“We were living in each other’s pockets. It would be against my nature anyhow.”
“I know. I wouldn’t try to make you a politician at this late date. But you are going to get some noise about it.” He cleared his throat and looked away. “Unless we marry him.”
“Some year, maybe. I’m not going to be rushed into anything.”
He nodded slowly. “I have to say…I’m glad to hear you say that. I would feel like the odd man out, you and Daniel with your young lovers.”
“You mean you haven’t made love with Evy?”
“Yes, twice. We are married.” He looked uncomfortable. “It didn’t work out. Very dry and tight. I don’t think her heart was in it. Though she tried hard ”
“She’s inexperienced.”
“That may be it.” He drank off most of the wine and handed it to me to finish, then got under the cover.
“I’ll have a girl-to-girl talk with her.”
He put his hand on my thigh. “Don’t intercede on my behalf. I’m satisfied with the way things are, now that you’re back.”
I turned off the light and sipped wine in the darkness, sitting up in bed. I couldn’t help feeling somewhat manipulated. John had probably acquiesced in Evy’s joining our line so he would have more time with me, though I suspect he would be surprised and hurt if I accused him of it. But then there was undeniably an element of manipulation in my relationship with Sam—mixed with honest lust; thinking about him gave me a prickly surge of desire.
My mother once counseled me that sexual relations grew more complicated in proportion to the square of the number of people involved. So this quintet was twenty-five times more complicated than masturbation. That seemed conservative.
The next month was a tiresome waste. The second day home I got a summons from God’s Armada. On Sandra’s advice I retained Taylor Harrison, an expert on constitutional law and a good trial lawyer as well.
Selecting the jury took more time than the trial itself. They came up with forty hand-picked Devonites, of course, and I found forty free-thinkers pretty easily. But then we both had veto power over the remaining twenty. We went through nearly a thousand before agreeing on them.
Harrison rejected out-of-hand my desire to consider the case on practical merits: the plain fact that the star-ship’s population had to remain stable for eighty years, and just a handful of Devonites would reproduce everybody into starvation. (I also asked the GA representative whether he had considered that little problem. He just smiled sadly and said God would provide.) By the screwy logic of the courts, that fact of certain disaster was irrelevant The case had to be decided in terms of technicalities of precedent and interpretation.
They droned on and on. It bothered me somewhat that GA’s lawyer, also an expert on constitutional law, was herself a hidebound atheist I supposed the two of them could switch sides and argue with equal passion either way. Maybe justice is best served with that kind of professionalism. It still bothered me. But not as much as the bombshell Harrison dropped halfway through the trial.
We were having lunch together, reviewing his notes, when he said, “O’Hara, do you know what a ‘front organization’ is?”
“Sure,” I said. I’d studied the history of the Lobbies in American government.
“Well, that’s what your God’s Armada is. They’re fronting for a conservative coalition headed up by old Marcus. They don’t really give a damn about equal representation.”
“What are they up to, then?”
“Just want to stop Newhome. They will, too, if they can compel you to take eight percent fundamentalist Devonites. Might as well put a time bomb aboard.”
“They should have moved earlier. With S-1 gone—”
“But that’s just it. They want S-1 to come back with the antimatter. They just don’t want to use it in a starship.”
“Power generation? Sunlight must be cheaper.”
“That’s not exactly the kind of power they’re interested in.” He put down his chopsticks and looked at me. “They want to use it on Earth.”
“My god!”
“The idea is to set up about a dozen magnetic containment devices, holding antimatter, in the largest cities. Like the Sword of Damocles. They do something we don’t approve of, we turn off the power. Boom.”
“Or if the power fails. Or the magnet runs down.”
“That’s right. Or if someone who doesn’t like, say, Los Angeles gets hold of the button. It’s a spectacularly unstable system.”
“How do they think they could do it? It’d never get past the Coordinators.”
“Well, Marcus was a Coordinator once. The thing is, if the starship gets vetoed and S-l comes back, we’ve got all that antimatter sitting in our own back yard. A lot of people would rather have it somewhere else.”
“Have you told Judge Delany about this?”
“Hardly. Delany was the one who told me. Of course it’s irrelevant, a side issue.”
“Of course.” I wished I had something stronger than orange juice.
As it turned out, it was irrelevant, or immaterial. We won the case, sixty-one to thirty-nine, even getting a few of the Devonites on our side.
In retrospect, the month was a useful lesson. I had already chosen ninety-two lawyers to go with Newhome. I reinterviewed them, and about a hundred more, in terms of the desirability of setting up a new system of jurisprudence. Surprisingly, I wound up with more old lawyers—including Harrison—than young ones. Fed up with the system, I suppose.
I also spent the month more or less losing Sam. Having discovered the female race, he started butterflying. The trial soaked up all my spare time, and he had plenty of girls his own age to divert him. It’s possible he was intimidated by John and Daniel, too, since he would be aboard Newhome on Engineering track, and one or both of them would sooner or later be his boss. I don’t really think he had that Machiavellian, or practical, a mind, though. One reason I was so fond of him.
My own mind being reasonably practical, even Ma-chiavellian, I let him go gracefully. I’ll be on the starship, too. In another ten years our age difference won’t be so significant.
Charlie’s Will 
After the violence at City Hall, the transition went fairly smoothly. Most of the Island’s weapons were locked up in the jail; Storm’s deputies were armed but loyal.
The Islanders were probably more amenable to the prospect of long life than any other group in Charlie’s country. They lived comfortably amid the only working remnant of prewar civilization south of New York and north of Antarctica; the only city in the hemisphere that had survived the war relatively unchanged. It wasn’t hard to convince them that the gift of the death was no blessing.
It was harder to talk them out of cannibalism. Jeff got no help from Storm on this matter, nor from Tad, who still wouldn’t eat human flesh but didn’t want to make an issue about it. Most of them had only vague memories of any other kind of meat.
Oddly enough, it was Mary Sue who came up with a solution. She wanted to go back to the farm anyhow, and suggested that the two groups might trade. An armed guard could escort her up and come back with mating pairs of rabbits and chickens, maybe pigs if they had enough. The farm could use a refrigerator in return. Their old one had died, and they hadn’t been able to find one that worked.
Mary Sue’s bunch could just go down into Tampa and raid an appliance store, and find one still in a packing crate, but Jeff didn’t suggest it. Instead he solemnly picked out a nice expensive model from a mansion on Duval Street and had it loaded aboard the mule cart he’d come down in. He sent a party of four volunteers along with her, armed with accurate maps and lots of artillery, and started dreaming about fried chicken.