Hello? she said, into the blackness.
Go away, said the baby, the voice as fully imaginary as the body that she saw, an upside-down fetus hanging in a field of stars.
I promised Vivian I would look at you every day. It’s supposed to be good for us.
How can I sleep with you staring at me like that, all creepy. You look crazy. Are you crazy? Am I crazy?
Sometimes I am. A little. Or more than a little. It’s Match Day! she said, trying to change the subject.
Maybe I can get a better family, he said. Would I not be crazy, if I went to live with someone else? Would I still die, if you loved me from far away, instead of from up close?
All that is past. You’re safe.
But I think I would prefer to live with someone else. It’s not personal. I just want to live. I just want to get away from the long reach of your parents’ hands. And I don’t want to have to watch your brother burn every night, or hear the story from you when you sit up drunk all night, regretting everything that ever happened to you.
Well, Jemma said.
I’m glad you understand. I’m glad we had this little talk.
But…
You’re a very good listener. Has anyone ever told you that before? Jordan Sasscock. Put me with him. He’s cute.
But I’m your mother.
Exactly! And before she could ask her baby and herself what that meant, or argue that nothing was ever going to be the same for her, that everyone was going to be happy in the new world, and that she held in her hands the mysterious green remedy for sickness and death, the chime sounded, her exercises were done, and their time was over.
* * *
She wanted to go back to bed. She went downstairs, instead, to Karen’s coffee bar, part of the ER complex, not far from Connie’s more traditional sort of bar. Behind the same series of windows where crabby triage nurses had instructed the wounded and the panicked and the soon-to-be dead on the virtues of waiting one’s proper turn, Karen pumped espresso from a manual machine as tall as she was, made of golden brass and covered in relief with eagles and oxen and calves. Rob was sure it had once been the ark of the covenant, but Karen said it looked just like one she had seen in Italy. During a brief vacation, the two weeks she’d had away from her eighty-hour weeks as an intern, she’d fled Florence and her fiancé and, after a hike and some hitchhiking and a mysterious process of emancipation (“I slept in a field and when I woke up the next day I was sopping wet and my throat hurt like hell but I was so free I cannot even describe it!”) she shacked up with a man who reeked perpetually of dark roasted coffee, hardly able to talk with him but enjoying the first satisfactions of her ten years of sexual activity and serving a brief apprenticeship in his café before going back to her fiancé, in many ways, she insisted, a new woman. She wasn’t the only person for whom an interlude of non-medical happiness had formed the basis of a career — Dr. Neder was throwing pottery on the seventh floor; Dr. Pudding was blowing glass on the second — and like the others she quickly surpassed her lover/teacher, assisted by the angelic technology in the replicators.
Dr. Chandra, Helena Dufresne, and Carla were already all lined up at the bar, Chandra staring morosely into his huge bowl of coffee, Tir’s mom having a discussion with Carla. Karen was drying a tall mug — not actually something she had to do, since used dishes could be thrown, like any other sort of garbage, into the gullet of the replicators, but she said it made her feel authentic, and she liked to meditate while she did her dishes, her best ideas, like the concept of eternally rotating children and the Over-Family, coming to her as she washed and dried.
“I figured it out,” she said to Jemma. “Truly caffeine-free espresso.”
“What’s the point of that?” Jemma asked.
“You have to try it,” Karen said. “It’s guaranteed — not even a picogram of caffeine, but you’d never know the difference. I don’t know the difference, and if anybody could tell it would be me. Anyway I verified it up in the lab. There’s a set of HPLC columns in special chem.”
“I trust you,” Jemma said.
“I don’t,” said Chandra, “this business about Pudding and the sexbot is too much.”
“Ask Jordan,” Karen said, “but get him good and drunk first. And it wasn’t a sexbot, it was a three-dimensional simulacrum of his wife. And he was just looking at it. There’s no evidence at all for any other sort of… activity.”
“There’s no evidence at all, period,” said Chandra.
“You turn everything dirty,” Karen said to him, and put a tiny little cup down in front of Jemma, not one-tenth the size of the one that sat in front of Dr. Chandra.
“Are people making sexbots?” Jemma asked, taking the briefest little sip of the coffee, and gagging.
“Of course not,” said Karen. “Stop spreading lies,” she said to Dr. Chandra.
“You’re the gossip monger,” he said. “And anyway, fuck off. You’re not my boss anymore. I’m out of the program, lady.”
“Sirius, Sirius,” she said. “You’ve got to let that go. Do you know that was in one of your letters, when we were talking about you at the selection meeting? He’s a worrier, the letter said, in that obligatory negative sentence. He tends to hang on to things.” She set down another huge cup in front of him, full of hot milk, and poured in the espresso, making an expert design, a perfectly symmetrical spirograph flower.
“I’m never going back,” he said calmly, poking a finger into the foam and bringing it to his mouth.
“Maybe I should just have some milk,” Jemma said.
“Milk for the baby then,” Karen said, sweeping up the little cup and drinking it herself. “I can’t tell the difference,” she said. “Not at all. Could you?”
“I’m not very experienced,” Jemma said. “About the sexbots — maybe we should talk about them in the Council. It could get pretty weird, artificial people running around and mixing with the real people. What if we couldn’t tell the difference?”
“There are no sexbots,” Karen said, looking among her shelves — once they’d held old charts and admission protocols — for a milk mug. She selected a bowl, like Chandra’s, poured the milk, and started to steam it, so Jemma could only pick out a few words when she continued to talk. “Artificial vagina… imaginary… his was like a formal portrait… just visiting… the angel wouldn’t… trust me.”
“Can I have a paper cup?” asked Dr. Chandra. “I’m not going to stick around here and be persecuted.”
“I have a nice relaxing tea,” said Karen. “You should try some. It would make you less touchy.”
“I don’t even like tea, and I’m not touchy,” he said, and tapped his finger on the bar. Karen gave him an aluminum mug with a rubber lid, and he transferred his drink.
“You ruined the flower,” she said. “Want me to fix it?” She held up her little metal pitcher of milk.
“I’m late to fuck my robot,” he said, and shuffled off.
“Pull up your pants!” Karen called after him, and whispered to Jemma, “He’s very lonely. He comes here every day to tell me how much he hates me, but sometimes I think I’m the closest thing he has to a friend.”
“Some people are having a hard time,” Jemma said, holding her bowl in both hands and sipping at her milk. Vivian had given her a calcium quota to meet each day. She could not remember how much was in a bowl of milk. “Not knowing what to do, and not having any work.”