Dawn Chapman

I wasn’t really all that worried—or not at first anyway, because I’d been careful and so had Vodge. Despite my better judgment, despite the complications, despite everything, I was deep into it with him at this point, deeper than I’d ever been with Johnny. Johnny was just a phase, or that was what I told myself. A crutch. Something to cling to on the emotional roller coaster leading up to closure—if I’d thought I was in love it was love as a kind of quick fix, bandaid love, a distraction from what Mission Control was putting me through and maybe an acting-out too because who were G.C. and Judy to dictate my private life? I understood that now. Johnny had pretty much stopped showing up anyway, and when Linda told me about Rhonda Ronson, I didn’t feel a thing. Actually, I felt more jealousy over Vodge’s involvement with her than Johnny’s. That was how far I’d come. And Vodge was diplomatic about it, giving me what I wanted to hear—she was just a fling, nobody really, a secretary at a doctor’s office who just happened to be available, though even then he’d known he was in love with me. He was looking for a quick fix, same as me. There she was one night at the bar at Alfano’s and one thing led to another.

We’d been inside a long time—forever, it seemed. To think about the world beyond the glass was like looking down the wrong end of a telescope, everything shrunk to irrelevance. We were on another planet and nothing that happened back on the home planet really mattered anymore. Still, I couldn’t help myself: I wanted details in the way I would have wanted to know about a car wreck along the highway we couldn’t even see from here, and it had nothing to do with Johnny, I swear it—only Vodge, only him. “What does she look like?” I asked. “Is she pretty?”

We were on the couch in his room, books propped in our laps, just being together, siesta time, the sounds of our world, both natural and manufactured, ticking away in the background. “I guess, yeah—in a kind of cheap way,” he’d said, pushing all the right buttons. “Nothing like you. Nothing at all.”

“What about—in bed?”

He held my gaze. He was good at that, Vodge, good at putting things over, smooth, very smooth. “The usual,” he said.

“And what about me? Am I the usual too?”

“No way,” he said and he reached for my hand and pulled me to him.

As I say, I wasn’t worried, but after I missed my period for the second time I went up to the library and paged through half a dozen books, including The Family Medical Guide and Basics of Human Physiology, until I found what I was looking for in a study about dietary deficiencies in the Japanese concentration camps in World War II. The women there, overworked and underfed, stopped menstruating—for months, years even. The medical term for it was “hypothalamic amenorrhea.” At the bottom of a page detailing the prisoners’ starvation rations of under a thousand calories a day, was this footnote: Women who regularly perform overtaxing exercise or lose a significant amount of weight are especially at risk of developing the condition. There was more, about how weight loss can cause elevations in the hormone ghrelin, which inhibits the hypothalamic-pituitary-ovarial axis, which in turn alters the amplitude of GnRH pulses and causes diminished pituitary release of luteinizing hormone and follicle-stimulating hormone, and though I didn’t have much of an idea of what exactly that meant, I was satisfied and relieved too. Here was the rationale for missing my period, laid out for me in the language of authority, a dense cluster of medicalese that made everything come clear: I wasn’t pregnant, just undernourished. Simple as that. It would all go away on reentry, and in the meanwhile, looking at the bright side, I wouldn’t have to bother once a month with the silicone cup we all hated.

As it happened, Diane strolled into the library just as I was slipping the book back into its place on the shelf and though I really had nothing to hide I couldn’t help feeling like I’d been caught out. I picked up another book at random and flipped it open, then glanced up, as if abstracted, and gave her a smile.

“Oh, hi,” she said, crossing the room to me. “I didn’t know anybody was up here—”

This was pre-dinner (Gretchen’s turn, a meatless stir-fry, sure to be heavy on peanuts). I’d already done the evening milking, fed the pigs, chickens and ducks, washed up and shampooed my hair in anticipation of seeing Vodge, though we wouldn’t sit next to each other because we were playing it cool (despite the fact that everybody must have known what was going on, thanks to Gretchen and her big vituperative mouth. Not that it was any of their business, but still there were all sorts of invisible sensors here, feelers and tentacles that made the human sphere as mysteriously interconnected as the wild ones, and you had to be careful, very careful—with everyone, all the time). It was past six, the windows darkening behind me, everything still, the chatter of the biomes and the hum of the technosphere muted up here so that when you closed the door this was the quietest place in all of E2. “Only me,” I said. Then added, all innocence, “Just looking for something to read.”

“Oh, I’ve got a ton of things, if you’re interested—” Her taste, judging from the bookcase in her room, ran from detective stories to romance (anything with Love in the title), which you wouldn’t have expected of her—Gretchen, maybe, but not her.

“That’s okay,” I said. “I was actually just doing a little research.”

“Really?” She was leaning over me now, inspecting the shelf where I’d just slipped Starvation in the Shanghai Camps back in its slot and plucked up—what was it? Swami Vivekananda’s Raja Yoga. How was I to know? It was a book. And it was in my hands.

Diane—Lark—gave me a curious look. “Yoga?” she said. “Good for you.” She let out a sigh. She’d just turned thirty-eight two weeks earlier and looked ten years younger, especially with her hair cut short, very short—not quite as severe as Sigourney Weaver’s in Alien, but close. She’d cut it for her birthday, claiming she didn’t have time to bother with styling it anymore—and didn’t want to waste the water either, which made the rest of us feel prodigal. “I could only wish,” she said. I thought she was going to go on, wondering aloud why I’d looked so distracted lately, pry a bit, indulge in a little exploratory girls’ talk vis-à-vis me and Ramsay, but she didn’t. “The way you work, E., I can’t imagine how you find the time, let alone the energy.”

“Me either,” I said and she let out a laugh.

So it was all right. Everything was all right. Diane liked and respected me and I liked and respected her in turn. I was suffering from nothing more serious than hypothalamic amenorrhea and maybe a little cramping. I was fine. We were all fine. The human experiment marched on, the O₂ had stabilized, the goat’s milk was holding steady and the whole world was watching us as Mission Control beat the drums in the lead-up to our first anniversary inside.

Only problem was, on the day of the celebration I woke up feeling out of sorts. I don’t want to say nauseous, actually, but more as if I were off balance, dropping in an elevator or an airplane that suddenly loses altitude. You must know the feeling. It’s as if your stomach can’t adjust, as if it’s falling faster than the rest of you. I didn’t vomit, though I walked around all morning feeling I was right on the verge of it, which in some ways is worse than vomiting itself, which at least gives you some relief, and I had to force myself to eat my morning porridge—and still I wound up slipping half of it to Vodge, who lifted his eyebrows because no one ever gave up so much as a molecule of food here no matter what. Again—and call me an idiot—I didn’t really put two and two together, thinking the queasiness was a reaction to the previous night’s dinner, a rice and beans dish Diane had gone overboard in spiking with our new crop of those deadly little green serranos that look so innocent on the cutting board but can really do a number on you if you’re not careful. I wound up picking half of them out of my portion, but still I’d felt the heat—and felt it all over again on the toilet that morning too. So I was nauseous, an inconvenience, nothing more.

It was early yet, just after breakfast (the celebration was to kick off in the afternoon, thank god, rather than at eight, the hour we were afraid Mission Control was going to insist on for the sake of proportion), and I was in bra and panties, ironing my jumpsuit for our two p.m. appearance at the visitors’ window. The nausea had already twice propelled me to the bathroom, but nothing came of it and I wound up just sitting there on the toilet seat staring into space. At the moment I was feeling marginally better, and if I was thinking about anything it was whether I would wear my hoop earrings or the pearl studs—or none at all—for our official presentation at the glass. Just then there was a knock at the door and before I could holler Just a minute! Gyro, already dressed in his jumpsuit, was pushing his way into the room and pulling the door closed behind him.

I felt a tick of annoyance. A closed door meant Privacy, please, and we all knew that and respected it. Again, given the cameras and the tourists and the inescapability of our crewmates, privacy—private space—was our most precious commodity, aside from food, that is. I wanted to be equable, wanted to be nice, but I was at the end of nice right about then. “What?” I said, making an accusation of it rather than a question. “Didn’t you see I had the door shut?”

His face dropped. “Well, I—it’s a special day, right, a whole year now, can you believe it? And I just thought I’d do something special—for you.”

The rooms were small, as I’ve mentioned, almost claustrophobically so, he was right there on the other side of the ironing board, three feet away, and I was in my underwear—ironing, for god’s sake, and couldn’t I have a minute to myself? Was that too much to ask?

He was fumbling in the deep outer pocket of the jumpsuit, his eyes roaming over me, and then he had the package in his hand, the crinkled yellow paper, bold brown lettering, M&M’s, peanut M&M’s, and my first thought was, So he does have a stash, which was immediately followed by, No, there’s no way I can accept it. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I can’t, really, not now—I’m not feeling all that great this morning if you want to know the truth, and really, I have to do this”—gesturing with the iron—“and get ready for the party.”

The room was lit by the early sun fingering its way across the IAB and spilling through the window, strands of the wool carpet lit like trees in a miniature forest, a whole ecosystem there, moth larvae, dust mites, flakes of shed skin. I was holding a hot iron in my hand. And despite my resolve—it wouldn’t be right to accept anything from him, not under the present circumstances—my mouth was watering. I wanted that candy, wanted it more than ever, but I fought myself.

“I can’t believe it,” he said. “I’m offering you sugar, chocolate, M&M’s—like last time. Remember last time?” He rattled the bag suggestively. “And you’re saying you don’t want them, that you’re what, refusing even to accept a present from me?”

I set down the iron, shook my head. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“What is it—Vodge? That’s it, isn’t it?” He dropped his hand, jamming the yellow bag back in his pocket. “I’m a better man than he is, you know that, don’t you? He’s a cheat. And he’s reporting on us to Mission Control—like the spy he is.”

I had nothing to say to this because I knew it was true and yet it didn’t matter because no one seemed to see Ramsay’s authentic self, what he was like beneath the surface, and it was no use arguing over it—or trying to defend him either. My stomach clenched. I felt a weird sensation as if I were itching all over and when I reached up to adjust my bra strap and scratch my shoulder there I saw the look in his eyes, the hungry look, adoring and needy at the same time, and I just nodded and said, “I know.”

The celebration wound up being a bigger deal on the outside than in, the band playing, G.C. speechifying and parading his celebrities past the visitors’ window for dutiful Ecospherian handshakes and photo ops, the whole followed by more speeches trumpeting our accomplishments and then the dancing and feasting that went on past dark. Inside, it was different. We were all more than a little weary of these ceremonial occasions, tired of forced cheer and the pretense that everything was going swimmingly when in actuality the cracks had begun to show, Gretchen against Vodge (and now me) and Gyro increasingly embittered while Stevie and T.T. seemed a separate force, as if they knew something nobody else did. Diane was in her own world, our boss and taskmaster. Richard was a cipher. Yes, we’d got through the winter, but there was another one to come, and if the oxygen levels had stabilized with the increased sunfall we all knew what to expect next time around, and it wasn’t especially joyful to contemplate. What did we have to look forward to? More hunger, more scrabbling in the dirt, more work. Fifty consecutive two-year closures began to seem an awful lot to expect from an environment as delicately tuned as ours, even if conditions were sure to improve as the vegetation—and soils—matured. More and more, we began to feel it was a trial just getting through our own closure, only the second in a string of forty-eight more to come. Forty-eight more. I’d be long dead by then and god knew what E1 would look like at that point, what with the effects of global warming, species extinction and habitat loss, let alone E2. Would it really be a kind of ark to save humanity? Was humanity even worth saving?

I don’t know. Maybe it was just me. Linda had warned me that this was going to be a difficult time and I tried to keep that in mind, to rise above it and join in with my crewmates in our own celebration—to be a good sport—but even after the tourists, reporters and celebrities went home and we were mercifully left alone to enjoy our own feast, I still couldn’t get into the spirit of things. I felt dragged down, exhausted. Everybody else acted as if nothing was wrong, Vodge clowning around and heaping up a plate for me, Richard pouring arak, T.T. rigging up a pair of speakers to shake the place with rock and roll and Gretchen at one point raising her glass to propose a late-night group swim to cap off the day. Pork was the centerpiece of the feast (Peter, disposable now that he’d served his function in impregnating Penelope and had become just another mouth to feed) and the meat, sliced thick and oozing juices, seemed to excite everybody. I tried to eat but just didn’t seem to have much appetite. Which didn’t go unnoticed.

Richard, seated across the table from me and clutching a glass of arak, turned away from Diane, whom he’d been deep in conversation with, and suddenly focused on me. I was pushing the food around my plate and trying to listen to what Stevie was barking in my ear about Albert Hofmann, inventor of LSD, who had shown up after all, though he wasn’t much to look at, to say the least, and never seemed to leave G.C.’s side. And, of course, none of us got closer to him than the three-eighths-inch thickness of the reinforced glass at the visitors’ window.

“What’s the matter, E.,” Richard said, “too excited to eat?”

He’d meant it to be funny, an ironic jab at Mission Control and the way they expected us to switch on the esprit de corps on command, but he wasn’t smiling. He was giving me his clinical look, doctor and patient. I didn’t answer right away. Stevie was in the middle of a reminiscence about a singularly vivid experience she’d had with Hofmann’s product—Like when I was nineteen?—when she suddenly pushed herself up, announced, “I’ve got to pee,” and hurried off down the hall. We both paused to watch her go—I couldn’t help thinking how he’d examined her, measured her, photographed her, how he knew everything there was to know about her, about all of us—and then I turned back to him, my heart fluttering now till I could feel it in my throat. If anybody could see through me, he could.

“I don’t know,” I said, the racket of T.T.’s music—industrial rock, Ministry or maybe Nine Inch Nails—drowning out all the conversation around us until we might have been alone in his consultation room. “I think I’m coming down with something.”

“We know it can’t be flu,” he said, and he was smiling now, “—or the common or not-so-common cold either, right? You sure you’re not just exhausted? I mean, you do look a little pale, or maybe drained is a better word. You could just go to bed, you know—our official duties are over for the day. All those people, all that glass. Enough already, right? You feel that? I sure do.”

“I guess.”

“Of course, as your physician, what I’d recommend at this point is a judicious shot of homemade arak, just to make it all fade away. What do you say?” He lifted the bottle—or beaker, actually—and reached for my glass, but I put my hand over the top of it.

“No,” I said, “it’s my stomach. Actually, I’m feeling a little queasy.”

He took a sip from his own glass, made a face. “Really? And how long’s this been going on?”

“I don’t know, couple of days.”

“Couple as in two—or more?”

I picked up my fork and set it down again. Diane had turned to Gyro and was talking him up now, her hair jagged in the glare of the overhead lights, punkish almost. For a minute there I drifted out of myself, staring at the back of her head, watching her increasingly animated gestures as she semaphored her ideas, and it was as if I’d never seen her before, as if I weren’t here in E2 but in the food court at a mall somewhere, people watching.

“Dawn?” Richard was giving me an inquisitive look. The music screeched, buzzed, thumped.

“I don’t know.” I let my shoulders rise and fall. For some reason, whether it was fear, denial or just plain exhaustion, I felt on the verge of tears. I glanced up to where Vodge and Troy stood at the kitchen counter, waving glasses at one another. “More, I guess. Maybe like three or four?”

“That doesn’t sound right. Could be bacterial, I suppose, but then we’d all have it, and”—the smile again—“it’d be on Ramsay, wouldn’t it? He’s our water man, he’s our purifier, and if we can’t count on him, who can we count on?”

That was when I had my first glimmer of the truth, but as soon as it flashed across my mind I snuffed it out because it was inadmissible—so wrong, so terrifying, it made me catch my breath. No, the problem was I’d picked up a bug, it had to be, something my immune system could handle or in the worst-case scenario an antibiotic out of Richard’s kit. But from where? The water was as pure as anything E1 had to offer, purer—Vodge was a fanatic about it—and there was no way I could be infected with anything we hadn’t brought in with us, which would have been long extinct by now. But the animals, what about the animals? I thought of bird flu, swine flu, the stew of bacteria the pigs—pig—lived, ate and defecated in. That had to be it. It had to be.

“I could have picked up something from the ducks—or the pigpen . . .” My voice trailed off. “I mean, that’s got to be a possibility, right? Realistically?”

Richard was still watching me closely, still smiling, although the smile had begun to settle around the edges. He wasn’t just looking at me now, he was examining me, as if he knew something I didn’t, and it made me uneasy. “You want to come in and see me tomorrow? I’m open all day—and I take all the major credit cards, Visa, Master Card, American Express—”

What I was thinking of was that first night with Vodge, Christmas night, in his room. We’d both been drinking, that much I remembered, but he’d used a condom, hadn’t he? We’d been careful since, rigorous, to the letter, no matter how carried away we were, because getting pregnant, knocked up, would be the end of everything we’d worked for, all of us, as catastrophic as blowing out the airlock with a stick of dynamite. That would be ridiculous, crazy, wrong. There was no way I was pregnant, no way. And yet I was flashing on the second time, the following morning when he’d slipped into my room before anybody was up and he was all over me and I was all over him and still I’d said, Wait, wait, and gone into the bathroom for my diaphragm and he’d said, I thought you were on the pill?

“I don’t think it’s anything, really,” I said, looking Richard in the eye. And then, to prove it to him, I reached across the table for the beaker, filled my glass and downed it in a single defiant gulp.

The nausea didn’t go away, hitting me the minute I opened my eyes the next morning, waves of it rising inside me like an internal tide, and it didn’t fade when I pulled on my clothes and went out to the IAB to put in my hour’s work before breakfast. Next thing I knew I was seated at the granite table staring into my bowl of porridge and willing myself to eat while my crewmates compared notes on the party and Gretchen plunked herself down at my end of the table without acknowledging me, let alone wishing me a good morning or even a Hello, drop dead. Gyro withdrew into himself, spooning up his porridge as if he were alone in his room, and since Vodge was late for breakfast, the burden of chitchat fell on Richard, Stevie and Troy, all three of whom seemed lit up still in the aftermath of the party. When Vodge did come in he took the only open seat, which was next to mine, even as Diane pushed her empty plate away, brandished the banana and laid out the day’s assignments with a speech that started with the phrase “Listen up, people.”

When Diane paused to pass the banana on to Stevie, who was going to give us her weekly status report on the ocean and its finicky corals, Vodge tilted his head toward mine till we were almost touching and I felt a shiver go through me: the tickle of his hair, the heat of his breath, the familiar comforting smell of him. “You don’t look so hot,” he whispered. “Still under the weather?” The night before he’d wanted me to come to his room but I’d begged off on the grounds that I wasn’t feeling well, telling myself it was only rest I needed.

Now I just nodded and watched him purse his lips and tighten the groove between his eyes till there was an imprint of flesh clamped there, and was he thinking the same thing I was? I couldn’t guess—and, truthfully, I didn’t want to. After a minute, when everybody was focused on Stevie, he slipped his hand under the table and took hold of mine.

I began to feel better as the day wore on, which just managed to scare me all the more. The term “morning sickness” came to me, a term I was familiar with in the vague way of things like “coronary bypass” and “radiation treatment,” neat two-word descriptors of calamities that happened to other people but never you. Women of my generation had careers instead of babies and I’d never known anybody who’d been pregnant except my mother, but I’d been only three years old at the time and that hardly qualified. I thought of calling her, of confiding in her, of getting some information, but Mission Control strictly limited our outside calls and I was afraid somebody’d be listening in on the other end—Judas—and I let things slide, hoping the nausea would go away, hoping it was in fact no more than a temporary infection I’d picked up from the animals. My stomach settled. I worked with Diane and Vodge in the rice paddies cum fish ponds and if I felt more worn down than normal, the hard physical labor helped cleanse my mind. I was fine by lunch. Which I plowed through like a marathon runner, licking not only my plate but the utensils too.

After lunch, at siesta-break, Vodge waited till everybody was otherwise occupied—doors shut up and down the hallway, Troy dozing in a chair on the balcony and Stevie gone to the beach, with a towel—before coming to my room. Everybody might have known what was up, but we were being discreet as a way of sparing people’s feelings—Gyro’s, Gretchen’s, even Richard’s, really—and making a show of the way we felt about each other would just be asking for trouble. Inside and out. Judy hadn’t weighed in yet, if she even knew about us. Nor had G.C.

What can I say about him, Vodge? He was beautiful, that was all, with a grin that was genetically programmed to trigger the lights in his eyes—if he was wearing a bandanna across his lower face like a bandito you’d still know he was smiling, just from the way his eyes jumped out at you. I loved his hands. Loved the way he looked in the doorway when the light was behind him, defining his shoulders, his arms, the hard knots of his calves. Love. I was in love. Careening through that delirious stage when sensation rules everything, my skin a sheath of nerves firing at his slightest touch, my brain swamped with dopamine, everything flashing and sparking as if I’d taken one of Hofmann’s little pills. I’d been deprived of physical intimacy for nearly ten months, even if he hadn’t (Gretchen, not that I was jealous of her), and we’d come together with the kind of urgency you see in the movies when the lovers, kept apart by one plot point or another through two-thirds of the film, are suddenly pawing at each other while the music swells and the camera goes fuzzy. That was us. That was how it was the first night, revelatory, passionate to the tenth power, and it was as if we couldn’t get enough of each other since.

But now, right now, in the slow sweet hour and a half given us for siesta each day, I felt him on top of me like a burden, an excrescence, something I’d given birth to, and if we were making love it didn’t feel that way to me. I had something to tell him, something that terrified me whether it was just my imagination or not, and I couldn’t stop thinking of it the whole time. When he rolled off me and we were both lying there staring at the ceiling, the condom still clinging to him and my skin burning from the touch of him, I was trying to put the words together in my head—I didn’t want to just come out with it because it was probably nothing and I’d only embarrass myself. There was an interval, our shoulders touching, his hand clasped in mine even as my mind raced and a beetle crept upside down across the ceiling as if the rules of gravity had been suspended, and then, incredibly, he began to snore with a soft rattling insuck of breath and the moment went up in flames. “Vodge,” I said, rising up on my elbows so I was looking down at him, at the pits of his nostrils and the cavern of his open oblivious mouth, “there’s something I want to say, to tell you, I mean—”

I watched his eyes flutter open, the consciousness gradually creeping back into his features. “What? What is it?” He was sprawled there still, still wearing the condom, his limp penis like something that had crawled up out of the sea and died before it could shed its skin. “Is there anything wrong?”

I didn’t go to Richard till the next day. I woke at five, feeling as if I’d had the air punched out of me, as if I’d been strapped down and couldn’t breathe, and the next thing I knew I was in the toilet, retching—the toilet I shared with Richard, his door giving onto it from the right side, mine from the left. I’d fastened the latch, but I was afraid he’d hear the noise I was making, though he wouldn’t have been awake yet, or he usually wasn’t at that hour. I didn’t bring anything up. It was just dry heaves, a whole churning cycle that left me feeling light-headed and weak. After a while I rose to my feet, unlatched the door and went back to bed. I wound up being late for the morning milking and I just went through the motions in the IAB, feeling as if I were down at the bottom of the ocean with Stevie, everything happening in slow motion. Though I didn’t have any appetite for breakfast, I sat there and dipped a spoon in my porridge as if there was nothing amiss while the others went through the usual morning routine and Vodge, derailed by what I’d told him the afternoon before, made himself scarce.

I shouldn’t have said anything, I saw that now, not till I knew one way or the other, but I was scared and I couldn’t keep it in any longer. I needed reassurance, that was all. Needed him to hold me and tell me it was all right, there was nothing to worry about, I was just being foolish. But when I told him I’d missed my period he just about exploded, not only jumping to conclusions that were in no way justified but blaming me, though he was just as culpable—more, because we hadn’t been in my room that first night but his and if it was on anybody it was on him. “Everything’s up in the air yet,” I kept telling him, “it could be a thousand things, nothing definite, nothing written in stone.” He wouldn’t listen. He was infuriating, hurtful, acting like a shit. To say he was a disappointment would be an understatement. But then it was only typical, wasn’t it? Men had their needs, and women too, but it was always the woman left holding the bag. Like Tess. The knocked-up milkmaid.

But I wasn’t knocked-up and this wasn’t the end for us either, not till Richard said so.

I spent the morning in the paddies again, up to my knees in muck, transplanting rice seedlings, Diane lost in the work, Vodge solicitous with me but unusually quiet, and as if I didn’t have enough on my plate, here were two families who must have been Mormons—two couples, thirteen children, count ’em, ranging from infants to leering pimply boys—pressed up against the glass just inches from me, watching the clumsy Terranaut splash, stagger and fall flat till her face was a mud pack and her hair hanging limp and dripping a pasty liquid the color of tobacco juice. When our walkie-talkies buzzed with the first call to lunch, Vodge hosed off Diane and me and then I hosed him off, changed into a clean shirt and shorts and sat down to the table with as fierce an appetite as I think I’ve ever had and it didn’t matter a whit that T.T. was the cook and the food—what he was calling a beet, bean and sorghum casserole—so bland you could barely taste it. I felt fine, though my back ached from bending over all morning and I was so tired all I wanted was to sleep through siesta, but I made myself go to Richard because that was what I had to do, if only to get it over with.

Nobody was around—people tended to scatter after lunch—and so nobody saw me duck into Richard’s office, which was the first doorway off the hall from the kitchen before you got to our rooms. At first I didn’t think he’d be there because this was his break period too—and maybe I was secretly hoping he wouldn’t be—but there he was, his back to me, slumped in the reclining chair, his feet up on his desk. He didn’t stir even when I pulled the door shut behind me, and I realized he was asleep, napping, his head lolling to one side. I saw he had a bald patch I’d never noticed before, a single beam of sun through the window picking it out as if it were a spotlight and we were onstage and the drama about to begin. Here he was, Richard, the man who was one of my best friends on earth, who’d photographed me nude, who’d cupped my breasts in his hands and made his intentions clear in the most unprofessional way, Richard, asleep.

I felt powerful suddenly, calm, all my fears shrunk down to nothing, because I could just walk back out that door and never have to listen to him ask if my breasts were tender or put his fingers there and comment on the way the areolas around my nipples had darkened and enlarged. I’d actually taken two steps back when he woke with a snort and swung round in the chair.

“Oh,” he said, “it’s you, Dawn. I thought—I guess I must have been dreaming. Or maybe I still am. You look—good. Pale, but then we’re all pale in here, aren’t we?”

“Yes, I guess we are,” I said, wondering if he’d forgotten our discussion of the night before last and if so, exactly how I was going to broach the subject. “First thing I’m going to do when we get out of here is go lay out in the sun—”

“I hear you. But be careful with that tender skin, E.—you don’t want to age before your time. Redheads, right?” He rubbed his eyes, yawned, then stretched his arms over his head. “Now, tell me again, what was this business with an upset stomach? Still bothering you—or did my special prescription take care of it?”

At first I didn’t know what he was talking about, but then I remembered the arak, which, strangely, hadn’t seemed to have any effect on me at all. “Yes,” I said. “Or no. I mean, it’s still bothering me”—and here it was, out in the open—“especially in the mornings?”

What he was doing was staring into me in that way he had, all business now, no cynic, no lover-in-waiting, but the physician who was there to assess and diagnose and cure, our priest of the age that had left priests behind. Richard. “You mean morning sickness?”

Maybe I colored. I don’t know. I was still standing there in the middle of the room, feeling guilty, devastated, like a betrayer, the one who was going to bring the whole mission crashing to the ground, worse, far worse even than Roberta Brownlow, because that was an accident. But then this was an accident too, wasn’t it?

He got up out of the chair quietly, came across the room, took me by both hands and gazed into my eyes. When he spoke it was with the softest voice, a voice so soft it could have been my own, seeping out of someplace deep inside me. “You remember when you had your last period?”

“I don’t know. Like two months ago?”

“Could be dietary,” he said. “You’re on the pill, right?”

I dropped my eyes. “Diaphragm.”

“Well, let’s have a look,” he said, but he didn’t lead me to the examining table, not yet, and he didn’t let go of my hands. Just held on till we were both conscious of the moment.

“You’re with Vodge now, aren’t you?”

I didn’t say anything. But I lifted my eyes to his, to show him I wasn’t evading the question. What everybody else knew, he knew.

“And you’re being careful?”

“As far as I know. Except maybe—”

“Yes? You can tell me.”

“That first night?” And now I couldn’t hold it back any longer, the truth laid out right there for both of us like some slide in biology class, and I started to cry. “Maybe. I don’t know. I just—I don’t know anything anymore.”