See, that's your foggy thinking for you. It comes of using words like "spin" to mean rotation (my gosh, the little devils certainly don't rotate!), and even more it comes from using words like "there." There is no "there"! There are only a lot of different "heres"! So if you find that the Bell inequality is unequal, don't you see?, it is only because you are measuring it with two bent tools!
Now, with that basis for your understanding, I think I can tell you what it is that makes me sad. Then you can go back to listening to poor dumb little Eve. Eve has very little to recommend her, but she has an option open to her—the option of growing, and changing, and then of dying—which is no longer open to me. Someday, perhaps, she can do what Shef and Flo and the others have done; she may even be able to do what Ann has done. And I never can.
You know that when we arrived in the Alpha Centauri system we built ourselves a habitat out of bits and pieces of debris, and if you know anything at all you will know that we did not by any means use all the pieces. Even a loner like Alpha has quintillions of tons of matter floating around it. Ultimately we found that there were actually three asteroid belts, nearly an equal mass in comets, and about a Moon's worth of other trash, and some of us wanted to push them all together to make a real world. The wiser ones laughed. Building a world is not a matter of sticking bricks together with mortar, they said. There is a dynamic balance. The interior must be squeezed and heated into magma so that the oxygen and hydrogen can migrate to the surface. The surface must cool, so that the water can stay there and the rapid gas molecules will not spin off into space. Not hundreds of years, at least millions!
So causality doth capture us all . . . until we transcend it.
It had taken all this time for Ann to transcend it; and that was why I envied Ann Becklund, who was once my mortal wife.
21
ON THE MORNING OF DAY 6354 JERON WAS HURRYING ME —"Come and see something! Come on!"—and I didn't want to be hurried. "What's the matter, Aunt Mommy?" he demanded, bristling his little moustache at me. "You hung over again?"
I was not, or even close to it. The operative word was not "hangover" but "depression." But "You'll be really interested," he wheedled. "I have to get to the cabbage patch." "Do not! Aw. Come on. It won't he take was more insistent: than a minute."
Part of what he said was no doubt true—I didn't really have to get to the cabbage patch; Molomy had taken over the biggest part of keeping the crew in line. Part was false. It took a lot more than a minute, and I did not at first see what he was trying to show me.
Partly it was because he took me to the great viewing port with all the funny little wrinkles built into its glass, where I almost never go, and we were not alone there. Standing tall and strange was my dearly beloved Other Half.
"Hello, Jim," I said. It didn't matter. Jim is sometimes willing to talk to me, but he's got this speech impediment. He has forgotten how. He gets all sweating and stammering, trying to find the words, and then he's not good for much else. So we mostly don't talk at all anymore. He looked away from the viewer and at me, trying to remember who I was—maybe even what I was—and I patted him on the shoulder. "That's all right, Jim," I said. "Don't let us dis-turb you." He sighed rustily and turned back to whatever he was watching.
Which, it seemed, was what Jeron wanted me to watch too.
The viewing window is not a solid piece of glass, and I am not sure if it is glass at all. It is made of layers and clots of transparent material of many varieties and indices of refraction, so that if you move around you can magnify parts of what you are looking at. It helps to know what parts are of interest. The biggest thing outside the window at that moment was the factory, with its immense bright sails trapping the heat of Alpha and the structural parts of the next ring of the habitat, wandering out of the finished-products end until they brought up at the limits of their tethers. That did not interest me. It was not what interested Jeron, either, and he was quite irritable about it: "No, Eve, not there! Beyond! Toward the damn Dipper!"
Well, that was a part of the sky I knew pretty well, because in our Centaurian constellations it was not far from where the good old home Sun lay; there were only about half a dozen first-magnitude stars in that whole section.
But now there were seven. The new one was reddish- rusty-ugly, and I had never seen it before. I bobbed around before the port, trying to get the best look at it; and under the highest magnification I could find the damned thing displayed an actual disk.
"My God," I said. "What am I looking at?"
Jeron was crowing with excitement. "Aunt Ann!" he cried. "She's pulling a new planet around her!"
The reason I hadn't had a hangover was that I had been spending more and more time sleeping, just sleeping. And the reason I had been sleeping was that more and more I had preferred my dreams, or nothing at all, to the world around me; and among the things I liked least about it were notions such as Ann Becklund building a planet.
Molomy had all the gardening crew hard at work when at last I showed up, and she gave me a hard look. "There's something the matter, right?" she decided.
I certainly didn't want to talk about it, since I didn't even want to think about it. "Did you get the new rows in?" I asked—to change the subject, because I had already seen that she had. The ten tiny farmhands were already snipping off shoots for the next brew.
"Of course," she said, frowning, and stood up, rubbing gently at her small breasts. Now that Molomy had a child of her own in a vegetable cow she didn't trust the little kids to tend the cabbage patch anymore, and that was where I had found her. "My boobs hurt. Aunt Eve," she complained. "It's just as though Albert was right in my belly, just like you used to have them in the old days."
I knelt down and felt the occupied pods myself. "I didn't really, Molomy," I said. "All the babies I had I had just the way you're having Albert—is that what you're going to call him?"
"Either that or Walter. Or Picklebick, or Bill. You mean you didn't ever get pregged with all that sex you were doing back on Earth?"
"Actually, no—well," I said, remembering, "I did get pregnant a couple of times when I was a kid. But I decided not to have them." That was in the Los Angeles days, and who wanted to have kids then? But no one knew about those old abortions, not even Kneffie; they were caught early and aspirated out, schloop, ptooie, and you weren't pregnant anymore.
"How very strange," Molomy said primly, and did not speak again for a while. We loosened the soil around the roots of the vegetable wombs and I thought about all that sex I had been doing back on Earth—although the sex had not been all of it. The most important part, maybe.
How long ago that seemed, and, from four light-years away, how pleasant! Especially compared to the scary thinking about what Ann was up to. It was an easy time. Los Angeles County paid for my root-canal work and doled out welfare checks, and the feds gave me food stamps, and for spending money all you had to do was hitch to Mexico to buy goods. I don't mean drugs. I was always too fearful to deal drugs. But in Tijuana you could buy cheap sleazy silver and cheap make-believe turquoise, and back home in Venice you could glue the turquoise to the silver, hitch down Santa Monica Boulevard (or take the bus) to the Century Plaza or one of the downtown hotels, and sell the stuff to the tourists. Easy money. Tax-free cash. And good friends! The loosest and coolest people I ever knew shared those beachfront houses. Don the Drunk, Harold the Head, sweet Lily, Marian the Marauder who could clean off any drugstore counter in the time it took the clerk to turn around for a pack of cigarettes. And studious old Jim.