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“Relax,” she said. “I know I don’t have a chance in hell of getting this post. I’m just flexing my muscles and getting in the game. People would wonder if I didn’t.”

Early one morning a week later, Eleanor brought coffee and a Danish and the morning visola to me in bed. “What’s this?” I said, but I already knew by the jaunty angle of her eyebrows.

WE MOVED INTO temporary quarters—an apartment on the 207th floor of the Williams Towers in Bloomington. We planned to eventually purchase a farmstead in an outlying county surrounded by elm groves and rye fields. El’s daily schedule, already at a marathon level, only intensified with her new responsibilities as the regional Tri-D director. Meanwhile, I pottered about the campus town trying to come to grips with my new circumstances.

A couple of weeks later, an event occurred that dwarfed all that came before. Eleanor and I, although we’d never applied, were issued a permit to retro-conceive a baby. These permits were impossible to come by, since only about a hundred thousand were issued each year in all of the USNA. Out of all of our friends and acquaintances, only two or three had ever been issued a permit. I hadn’t even seen a baby in realbody for decades (although simulated babies figured prominently in most holovids and comedies). We were so stunned at first we didn’t know how to respond. “Don’t worry,” said the undersecretary of the Population Division, “most recipients have the same reaction. Some faint.”

Eleanor seemed far from fainting, and she said matter-of-factly, “I don’t see how I could take on the additional responsibility at this time.”

The undersecretary was incredulous. “Does that mean you wish to refuse the permit?”

Eleanor winced. “I didn’t say that.” She glanced at me for help.

“Uh, a boy or a girl?” I said.

The undersecretary favored us with a fatuous grin. “That’s entirely up to you, now isn’t it? My advice to you,” he added with forced spontaneity—he’d been over this ground many times before, and I wondered if that was the sum total of his job, to call a hundred thousand strangers each year and grant them one of life’s supreme gifts—“is to visit the National Orphanage in Trenton. Get the facts. No obligation.”

For the next hour or so, El and I sat arm in arm in silence. Suddenly El began to weep. Tears sprang from her eyes and rolled down her cheeks. I held her and watched in total amazement.

After a while, she wiped her eyes and said through bubbles of snot, “A baby is out of the question.”

“I agree totally,” I said. “It would be the stupidest thing we could ever do.”

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

AT THE NATIONAL Orphanage in Trenton, the first thing they did was lead us down to Dr. Deb Armbruster’s office where the good doctor warned us that raising a modern child was nothing like it used to be. “Kids used to grow up and go away,” said Dr. Armbruster. “Nowadays, they tend to get stuck at around age eight or thirteen. And it’s not considered good parenting, of course, to force them to age. We believe it’s all the attention they get. Everyone—your friends, your employer, well-wishing strangers, HomCom officers—everyone comes to coo and fuss over the baby, and they expect you to welcome their attention. Gifts arrive by the van load. The media wants to be invited to every birthday party.

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

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

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

“Actually, Doctor,” El said, “we haven’t decided to go through with it. We only came to acquaint ourselves with the process and implications.”

“I see,” Dr. Armbruster said with a hint of a smile.

AT THE NATIONAL Orphanage in Trenton, the second thing they did was take us to the storage room to see the “chassis” that would become our baby, if we decided to exercise our permit.

One wall held a row of carousels, each containing hundreds of small drawers. Dr. Armbruster rotated a carousel and told a particular drawer to unlock itself. She removed from it a small bundle wrapped in a rigid tetanus blanket (a spin-off of my early trauma blanket work). She placed the bundle on a gurney, commanded the blanket to relax, and unwrapped a near-term human fetus, curled in repose, a miniature thumb stuck in its perfect mouth. It was remarkably lifelike, but rock still, like a figurine. I asked how old it was. Dr. Armbruster said that, developmentally, it was 26 weeks old, and that it had been in stasis seven and a half years. It was confiscated in an illegal pregnancy and doused in utero. She rotated the fetus—the chassis—on the gurney.

“It’s normal on every index,” she explained. “We should be able to convert it with no complications.” She pointed to this and that part of it and explained the order of rewriting. “The integumentary system—the skin, what you might call our fleshy package”—she smiled at me, acknowledging my professional reputation—“is a human’s fastest growing organ. A person sheds and replaces it continuously throughout her life. In the conversion process, it’s the first one completed. For a fetus, it takes about a week. Hair color, eye color, the liver, the heart, the digestive system, convert in two to three weeks. The nervous system, major muscle groups, reproductive organs—three to four weeks. Cartilage and bones—two to three months. Long before its first tooth erupts, the baby is biologically yours.”

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

“Certainly,” she said. She placed her large hands carefully under it and handed it to me. It was hard, cold, and surprisingly heavy. “The fixative is very dense,” she said, “and brittle, like eggshell.” I cradled it awkwardly. Dr. Armbruster smiled and said to Eleanor, “New fathers always look like that, like they’re afraid of breaking it. In this case, however, that’s entirely possible. And you, my dear, look typically uncomfortable as well.”

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