Ramsay Roothoorp

All right, so call me heartless, call me a shit, a poser, a hypocrite and anything else you can think of, but when E. laid the news on me, it struck me as the ultimate act of betrayal, not to mention stupidity, and if I was less than sympathetic, I’m sorry. That she wasn’t on the pill was beyond comprehension. Every female in this country from the age of menarche to menopause was on the pill—wasn’t that what the sexual revolution was all about? I’d never known a woman who wasn’t on it, never even imagined it. In college, I’d even had a girlfriend who worked for Planned Parenthood, doing outreach work in the projects and trailer parks, and she was on-message pretty much all the time—female empowerment, population control, no more womb slavery and the like. She pinned a poster of Dr. Pincus up on the wall over our bed, as if I needed a reminder. Well, I didn’t. I had no intention of bringing another mouth into this world, not then or now or ever—I was an environmentalist, we all were, and it was clear that the fundamental problem facing our species, the root of all the world’s woes, the very reason we needed a place like E2 to begin with, was overpopulation. Nothing definite, E. told me that first afternoon, nothing written in stone, but even if that was true it put a chill in me—really, what had she been thinking?

We were in bed. I’d dozed off. Five minutes earlier I’d made love to her, had been in love with her, floating on the ascending beauty and rightness of it as if I were stretched out on a raft in the middle of the big hot tub we called an ocean, and now she was telling me she’d missed her period two months running? And it was just a dietary problem?

“It’s probably nothing,” she said.

“Then why mention it?”

She was propped up against the headboard, gazing down at me, her mouth clamped tight. She’d pulled her T-shirt back on and pushed the hair up away from her temples, where it flared in the light coming through the blinds. “I just thought you ought to know.”

“Ought to know what? You just said it’s probably nothing, didn’t you?”

She was silent a moment. “I’m saying, just in case—”

“In case you’re knocked up? In case the mission’s fucked? We’re fucked? I mean, is that what you’re trying to tell me, because I can’t believe what I’m hearing.” I’d pushed myself up to a sitting position, and though we were in bed together, inches apart, we might as well have been shouting across canyons. I wanted a cigarette. I wanted a drink. My hands were shaking. “I can’t believe you. Really, I can’t. Did you tell anybody?”

She shook her head.

“What about Richard? You see Richard yet?”

“It’s probably nothing.”

I came up off the bed then, naked, enraged, the wet condom still clinging to me as if in some X-rated cartoon, and before I could think I snatched it off and flung it across the room. “Christ, talk about a circular conversation—I mean, we could be doing Mr. and Mrs. Smith here. Talk to me. What do you mean, it’s nothing?”

In a small voice: “I looked it up. In this book about the Japanese camps?”

That was when I learned about hypothalamic amenorrhea, our big hope. “Okay,” I said, “okay,” but I wasn’t mollified, not even close. She’d put a scare into me—everything we’d worked for crashing down around our ears—and I wasn’t about to let it go. “And the pill,” I said. “Tell me again why you’re not on the pill? What kind of sense does that make? In here, of all places?”

I didn’t like the look she was giving me—it wasn’t a loving look and it wasn’t apologetic either. “If you want to know, Gretchen and I felt right from the beginning we didn’t want to put anything artificial in our bodies because wouldn’t that defeat the whole purpose of E2?”

That made me go cold all over: Gretchen. Jesus. What had I gotten myself into? Did I have any dignity in that moment, standing there naked, limp, dripping, trying to summon the proper degree of inquisitorial outrage? Did I have gravitas, did I even have a reason for being part of this ridiculous conversation in which nothing was decided and everything pushing us farther and farther apart? “I don’t see your point,” I said as savagely as I could, bending now to snatch my shorts from the floor and press them to my groin, as if my privates had become private all over again. “I mean, wouldn’t being”—I could barely get it out—“knocked up defeat the purpose a thousand times more?”

I avoided her the rest of the day. I was angry, furious, right on the verge of snapping—and as soon as I left her room, slamming the door for emphasis, I went out into the rain forest to try to calm down. At first, I just sat there on a damp rock, blind to everything around me, but before long I got up and began to lose myself in work, cleaning debris out of the deep pool at the bottom of the waterfall and adjusting the flow in the smaller pools at the top of the cliff above it. This was our tepuis, or cloud forest, replete with misters that were timed to come on at five-minute intervals, and since I was there anyway I decided to clear the vegetation away from the nozzle heads, hacking at things with my sickle while the stream gurgled and the mist rose like steam around me, and before I knew it the afternoon was gone. I was a no-show for dinner—Stevie, who was chef of the day, set a plate of food aside for me, which I took down to the beach so I could be alone—and I didn’t go back to my room till it was past midnight. I didn’t want to see Dawn, not till I had time to think. What she was going through, what she must have been feeling, really didn’t cross my mind, or not yet anyway. Understand me: this wasn’t like the young wife laying the happy news on her befuddled hubby while the music soars and the robins burst into song, this was like stabbing seven people in the back. Or no, hundreds of people, thousands even, everybody who’d invested in E2, from the four hundred consulting scientists to G.C., G.F. and Judy and every schoolchild who’d written a report and crayoned a galago leaping across the white margin at the top of the page. If she was pregnant, and that was the crux of it, that hovering fateful if, then closure would have to be broken, if only for the five seconds it took to push her and what was growing inside her through the airlock. Nothing in, nothing out. What a joke.

I didn’t sleep well that night—how could I? Every time I dozed off it felt as if there was a craps game going on in my head, lucky seven (she isn’t), snake eyes (she is), lucky seven, snake eyes, snake eyes, snake eyes. I woke exhausted in an envelope of sweat. I’d had three or four hours’ sleep, total, and maybe that was part of it, but I felt calmer. She wasn’t pregnant, I was sure of it—I mean, really, truly, what were the chances? It was a scare, a false alarm, a warning. The phrase Led by his dick came into my head. I was a fool. Worse than a fool. Hadn’t I learned anything from the Gretchen fiasco?

The thing was, I still wanted E., wanted her more than ever. I’d acted in the heat of the moment, thinking of myself first, thinking of the mission and Judy and the nightmare of how I was going to spin this if the throw of that infinitesimal chance did turn up snake eyes, and I regretted that now. I’d showed my true colors, that was for sure. I hadn’t done a thing for E., hadn’t given an inch, and I wondered how that would affect us going forward—she must have been suffering all this time, holding everything in, never breathing a word of it, and of course she was as dedicated to the mission as I was, as anybody was, and the implications must have been even starker for her than for me. I’d been wrong and I vowed to make it up to her. Especially since I couldn’t imagine going through the next three hundred sixty-three days without her, without her lips and her laugh and the way she clung to me and caught her breath when she came.

Still, I couldn’t bring myself to face her just yet—she was going to see Richard that afternoon to resolve the question one way or the other—and so again I prevailed upon Stevie and asked her to set aside a plate for me at breakfast, which I wound up taking back to my room. I didn’t actually lay eyes on E. until we were in the paddies together, setting rice seedlings, and of course we couldn’t talk because Diane was there. Watching. And listening. Not to mention a whole mob of straight-arrow tourists and their monkey-faced progeny tapping at the glass till we were all three of us waving and smiling our official Terranaut smiles every thirty seconds. I did ask how she was feeling—everybody knew she’d been under the weather so I was covered there—and I tried to help with the lifting and bending a little more than usual and let her know through my body language that I was sorry about what had passed between us the previous day. Then there was lunch. I sat next to her, though she didn’t have much to say and seemed content to let the communal conversation wash round her. After lunch I went out into the savanna, where our resident acacias and thorn bushes were—a prickly place, the only place in E2 where you had to wear shoes—and found a spot to spread a towel, stretch out with a book and try to take my mind off what was happening in Richard’s office.

At first I couldn’t get into the book at all (the first volume of the Bigger Bang series, which Linda Ryu had insisted E. bring in with her), rereading the same paragraph over and over, but finally I lost myself in a description of how a team of eight—eight!—terraformers went about defrosting the ice of a frozen planet with nuclear heaters inserted beneath the surface and seeding it with blue-green algae, the first step in producing a viable atmosphere. They were six men and two women, but the disparity in numbers didn’t matter because the women were heroically built and sexually free, and I was just getting to one of the juicier passages—the ship, the void, the greening planet floating beyond them in a globe of radiant light and astronaut Vita Novgorod stripping down to step into the zero-gravity shower with two of her male teammates—when my walkie-talkie buzzed. It was E. “We need to talk,” she said. “Over.”

“Sure,” I said, “of course, yeah.” I could feel my pulse accelerating. “Everything cool?”

“Not now. Not over the air.”

Her voice was drawn tight, bad news, I knew it was bad news, but then the walkie-talkies distorted everybody’s voices so you could barely recognize them. Or so I told myself. “Just give me a word, one word, that’s all.” And then I added, superfluously, “Christ!”

Nothing.

“Come on, E. I’m dying here. Over.”

The connection crackled and that crackle infuriated me—here we were almost at the end of the twentieth century and they couldn’t even make a reliable two-way communications device?

“Meet me in five minutes,” she said. “The rain forest. Over.”

It was that tranced time of day when everybody was in their rooms, dozing, digesting, writing in their diaries, and there was nothing moving but the animals—lizards, frogs, toads, turtles, snakes, crazy ants running crazy over every surface in their long anfractuous streams, dragonflies maneuvering, bees fumbling over the flowers. The air handlers blew. The wave machine coughed and spat. In my hurry I wound up stumbling into one of the acacias that formed the border of the savanna and felt the sting of a two-inch thorn puncturing the flesh of my upper arm as if I were taking an inoculation, blood there, surface pain as prelude to the deeper trauma ahead of me because the tone of her voice had told me everything I needed to know and all I was doing now was careening blindly through the biomes to pick up the pieces.

What would I say, what could I say? She was out. No two ways about it. Dawn Chapman, the Terranaut who brought down Mission Two. Disgraced. Cast out. Number one on the Roll of Dishonor and Roberta Brownlow right behind her. I let out a curse, swatting at the heavy drooping leaf of a plantain that just happened to be in my way, right in my face, as I burst into the rain forest and started down the path. “Dawn!” I called, my voice a hurled whisper. “E.! Where are you?”

Nothing. I stepped over the várzea stream that wound its way out from the waterfall pond, conscious of the cameras overhead. Something rattled in the undergrowth. “E.?” I called, louder now, because who would be listening—except maybe Gretchen, and she could be anywhere. I was sweating heavily, the shirt glued to my back, the air barely circulating. “E.?”

Her voice drifted to me then, thin, battered by the roar of the waterfall, a plaintive bleat that threaded its way through the call of the tree frogs and the chatter of the insects: “Here.”

“Where? I don’t see you.”

“Here,” she repeated and suddenly she came into focus, her limbs separating themselves from the vegetation around her and her face a pale cameo floating there in the greenery as if it were separate from the rest of her. She was on the ground, in the mud, buried in the dense stand of ginger the Mission One crew had planted around the margins of the rain forest to protect the understory from the blast of Arizona sun, hugging her knees to her chest. Her face was dirty. She’d been crying.

If I were to stop here to enumerate my strengths, my virtues, I could go on for pages, but one of them, most emphatically, is not empathy. I’ve never been good in situations of loss, hurt, sorrow, because I just can’t summon the standard clichés, not least because they sound false in my own ears. There she was, crying, wrapped in her own arms and rocking back and forth, and what consolation could I offer? We both knew what this meant and it was beyond consolation. Forgive me if I was thinking of Judy and G.C. and how they might tend to view my part in all this and what I could say in my own defense, because if one person was going through that airlock they might as well bring down the cleaver and make it two. I went to her, squatted over my knees. “It’s that bad then?” I said.

She lifted her head but she didn’t answer, just stared right through me.

“He’s sure? I mean, it’s not like he has one of those test kits on hand, does he? What would be the point—in here, I mean? It’s not as if—” And I stopped myself right there.

“He did an examination, Vodge—he examined me.”

I wanted to raise objections—there’d been no urine test, no blood test, so how could he be sure, how could the guillotine drop so finally and definitively?—but she just said, “He can tell. He’s a doctor, don’t you get it? I’m pregnant!”

What he’d done—and this made a shiver run through me despite the temperature—was have her climb up on the examining table and spread for him while he inserted his speculum and noted the dark purplish-red blush in the vaginal mucosa due to the increased blood supply there (Chadwick’s Sign, after James R. Chadwick, 1844–1905), which appears around the sixth week of pregnancy, before moving to her breasts to probe their tenderness and observe how her nipples had enlarged and darkened in preparation for milk production and delivery. Richard had measured her, measured all of us, and of course he’d examined every inch of her too, but I hadn’t been involved then, hadn’t even thought about it. Now I was involved. And I didn’t like the picture developing in my mind—of him, of her—not one bit.

“How long? Did he say how long?”

“Two months, maybe a little more.”

“What about Gyro?”

“Gyro? What has he got to do with it?”

“I don’t know, weren’t you two—I thought, for a while there?”

“God, you’re a shit—you can’t be serious?”

“You tell me.”

“It was that first night, Christmas,” she said, as if she hadn’t heard me. “I’m sure of it. It was the only time we—you—didn’t use protection.”

That was when I became aware of the thumping on the glass behind us, some moron there with his camera, and then the flash, and I was beyond caring at that point, all my training, all my slickness, my cool, deserting me, and I gave him the finger—and more, and worse. “Fuck you!” I shouted, and in the next instant I was there, pounding on that three-eighths-inch-thick panel of safety glass as if I could burst right through it.

“So, Richard, you got a minute?”

This was after dinner that night, E. having excused herself because she wasn’t feeling well. Diane, with a face set in concrete, had stalked down the hall to bring her a plate of lablab bean burritos and baked squash and suss out the problem (sickly Terranauts just wouldn’t do, and whatever was wrong, whether it was a dietary deficiency, monthly cramping or simple exhaustion, it ultimately came down on Diane, as crew chief). I’d lingered in the kitchen, helping Richard, our chef of the day, with the cleanup, and to this point our conversation hadn’t risen above the trivial, though we both knew what I was doing there.

He gave me a hooded look, then leaned over the counter to shoot a glance round the dining room—only Gyro was there still, sitting over a book at the end of the table, his elbows splayed and his chin cupped in one palm. “Sure,” he said, straightening back up and giving his hands a quick wipe on the apron, which he then removed and hung ceremoniously on its hook beside the refrigerator. “You want to go to my office?”

The office had its own smell, a lingering undertone of medicinal odors, and it hit me the moment we stepped through the door. It was subtle, but the effect was magnified because I was so inured now to an atmosphere free of artificial scents, and I couldn’t help commenting on it. “Whew,” I said, “what’s that smell—or don’t you notice it?”

“You’ve been out in the biomes too long,” he said, sinking into the chair behind his desk. “Call it the sweet breath of healing.”

“What is it—alcohol? Camphor? Like Vicks VapoRub or something?”

“Actually,” he said, gesturing to the seat in front of the desk, which I dutifully slid into just like any other patient with medical issues on his mind, “it’s probably the still you’re smelling. Got to have our arak, right?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Yeah. Couldn’t do without that.”

We were silent a moment. He was watching me carefully in that way he had, as if he were back in med school laying a corpse out for dissection. I took in the scale, the examining table, the diagram of the human skeleton across the top of which I’d written “Dem Bones” in black Magic Marker the first time I’d been here to submit to my bimonthly probing. Richard was our doctor, our man of healing, and he knew me as minutely as anybody did. What he said now, tenting his fingers and staring right down into the depths of me, was, “So we’ve got a little problem here—”

I felt like a condemned man at the moment the hood is drawn over his face. A black coil of despair settled in my stomach. I wanted to deny everything. “Are you sure? I mean, could it be anything else? Dietary?” And here I trotted out the term she’d given me: “Hypothalamic amenorrhea?”

“That’s ‘A-menorrhea,’ long a, like in ape.”

“All right, yeah, thanks for the lesson, but what about it?”

“Nothing’s a hundred percent—and it won’t be till she starts showing. And I’m not an obstetrician, mind you. But—” He paused.

“But what?”

“What’s a nice small fraction you can subtract from a hundred percent—without getting into decimal points? Let’s say maybe an eighth of one percent, just for the sake of argument. That leaves me ninety-nine and seven-eighths sure. Okay? That good enough for you?”

“Oh, come on, Richard. Shit. You don’t have to get sarcastic on me—I feel bad enough as it is—”

“Uh-huh,” he said, and I swear he hadn’t blinked his eyes since we’d sat down. “And so does Dawn. Believe me.” And then he reached down to pull out the bottom drawer, extract a packet of Naturalamb condoms and slide them across the desk, wordlessly.

“Yeah, thanks. If you want to know if I feel like an idiot, the answer is yes. If I’d known this was going to happen I would’ve come in here and had you cut my dick off, but I thought she was on the pill, I mean, wasn’t that the understanding, the requirement, for shit’s sake, that all the women had to be on it?”

“Even the pill’s not infallible. Or an IUD or a diaphragm either. The only thing that’s infallible is no sex, no intromission of the phallus in the vagina, period.”

“Very funny. You got any sex-ed pamphlets back there?” I was glaring at him now, all my wheels spinning. “The question is, what are we going to do about it?”

He took his time, pulling a pair of reading glasses out of his shirt pocket, breathing on the lenses and polishing them on the cuff of his sleeve before putting them back again, unused. He held out his palms, gave an elaborate shrug that could have meant anything from It’s your problem, not mine to Go ask G.C., pausing long enough for me to recall just what side he’d been on when the electricity went down. “Nothing much,” he said finally, looking glum. “Unless she spontaneously aborts—has a miscarriage, that is.”

“What are the chances of that?”

“Up to the thirteenth week it’s something like fifteen to twenty percent, so you never know. But after that it goes way down—”

I was leaning forward in the chair now, my hands resting on the edge of the desk. The smells, whatever they were, seemed stronger than ever. Fifteen to twenty percent. Long odds. I was sweating. My shorts were stuck to my crotch. I felt sick to my stomach, sicker than Dawn, sicker than anybody. “Couldn’t you—?” I didn’t know quite how to put it. “Do something?”

“What are you saying?”

“I don’t know—couldn’t you, like, give her an abortion?”

It took him a minute, his face hardening until he was wearing the same inflexible look he’d worn the day he announced we were going to have to break closure or risk dying of heatstroke. “And what, take the fetus and feed it to the pig?” He let that hang between us, then dug out the glasses again and fixed them over the bump of his nose, though we both knew they were just a prop. “You know, Vodge,” and he put an emphasis on it I didn’t like, not one bit, “we may be crewmates and we may be locked in here together, but you’re just beyond the pale. You’re not even human. Untermensch—you know what that means?”

“Fuck you,” I snarled, pushing violently up from the chair. “You talk about me? What about you? You pretend to support the mission but at the first sign of a problem you just what, abandon ship—hey, let’s just throw open the airlock, right? This is the end, you know that, don’t you? Because they’re never going to let her—”

He leaned back in his chair, very carefully lifted one leg, then the other, and crossed his feet on the desk. “Yeah,” he said, “and fuck you too. Vodge.”

Rachel Carson said, “In nature nothing exists alone,” and what she meant was that every ecosystem is interconnected and interdependent, a community of organisms working inscrutably to sustain its own existence. Ours was no different: what affected the individual affected the whole. Various species might have gone extinct during the first mission and others—nuisance species, like the morning glory—had flourished and crowded out more useful things, but that was by way of natural selection and as minders and keepers we could tweak the process one way or the other to suit our own needs. Tear out the morning glories and increase the sunfall available to the crops and the understory of the rain forest; run the ocean water through a series of algae scrubbers by way of filtering out the excess nutrients that otherwise would make pea soup out of it and spell slow death for our corals. Accident claims a galago? A shame. But if we were lucky the others would reproduce and the cycle would go on. Pigs consuming too much? Slaughter them. Tilapia aren’t breeding up fast enough? Tighten your belt. But this—E.’s situation—was something else altogether.

We were a team, each of us an essential cog. We were working ourselves to the point of no return as it was—how could the mission possibly go forward without any one of us? Eight wasn’t just ideal, eight was necessary. I saw that now. E. was our MDA. Without her, we’d lose the biggest factor in food production, not simply in terms of the animals—milk, cheese, meat—but as a full-time field hand too. Diane could fill in, sure, but she’d need help, a whole lot of help that would cost us all in time, effort and calories and drive a stake into our own projects and specialties. When Mission Control found out (if they didn’t know already; news travels fast in a fishbowl like this), they would cut her loose in a heartbeat. G.C. wasn’t part of our team—or Judy or Dennis either—and they couldn’t begin to imagine what it was like. They weren’t inside. They didn’t have to starve themselves, didn’t have to work till their muscles were tight as wire and their backs aching every minute of every day. If somebody on their team lost it or got cancer or took a maternity leave, they could just hire somebody else. There were millions of replacements out there, billions—but not in here. Here there were only eight of us.

But what if they did decide on a substitution? A new MDA? If they were going to break closure for the five seconds it would take to expel Dawn, then why not shove somebody else in through the airlock since the mission was compromised anyway? And who would it be, who was next in line? Linda Ryu. Linda Fucking Ryu. The thought came to me as I was making my way through the tunnel to the south lung, where I was planning to check on the settling tank, though I’d checked it twice that day already, and it stopped me right there in the passageway as if I’d been hit in the face by a two-by-four. Linda Ryu. Linda Ryu in place of E.? No, it wasn’t going to happen. We weren’t going to break closure, no matter what anybody said, whether it was G.C. or G.F. or the governor himself. I’d kill first.

So where did that leave me? I’d slammed out of Richard’s office not twenty minutes ago and still I hadn’t gone to E. It was eight-thirty in the evening. There was a wind rushing up through the tunnel as the big aluminum saucer in the lung below descended in the cool of the evening and the pressure began to equalize. I was in this tube, the long narrow underground gut of E2 that might have been lifted wholesale from the set of a sci-fi movie, a place that seemed suddenly alien, eerie, so confined you couldn’t even stand up straight without banging your head, and I was contemplating violence—or extreme measures anyway—because I had a world to protect and nothing short of an asteroid strike would make me back down. To hell with Richard. To hell with Judy and G.C. and all the rest of them. There was no putting it off any longer: I had to go to Dawn, get things out in the open, think—in concert, as team members, lovers and whatever else we were—because there was no way I was going to let this fall apart. She was the key. She was the one. It was on her, not me. Anything can be negotiated—wasn’t that the basis of civilization?

I went to her room first, but she wasn’t there. The kitchen and dining room were deserted, ditto the balcony. I heard music coming from Troy’s room, but the door was shut and she wouldn’t have been in there anyway, so I went on down the hall, thinking maybe I’d go up and check the library. Gretchen’s door was open, and I noted it absently, almost casually, as I passed by, but I had no intention of letting her in on any of this—or even asking if she’d seen Dawn. Fortunately, Gretchen wasn’t there, or at least not in her sitting room, where she liked to lurk like a big gray spider, looking for somebody to draw into her web, but that somebody wasn’t me, not anymore, not ever again. Dawn wasn’t in the library, but Richard was. With Diane. I cracked the door and there they were, sitting side by side in a pair of easy chairs. Did that give me pause? Did that make my heart rate jump? They looked awfully chummy, their faces soft and composed, and what they might have been discussing, what confidences they might have exchanged, what gossip, rumor, fact, I could only imagine. I tried to back quietly out the door but in that moment they both glanced up.

“Oh, hi,” I said. “Richard. Diane.” It was all I could do to keep from screaming What about patient/physician confidentiality! but I controlled myself. Nothing had happened. You could see from Diane’s face that the poison hadn’t entered her system. Yet. And maybe it didn’t have to, maybe there was some way out of this still. “Anybody seen E.?”

Richard just stared. Diane murmured, “Hi, Vodge,” and set down the book she’d been pretending to read. “She isn’t in her room?”

“I already checked.”

“What about the animal pens?”

“Oh, yeah, good idea. Though it’s late—” I had a picture of E. then, crouched in the pen with her goats, stroking their ears, murmuring to them in her softest whisper of a breath, the goats more comfort to her than I was, and what did that say about me?

“She sometimes goes down there, just to check on the animals before bed,” Diane said. “But you know that already, don’t you?” And here was the insinuation, the link, the presumption that if we weren’t busy screwing in bed we’d be going at it out in the biomes or down there amongst the goats.

“Yeah, thanks,” I said. “I’ll go have a look.”

I was just turning to make my exit when Diane said, “Vodge, what was that business with the tourist today? In the rain forest?”

“I don’t know—what tourist?”

“He’s some retired science teacher from somewhere in Georgia, or that’s what they’re saying over at Mission Control. He put in a complaint—said you gave him the finger, is that right? Beat on the glass. Used the F-word? Is that right?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I was already pivoting on my heels, heading for the door.

“Just to let you know,” she called, “Judy’s on the warpath.”

I found E. in the animal pens, the only illumination what little light managed to leach down from the floor above—that and what the stars provided. There were the usual smells, homey smells, the natural funk we’d all gotten used to and which made Richard’s office and T.T.’s chem lab seem so alien to our reprogrammed olfactory lobes (or maybe I should say “rewilded,” because that was what we were doing here, rewilding ourselves in the way of the circus animals released back into the game parks of India and Africa or the pet wolves let go on the tundra). At this point, after a year inside, this was what I expected the world to smell like. I drew in a deep breath. All was still. A soft drawn-out bleat escaped one of the goats, followed by the matter-of-fact rattle of its pellets hitting the ground. The pig—alone now—snuffled from the dark confines of her pen. “E.,” I called softly, and it was like a replay of the scene in the rain forest, only this time I was going to stay calm and see things through, clearly, reasonably. “You there?”

“Vodge?” She rose from where she’d been sitting on one of the rails of the pen, the pallor of her face and bare arms reflecting the light so faintly I had to look away and back again to be sure she was there.

“Yeah, hi,” I said.

Very softly: “Hi.”

“You look ectoplasmic rising up there out of the pen, you know that?”

“Look what?”

“Like a ghost.”

She let out a laugh, a good sign, bury the hatchet, get on with it. “No, I can assure you I’m flesh and blood.” A beat. “Though I wish I wasn’t.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and the smell—the stink, the muck and the shit and all the rest of it—flowered till it was like a bouquet. “I acted like a jerk. I am a jerk. But come here, let’s go sit someplace and talk this out, okay? Sound like a plan?”

A moment of silence. The goat, the pig, a shuffling there in the pen. In the distance, the mewl of the galagos—the bush babies—grieving over something in the night. “What’s there to talk out? Unless you’ve got a time machine and we could go back to that first night and do it all over again, I’m screwed. You know that—” Her voice caught and she couldn’t go on, and let me tell you, that was about the saddest moment of my life, because it wasn’t on her—I saw it then—it was on me.

“It’s not over yet—we’ll work it out, you’ll see.”

“How?” she said, but it wasn’t a demand, wasn’t harsh and accusatory, just a question.

“Here, take my hand,” I murmured, and she reached out and we were touching, skin to skin, for the first time since all this came down. “You want to go to the beach? Let’s go to the beach and just sit for a while, okay?”

She didn’t say anything, but in the next moment she was climbing out of the pen and I had her by the hand still, bracing her, guiding her forward, up the stairs, through the deserted Habitat and down along the side of the cliff to where the beach sat glistening in the starlight and the miniature waves rolled in to reconfigure G.C.’s trucked-in sand. We walked out to the edge of the beach and sat in the sand with our feet in the water and I told her I was sorry again, that I was there for her now and would be there for her no matter what happened, and if I didn’t get to give the speech I’d intended (she was going to have to go to Richard and ask him—beg him—to terminate the pregnancy because of course he wouldn’t listen to me when it was her decision and her decision only) it was because she put her arm around me and gave me her lips and leaned into me with all the inescapable weight of her heat and sadness and beauty and I found I could support her, after all.

“So, look, I know you’re under a lot of pressure in there but there’s no excuse for this kind of thing. None. Zero. Zilch. We’re selling something to the public here, Ramsay, which you, as Communications Officer, should be aware of even more than anybody else, right? And I don’t want excuses, there are no excuses, so don’t start giving me your patented line of crap—”

It had been a while since I’d talked to Judy about anything other than whatever matter was at hand—the First Anniversary Celebration, most recently—and it took me a moment to acclimate myself to her tone, to the whole tenor of what had been to this point a one-sided conversation. What I was getting was a dressing-down, well deserved and a long time coming, at least in her estimation. And I was getting it face-to-face, at the visitors’ window, because she wanted me to see her in the flesh, it was that earth-shattering, that huge, and so she could underline her points with her eyes, her mouth, her breasts and her legs. She was wearing her business attire, jacket, blouse, skirt cut at the knee, stockings, heels. Heels. I hadn’t seen a woman in heels in a year and I have to admit the sight of them and the way they sculpted her calves and brought out the sweet articulation of the bones of her ankles really moved me in a way anything she had to say couldn’t have begun to.

“I’m talking to you—Ramsay? This is no joke. What in Christ’s name were you thinking—or were you thinking at all?”

“No, I wasn’t thinking, just reacting. Like an animal in a cage.” I held her eyes. “Which is just what I am. You know something? Why don’t you put up some signs, like DON’T MOLEST THE ANIMALS, NO TAPPING ON THE GLASS, that sort of thing. And what about FUCK OFF, will that work?”

“Everything’s a joke, right? We’re out here busting our butts and waving the banners, trying anything, giveaways, press junkets, anything to raise awareness. And dollars. That man you gave the finger to? He paid his admission fee, ate at the snack bar, rented a motel room in town—dollars and cents, Ramsay. That’s the bottom line here. And you don’t—ever—let anything like this happen again, you hear me?”

This little interlude was colored, of course, by what had gone on between us and no longer was going on—and wouldn’t go on after reentry either. Or at least I didn’t think it would. I had E. I’d always have E. But the way Judy was looking, the umbrage in her turquoise eyes, the way she bit her underlip and how full it was, those ankles, those heels, made me lose my concentration.

“And what was this I heard about Dawn being there? Was it some kind of argument you two were having? Or what, a lover’s spat? Was that it? The two of you going at it like rabbits in there?”

I didn’t have anything to say to this. I was thankful word hadn’t got out yet about just what E. and I had managed to produce while going at it like rabbits and I was hopeful too that the three of us involved—E., Richard and I—would find a satisfactory way to put it all behind us without anybody catching even the slightest intimation of it, and so I just nodded. And grinned.

Judy, inches away, the phone pressed to her ear and her face contorted by a grimace, snapped, “Yeah, that’s right—smile, you jerk.”

“Come on, Jude,” I said, “what else do you want me to do? Nobody can touch me in here, don’t you realize that?” I took in a breath, held it, then added, “Not even you,” and put the phone back on its hook.