Eve peered at him more closely. “Who are you?”
“I’m Aaron. Aaron Rossman.”
“Rossman—” She took a half step backward. “My … God. What are you doing here?”
Aaron became even more flustered because of her reaction. “You’ve heard about the Argo, of course,” he said, the slightest trace of a stammer coming to his words. “I’m going on that mission. I’m leaving Earth, and I won’t be back for a hundred years.” He looked at her expectantly, as if it should be obvious from what he’d just said why he’d come. When she made no reply, he added quickly, “I just wanted to meet you, just once, before I left.”
“You shouldn’t have come here. You should have called first.”
“I was afraid that if I called, you’d refuse to see me.”
All color had gone from her face. “That’s right. I would have.”
Aaron’s heart sank. “Please,” he said at last. “I’m confused by all this. It wasn’t until a short time ago that I found out I was adopted.”
“Did your parents tell you where to find me?”
“No. They didn’t even tell me I was adopted. I stumbled across some papers. I was hoping you’d want to see me. I put my name into the Ministry of Social Services’ Voluntary Disclosure Registry, but they said that you hadn’t applied to find me, so they couldn’t help. I thought maybe you didn’t know about the registry—”
“Of course I knew about the registry.”
“But…”
“But I didn’t want to find you. Period.” She looked closely at Aaron’s face. “Damn you, how could you come here? What right have you got to invade my privacy? If I’d wanted you to know who I was, I would have told you.” She stepped back into the doorway and then barked the word “Close” at the god. The flat gray door panel slid noisily shut.
Aaron stood there, the breeze cool on his face. He pressed the button on the jamb that woke up the god. “Yes,” it said in the same dull tone.
“I’d like to see Ms. Oppenheim.”
“Ms. Oppenheim has no appointments scheduled for this evening.”
“I know that, you piece of junk. I was just speaking to her a moment ago.”
“Here?”
“Yes, here.”
“You are Mr. Rossman, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t believe Ms. Oppenheim wants to see you.”
“Will you tell her I’m still here?”
The god was silent, apparently mulling this over. “Yes,” it said at last, in its slow and clunky voice. “I will tell her.” There was more silence, marred only by the sound of leaves blowing in the chill wind, while the god presumably relayed the message to his mistress.
“Ms. Oppenheim has instructed me to ask you to leave,” said the god at last.
“I won’t.”
“I will summon the police then.”
“Damn you. This is important. Please, ask her once more.”
“You are a per-sis-tent person, Mr. Rossman.” The voice chip had trouble with the polysyllabic word.
“That I am. Will you ask her, just once more, to come and talk to me.”
Another long pause. Finally: “I will ask her.”
The god fell silent. Aaron’s only hope was that Eve Oppenheim would decide that trying to deal with her bargain-basement god was as frustrating as Aaron was finding it. After many seconds, the door slid open again. “Look,” said Ms. Oppenheim, “I thought I made myself clear. I don’t want to see you.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, but I thought maybe my birth father would like to see me. Your husband, is he home?”
The woman’s face grew hard. “No, he’s not home, and no, my husband isn’t your father.”
“But the adoption database listed Stephen Oppenheim as my father.”
Aaron turned around. There was a flurry of leaves being kicked up on the landing pad a few dozen meters from the house. A private flyer, rusty-looking and somewhat dented, was making a slow descent toward the pad.
The flyer was a hundred meters or so up, hovering as a small robot cleared the day’s accumulation of autumn leaves from the pad. From this angle, Aaron could see that one person, a man, was in the cockpit, but he couldn’t make out his face.
Eve looked nervously up at the flyer. “That’s my husband,” she said. “Look, you have to go before he gets here.”
“No. I want to talk to him.”
Eve’s voice took on a razor edge. “You can’t. Damn you, get out of here.”
The car was descending rapidly. It was perhaps twenty-five meters up. Twenty meters. Fifteen.
“Why?”
Her face was flushed. She looked torn, agonized. Tears were at the corners of her eyes.
The flyer settled onto the pad.
“Look, Stephen Oppenheim isn’t my husband,” she said at last. “Your father was—” She blinked rapidly, the action freeing the heavier drops. “Your father was my father, too.”
Aaron felt his mouth dropping open.
The gull-wing door to the flyer swung up. A large man got out. He went to the rear of the flyer, opened the trunk.
“Don’t you see?” said Eve quickly. “I can’t have a relationship with you. You never should have existed.” She shook her head. “Why did you have to come here?”
“I just wanted to know you. That’s all.”
“Some things are better left unknown.” She looked toward the pad, saw her husband coming toward her. “Now, please leave. He doesn’t know about you.”
“But—”
“Please!”
The tableau held for a moment, then Aaron turned and briskly walked away from the house. Eve Oppenheim’s husband came up to her. “Who was that?” he said.
Aaron, now a dozen meters away, his back to the house, paused for a second and cocked his head to catch Eve’s answer: “Nobody.”
He heard the hiss of the door panel closing and the final, definitive click as it slid into the opposite jamb.
TWENTY
Kirsten Hoogenraad sat on the beach with her legs spread wide, bending from the waist to try to touch her toes. She alternated stretching toward her left foot and her right. Her toenails and fingernails were painted the same pale blue as her eyes. She wore no clothes—most of the beach was nudist, although a section was set aside, hidden by fiberglass boulders, for those whose cultures forbade public nudity. However, she did have on a sweatband to keep her long brown hair out of her face.
Aaron lay on his stomach next to her, reading. Kirsten looked over at his textpad. I doubted she could make out the actual words. Orthokeratology had restored her vision to 6:6, but even so, the type was quite small, and although the pad’s screen was polarized, the glare from the sunlamp high overhead would have made it hard to read from her vantage point. Still, I’m sure she could see that the document was laid out in three snaking columns. Continuing her warm-up, Kirsten spoke to Aaron, the words pumping out with a staccato rhythm in time with her stretches. “What are you reading?”
“The Toronto Star,” said Aaron.
“A newspaper?” She stopped stretching. “From Earth? How in heaven did you manage to get that?”
Aaron smiled. “It’s not today’s paper, silly.” He glanced at the document-identification string, glowing in soft amber letters across the top of the pad. “It’s from ’74. May eighteenth.”
“Why would you want to read a two-and-a-half-year-old newspaper?”
He shrugged. “JASON’s got most of the major ones on file. The New York Times, Glasnost, Le Monde. He’s probably even got one from Amsterdam. Hey, Jase, do you?”