Gravity Box and Other Spaces (37 page)

“I need privacy,” she said.

“You've had all morning,” Jeff said. “Much more is self-pity.” He held up the report. “This is one lab. What we do now is get another opinion.”

Lora felt her control slip. “I don't think so. Being told once is hard enough.”

“Jeff—” Audry said, a warning quiet in her voice.

“What? So on the off-chance these people did something wrong, you die for not finding out?”

“No, I don't die. I take the Orion program.”

“How is that not dying? You won't be here for a couple of centuries. What do we do, play vids while you're gone to remind us that you used to be part of this family?”

Lora laughed, a sarcastic release of dismay, “Well, excuse me for having an option.”

Lora pushed away from the island and stomped through the side door. She made it to her room before either of the others caught up with her. She slammed the door and threw the bolt.

Each of them had a room apart, their own private space, to be entered only with permission. Lora suspected Audry used her room the least of the three. Until recently, Jeff tended to be more private than either Audry or Lora. But, the dynamics of the relationship had evolved, shifted, rolled with the waves of uncertain circumstance. Lora had been in a couple of relationships before this one in which that capacity to adapt had been too limited, and things got knocked apart. This one, though, seemed to work.

Till now.

Leaning against the door, she was confronted by the contents of her room. A cork bulletin board above a small desk held overlapping snapshots of their lives together—trips, parties, an odd house picture or two, and off-guard portraits of personal silliness. Above her neatly-made bed hung a painting Jeff had done of her when they were still dating. She was looking past his shoulder, at something that had put a smile in her eyes. She was nude, but the cross-hatching of shadows complicated a clear view of her body, revealing it in frustrating segments. There was the hint of perspiration.

The painting faced an antique chestnut armoire. Within it hung some of Lora's favorite clothes and a description of the provenance of the armoire Audry had tracked down. She would have to leave it all behind when she left.

Lora went to the bed and sat down. She rarely used this room to sleep. She could not remember the last time she had slept alone.
Time to get used to that again
, she thought.

She stretched out on the double bed, drew her knees up, and groped under the covers for the pillow. Maybe a long sleep, van Winkle style, would change everything. Previous interstellar missions used something like that, but breakthroughs in drive technology—not to mention telemetry and shielding—had rendered all that irrelevant.

Should I stay and hope for another breakthrough? After all, through normal medicine I might have at least another sixty or seventy years. Without the advent of the new antiagathic treatments, that was near immortality to past generations.

By any measure it was a long life. And who knew but that within those six decades her condition—the precise matrix of her genes—might turn out to be an obstacle easily overcome.

But that was not the only consideration.

She sat up at a knock on her door. She stared at it in silence, thinking she had imagined it. But it came again, followed by the knob turning.

“Lor?”

Audry. Stunned, Lora groped for something to say. The rule was, until she emerged on her own, privacy was an absolute. Disturbing it this way violated their mutual understanding.

“Lor, come on, we need to discuss this.”

“Privacy!” Lora called.

“Fuck privacy; brooding won't fix this. We need to talk.”

Lora unlocked the door and stepped back. The knob turned again, a moment passed, and Audry entered her room. She took three steps in and folded her arms.

“Jeff said I should wait—”

“Jeff knows the rules.”

“I just think the longer we let this go the worse it will be. Maybe he's right, maybe another lab—”

“Wait, wait. Before this whole immortality thing became viable, we talked about going into space. The three of us. We were making plans, if I remember correctly.”

“Yeah, but—”

“But this came along and now everything's different?”

“Part of the reason I wanted to do that was to see the future. I think Jeff felt the same. But now we can see it just by living long enough. I don't know about you, but I like it here.”

“I do, too, but it might get just a little bit boring after a few hundred years, don't you think?”

“Not if you're with people you love.”

“That's not fair, and it's not the point.”

“Well, what is the point? You get one test done, and it's over? You won't even consider trying again?”

“The test is the same. It's your genome. They map it. They look for certain markers, and that's it. You're either suitable or you're not.”

“Your mind is made up?”

“No! It has nothing to do with my mind being made up or unmade or anything! It's science!”

Audry grunted sarcastically.

“You may not think much of science,” Lora said, “but you didn't hesitate to take advantage of it.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

Lora turned away. “Nothing. Look, I need to sort my own head out, all right?”

“We need—”

“—to talk, yes, I know. We will. When I'm ready.”

“Promise?”

“Of course. Haven't we always talked things through?”

Audry nodded. “Okay. I'll—we'll—”

“Out. Please.”

Audry looked like she was about to hug Lora, but changed her mind, nodded, and left, closing the door quietly. Lora locked her door again. Then she went to her bed, fell across it, and began sobbing.

Lora had forgotten how large their house was. With three incomes, all of them substantial, they could afford a lot of space. Four bedrooms, a den, a living room, kitchen and dining room, a library, and two fully-equipped offices, one for Jeff and the other for Audry. The house formed a cordon around a garden and patio where Lora had spent many a morning with coffee and whatever book she was reading. Audry had taken care of the garden before Lora joined Jeff and her, but over the years, more and more, Lora had tended it. It had become the place where important meetings happened. No one had planned it that way; it simply became that way.

Now she sat in the middle of it, waiting. She had been gone for a bit more than a year by her reckoning of time. It seemed strange that this place did
not
feel strange to her, but wonderfully, comfortably familiar. She had changed out of her ship-skinnies into a dress bought at a port shop, a shimmering turquoise wrap that seemed to shift and rearrange of its own accord, contouring her body.

Through the windows into the house, she kept gazing at a painting hanging on the wall between Jeff's and Audry's rooms, a desert landscape with an absurdly twisted cactus in the center, the limbs bending into shapes that seemed simultaneously natural and Escher-esque. It was the only new thing she had found.

The sliding doors opened. Lora turned her head to see Jeff coming through them wine in hand. He was naked, body almost as perfect as she remembered. He stopped mid-stride when he saw her sitting there.

“Hey, Lora!” He set down his wine and came toward her, arms wide.

She stepped happily into the hug. She breathed him in, searching for the familiar in every sensation. He smelled more or less as she remembered, but there was something added, a kind of flat odor underlying the nascent sweat.

She stepped back to look at his smile. His eyes danced, then shifted left and right. “Can I get you anything? You must be tired.”

“I—”

“Lora, hi!” Audry hurried toward her from the patio doors. “I thought I heard your voice!”

She wore shorts and nothing else. She looked thin. They hugged briefly. Lora enjoyed the soft contours of Audry's body against hers. She breathed in her familiar scent, sweet and fresh. The embrace was brief. Audry pulled away first.

“Let me get us drinks and something to eat. I'll be right back.” A few moments later she reemerged with a tray bearing glasses, a filled decanter, and a cheese plate.

“Did you tell her?” Audry said.

“No, I didn't get a chance yet,” Jeff said.

“Well, don't waste time! She's leaving soon!”

“Okay, okay—”

“I'm here a month,” Lora said.

“Wink of an eye,” Audry said. “We should have sex. Right now.”

Jeff held up a hand. “News first, right?”

“Right.” Audry poured drinks. “They refined the technique. You may qualify now. You can be retested.”

“Oh.” She accepted the glass, sipped. She had been expecting wine, but was some kind of orange drink.

“I read about—what was it? Thirty years ago? Time—” He waved at the air, fingers flexing, and laughed. “Anyway, yeah, about then, they found a way to rewrite the specific codes blocking the treatment for people like—well, like you.”

“Thirty years ago?” Lora questioned.

“Something like that,” Audry replied. “Isn't that exciting?”

“I guess it's a good thing I went with Orion, then.”

They looked at her blankly.

“I'd have died before they figured it out.”

Audry's face changed. She looked stricken, almost inconsolable.

“That would have been—” Jeff began. “I guess you did choose right. But we've missed you.”

“I missed you, too.” Audry's expression softened a little, but she kept looking at Jeff as if waiting for something.

“Hey,” she said, “maybe we
should
have sex. I don't know about you two, but it's been over a year for me.”

“A year?” Audry said. “Was there someone before, then?”

“Yeah. You two.”

Jeff laughed and Audry, tentatively, smiled. After an awkward pause, she pushed her shorts down.

“I still don't qualify.”

Audry and Jeff stared at the report on the screen, their expressions unreadable. The silence extended, working on Lora's nerves.

“Tragic,” Lora said. “But I'm not sure if I can take being told again that I won't live forever.”

“So you won't try again?” Audry said.

“No.”

Jeff laughed. “You know, this is interesting. When this all came out, the idea of living to a hundred was not a death sentence. Now suddenly with only six or seven centuries of life left, it is?”

“Everything's relative,” Audry said.

“Sure, but so fast?”

“What, in your opinion, would be slow enough?”

Lora's dread resolved into acute disappointment. They had been fighting. She recognized the signs easily after years of sharing a life with them. Audry was sulking, not yet ready to abandon her anger, and Jeff was trying to be casually reasonable, as if whatever transpired between them that was ugly meant nothing and would evaporate along with the raised voices and accusations.

Jeff sighed. “The viral recoding that's supposed to shut off our aging processes is linked to both nucleic DNA and mitochondrial DNA. Certain markers have to be present in both for it to be both a safe procedure and effective.”

“Do you really know what all that means?” Audry asked. “Or are your just parroting what you've read?”

“Both, really,” Jeff said, still managing a calm voice. “I don't understand the why of any of it. But it means that a certain set of genes have to be present, in a certain order, so that the treatment works instead of killing you. Loosely, it's the same kind of thing you find when a virus infects a population and certain people simply aren't affected. According to our profiles,” he pointed from himself to
Audry, “those genes are right where they need to be. But in Lora's case they aren't. Which means the treatment would probably be fatal.”

“Or simply ineffective,” Audry said.