry.” The hair sizzles along its length until it burns my fingers, and I have to drop it. My fingertips are already charred from this game.

I miss Henry terribly. It’s as though a whole chunk of my mind were missing. I never knew how deeply integrated I had woven him into my psyche, or where my thoughts stopped and his started. When I ask myself a question these days, no one answers.

I wonder why he did it, what made him think he could resist the militia. Can machine intelligence become cocky? Or did he knowingly sacrifice himself for me? Did he think he could help me escape? Or did he protect our privacy in the only way open to him, by destroying himself? The living archive of my life is gone, but at least it’s not in the loving hands of the militia.

My little death has caused other headaches. My marriage ended. My estate went into receivership. My memberships, accounts and privileges in hundreds of services and organizations were closed. News of my death spread around the globe at the speed of light, causing tens of thousands of data banks to toggle my status to “deceased,” a position not designed to toggle back. Autobituaries, complete with footage of my mulching at the Foursquare Cafe, appeared on all the nets the same day. Every reference to me records both my dates of birth and death. (Interestingly, none of my obits or bio’s mention the fact that I was seared.) Whenever I try to use my voiceprint to pay a bill, alarms go off. El’s attorney general has managed to reinstate most of my major accounts, but my demise is too firmly entrenched in the world’s web to ever be fully corrected. The attorney general has, in fact, offered me a routine for my belt system to pursue these corrections on a continuous basis. She, as well as the rest of El’s cabinet, has volunteered to educate my belt for me as soon as I install a personality bud in it. It will need a bud if I ever intend to leave the security of my dungeon. But I’m not ready for a new belt buddy.

*   *   *

I pluck another eyebrow hair, and by its tiny light I say, “Ellen.”

We are living in an armed fortress. Eleanor says we can survive any form of attack here: conventional, nuclear, or molecular. She feels completely at ease here. This is where she comes to rest at the end of a long day, to glory in her patch of Earth, to adore her baby, Ellen. Even without the help of Mother’s Medley, Eleanor’s maternal instincts have all kicked in. She is mad with motherhood. Ellen is ever in her thoughts. If she could, El would spend all her time in the nursery in realbody, but the duties of a Tri-D governor call her away. So she has programmed a realtime holo of Ellen to be visible continuously in the periphery of her vision, a private scene only she can see. No longer do the endless meetings and unavoidable luncheons capture her full attention. No longer is time spent in a tube car flitting from one corner of the Protectorate to another a total waste. Now she secretly watches the jennies feed the baby, bathe the baby, perambulate the baby around the duck pond. And she is always interfering with the jennies, correcting them, undercutting whatever place they may have won in the baby’s affection. There are four jennies. Without the namebadges on their identical uniforms, I wouldn’t be able to tell them apart. They have overlapping twelve-hour shifts, and they hand the baby off like a baton in a relay race.

I have my own retinue, a contingent of four russes: Fred, the one who showed up on the day of my little death, and three more. I am not a prisoner here, and their mission is to protect the compound, Governor Starke, and her infant daughter, not to watch me, but I have noticed that there is always one within striking distance, especially when I go near the nursery. Which I don’t do very often. Ellen is a beautiful baby, but I have no desire to spend time with her, and the whole house seems to breathe easier when I stay down in my tomb.

Yesterday evening a jenny came down to announce dinner. I threw on some clothes and joined El in the solarium off the kitchen where lately she prefers to take all her meals. Outside the window wall, heavy snowflakes fell silently in the blue-grey dusk. El was watching Ellen explore a new toy on the carpet. When she turned to me, her face was radiant, but I had no radiance to return. Nevertheless, she took my hand and drew me to sit next to her.

“Here’s Daddy,” she cooed, and Ellen warbled a happy greeting. I knew what was expected of me. I was supposed to adore the baby, gaze upon her plenitude and thus be filled with grace. I tried. I tried because I truly want everything to work out, because I love Eleanor and wish to be her partner in parenthood. So I watched Ellen and meditated on the marvel and mystery of life. El and I are no longer at the tail end of the long chain of humanity—I told myself—flapping in the cold winds of evolution. Now we are grounded. We have forged a new link. We are no longer grasped only by the past, but we grasp the future. We have created the future in flesh.

When El turned again to me, I was ready, or thought I was. But she saw right through me to my stubborn core of indifference. Nevertheless, she encouraged me, prompted me with, “Isn’t she beautiful?”

“Oh, yes,” I replied.

“And smart.”

“The smartest.”

Later that evening, when the brilliant monstrance of her new religion was safely tucked away in the nursery under the sleepless eyes of the night jennies, Eleanor rebuked me. “Are you so selfish that you can’t accept Ellen as your daughter? Does it have to be your seed or nothing? I know what happened to you was shitty and unfair, and I’m sorry. I really am. I wish to hell the slug got me instead. I don’t know why it missed me. Maybe the next one will be more accurate. Will that make you happy?”

“No, El, don’t talk like that. I can’t help it. Give me time.”

Eleanor reached over and put an arm around me. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Forgive me. It’s just that I want us to be happy, and I feel so guilty.”

“Don’t feel guilty. It’s not your fault. I knew the risk involved in being with you. I’m an adult. I can adapt. And I do love Ellen. Before long she’ll have her daddy wrapped around her little finger.”

Eleanor was skeptical, but she wanted so much to believe me. That night she invited herself to my bedroom. We used to have an exceptional sex life. Sex for us was a form of play, competition, and truth-telling. It used to be fun. Now it’s a job. The shaft of my penis is bruised by the normal bend and torque of even moderate lovemaking. My urethra is raw from the jets of scalding semen when I come. Of course I use special condoms and lubricants for the seared, without which I would blister El’s vagina, but it’s still not comfortable for either of us. El tries to downplay her discomfort by saying things like, “You’re hot, baby,” but she can’t fool me. When we made love that night, I pulled out before ejaculating. El tried to draw me back inside, but I wouldn’t go. She took my sheathed penis in her hands, but I said not to bother. I hadn’t felt the need for a long time.

In the middle of the night, when I rose to go to my dungeon, Eleanor stirred and whispered, “Hate me if you must, but please don’t blame the baby.”

*   *   *

I ask my new belt how many eyebrow hairs an average person of my race, sex, and age has. The belt can access numerous encyclopedias to do simple research like this. Five hundred fifty in each eyebrow, it replies in its neuter voice. That’s one thousand one hundred altogether, plenty of fuel to light my investigation. I pluck another and say, “Fred.”

For Fred is a complete surprise to me. I had never formed a relationship with a clone before. They are service people. They are interchangeable. They wait on us in stores and restaurants. They clip our hair. They perform the menialities we cannot, or prefer not, to assign to machines. How can you tell one joan or jerome from another anyway? And what could you possibly talk about? Nice watering can you have there, kelly. What’s the weather like up there, steve?

But Fred is different. From the start he’s brought me fruit and cakes reputed to fortify tender digestive tracts, sunglasses, soothing skin creams, and a hat with a duckbill visor. He seems genuinely interested in me, even comes down to chat after his shift. I don’t know why he’s so generous. Perhaps he never recovered from the shock of first meeting me, freshly seared and implacably aggrieved. Perhaps he recognizes that I’m the one around here most in need of his protection.

When I was ready to start sleeping with Eleanor again and I needed some of those special thermal condoms, my belt couldn’t locate them on any of the shoppers, not even on the medical supply ones, so I asked Fred. He said he knew of a place and would bring me some. He returned the next day with a whole shopping bag of special pharmaceuticals for the cellular challenged: vitamin supplements, suppositories, plaque-fighting tooth soap, and knee and elbow braces. He brought 20 dozen packages of condoms, and he winked as he stacked them on the table. He brought more stuff he left in the bag.

I reached into the bag. There were bottles of cologne and perfume, sticks of waxy deodorant, air fresheners and odor eaters. “Do I stink?” I said.

“Like cat’s piss, sir. No offense.”

I lifted my hand to my nose, but I couldn’t smell anything. Then I remembered the “stinkers” on the Moon shuttle, and I knew how I smelled. I wondered how Eleanor, during all those months, could have lived with me, eaten with me, and never mentioned it.

There was more in the bag: mouthwash and chewing gum. “My breath stinks too?”

In reply, Fred crossed his eyes and inflated his cheeks.

I thanked him for shopping for me, and especially for his frankness.

“Don’t mention it, sir,” he said. “I’m just glad to see you back in the saddle, if you catch my drift.”

III

Two days ago was Ellen’s first birthday. Unfortunately, Eleanor had to be away in Europe. Still, she arranged a little holo birthday party with her friends. Thirty-some people sat around, mesmerized by the baby, who had recently begun to walk. Only four of us, baby Ellen, a jenny, a russ, and I, were there in realbody. When I arrived and sat down, Ellen made a beeline for my lap. People laughed and said, “Daddy’s girl.”

I had the tundra dream again last night. I walked through the canopy lock right out into the white, frozen, endless tundra. The feeling was one of escape, relief, security.

My doctor gave me a complete physical last week. She said I had reached equilibrium with my condition. This was as good as it would get. Lately, I have been exercising. I have lost a little weight and feel somewhat stronger. But my joints ache something terrible and my doctor says they’ll only get worse. She prescribed an old-time remedy: aspirin.

Fred left us two months ago. He and his wife succeeded in obtaining berths on a new station orbiting Mars. Their contracts are for five years with renewal options. Since arriving there, he’s visited me in holo a couple times, says their best jump pilot is a stinker. And they have a stinker cartographer. Hint, hint.

Last week I finally purchased a personality bud for my belt system. It’s having a rough time with me because I refuse to interact with it. I haven’t even given it a name yet. I can’t think of any suitable one. I call it “Hey, you,” or “You, belt.” Eleanor’s chief of staff has repeated her offer to educate it for me, but I declined. In fact, I told her that if any of them breach its shell even once, I will abort it and start over with a new one.

Today at noon, we had a family crisis. The jenny on duty acquired a nosebleed while her backup was off running an errand. I was in the kitchen when I heard Ellen crying. In the nursery I found a hapless russ holding the kicking and screaming baby. The jenny called from the open bathroom door, “I’m coming. One minute, Ellie, I’m coming.” When Ellen saw me she reached for me with her fat little arms and howled.

“Give her to me,” I ordered the russ. His face reflected his hesitation. “It’s all right,” I said.

“One moment, sir,” he said and tongued for orders. “Okay, here.” He gave me Ellen who wrapped her arms around my neck. “I’ll just go and help Merrilee,” he said, relieved, as he crossed to the bathroom. I sat down and put Ellen on my lap. She looked around, caught her breath, and resumed crying; only this time it was an easy, mournful wail.

“What is it?” I asked her. “What does Ellen want?” I reviewed what little I knew about babies. I felt her forehead, though I knew babies don’t catch sick anymore. And with evercleans, they don’t require constant changing. The remains of lunch sat on the tray, so she’d just eaten. A bellyache? Sleepy? Teething pains? Early on, Ellen was frequently feverish and irritable as her converted body sloughed off the remnants of the little boy chassis she’d overwritten. I wondered why during my year of brooding, I’d never grieved for him. Was it because he never had a soul? Because he never got beyond the purely data stage of recombination? Because he never owned a body? And what about Ellen, did she have her own soul, or did the original one stay through the conversion? And if it did, would it hate us for what we’ve done to its body?

Ellen cried, and the russ stuck his head out the bathroom every few moments to check on us. This angered me. What did they think I was going to do? Drop her? Strangle her? I knew they were watching me, all of them: the chief of staff, the security chief. They might even have awakened Eleanor in Hamburg or Paris where it was after midnight. No doubt they had a contingency plan for anything I might do.

“Don’t worry, Ellie,” I crooned. “Mama will be here in just a minute.”

“Yes, I’m coming, I’m coming,” said Eleanor’s sleep-hoarse voice.

Ellen, startled, looked about, and when she didn’t see her mother, bawled louder and more boldly. The jenny, holding a blood-soaked towel to her nose, peeked out of the bathroom.

I bounced Ellen on my knee. “Mama’s coming, Mama’s coming, but in the meantime, Sam’s going to show you a trick. Wanna see a trick? Watch this.” I pulled a strand of hair from my head. The bulb popped as it ignited, and the strand sizzled along its length. Ellen quieted in mid-fuss, and her eyes went wide. The russ burst out of the bathroom and sprinted toward us, but stopped and stared when he saw what I was doing. I said to him, “Take the jenny and leave us.”

“Sorry, sir, I…” The russ paused, then cleared his throat. “Yes, sir, right away.” He escorted the jenny, her head tilted back, from the suite.

“Thank you,” I said to Eleanor.

“I’m here.” We turned and found Eleanor seated next to us in an ornately carved, wooden chair. Ellen squealed with delight, but did not reach for her mother. Already by six months she had been able to distinguish between a holobody and a real one. Eleanor’s eyes were heavy, and her hair mussed. She wore a long silk robe, one I’d never seen before, and her feet were bare. A sliver of jealousy pricked me when I realized she had probably been in bed with a lover. But what of it?

In a sweet voice, filled with the promise of soft hugs, Eleanor told us a story about a kooky caterpillar she’d seen that very day in a park in Paris. She used her hands on her lap to show us how it walked. Baby Ellen leaned back into my lap as she watched, and I found myself rocking her ever so gently. There was a squirrel with a bushy red tail involved in the story, and a lot of grown-up feet wearing very fashionable shoes, but I lost the gist of the story, so caught up was I in the voice that was telling it. El’s voice spoke of an acorn who lost its cap and ladybugs coming to tea, but what it said was, I made you from the finest stuff. You are perfect. I will never let anyone hurt you. I love you always.

The voice shifted gradually, took an edge, and caused me the greatest sense of loss. It said, “And what about my big baby?”

“I’m okay,” I said.

El told me about her day. Her voice spoke of schedules and meetings, a leader who lost his head, and diplomats coming to tea, but what it said was, You’re a grown man who is capable of coping. You are important to me. I love it when you tease me and make me want you. It gives me great pleasure and takes me out of myself for a little while. Nothing is perfect, but we try. I will never hurt you. I love you always. Please don’t leave me.

I opened my eyes. Ellen was a warm lump asleep on my lap, fist against cheek, lips slightly parted. I brushed her hair from her forehead with my sausage-like finger and traced the round curve of her cheek and chin. I must have examined her for quite a while, because when I looked up, Eleanor was waiting to catch my expression.

I said, “She has your eyebrows.”

Eleanor laughed a powerful laugh. “Yes, my eyebrows,” she laughed, “poor baby.”

“No, they’re her nicest feature.”

“Yes, well, and what’s happened to yours?”

“Nervous habit,” I said. “I’m working on my chest hair now.”

“In any case, you seem better.”

“Yes, I believe I’ve turned the corner.”

“Good, I’ve been so worried.”

“In fact, I have just now thought of a name for my belt valet.”

“Yes?” she said, relieved, interested.

“Skippy.”

She laughed a belly laugh, “Skippy? Skippy?” Her face was lit with mirthful disbelief.

“Well, he’s young,” I said.

“Very young, apparently.”

“Tomorrow I’m going to teach him how to hold a press conference.” I didn’t know I was going to say that until it was said.

“I see.” Eleanor’s voice hardened. “Thank you for warning me. What will it be about?”

“I’m sorry. That just came out. I guess it’ll be a farewell. And a confession.”

I could see the storm of calculation in Eleanor’s face as her host of advisors whispered into her ear. Had I thrown them a curve? Come up with something unexpected? “What sort of confession?” she said. “What do you have to confess?”

“That I’m seared.”

“That’s not your fault, and no one will want to know anyway.”

“Maybe not, but I’ve got to say it. I want people to know that I’m dying.”

“We’re all dying. Every living thing dies.”

“Some faster than others.”

“Sam, listen to me. I love you.”

I knew that she did, her voice said so. “I love you too, but I don’t belong here anymore.”

“Yes, you do, Sam. This is your home.”

I looked around me at the solid limestone wall, at the oak tree outside the window and the duck pond beyond. “It’s very nice. I could have lived here, once.”

“Sam, don’t decide now. Wait till I return. Let’s discuss it.”

“Too late, I’m afraid.”

She regarded me for several moments and said, “Where will you go?” By her question, I realized she had come to accept my departure, and I felt cheated. I had wanted more of a struggle. I had wanted an argument, enticements, tears, brave denial. But that wouldn’t have been my El, my plan-for-everything Eleanor.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Just tramp around for a while, I guess. See what’s what. Things have changed since the last time I looked.” I stood up and held out the sleeping baby to El, who reached for her before we both remembered El was really in Europe. I placed Ellen in her crib and tucked her in. I kissed her cheek and quickly wiped it, before my kiss could burn her skin.

When I turned, El was standing, arms outstretched. She grazed my chest with her disembodied fingers. “Will you at least wait for me to give you a proper farewell? I can be there in four hours.”

I hadn’t intended to leave right away. I had just come up with the idea, after all. I needed to pack. I needed to arrange travel and accommodations. This could take days. But then I realized I was gone already and that I had everything I’d need: Skippy around my waist, my credit code, and the rotting stink of my body to announce me wherever I went.

She said, “At least stay in touch.” A single tear slid down her face. “Don’t be a stranger.”

Too late for that too, dear El.

*   *   *

We were out of our minds with joy. Joy in full bloom and out of control, like weeds in our manicured lives.