Gravity Box and Other Spaces (38 page)

“In a small percentage of cases,” Jeff said, his voice rising finally. He looked at Lora. “What do you want to do?”

“I suppose since they had two breakthroughs, I might be lucky enough that a third will happen before too long.”

“But?”

Lora looked at them. “You know, I've been home now three weeks and neither of you has asked me once what it was like.”

Audry frowned. “What was what like?”

“The voyage.”

Audry looked chagrined. Jeff shrugged. “The whole thing was live on the comm. We watched.”

“But you couldn't know what I was feeling.” She sighed. “What am I going to do? Next month another mission is leaving. Longer, this time. I've been offered a slot.”

Jeff nodded.

“What about us?” Audry said.

“You'll be here when I come back.”

“But—so you're not going to do another test?”

Lora stood. “I'm going for a walk.”

“We need to settle this!” Audry said.

“I think you just did.”

“I hope I die first.” Lora mused.

Audry drew back to study her face in the fragment of light from the hall doorway. Sweat dappled her cheek. Her breath came warm, struggling for control. “Why would you say that?”

“He loves you. I don't want to be the one watching him grieve.”

“Christ, that's—”

“Cold? Greedy? I admit it, I'm a greedy bitch.”

“I'm impressed with your self-possession.” Audry laughed. “It's not. I'm not. I mean, I don't have myself. Jeff does.”

“So why isn't he here right now?”

“Man's gotta sleep sometime.”

Lora laughed, reached a hand across Audry's hip, and trailed fingers along it, down her thigh.

“Soft,” Lora said.

“What is?”

“You.”

“Am I now? So you intend to leave me behind to watch Jeff grieve for you? Add sadistic to your list of qualities.”

“At times. But you have to admit, I'm good at this.”

Motiles worked in the house and the garden outside, maintaining it to a standard of perfection Lora found unsettling. Neither Jeff nor Audry seemed to be home. The air inside had the same smell and consistency older shipboard recycling systems spewed out. Not stale but not fresh, either. She went to the screen in the den and touched the center.

Audry's face came on. “Hello. Give me a sec while I scan. Oh! Lora, hi! Make yourself at home, we should be back soon. We took a jaunt to the Antarctic this week. Not sure when you're seeing this, but our return is scheduled soon. Glad you're back!” Her face vanished.

Lora decided to take a walk and headed for the park. She barely noticed the two miles, legs scissoring through the distance, fueled by disappointment mixed with anger at Audry and Jeff for scheduling a trip when they knew she
would be home. They had been keeping in touch through an epistolary communication, made slightly easier by a new method of quantum tunneling, but their transmissions kept getting longer and longer about less and less. Lora had stopped responding about a month before deceleration back into the system, which would have been—she was still slow at the calculation—about four years objective time.

At least they went somewhere
, she thought, relieved. They had spent nearly all of Lora's last voyage in the house, almost three centuries. The atavistic meanderings in their missives reflected off the walls around them, even though they kept tabs on the world through the comm. It was hardly adequate. They seemed to be losing touch or perhaps were being stretched thin, like a lake many miles across but only an inch deep.

She found the cluster of elms where she liked to sit sometimes to think. The trees could not possibly be the same ones, but the park had been carefully preserved almost exactly as she remembered it. The space was as familiar as her own room.

Few others were in the park and of those she saw many were, surprisingly, aged. Lora saw gray hair, wrinkles. She wondered if a new cosmetic fad had taken hold, but as she watched one couple she realized that they probably were as old as they looked. She saw no one who might be in the thirty-or-younger profile.

As she watched them, she remembered the trip to the clinic, a week past and five centuries ago, on her way to take the tests to determine compatibility with the antiagathic treatment. Lora had walked through a thin line of protestors. None of them had spoken to her. They only watched her, milling uncertainly with a few signs declaring the new process an abomination, contrary to God's law, a disaster waiting to happen—vague
imprecations, some of which nevertheless had disturbed Lora.

There had been pirate clinics for years. The number of celebrities receiving the treatment kept rising, the numbers of ordinary people petitioning Congress and the president to legalize immortality swelling finally to the point a year later when a bill passed both houses and the president signed it, and legitimate clinics could open. Arguments in opposition had always seemed either too shrill or too arcane to matter as much as some people thought they did, so fell silent. For a time. The gathering of disenchanted had surprised her. Now she wondered how many of them had been denied the treatment, like her.

Why am I thinking about this now?
She wondered.
Because I'm still mortal
came the answer. Five centuries had passed here while she had traveled at relativistic speeds. For her it had only been a few years, but she did still stare mortality in the face.

She stretched her legs out and leaned back against the tree. There had been dozens of studies done on the process, many of which contradicted each other. Everyone agreed that not all people could take it, but no one knew how many. Certain gene markers eliminated candidates for a variety of reasons, but since even in families among close relatives those markers were not predictable, reliable statistics proved impossible. The guesses ranged from ten percent to sixty. The news feeds were choked with debates about what this would mean, but the clinics were open and people were getting the treatment.

But not she. The tests disqualified her. The treatment would produce unacceptable, adverse, or fatal results. Lora was not destined to be immortal.

After a time, she returned to the house and waited for Jeff and Audry to come home. But they didn't come home that day or the next or the one after that, until finally the time came for her next mission. Another two years exchanged for another four centuries of “immortality.”

Audry entered the room wearing feathers of some kind. Lora recognized them as modeled on an avian species that lived in a system ninety-two light years distant.

“Hey,” Audry said, waving at her. She went to the wall, touched it, and the entire room disappeared, replaced by an outdoor vista, pine forest to one side, desert to the other, a lake in between, and a mountain in the distance. Lora watched Audry spin around in the center of the new landscape, smiling brightly. She stopped, facing Lora, hands out as if offering the scene to her. “What do you think?”

“Lovely.”

“Thought you'd like it.” Audry's eyes shifted. “Jeff!” She waved.

Jeff came from between two trees. Lora stared, startled at the muscle he now carried. He advanced on them, long strides, arms swinging, and came alongside Audry. He surveyed the scene, nodded, then headed toward the desert.

“Hi, Lora.” Jeff waved as he passed.

Audry followed him. Lora watched as they walked toward the horizon. They did not really seem to be together or aware of each other. Both were just walking their own path until they shimmered beneath the illusion of sunlight and disappeared.

The front door clicked on closing, and Lora listened to the tread of footsteps through the house. It was Jeff. The glass of wine she had been sipping was nearly empty, and she felt slightly buzzed. She remained sitting and silent, listening as he explored the house, finally coming through the garden doors.

“Hey,” he said in greeting.

“Come on out,” Lora said. She raised her glass. “The water's fine.”

Jeff laughed and took the chair opposite her. “Where's Audry?”

“I thought she was with you.”

“No. She left right after you did.”

“Which time?”

He looked puzzled for a moment, then shook his head dismissing his confusion the way he always did, but his eyes continued roving over the garden and patio.

The muscle was gone. He was back to the way Lora remembered him from long ago. Wiry. It had been almost twenty-five years subjective, and she had seen so many Jeffs over the past five thousand years that she could not be sure which one was the original.

“No,” he said. “I went—somewhere else.” He pointed at the glass. “First?”

“First. If you're fast, you can catch up.”

He seemed to consider it, then shook his head. “Maybe one of us should stay sober.”

“How do you know I'm not?” Lora leaned forward. “Are you still in love with Audry?”

“Sure.”

“No, no. Not ‘sure.' Are you in love with me?”

He frowned. “I don't—how long will you be back this time?”

She regarded him for a few seconds and decided to ignore his question. “Four years. That's how long we were
a unit before the treatments. Four. Six months before then, building up to me moving in with you two. Eventually, I got used to certain aspects of our relationship that bothered me originally. I convinced myself that what I took to be signs of trouble between you two were just the stress marks of a longer relationship. Was I wrong?”

“I don't know. When was this?”

“About—oh, I think you two had passed the two-millennium mark.” She watched him closely to see if he had caught that the timeframe was completely inaccurate. He did not.

“It doesn't seem that long.” He looked over the garden.

“You know,” Lora said, “neither one of you have ever asked me about the missions. I've been back—”