“I see you,” he said.
53
They called it the Match, after another process of assignation. There was on the one hand an embarrassment of parentless children and on the other a large population of childless adults. There were the hundred-and-thirty families and the seventy-two single parents who’d been together with their children on the night of the flood; the hundreds of other children had been up till now cared for by the same nursing teams who had cared for them from the time they first entered the hospital. The ward had become the family unit. So twenty different parents played with Ella Thims and fed her and changed her diapers, and she had her siblings among the GI kids, and Josh and Ethel were at first a part of the big one family. These families had been unstable from the start — Cindy and Wayne and other, older children were already together, in a sense, like dozens of other teenagers were coming together in benevolent gangs, more and more resistant to the authority of the nurses and the other adults, and there were families who vacuumed up stray children and adopted them. Unofficial, unorganized, it had been progressing since Thing Two, and no busybody worth their salt could let it just happen. Who knew what they would end up with, when the dust settled? The Council, Jemma’s not-wedding behind them, the educational curriculum set and deemed appropriate, every child and teacher seeming reasonably content with what they were learning or teaching, and most of the old hospital transformed or being transformed into spaces deemed better suited to their new mission of education, preservation, and the fostering of hope, turned its eye on the current distribution of individuals throughout the hospital, and overturning the last vestiges of the old hospital order.
I should be on my honeymoon, Jemma thought as she listened to the days of debate on how they should organize themselves. There must be a hundred different patches of tropical water she and Rob could have visited. Or they might have floated behind the hospital in a romantic dinghy, a houseboat big enough just for the two of them with an automated crank to pay out the line, farther and farther until the hospital was only a smudge against the horizon, and conspirators with sharp knives might depose her with a single cut. Where is the resolution, she wondered, that would have built me a honey-boat? She was in meetings the next day. “It wasn’t really a wedding,” Vivian noted, “so you shouldn’t really get a honeymoon, right?”
People had cleaved together from the first into pairs and even the occasional much-whispered about ménage, or the more innocent but no less frequently discussed situations of two-timers or men and women who dated the same three people, one then two then three then back again to one, in serial but evanescent monogamy. True multiple-partnerships were extremely rare, but Jordan Sasscock had acquired eight wives, though none of them called themselves that. There’d been no ceremony, private or public, and Dr. Sasscock certainly never described them that way. In fact, when someone called them wives he’d become uncharacteristically upset, his suave jovial affect lifting off of him in a second. As serious and furious as Dr. Snood in a snit, he’d say, “We are all together, but it’s not like that.” There was something derogatory about wives that rubbed all nine of them the wrong way, though when he was drunk you might get him to agree that he was in some sense husband to all of them. But he pointed out to people who were curious enough to ask at length about the arrangement that he was no bigamist or powerful fuck-lord presiding over a harem. It was all more equitable and more mysterious than that. “I am lost in them,” he would say finally, dreamily.
There were only two of them at first, girls he had unwisely tried to date simultaneously in a world that was only two-hundred meters across. It was not surprising that the two outraged women became friends, but no one ever understood how they made a collective decision to receive the miscreant back into their beds and their lives — there were rumors that Sasscock, who’d proved himself a very capable replicator engineer, had made a potion to addle them with, but too many people had tried something similar and failed for anyone to believe that the angel would do that, and anyone who spent time with the threesome could tell right away that the women, though in love, were not love-slaves.
Jemma had imagined it, feeling a little dirty even though it was only on one occasion that she diagrammed all the sexual possibilities, arranging them like groaning Lincoln Logs in her head to make structures of ecstasy and lust. It was more work, and more interesting, to imagine the comforts they found, these refugee women, in the many-armed other, and what words they whispered over their gigantic pillow in Sasscock’s room, now all bed except for the little alcove for the replicator and the sink. Sometimes she had envied them, and imagined herself stepping into a groaning mass that petted and stroked itself not to orgasm but to solace, and she thought she could understand the appeal, entirely separate from the prospect of owning a share of handsome Jordan Sasscock, of entering into such a compact.
Conclaves were just shaping up, associations of sentiment — a preponderance of Baptists on the third floor, the fifteen Mormons moving one night, en masse, to the fifth, separate lesbian and gay ghettos in the rehab unit, but they were voluntary and amorphous congregations, and seemed to denote little in terms of either a grander plan, or a deeper meaning; no matter where people lived, or what creed they professed, everybody mixed in Father Jane’s huge Sunday Services, only Dr. Sundae and her snake handlers, the Jews, and the Coptics holding anything like regularly separate services yet. The Council looked for other patterns of condensation, wondering if there was a plan in which they participated unaware, that might guide them when it came time to assign the children, but there was no pattern anyone could make out. People were dating across the borders of race and class and profession and age and religion, across floors and specialties, across vast disparities of height and weight and attractiveness. How best, then, to decide which child should go where when the crèches were disbanded and every hospital room turned into a home?
“The family is dead!” Anika proclaimed, speaking in one of the crowded meetings — they became increasingly public forums with every passing day, until they had to be moved from the conference room to the lobby, where Jemma’s table was set up under the shadow of the toy — for the most radical contingent of the population. It would be not just futile but dangerous to imitate the old pattern. In fact, these people urged the Council to consider that they may all have been placed here for the very purpose of formulating and implementing a new order. The absolute minimum number of parental units needed for each child was five — they’d done the calculations, and this was a number that guaranteed every child at least two good parental units without crossing a threshold of confusion beyond which the mixture of opinions and styles would do as much harm as good. “There’s always a bad mother,” Anika said, “and there’s always a bad father. The molester is always lurking, somebody’s always waiting to tell you that you look fat in your prom dress. There’s always somebody who will hate the child that they should love, and half the time or more it’s the same person, isn’t it? If you do the math you discover that you hated a fourth of your mother and half of your father and they loved perhaps one-seventh of the person that you became. This is the misery of two. But with five you get perfection, because even if each parent only loves 20 percent of the child each child is totally loved, and every child can pick and choose among the smorgasborg to construct the parent they love totally.”