I really had only two choices. I could allow Evelyn to join the line, or ask Daniel to leave it. I didn’t see how I could refuse Evelyn and keep Daniel. So it was really a question of whether I loved Daniel enough to share him. Or little enough not to care. I looked myself straight in the heart for a long time over that. Finally I went back to the monitor and called Evelyn and welcomed her to our family. Asked her to relay my consent to Daniel and give him my love; I couldn’t hog the monitor. I could, of course.
Instead I went back out into the garden, dark now, and sat on the damp earth and listened to things growing. There was a hint of wild honeysuckle on the air, that somehow disgusted me. I didn’t feel much like springtime. Evelyn was twelve years younger than I. Under other circumstances she could be my own child (not as pretty and somewhat lighter in complexion). I think the jealousy faded away there in the garden, but what replaced it was a hollow and cold feeling of mortality. Finally I did cry, but I don’t think it was over Daniel. I think it was over everything dying eventually.
I had a desperate desire, not especially erotic, to go find myself a limber young penis. Rocky or Sam. I even got up and walked toward the cottage where Rocky was sleeping. But at the brick footpath I turned away. He might have company. Or he might say no.
The next day was shift change. Ahmed had been out at the Mercedes for the past week. He came back to the farm and we stretched the foodisolation policy to the extent of one small bottle of gin. It’s not every day that you get a new in-law.
He was cautiously happy but a little concerned about her age. Also, it was odd for a Ten to marry outside of the line, which claimed to trace groundhog roots back to seventeenth-century Africa. He himself was all for it, especially since the war had effectively frozen New New’s gene pool.
(The marriage made me obliquely related to the single postwar addition to that gene pooclass="underline" Insila, the girl we had brought back from Zaire. Ahmed had adopted her as soon as she came out of isolation.)
By the time we saw the bottom of the bottle he had taught me a half-dozen outrageous phrases in Swahili to surprise Evelyn with. Then he wandered off to bed. I was on night duty, so I had Dr. Long give me a shot of toloxinamide, which compresses all the joys of a. hangover into ten minutes of concentrated woe, followed by remorseful clarity.
I shared the shift with Sam again. He was always good company. I’d chosen him to come along as sort of a wild card. At eighteen he had a certificate in mathematics and most of a second one in historiography. He composed music, popular ballads, and last summer had written a young people’s introduction to calculus. He didn’t have much ambition in the conventional sense; he’d been offered a line apprenticeship and refused it, saying he’d rather stay in school until Janus took off. (That’s how we’d met originally; his name percolated to the top when I was databasing for a parttime ship’s historian.)
There wasn’t really anything to do at night but stay awake. The farm’s “nerve center” was originally a groundskeeper’s office, situated on a slight rise, giving us a view of the whole area. We had the monitor there and a sound-only communications system that Ingred Munkelt had jury-rigged. If anything suspicious happened, we could throw a switch that flooded the area with light. Another switch sent a wake-up buzz to every bedroom and dormitory floor, and unlocked the armory. We had a laser and a scattergun by the door. Otherwise, only Friedman had a weapon; we’d decided on a strict lock-up policy to prevent accidents and keep the murder rate down near zero.
We talked about history and historiography for a couple of hours and played a game of fairy chess. He spotted me a barrel queen and still won in fifteen minutes. Then, while I was putting the pieces away, he demonstrated yet another talent: mental telepathy.
“Uh, you know I overheard your conversation with your husband yesterday. You were pretty upset.”
“Surprised. Yes, upset. I still am, a little.”
“I don’t blame you. I wondered, um, whether you might want, whether your line permits, uh…” He started to make the polite finger sign but instead put his hand lightly on my forearm. His palm was wet and cold. “Would you want to have sex with me as a friend?” he said quickly. “I thought it might help.”
“It would help, a lot.” I put my hand over his. “You do know how old I am.”
“Sure.” He laughed nervously. “I like that. Women my age, we just don’t have anything real to talk about.” He looked around quickly. “Should I put the shades down?”
I tried to stifle a laugh. “Let’s wait until the shift is over, okay? Only another hour and a half.” He agreed, with a winsome look of real pain.
Boys that age should wear loose clothing. Galina and Ingred, who replaced us, could hardly have missed his erection. They were poker-faced, but Galina gave me a roguish wink as we went out the door.
Back at my place, the first iteration was predictably brief. But Sam’s refractory powers were impressive even for a youngster. After the fourth he fell asleep beside me, still inside. It was my first deep, untroubled sleep in a month.
(Sam was curiously ignorant of female geography. He confessed he’d only discovered girls a year before, having spent several years loving an older man, one of his teachers. Such a waste of natural resources.)
The next day we began working on a program of recruitment. Our efforts here would be spectacularly trivial if only sixteen people benefited. We decided it would be best to find loners and people living in twos and threes. If we tried to assimilate a large group, it might lead to an organized power struggle after we left.
I saw the farm as eventually growing into a small town, thousands of people, agriculturally self-sufficient and still close enough to New York to take advantage of the city and serve as a nucleus of power for rebuilding it. Some day I wanted to come back to the city and see it crackling with energy again.
There was some dissension over this ultimate goal, led by Carrie Marchand. A lot of people believed that cities were obsolete; that living in cities contributed to the mental disease that made war possible. A strange point of view to come from someone who grew up inside an oversized tin can. But she had never been to New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, as they had been before the war. As I was stating this argument, I realized that only a handful of adult people ever had been to a real city, let alone every one of the major cities in the non-Socialist world. It made me feel lonely rather than unique. And I did have to admit that the experience colored my judgment profoundly. Carrie made a good case, but my side prevailed. Being boss does simplify the process of debate.
The first stage of recruitment had to be quite selective. We made a couple of hundred flyers describing what we were and how to get in touch with us, and left them in prominent places in book stores and print libraries. We didn’t tell exactly where the farm was, but said we would pick people up at noon outside the Ossining tube station, every clear day.
We distributed the flyer over several hundred square kilometers, but for almost a week it looked like a wasted effort. Every noon Friedman or I would take the school bus inland a few kilometers, then circle around to the south of Ossining and sneak up on the tube station. On the fifth day three recruits, as cautious as we were, came out of the bushes after we landed.