Gravity Box and Other Spaces (36 page)

He continued working, making the forearm as lifelike as he could. The sound of canvas sliding over wood snapped him around on his stool.

Dulcie stood before Elyssa's statue, gazing at it, the canvas dangling by a corner from her right hand. He looked up at the reflection of his dead wife, felt the sharp sting of loss, and made himself look outside. Dulcie had come alone.

“Please,” he said.

“I miss her,” Dulcie said. “It's hard to say good-bye. What will you do?”

“I don't know. Try to figure that out, I guess. Why are you here?”

“I have nowhere else to go.”

He focused on her. “Hmm? What do you mean?”

“We do not kill. I killed. Our bond has been broken.”

He almost protested. He knew how that felt, though no one had ever said it to him. He just knew.

“I'm sorry,” he said.

“I'm no longer myself. I don't know where to go.”

“Paphos told me you didn't talk to anyone. Until Elyssa.”

“She accepted.”

“Yeah, she did. There's no one else I could ever talk to.”

“So are we both mute now?”

Peter felt a twist, a warming in his sinuses, a tightening in his chest. “You can talk to me, I guess. I'm not Elyssa—or Paphos. But I can listen.”

Dulcie folded the canvas and came over to the bench. She studied the carvings for a moment. “I am no longer what I was. I have to find—I have to become—something new. Maybe you do, too.”

“No doubt.” He shook his head. “I don't know what I'll be like, never seeing her again.”

“We can both talk because of Elyssa.”

“Dulcie—”

“I need to be new. I need somewhere to be.” She picked up a knife and handed it to him. “She will always be with us. I can think of no one I'd rather be.” She nodded at the statue, and then faced him. “You can talk to her. I can talk to you. We can heal.”

Peter's hand trembled. Dulcie leaned forward.

“Go along the grain,” she said. “It's always best.”

“I'm not really bisexual,” Audry said.

“Then why are we doing this?” Lora asked.

“With you, it's different.”

“That's—no, sorry, it doesn't work that way.”

“Speaking from long experience?”

“Speaking from some experience. It doesn't take a lot to understand certain things.”

Audry looked puzzled. “Does for me. Are you attracted to me?”

“Very.”

“And Jeff—”

“Very.”

“And both of us at the same time?”

“Why did you agree to this, Audry? You don't sound like your heart's in it.”

“My heart—Jeff has my heart.”

“He wanted it?”

“He wanted you.”

“And you're going along with it because—?”

“I'm happy when he's happy.”

“And if it lasts forever?”

Audry shrugged. “Nothing lasts forever.”

“You're right about that.”

“Don't leave.”

“For now. But tell me something. What are you getting out this arrangement?”

“It's better now. He's better. He's better with me. What about you?”

“It's good.”

“For now?”

“Now could last the rest of our lives.”

Audry smiled, but Lora thought it was an unconvincing one. Before she could say more, Audry reached for her. “Can we try again? I want this to work.”

“I lived with someone for three years. Then I was married for five. Neither worked out” Lora explained.

“Bad fit?” Jeff asked.

“Entropy,” Lora said. “I'm not sure people—I'm not sure I am suited to lifetime commitments.”

“Or maybe you just haven't found the right people,” Audry said.

“Like you two?”

Audry grinned. “Yeah.”

“Then why do you need me?” Lora asked.

“Well,” Jeff said, “when you find paradise, sometimes it's nice to share it. Expand the boundaries, stretch the horizons. Besides, we love you.”

Audry reddened.

“That's today,” Lora said. “Maybe tomorrow and next month. Things change.”

“It's a risk,” Jeff admitted. “We're all risking it, though. That's what makes it workable. There's equity, both in the risks and in the rewards.”

“Egalitarianism as the answer to relational problems?”

Jeff grinned. “It's a good start.”

“So as long as we remain the same

“Can't do that,” Audry said. “Change happens. But as long as the foundations we bring to this don't fall out of balance, the changes only add to it.”

“Sounds utopian.”

“Utopias never change,” Jeff said. “This is better.”

Lora sighed. “I love you, too. Both of you. I'm not leaving. It's just—”

“Yeah,” Audry said. “It's just.”

“It was hard enough with one other person, how do you hope three of us can do it?”

Jeff shrugged, smiling cryptically. “Maybe with the right people, it's easier with more. With the wrong people it doesn't matter how few, it won't work.”

“And how to define ‘right people'?”

Audry looked almost ready to laugh. Instead she brushed imaginary lint from her breast. Jeff stretched back, arms above his head, and Lora thought she had never seen a man look so impossible to leave alone. Her right hand began the short journey to his chest, but she pulled back.

“People who don't resent sharing,” he said. “Ever.”

“How do you know you're like that?”

Jeff laughed. “What did we just get done doing?” He waved a hand to encompass the three of them, arrayed on the bed.

“Yeah,” Audry said, “but that's just sex. There might be some things we don't want to share, even with each other.”

“And some things,” Lora said, “we can't share.”

“Like what?” Jeff challenging, sitting up. He looked from one woman to the other. “Come on, now. You may have a point, but I want examples.”

“Well—” Lora stopped. “Hell, I don't know. We may not even have it yet!”

“So you're expecting to acquire something in the future that you might not be willing to share with us.”

“Not intentionally. I mean, I'm not going to go looking for something just to have an example to counter your argument.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“Okay, smartass, what about dreams?”

“Dreams as in what do you want to do when you grow up?”

“Yeah.”

“I don't plan on growing up.”

“Neither do I, but it happens anyway.”

“Well, there is one thing,” Audry said. “Sometimes you have to keep a piece of yourself just for you.”

“Privacy? By definition you can't share privacy. You can only grant it. Beyond that, though, what wouldn't you share with me if you had it and it could be shared?”

Audry shrugged. “With you, I'd share eternity.”

“Let's keep it in the realm of the achievable,” Jeff said. He looked at Lora. “You?”

“I guess—” Lora paused. “I guess I would share my mortality with you.”

Jeff's face seemed to soften, as if a deeper light had fallen onto the skin and penetrated to the bone to show his feelings. “That's pretty much everything. Don't you think?”

Lora set the reports aside when Jeff and Audry entered the living room, arms around each other's shoulders, the last echoes of laughter falling from their grinning mouths. Lora felt her own mouth flinch into an answering smile, but the effort exhausted itself before it really began.

“Hey,” Audry said, stepping away from Jeff. “What's with the face?”

Lora glanced at the documents lying on the end table. “You first. How'd it go?”

“Exhausting,” Jeff said. He dropped into the armchair, long legs thrust out, ankles crossed. He closed his eyes. “I didn't think living forever would be so tiring.”

Audry bobbed her eyebrows at Lora. “Bitch, bitch, complain. They said it would be a few days of mild flu-like symptoms at worst, and then we'd feel the effects.”

“Yeah, but they didn't say what the effects were that we'd be feeling,” Jeff said.

“Do you want to take it back?” Audry asked.

“Can we?” He laughed. “No. I'm just—” He looked at Lora then. “Hey, there
is
something wrong. What's the matter?”

Lora, watching their byplay, felt on edge. Pressure rose behind her eyes. She did not want to cry, but it seemed inevitable. Happiness, horror, they both caused the same reaction at the extremes, but together—

“What's this?” Audry asked, gracefully crossing the room and snatching the top report before Lora could grab it. She flipped open the cover. “The Institute—your assessment?”

“I've been rejected,” Lora said, hoping she had beaten Audry to the relevant paragraph. “My make-up won't allow it.”

The silence that enveloped them instantly went deeper than the absence of sound. No one, Lora knew, was thinking. Sensation ceased for seconds. The fabric of the present muffled response and suppressed reaction. The silence of soul-shock.

Audry and Jeff spoke at once.

“No, that—”

“—has to be an error.”

“The numbers are there,” Lora said, standing. A thrill of trembling, like a promise, ran down her legs, but she did not stumble as she walked toward the door to the kitchen. “It's pretty final.” She stopped at the doorway, hand on the frame, and said over her shoulder, “However, I have been accepted into the Orion program.”

Before they could react to that, Lora went into the kitchen, heart pounding.

Out of their sight, in the recently redecorated kitchen with its new cabinets, faucet fixtures, stone tile floor, and skylight above, Lora leaned against the center island, squeezed her eyes shut, and for nearly half a minute concentrated on waking up, on the off-chance that this was a bad dream, and all she needed to do was open her eyes.

Her dreams had always been exceptionally vivid and fooled her with their veracity sometimes for minutes after waking. Not this time. This time, reality had handed her an impossible situation to assimilate.

“Lora—?”

Audry came up beside her, placing a hand on her shoulder. Very tentatively, almost like the first time they had made love, as if too firm a touch would cause Lora to reconsider and run away.

“What a bitch, huh?” Lora said. She shrugged and made a smile. “It's still a kind of immortality.”

Audry frowned. “No, it's not. It's a cheat. Time dilation is not the same as living forever.”

“Of course,” Lora said, stepping away, “it's not actual immortality for you, either. It's what? A thousand years?”

“They don't know the upper limit yet. And by the time we get there they might have found a new way to extend it.”

“Well, the first voyage is supposed to take about two hundred years objective. I'll only experience about nine months or so in subjective time.”

“But you'll be gone! You won't be here!”

The petulance in Audry's voice surprised Lora. She had heard it once or twice before, but not with such force. Audry's face distorted, the effort to hold back tears narrowing her eyes.

“There's always—” Audry began, then stepped back. “No, I guess not.”

“This is better,” Lora said.

“How do you figure that?”

“Come on! My genetic make-up isn't compatible with the longevity process, so if I stay here I get to grow old normally and die. Long before that, we'd fall apart, and you'd go somewhere else—”

“Stop.”

“I'd be a burden, unattractive to boot.”

“That's enough!”

“I'm being honest.”

“You're wallowing in it!”

“Hey!” Jeff came into the room. “If we're going to fight about this, let's all fight!”

Lora bit back a sharp response to him. Then she thought of the last argument they had, though she could not remember over what, and how wonderful the reconciliation had been, and how within fifteen or twenty years she would lose her youth and vigor, while he—