Ramsay Roothoorp

To tell you the truth, Christmas is beyond irrelevant as far as I’m concerned, a coercive brainless holdover from primitive times when people saw the sun sink lower every day and it scared the living bejesus out of them. What if it never came back? What if the days kept counting down, getting shorter and shorter, till night was all there was? They shivered in their huts, built up the fire, chanted, cast spells, made sacrifice to appease whatever gods they suspected of having a hand in things, and sure enough, the days began to grow longer and everyone was saved—for another year anyway. Then the historical Jesus came along and his followers just happened to conveniently fudge the date of his birth so they could prop the whole Spiritus Sanctus business up on the shoulders of the ancient solstice rituals, birth of the sun and the son of God too. But really, who can argue with a tradition that goes back two millennia? If people have believed that long, it must be true, right? I like to think about the kind of historical gravitas something as manipulative and patently absurd as Mormonism—or worse yet, Scientology—will be busy accumulating over the next millennium or two. Picture it: in two thousand years you’ll have everybody scrambling around the malls and carving up turkeys over the birth of our true savior and redeemer, second-rate sci-fi hack L. Ron Hubbard.

No, I see Christmas in strictly practical terms, the way the Japanese do—as an excuse to indulge and overindulge and move product, with no religious connotation whatever, if you discount Santa Claus, who looms large in Shibuya come December every year. That other figure, the scrawny bearded one nailed to the cross in his loincloth, isn’t all that much fun, really, when you come right down to it. He doesn’t shake it out like a sumo champion squatting in the dohyō or dress himself in red from head to toe and shower gifts on everybody—and if there’s any culture built on gift-obsession, it’s the Japanese. So what I’m saying is that while I was inside I made use of Christmas strictly for its PR value, doing my best to tie the commercial and religious aspects to us, the new saviors, the Terranauts celebrating Yuletide inside the only man-made ecosphere in creation—suffering, but rejoicing too, and all for the good of mankind and the future of the earth.

Richard called it a dog and pony show, and I guess it was. But it produced results. We enjoyed the widest news coverage since closure and I worked hard with Dennis and Judy to arrange for the choir and the Girl Scouts and the photo opportunity at the window and all the rest. And when things died down and everybody but the hard-core nutballs and eco-crazies had packed up and gone on home to their trees and wreaths and menorahs, we had our own calorie-packed feast that was as rich as anything you could get on the outside, though I would have wished for a splash or two of Sriracha or even a sweet butter pickle or a slice of cranberry sauce still indented from the can. Or mustard. I would have died for mustard. I’m sorry, but pork needs mustard, no matter how much you smother it in caramelized onions and ground sage. At any rate, we did the best we could, which was the whole point.

The centerpiece was the pork roast—the sacrificial flesh—and the mental picture I still hold on to is of E., lit with arak and joining lustily in the singing of Christmas carols round the table, fully vibrant and open and giving herself a hundred percent over to the festivities, and yet all the while steering her fork around the oozing redolent slab of meat laid out on her plate. I made chitchat with Diane on my left and Troy on my right, but what I was really doing was watching E. without letting on. She went at the turnips and potatoes and all the rest of the trimmings as avidly as anyone, but finally, when everybody was distracted by Stevie doing a kind of pole-dance version of “Santa Baby” at the head of the table, she quietly slipped her half-inch-thick slice of pork back onto the platter.

Again, to repeat, I’m not the heartless manipulator some people have made me out to be—I feel, and feel as deeply as the next person, and I have to say that little move on Dawn’s part really got to me. She was the one who’d overseen the slaughtering, directing Troy and me through the whole process, because that was her job as our MDA and there was no shirking in her. She never hesitated, though her hand trembled, I saw that much. Troy did the killing, three quick blows with the blunt edge of the axe, but she stuck the pig herself and drew the blade down to slash open its gut and remove the viscera—a team player all the way—but she was hurting inside and here was the proof of it. She loved that pig, and why not? It just showed how compassionate she was, how compassionate we all were, or could be, no matter how practical or dispassionate the task at hand. And the task at hand was to keep E2 afloat. Dawn believed in that a hundred percent, believed in it more than anybody, even Gretchen, even me, as events would prove.

But the gifts—did I mention the gifts?

We’d all drawn names out of a hat a few days earlier to ensure that each of us would receive a modest gift, eight names, eight gifts. I was ready to shout hosannas when Gretchen drew Stevie’s name instead of mine—our breakup, and I’ll get to that in a minute, was nothing short of catastrophic—and my mood improved even more when I drew E.’s name. What I was thinking, the slip of paper in hand with E.’s neat cursive flowing across it—her whole name, first, middle and last, written out as if it were a school exercise—was that here was my opportunity. Or an opportunity. I’d taken baby steps up to this point and I knew she knew about Gretchen, though she never mentioned it, or only, I suppose, in a glancing way, but I was building toward something with her, something genuine, something real. I’m talking love here, or the possibility of it. Stevie left me cold—and Diane was too remote, too focused on the mission to ever let loose. And Gretchen. Gretchen was like a volcano that’s been waiting six centuries to erupt. But E. was my girl. E. was just right for me. E. was what I wanted—for herself, for the sound of her voice with its sweet trilling notes and its faintest catch of a lisp, for her body, her legs and breasts and lips, the way her eyes seemed to bring everything inside her to the surface and nothing coy about it. She didn’t play games. She was genuine, the real thing. And Johnny, the guitar-strumming clown in the cowboy shirt (and I could play guitar too), was remote now, gone, vanished, glassed-out. It had been gradual, but we’d drawn closer over the months, E. and I, and what I thought was that I’d give her something special that might draw us even closer because, understand me, I couldn’t wait forever.

The gifts, homemade of course (or E2-made, I should say), went round the table, giver to receiver. All were decorated with flowers and wrapped in whatever scraps of paper were available or folded up in banana leaves, and all—or nearly all—were gifts of the one and only thing that mattered to us: food. Diane presided, her jumpsuit radically compressed and pinned up on her head to represent the sort of stocking cap Santa wore, though to my mind it looked more like a flame-red pallu and she less like the merry old elf than a pale-faced version of Indira Gandhi. “Who’s first?” she called out, and I said, “E.”

Dawn was sitting beside Diane at the far end of the table from me. She’d washed and combed out her hair and it flared in the late-afternoon light—not in the way of all those Tropicana dye-jobs out there in the world, but more coppery, more gold. Like the rest of us, she’d changed out of her jumpsuit once the day’s public activities had been put to rest, and she was dressed now in a clean pair of jeans that had gone ever so slightly loose on her and a low-cut top, light blue or maybe turquoise, I’d never seen before. “Me?” she said, flushing, and covered herself with a laugh. She turned to Diane. “Why don’t you go? Or somebody?”

I pushed the gift across the table, where Richard took hold of it and nudged it toward her. “Open it,” he said. “Come on, E., you’re holding up the proceedings here—”

I’d wrapped E.’s present in a single banana leaf, using the slim elastic runners of our nuisance plant, the morning glory, for twine. Inside was a foot-long section of sugarcane I’d squirreled away from our last harvest—my own portion, which I’d hidden in the drawer of my oak entertainment center while the others had gnawed greedily at theirs till there was nothing left but sticky fingers and sucked-out fiber to feed to the goats. I’d wanted the sugar rush as much as anyone, of course, but I’d seen the value in that length of cane, and whether I was thinking of E. or not—or temptation or seduction or whatever you want to call it—I restrained myself and set it aside. I might have chewed something else that day—azolla, probably, with its earthy taste and rubbery texture—to take my mind off it. (By the way, azolla, if you don’t already know, is a tiny nitrogen-fixing aquatic fern that floats on the surface of freshwater ponds like duckweed and doubles its biomass every two to three days. It’s packed with protein, amino acids, vitamins and minerals, and Asian rice farmers have made use of it for centuries as a way of discouraging weed growth in the paddies and providing nutrients at the same time, after which it’s harvested for animal fodder. We used it as chicken feed for the most part, though toward the end you saw it ending up more and more in our soups and stews.) At any rate, let’s just say I chewed a cud of the stuff that day to keep my mind off the sugarcane. Which I was saving for some as yet unspecified purpose, which had now achieved specificity: it was for E.

I watched her face as she undid the twine after shooting a quick glance at me, her benefactor, and then she had the cane in hand and was brandishing it aloft. “Sugar for Christmas!” she sang out, then looked me full in the face and said, “Thanks, Vodge.”

“Who’s next?” Richard leaned into the table on his elbows, gazing round expectantly. He was excited, and why blame him—who doesn’t light up at the prospect of receiving a present? (Better to give than receive, though, that was what I was thinking, especially as it was Diane who’d drawn my name out of the hat and I didn’t want to feel beholden to her—or anybody else for that matter.)

“Stevie, what about you?” Gretchen cried, a little too loudly, her second glass of arak already half-drained. She had an interest here, since she was the one who’d drawn Stevie’s name, and as everyone boisterously seconded the motion, I tried to catch E.’s attention. “E.,” I said, my voice a kind of elevated whisper, “there’s a note with that. I mean—see, tucked inside the banana leaf?—so don’t throw it away.”

A momentary frown and then the smile. “Yes, oh yes, I’ve got it,” and she held up the little three-by-five envelope I’d fashioned from a sheet of lined yellow notepaper. As I’d hoped, nobody was really paying attention because they were all focused on Stevie, pretty Stevie, with her white-blond-going-to-dirty-blond tresses tucked behind her ears, as she unwrapped Gretchen’s gift: a selection of rain forest fruits and palm nuts only the galagos would have known where to find.

What my note said was this: Meet me outside my room after the festivities—there’s more to come. Much more. And it’s not a jot less than you deserve, E. What I said now, in a whisper, was: “Later.”

The whole thing with Gretchen was regrettable—I admit that up front. And if I was being honest with myself, I’d say I’d known it all along, say I should have known better, acted like an adult, restrained myself for the good of the mission. But the flesh is weak, and that first night, after the whole crazy business with the galago and the way she’d so patiently and skillfully tended to the thing while I looked on and her breasts gathered and released and her limbs flowed hypnotically beneath the filmy material of her nightgown, I just couldn’t help myself. And she initiated it, as hard as that may be to believe—she was the one who put my hand on her breast, and if she wasn’t my type exactly, or hadn’t been up till that very minute, the problem was that I was her type and that night set something loose in her. All right. I’m venal. A dog, just like my old roommate Jason Fourier said. She was easy, she was needy, and we were both locked up together with no way out.

For the first week or two it was nice, her room right next to mine and no one the wiser. I came to her, late, at her signal—a coded knock at the wall that separated our rooms, three beats, two beats of silence, three beats more—and believe me I might have sat there pretending to read or work or whatever but my every cell and fiber was just burning for the moment when that knock would come. Unfortunately—and isn’t this the adverb that inevitably descends on just about any love affair, especially one as lopsided as ours?—she started to turn spooky on me.

Jesus, I look at that line and wonder what it means. Spooky? Let me try for something a little more precise: she was demanding, possessive, moonstruck, never happy unless I was there at her beck and call. She began coming up with projects in the rain forest or the marsh biome that just couldn’t do without a man’s help—mine—and by the second or third week she’d given up all pretense and kept wanting to hold hands like a teenager or bump hips as we passed in the hall, which made me shrink down to a nugget inside because the last thing I wanted was for anybody to know what was going on between us, least of all E. Or Judy. Christ, I could only imagine what Judy would have to say about it—and how she’d make me pay too.

But Gretchen was hard to shake. More often than not she’d wind up sitting next to me at meals, once even snaking a hand under the table to take hold of me where I was most vulnerable, all the while making a game of joining in the general conversation as if she didn’t have my cock in her hand at all and things were just as normal as normal could be. I hated her then. Hated the way her face looked, smug, as if she were getting away with something, which she wasn’t, as it turned out, and she had nothing to be smug about. She was childish. Needy. Told me she couldn’t live without me. Worse: she began to talk of long-term commitment, every other minute mentioning some couple she knew who’d been together for ten years, twenty, old people in love still after a lifetime. Her parents. Her grandparents. What I mean is, she began talking about marriage, which came as a shock to my system, because marriage was a state of being I’d never really contemplated, not with her or anybody else, but especially not with her. One night, out of nowhere, as we lay there naked in my bed, she said, “Let’s get married. Inside, I mean. Wouldn’t that be great? I mean, Vodge, think what you could do with that in terms of publicity—a Terranaut wedding? We could hold the ceremony at the glass and G.C. and everybody—the press—could be there with the cameras rolling, right? What do you say?”

I tried to back off. The next night, when she rapped at the wall, I didn’t respond. She waited fifteen minutes, then tried again, and the sound of her knuckles tapping at the plaster was nothing but an irritant now and I wished I could lock the door and keep her out, but of course, there were no locks on our doors because a lock, by its very nature, connoted a failure of mutuality and trust. I tiptoed up the stairs and got into bed and when I heard the whisper of the hinges and her soft furtive tread first on the carpet and then the stairs I pretended I was asleep. But I wasn’t asleep and she knew it. “Vodge? You awake?”

“I’m sleeping.”

She was naked. I could just make out her form hovering over me like a succubus, and I’m sorry for that image, but there it is. She put one knee on the bed and the bed sank under her weight. “Don’t you want, you know—? It’ll help you sleep.” I didn’t respond. I didn’t want anything to do with this and I wished I’d never started it, wished I’d smuggled in a quart of saltpeter or gone Gyro’s route, strictly. “Vodge?” She laid a hand on my shoulder and it was like a hot iron, like a claw, and I just snapped. I rolled over, sat up, peeled off her hand and flung it away from me.

“Get out,” I said before I even knew what I was saying, and then I tried to soften it by claiming I was exhausted—and sick, feeling sick—and just needed to be alone, that was all.

It was dark, but I could make out her face in the glow of the night-light, her face that was still heavy, jowly, despite her weight loss, her old woman’s face that showed what she was going to become in a few years’ time, her face that had always looked old, probably even when she was young and none of us had yet to lay eyes on her. She began to cry, very softly, a sound like rain in the gutters on a night when you never suspected a storm was brewing.

I listened to this for a while, both of us silent, her effort to keep from sobbing out loud radiating through the mattress and right into the core of me. “What are you saying? Don’t you”—she choked back a sob—“want me anymore?”

I should have been harder, colder, should have broken it off right there and chased her out into the dark night of the biomes, but I didn’t. Coward that I was, fool, and let’s face it, shit—shit too—I whispered, “I’m just tired, that’s all.”

The party wound down by eight or so, all of us moving in slow motion by then, too exhausted by the demands of keeping our world together to really let go. We had to be up and at work first thing in the morning, as usual, no winter break here, no bank holiday—no bank, for that matter—the twelve days of Christmas shrunk down to one, and that was just about over. Mission Control had opened up the phone line so that we could schedule times to call friends and relatives and wish them the best of the season and have those wishes returned, and we’d all taken advantage of that. I called my grandmother, who, along with my grandfather, had raised me after my parents’ accident, and she sounded like her old self despite the fact that she was a widow now. She told me she was glad to hear from me and that she was proud of me too. “Everywhere I go, I can’t help bragging, you know that, don’t you?” she said in her voice that seemed more fractured and reduced with every breath she took (she was a smoker and I couldn’t help seizing on the implications—if god forbid she should die over the course of the next fifteen months I wouldn’t be at the funeral, that was for sure, and of course I’d had to lie to Mission Control right from the outset about the force of my attachment to her). “Did you see him on Good Morning America? I say to people like Evelyn Porter down at the library and Dorie Stachowitz across the street and just about everybody else I can grab hold of—or where, in Time magazine? Evelyn’s got a big Terranauts poster on the wall over the checkout desk, did I tell you that?”

I thought of calling Judy, for reasons that were complicated, but I didn’t because I couldn’t. Somebody would be listening in, you could bet on that, and just the fact that I’d placed the call would raise red flags over in Mission Control, even if all I wound up doing was wishing her a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. So I didn’t make the call and she didn’t call me either, whatever that meant. And frankly, as the day wore on and others were getting called to the phone, I began to realize I wouldn’t be hearing from her, and good riddance, that was what I was thinking. I had E. now, or was going to have her, and the whole thing with Judy was just worse than bad, a kind of tiptoeing around disaster neither of us needed.

I’d had maybe two or three glasses of Richard’s latest batch of arak, which seemed smoother and less astringent than the batch he’d cooked up for winter solstice, especially if you squeezed half a lemon into it, which I did, and after dessert—my banana crème pie—I ignored the way Gretchen was ignoring me and sat down next to E. “Merry Christmas,” I said, and it was the most natural come-on line in history. “You having fun?”

She opened up her megawatt smile, her lips—have I mentioned her lips?—so ripe and wet and full I almost kissed her right there with everybody looking. The thing that got me about her lips was how they always seemed ever so slightly parted, as if she were about to whisper something dirty or at least seductive, and tonight she’d put on lipstick and done her eyes and brushed on a fine layer of makeup to hide the orangeing glow of her skin. The effect was devastating, especially considering what I had in mind for the rest of the evening. “Absolutely,” she said. “This is like the best Christmas ever.”

“Me too,” I said. “I mean, Christmas inside. A year ago—” I didn’t finish the thought, but she knew what I meant. We were talking about privilege here, intimacy, the brother and sisterhood of E2 that brought us together in a way nothing else ever could have. If we were on the outside, we might never even have met. Or no, we would have met—we did, of course, as members of the extended crew—but if one of us had been excluded from E2 we would never have had this moment, this feeling I could sense deepening between us. She’d had a bias against me, I knew that, and it stemmed from an incident long before Gretchen—or Johnny—but that was behind us now. I had a present for her, a very special present even rarer than a stick of sugarcane and it was meant to show her how much I cared about her—once I got her to my room, that is, and hopefully without being too obvious about it. “Did you get my note?” I asked, even though I knew she had, but I was asking by way of reinforcement.

“Oh, yeah,” she said, “yeah.” The smile, the lips. “You have something else for me? I mean, really, the sugarcane was more than enough, and thank you, did I say that?” She leaned in and pecked a kiss to my lips, an official thank-you kiss, one the others could register for what it was. It came to me in that moment that she was drunk, drunker than I was at any rate, and that this was a good thing, a happy let-go-of-it-all sort of moment that was to be prelude to all the rest. If I could get her to my room.

The incident I referred to above had come during the first month or so after the extended crew had been chosen. We were on our first cruise on The Imago, it was one of those magical Caribbean nights, and everybody was stuffed to the gills with conch fritters, black beans and rice and flying high on local rum mixed liberally with the real Coca-Cola sweetened with real sugarcane in some no doubt unsanitary bottling plant in San Juan or Santo Domingo and all the better for it. We were just feeling each other out at that point, men and women alike, and I’d naturally gravitated toward Stevie because Stevie was like one of those cheap disco balls, all glitter and shining facets, and in my shallow go-straight-for-the-target brand of inveterate male obliviousness I was dazzled by her. I sat with her on deck and we shared a drink. Thinking I had a read on her, I steered the conversation around to what I had in mind, but before I could gain any traction her face tensed up and I saw my mistake. I tried to cover myself with a joke but the joke fell flat and she just gave me a long withering stare. If you quizzed me about it now I’d say that she lacked a sense of humor—still does—but that would only be scratching the surface of the situation: it was my bad, I admit it. I was the one out of bounds.

Anyway, she got up abruptly and went off to throw her golden head back and laugh with a group gathered round the stern railing and I sat there feeling like an idiot. But an idiot who doesn’t learn, an idiot who happened to spot E. sitting alone in the bow and went up to her and tried the same approach with the same result. Ever after, E. had been wary of me—she considered me a player, I guess, or that was what I gathered from talking to some of the others, from hints dropped, body language, the way she dealt with me, neither particularly friendly nor unfriendly either. Wary. Just wary.

All that changed, or began to change, once we were inside. There was the elaborate praise she’d given me that first night over my cuisine—and the pie, oh, the pie!—praise that was rightly deserved because I’d put my all into that lunch and that dinner too. And then there’d been the night in her room when we opened up to each other for the first time and really talked—beyond the self-congratulation and the party line and the usual self-replenishing stream of gossip, I mean—and after that, as I say, we’d become closer and closer so that I really did feel things building toward the moment of truth, and never mind the detours with Judy, which she didn’t know about, and Gretchen, which she did.

I stood and offered her my hand and she rose lightly from the chair, still with that smile in place, but there were the beginnings of a frown there too now, a quizzical expression working its way into her eyes and brow, as in What now?

“Just give me a minute,” I said. “I’ll go ahead. I’ll leave the door open.”

“Vodge,” she said, holding on to my name as if it were something sweet to lick off her lips, “you really have something for me? Seriously?”

“You just wait,” I said.

I’d made some preparations. The lights were down, I’d cleaned up to be sure there was no lingering trace of Gretchen anywhere about the place (though there was the problem—or potential problem—of her being in situ right next door), and I would have lit a joss stick or scented candle except that we couldn’t do that in our world and I’d already wasted my only candle on Gretchen. I’d found and evicted a stream of crazy ants that had, in their turn, already evicted the cockroach colony that had persisted in the back corner of my closet. The odd crusted-over dish or forgotten utensil had been returned to the communal kitchen and I’d made use of some of our scentless dish soap to scrub the fine green scrim of mold from the walls, something I’d been meaning to do for months. Nat King Cole, the reigning regent of corny Christmas ballads, was cued up on the CD player because I knew how susceptible E. was to what the retailers like to call the spirit of the season. But that sounds too cold. I just thought she would enjoy the album, that’s all, and when I borrowed it from T.T.’s collection it was for that purpose only because to me, no matter how sensitive the interpretation, you couldn’t separate the song from its function, viz., to narcotize the shopper while the cash register jingles in the background. Sleigh bells? What about the ka-ching! of the cash drawer?

I wasn’t nervous, or not particularly. I knew E. in a way I’d never known Judy, at least before our first time together, which wound up being as much a function of her initiative as mine—more so, actually. Judy and I had worked together, of course, but our relations had been strictly formal for the first year or so—she was my boss, after all, or one of them—until she began to single me out from the others. It was nothing radical, just that she seemed to be a whole lot friendlier all of a sudden, going out of her way to consult me on one thing or another, as if she really valued my opinion. Then came a sun-scorched spring day when the air conditioner was down and she wound up adjourning our regular late-afternoon meeting early because of the heat. As the others filed out, she asked if I might have a minute to spare—she wanted to solicit my take on what might be going wrong with the wastewater systems inside because the crewmember I was ultimately to replace, Walt Truscott, was having trouble with clogs in the pipes leading from the solid-waste settling tanks. I didn’t have a clue, but of course I spouted whatever nonsense came into my head that sounded like something she might want to hear (not enough circulation over the gravel at the bottom of the tank—or maybe too much) and went on until I realized she wasn’t listening to a word I said.

That was about when I realized too that the way she was looking into my eyes couldn’t be described as the impartial gaze of one team member receiving information from another but something else altogether. And what did that look, and the ruse of holding me back after the meeting, have to do with the fact that G.C. was in Pasadena in the company of G.F. and three of their consulting ecologists, addressing a gathering of JPL engineers on the subject of terraforming? I might have been a bit slow that night, but I got it, I did. “Forget wastewater,” I said, breaking off in the middle of the next empty sentence. “How about a little taste of good clean spring water fortified with scotch whiskey?” And she said, “Vodka’s my drink.” And I said, “Really?” And she said, “I hear you keep a bottle of Stoli in your freezer.” I was about to ask her how she knew that when I realized I already knew the answer and just moved in to kiss her.

Truthfully? That was just a warm-up, the kind of affair people have because it’s available, and I make no apologies. Or for Gretchen either, though Gretchen could get at me—and did—while Judy couldn’t, which put the Judy situation to rest except for the phone snits and PicTel recriminations, which, thankfully, had begun to taper off as the months stretched out and she set her snares elsewhere. Or at least that was what I assumed. Maybe she and G.C. were humping merrily away, as she claimed, or maybe she was fucking the pool boy at her condo or one of the suits G.F. trailed in his wake. It was all the same to me. But Gretchen was something else. That was hard. That was a horror show. The point came when I had to cut her off altogether—I told her, point-blank, I can’t do this anymore—but there she was, right next door, right there every time I opened the door, or, god forbid left it open. “I need my space,” I kept saying, but she wasn’t listening.

It all came to a climax one night after I’d explicitly said no, after I’d tried to indicate in every way I could that whatever we’d had together was over, that she was annoying me, crowding me, hurting me. For a full hour I ignored her knock, then went up to bed after first taking the precaution of edging my oak entertainment center across the floor and blocking the door with it. I hadn’t wanted to do that—it was as heavy as if it had been carved of stone, I was exhausted, and I’d just have to move it back again in the morning—but I really felt I had no choice. The knocking continued for a while, fainter now, and the human sounds began to fade all up and down the hallway as my crewmates turned in and the thrum of the biomes gradually took over. I heard the galagos, heard the coquis and crickets, and then I was asleep.

I awoke to the sepia glow of the night-light and a new sound, breath in, breath out, a moist sound, steeped in fluid, discontinuous, disconnected: the sound of Gretchen feeling sorry for herself. She was fully clothed this time and she was sitting cross-legged on the floor at the foot of the bed. My reaction? Outrage. Put yourself in my position and you might begin to imagine what I was feeling because there was no escape from this, no privacy, no surcease. “Shit, you scared me,” I said.

Out of the shadows, her voice low, shaky, dripping wet: “Good.”

“What are you doing here? How’d you even get in?”

“You think you can stop me?”

I didn’t want to be having this discussion. Not in my own room, not in the middle of the night. “Get the fuck out of here,” I said. “Get out and don’t come back. Ever.”

“You think you can just toss me aside? What do you think, they put me in here for your pleasure, or what? You owe me.”

“Owe you what? I don’t owe you a thing—”

“You make me feel cheap. And I’m not cheap. And I’ll tell you another thing—I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to sit right here, right here, till you give me an explanation—I mean, what were you thinking?”

“I wasn’t thinking anything. I just wanted a fuck, that was all.”

She was silent a moment, everything held in suspension until the murmur of the biomes began to leak back in to fill the void. “I still do,” she whispered, and I could see the outline of her there on the carpet, a hazy lump of shadow, legs tucked under her, arms folded across her chest.

I don’t enjoy inflicting pain. I’m a temporizer, a diplomat, a talker—above all, a talker. But she’d crossed a line here and no matter what it cost me I wasn’t going to allow it. “Well, I don’t,” I said, coming down hard on the negative. “Can’t you get that through your head? It’s over. It’s finished. Could I make it any plainer?”

“It’s Dawn,” she said, “isn’t it? It’s Dawn you want.”

I didn’t try to deny it.

“Or who,” she said, “—Judy?”

I didn’t deny that either. I didn’t say a word. Just got up off the bed, slipped into my shorts and made for the stairs, but she wouldn’t let me go, snatching at my ankles—raking them with her nails—till I kicked free in the dark and she began to scream, not even cursing me, just screaming. I got as far as the door, where I had to fight to get by the oak entertainment center, and I still don’t know how she’d managed to move the thing—that far and no farther, because she was right there now, jerking at my arm, and if I shoved her back into the room, shoved her to keep from balling my hand into a fist and breaking every bone in that white surging face, that was as far as my rage would take me. In the next moment I was out the door, thinking only to get away from her, to hide myself in the deepest darkest hole of the technosphere till things cooled down.

But things didn’t cool down. Just the opposite. Everybody was awake suddenly, doors flinging open up and down the length of the hallway, Stevie’s face hanging there like a flickering lantern, and Troy behind her asking what was wrong, what was happening, and E. too, E. squinting into the glow of somebody’s flashlight, and what could I say? Was I at a loss? No, never. Not me. I said, “It’s nothing. It’s Gretchen. She had a bad dream, is all.”

“Bad dream?” Troy had come up to me, right in my face now. He was barefoot, in a pair of shorts. His hair was mussed. I could smell the funk of his nighttime breath. “Sounded like somebody stabbed her. Gretchen?” he called, pushing past me. “Gretchen, are you all right?”

I kept going, past Stevie, past Richard and Diane and E., slipping down the stairs, through the orchard and out into the cover of the sealed-in night.

“So I’m embarrassed because I don’t really have anything to give you, besides maybe—do you want to share the sugarcane?” It was twenty minutes after we’d shut down the Christmas party, and E., in her turquoise top, blue jeans and a pair of open-toed clogs on her pretty feet, was sitting in the chair in my living room, holding up the (untouched) length of sugarcane I’d given her as the first installment of her Christmas present. Nat King Cole dripped treacle from the speakers, working his patient way through the changes of “Silent Night,” and the three-way bulb in the one lamp I had on was turned down low.

“No,” I said, “that’s for you. What kind of present is it if you have to share it around?”

She was a little drunk. I’d seen that earlier and I saw it again when she had to catch herself on the doorframe to keep from stumbling as she stepped into the room. “Come on, Vodge. I want to share. Really. Come on, help me out here—”

I was a little drunk too. All the better. When you’re drunk you’re not really thinking—or calculating—but just going with the flow. I let the flow take me to the counter, where I picked up the first thing that came to hand—a plate I’d been meaning to take back to the communal kitchen—and a kitchen knife I kept around for occasions like this. (Or not like this—there hadn’t been anything like this, and if somebody had told me E. had been in my room more than once or twice since closure, I would have been surprised. I suppose she had, but it would have been with some of the others, for cards or music or just a change of scene, a feature of the ongoing fiesta that was downtime in E2.) Next thing, I was slicing through the cane’s woody outer layer and digging out a section of the sweet fibrous pulp. I handed it to her and she leaned forward to take it from my hand, her cleavage staring right at me in a way that made me re-dedicate my mission here tonight, and then she was chewing—we were both chewing—and she said, “Hmm, good. Great, actually. Isn’t it amazing how the simplest things can give you the most pleasure?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said, “yeah. Absolutely. And it’s nice to have you here to share it with. Really nice.”

She was silent a moment, chewing, but her eyes never left mine. “You really have something else for me?” Her smile was hopeful and doubtful at the same time, and what did she think—I’d lured her here under false pretenses?

I gave her a grin, probably what you’d characterize as a loose-lipped grin, given my muscular response at that point, but I wasn’t the one observing it. I answered her with a question: “You don’t think I’d be satisfied with just the sugarcane as a present, do you? I mean—we’re teammates, right? And I really”—I was going to say “respect you” but caught myself. “I really admire what you bring to the table. Of all of us, of all the Terranauts, you’re the heart and soul of this mission, you really are—”

She was smiling, full-on, her eyes bright, dimples showing, and she caught a little loop of her hair and twisted it round one finger in a self-conscious gesture. “Go on,” she said. “Just keep telling me how wonderful I am—I could listen to this all night long. But what is it? What do you have?”

I didn’t know about Gyro’s stash of M&M’s, or not yet, but even if I had known it wouldn’t have fazed me. What I did then—and yes, I’d had it all planned out, from the sugarcane to the formal invitation to this, the moment of truth—was reach into my shirt pocket and produce one of the fat overstuffed spliffs of Cannabis indica I’d secreted beneath the flap of the false bottom of the suitcase I’d spread wide for the reporters the morning of closure. I’d rolled it in bright yellow papers so that it looked like the one Bobby “Blue” Bland is offering up to his two bikinied beauties on the inside cover of the Dreamer album. (I don’t know if you’re a Bobby Bland aficionado, but he makes Nat King Cole look sick—and he never recorded any hokey holiday albums either, or not that I know of.) “For you,” I said.

“You’re kidding! Where did you—?”

“I have my sources.”

“You smuggled pot into E2? I don’t believe you!”

I just shrugged. I felt good. Better than good. “You want a toke?”

From the look on her face I thought she was going to say something like Does the pope shit in the woods? but that wasn’t like E. Her friend Linda, maybe, but not E. What she said was, “Is it strong?”

This was a question I hadn’t been prepared for and for just a fraction of a second I hesitated, wondering what she wanted to hear. Of course it was strong—what would be the point if it wasn’t? Beyond that, beyond the wallop this particular strain of indica gave you, it was a potent aphrodisiac. “You bet it’s strong,” I said. She was leaning in close to me now, staring as if hypnotized at the joint pinched between my thumb and forefinger. “And I’ve got to warn you, it’s sexy too. Sexiest pot I’ve ever smoked.”

Nat King Cole butted in then, if only briefly. All is calm, he sang, his voice hushed and hymnal, all is bright.

E. leaned in even closer, braced herself with one hand against my chest and gave me a long slow kiss. Then she pulled back so that she was looking into my eyes again, right there, six inches away. “What are we waiting for?” she said.