“But you want me to take neuropharms always. To be somebody different from me.”
“Theresa, you can’t compare—” he began, but she interrupted him.
“That’s not the answer. I don’t know what is, but not that.” She let go of Jackson’s hand and struggled to stand.
Cazie said, “Tess, honey, you’re not really being fair to Jack. He just—”
“I know what he just,” Theresa said, and somehow she left them there, Jackson looking stricken and Cazie rueful. Staggered to her room really, her walk was so unsteady, her arms and legs did tingle and once she thought they might buckle under her.
But at least they were her own.
The building sat on the side of a mountain high in the Adirondacks. Theresa landed the car, which of course flew on automatic, on an artificially flat stretch of nanopaved ground that she assumed was a parking lot, although no other cars rested on it. Then she stood for a long time in the cold just gazing up at the Sisters of Merciful Heaven.
The convent, not foamcast but built of genuine stone, blended into the mountain. Gray rock, scantily covered with withered ivy vines that matched the withered winter vegetation growing at angles on the steep ground. It was the first donkey building Theresa could remember ever seeing, even in newsgrids, that wasn’t surrounded by the faint shimmering bubble of a Y-shield. Only snow, heaped in clean drifts. A little wind skirled the light powder around Theresa’s legs, and she shivered. She started toward the door.
It was opened by a middle-aged woman, not a security system or a ’bot. A woman—a sister?—dressed in a straight gray robe of what looked like cotton. Cotton. A consumable. The sight almost overcame Theresa’s usual shrinking from strangers. She clutched her two hands tightly together and forced herself not to step back.
“I’m… Theresa Aranow. I called…”
“Come in, Ms. Aranow. I’m Sister Anne.” She smiled, but Theresa couldn’t smile back. Her face felt too tight. “I’m the one you talked to on comlink. Come with me to where we can talk.”
She led Theresa through a gloomy stone foyer and opened a heavy wooden door. Sound flowed out.
“Oh! What… What is it?”
“The sisters, singing vespers.”
Theresa stopped, transfixed. She had never heard singing like that. Not from any sound system, ever. A glorious outpouring of sound, without instruments—just human voices, every one genemod for musical ability, raised in fervent ardor. She couldn’t make out the words, but the words didn’t matter… it was the passion that mattered. Passion for something unseen but—but what? Felt. The passion…
Sister Anne said gently, “You said on comlink you were not raised Catholic. Have you heard vespers sung before?”
“Never!”
“Well, neither have most Catholics. Or what passes for Catholics now. Come in here, where we can talk.”
Theresa followed her into a small, white-walled room furnished only with a desk, terminal, and three chairs. Wooden chairs. She blurted, “You’re not Changed. Any of you.”
“No,” Sister Anne said, smiling. “We must eat, and drink, and depend on our own efforts and His grace for our daily bread.”
“Is it… is it…” She was trembling. But she made herself get the words out, because they were so important to her. “Is it a spiritual discipline?”
“It is. Suppose, Ms. Aranow, you start by telling me why you’re here.”
“Why I’m here.” Theresa looked at the nun. Theresa had had Thomas do background. Sister Anne was fifty-one years old, had entered this semi-cloistered order at seventeen, was one of only eight hundred forty-nine Sisters of Merciful Heaven left in the world. Born Anne Grenville Hart in Wichita, Kansas, she had inherited three million dollars from her mother, cofounder of a bakery franchise, Proust’s Madeleines. The entire three million had been donated to the order. Why was Anne Grenville Hart here? But Theresa couldn’t ask that. Obediently, she tried to answer the sister’s question, knowing even before she began that the answer would be inadequate, wouldn’t really say at all what Theresa could never find words for in the first place.
“I’m here because I… I’m looking for something.” And waited to be asked what. The unanswerable question, which would only lead to stammering and muddled words and puzzled looks from the sister, growing more impatient, until Theresa collapsed into hopeless silence.
But Sister Anne said, “And you’ve looked everywhere else you could think of, couldn’t find it, and so have tried here, in desperation. Even though you can’t begin to define what you’re looking for, and are afraid it isn’t the Catholic conception of God at all.”
“Yes!” Theresa gasped. “How… how did you know?”
“You’re not the first to come to us,” Sister Anne said serenely, “and you won’t be the last. But I think you may be different from most. Ms. Aranow, why aren’t you Changed?”
“I can’t.”
“Can’t? You mean, there is some physical difficulty?”
“No, no, I mean I just… can’t.”
“You’re afraid of making your own life too automatic. In physical need, you think, begins spiritual questing. Its roots and wellspring.”
“Yes!” Theresa gasped. “Oh, yes! Only…”
“Only what, Ms. Aranow?” Sister Anne leaned forward on her chair, a chair of hard mellowed natural wood that her unChanged body would not consume molecule by molecule until the solid had been turned into a holed skeleton of itself. Sister Anne’s chair would stay a chair. Sister Anne’s expression was as warm as Jackson’s and Cazie’s but different somehow, not… not what? Not careful with Theresa, not pitying, not condescending. Sister Anne didn’t think that Theresa Aranow was weak, or crazy.
The words spilled out. Looking at the calm, understanding face, Theresa’s fear of strangers somehow disappeared and the words tumbled out, tidal-waved out, unstoppable.
“I’ve always wanted something, looked for something, my whole life… only I don’t have any idea what it is! And nobody else has ever seemed to need it, or to even know what I’m talking about, even good people that I know are good people. People I love. They look at me like I’m crazy… actually, I am crazy. I’m depressed, agoraphobic, and severely neurologically inhibited. I haven’t left our apartment in over a year except once and that was—nobody else I know feels like this. I want there to be something… large. Larger than myself. Something in the universe to hang on to, to give my life some kind of meaning… I’m a fraud, you know, agreeing with you that I’m unChanged because I don’t want things too automatic. They are automatic for me. I’m rich, and I have a loving brother who stands between me and the world, and I never have to worry or struggle for anything, certainly not my daily bread, which is delivered and cooked and served by ’bots that—while most of the people in this country are out there without safety or enough Y-cones or medical care for their children who are born without enough Change syringes… Not that I think the Change is a good—I’m confused about the Change. I know it. But the reason I’ve always been different is that I want something nobody can have—Jackson says nobody can have it because it doesn’t exist. I want the truth! The truth that is real and solid and you can use to help you figure out how to live your life and what that life is supposed to mean. Oh, I know there’s no such thing as that kind of truth—absolute truth—and it’s stupid and naive to go looking for it… but I did. I tried to, anyway. I had Thomas help me search through Christianity and Zen and Yagaiism and Hinduism and the Text of the Scientific Change… I’m not very smart, Sister, something may have gone wrong with my in vitro fertilization and maybe I don’t understand much of what Thomas brought me. But I did try. And it seems to me that those beliefs all contradict each other, all say different things, and if so, how can they all be true? And then they also contradict themselves internally, with different parts of their own beliefs that don’t fit with each other, or don’t fit with what I see all around me in the world, so how can any of them be true? They’re not! But then I’m left with nothing except this longing, and nobody else I know seems to feel it so I end up so alone I think I’ll die. I’ve seriously thought of suicide. But what that would do to Jackson, who already feels so responsible for me… I can’t. I can’t. It wouldn’t be right. Only… how do I know what’s ‘right’ if I can’t find out what’s true? And so I go on living in this… this void, and sometimes the emptiness is so big and dark and thick I feel that I’ll suffocate, or that I’m so lost I can’t ever be found… can’t find myself, I mean, except that myself isn’t what I want! It’s too small, to find nothing but myself!”