Jemma nodded and put on a thoughtful face while Anika was speaking, but made an unnecessary note to herself on the big yellow pad that sat in front of her during every meeting: V-E-T-0. Over the hours and days of deliberations they heard other ideas. There were staunch traditionalists, represented not unexpectedly by Dr. Sundae, who wanted to keep the present arrangement until every last two citizens of the hospital had been partnered in an officially recognized marriage, and offered Rob and Jemma as an example of a partnership insufficiently formalized, what with the unusual permutations of the ceremony and the insistence of the lesbian priestess and deacon-prophet as they married them that they were not in fact marrying them. There should be a mass ceremony presided over by Father Jane in her strictest and most formal Unitarian capacity, in which every male and female of marrying age (described as being so low as fourteen and as high as twenty-one) were joined together based on whatever natural (but not unnatural) affinities were already in play among the population but also, and more importantly, on a subcommittee of the Council, newly to be formed, which would study files to be prepared by an entirely separate subcommittee and make incontrovertible matches, the last of them to be completed no more than forty days from the adoption of the authorizing resolution. A week after the ceremony, the children would be distributed, these matches made based on the work of yet another heroic subcommittee.
“We are all still thinking,” said Karen, “in the terms of the old system. Didn’t Ishmael say it many weeks ago? If we are all a big family, then aren’t these, each of them and all of them, our children? Each of us shares somehow in their care now, why shouldn’t that continue? Why not make ourselves formally what we already are informally?” She went on to suggest that every child begin to circulate among the adult citizens in such a way that every last child would rotate with every last possible parent. They would build a clock in the lobby that would chime whenever it was time to switch, and slowly, by means of deceptively transient-appearing relationships (and wasn’t every family relationship transient anyway, disappointment or suppressed hatred or mortality counting the time as surely as any giant clock?), individual transience becoming collective permanence, they would become a giant family in truth, where every boy or girl was son or daughter to every man and woman, and every man and woman parent to every boy and girl. Jemma tried to mouth veto reassuringly to Jeri Vega’s mother, who was clenching her fists while Karen told her that Jeri would rotate away from her, but rotate back, like all good things joining in an ebbing, flowing cycle of departure and return. “But she’s my daughter,” Jessie’s mother said, and Karen said, “She is my daughter, too.”
Jemma’s suggestion, delivered on the third day of deliberations that seemed likely to go on forever, combined elements that had already been put forward by others. The heavy duty of researching and defining affinities she delegated to the angel, who would work based on what she already knew of everyone on board and what they would tell her in interviews or questionnaires. Requests for specific individuals would be accepted but not encouraged. Children who already had one parent or more in the hospital would stay with them and not be rotated way or shared except through the usual media of school and play. Individuals could submit themselves to the Match as individuals or in groups of up to two; same sex couples must not be discriminated against. Siblings would not be separated, and if the thing were going to happen there was no reason for it not to happen soon. They should do it within the week.
This didn’t end the debate. A whole parade of people were still waiting to tell their ideas, but after every third or fourth crazy scheme the Council would talk again about Jemma’s suggestion and as people delineated the benefits of robot nannies upon a nascent civilization, or made calls for inverted families where the children would discipline their parents and teach them how to live in the new world, it became obvious that her plan possessed more than all the others the attractive qualities of being both feasible and not too loony. The Council retired back to its chamber and after a short discussion with the angel passed a resolution which Jemma signed into law. This time she really did say, “So let it be written, so let it be done,” but quiet enough that only Vivian and Ishmael heard her.
The angel preferred interviews; these were conducted. Some relationships were fortified or even inaugurated by the stimulus of the Match, a few fell apart. Those who wanted to make requests made them, and the angel held the algorithm in abeyance until such time as the Council wished it activated. It would take about eight hours to run. Why that long and not seven or nine, or why not instantaneously, she would not say. She manufactured a big red button — eminently pressable — which Jemma wanted to hit right away, but Ishmael had the idea of waiting until the following day, taking advantage of a previously scheduled talent show to distract people from the waiting. So Jemma awoke that day about a half hour after Kidney had made her mark on her door and not half a second after Pickie Beecher laid his eyes upon me. Before she opened her eyes she considered her schedule, picturing it in her head, thick blue letters on a yellow pad as big as the bed. There was only a single item on it today: 12:00 p.m. — Press button.
She opened her eyes, stared at the ceiling for a while, stared at the window for a while, stared at the door for a while, hoping that Rob might come through it and lie down beside her. She was not yet so far removed from sleep that she couldn’t go right back to it, and it would have been very pleasant to put her head on his chest, murmur, “I’ve got a big day ahead of me,” and sleep for three hours and forty-five minutes. Her eyes closed, she drifted back toward sleep and she had a small, swift dream in which not Rob but the big red button walked through the door and lay down beside her, and she tried unsuccessfully to snuggle up to it. Careful, it said to her. Don’t make me pop yet.
It was not a usual morning, though she went about her usual business. She got out of bed and did the chair-assisted yoga poses that Vivian had taught her. She hated them, though less than the exercises she was supposed to do on odd days. The room was almost too small to do them, but she wouldn’t be caught dead stretching and lotusing in public, or any place that she might be seen. She dragged a chair to the middle of the room, pushed the table up against the bathroom door, and did the downward-facing dog, leaning forward from her hips and grabbing the lower edge of the seat. “Watch your head,” said the angel.
“Leave me alone,” Jemma said. “Who said you could watch?”
“I am always watching,” she said, but shut up. Vivian had cautioned her not to lower her head too far, and said that she must be extremely careful once she got to the third trimester. “If you lower your head below your heart in the third trimester,” she said, “you will die instantly.”
Eight breaths later, she was done with that one, and then it was time for the modified dancer and warrior two and warrior three and the pony on the table and the squatting palm, eight breaths for every pose. She spent ten minutes, exactly the requisite time, in a lotus on her mat — now was the time she was supposed to be visualizing her healthy pregnancy. She managed it for a minute, imagining it, a foot long now, wrapped in transparent skin, and then it was laid out beside any number of other approximately foot-long objects: Rob’s hairy foot, a submarine sandwich, the first dildo she had ever met, a really big hot dog. This was the exhausting part, to turn her thought on her baby, and dive into the black whole in her belly.