"Why, I'd be delighted to!" I say it with perfect sincerity, because I mean it. If I ever ended up in some kind of dark ages hospital for three or four cycles I'd want visitors. "You'll let me know what you want, all right?"
"Thank you." Janis sounds grateful. "Now if you could just get the footstool, these go on the top shelf and I can't reach as high as you can."
On my third day I'm due to meet up with Jen and Angel and Alice and do lunch. Jen's picked the Dominion Cafe as today's venue, and I walk there from the library, whistling tunelessly. I'm feeling unaccountably smug. I've found something new to do, I've got a source of income all of my own, I know things that the ladies who lunch haven't got a clue about, and if only I wasn't spending half my waking hours in fear of the future and wishing I could get out of this glass-walled prison and hook up with Kay again, I'd probably be quite happy.
The Dominion Cafe is a lot plusher than the name makes it sound, and I feel a bit underdressed as the maître d' ushers me to the booth where Jen is holding court. Here I am in a plain skirt and sweater, while Jen wears ever-more-exotic concoctions of spun bug spit and must spend three or four hours a day on her makeovers and hair. Angel isn't so much trying to ape her as getting tugged along in the undertow, and Alice looks a bit uncomfortable in their presence. But what do I care? They're people to talk to, and we're chained together by the mutual scorefile so I can't ignore them. This must be how the ancients used to feel about their families.
"Hello all," I say, pulling out a chair. "And how are you today?"
Jen waves at a metal bucket on a stand, with some kind of cloth draped over it. "Livin' large!" she announces. "Girls, a glass for Reeve. Won't you join us in a little Chateau Lafitte '59?"
"A little—" She whisks the cloth off the bucket, and I see it's full of ice packed around a green glass bottle.
"Champagne," Alice says, a little apologetically. "Fizzy wine."
"I wouldn't say no." Angel holds out a fluted glass while Jen picks up the bottle and pours.
"Why, is there something in particular to celebrate?" Jen and Angel don't normally do their drinking before sunset. So I figure it must be good.
"Well." Jen's eye sparkles wickedly. "You might think it was something to do with your correcting your last social shortcoming at long last." I feel my face heating. "But that's not it." Bitch. "It's just that this is Alice's last drink for some time."
"Excuse me?" I say, unsure what's going on.
"About eight months to go," Alice says, dabbing at her lips with a napkin. Her eyes flicker from me to Jen and back again, as if looking for an offer of help.
"I—" I stop. Lick my lips. "You're pregnant?"
"Yes." Alice nods, a quick up and down. She doesn't look happy. Jen, however, looks ecstatic.
"Here's to Alice and her baby!" She raises a glass of bubbly, and I echo the gesture because it would be rude not to, but as I take a mouthful of the sweet, fizzy wine I catch Alice's eye, and it's like there's a static discharge—I can see exactly what she's thinking.
"To your very good health," I tell her over the rim of my glass, and I'm pretty sure she gets the unspoken message because her shoulders slump slightly, and she takes a small sip from her own glass. I look at Jen. "And you?" I ask, before I can apply the brakes to my motor mouth.
Jen doesn't crack a smile. "Shouldn't be too long now," she remarks, calmly enough. "Then you can buy me a bottle of champagne too, eh?"
I manage to summon up the ghost of a grin from somewhere. "You must want a baby badly."
"Of course! And I'm not just going to stop at one." Jen smiles at me sympathetically. "Of course, I heard all about your job. It must be very difficult."
"It's not so bad," I manage, before retreating into the glass. Bitch. "You know Janis is pregnant, too?" I'll bet you do . "I'm training to be her replacement." What is this, let's all overload the life-support system week? "It's going to mean more work for the rest of us."
"Oh, you'll be next," Jen says, with a casual, airy certainty that makes my blood run cold. "You'll see things differently when you've got one of your own. I say, waiter! Waiter! Where's our menu?"
9. Secret
TIME passes fast, mostly because I spend the afternoon with my nose buried in the encyclopedia, trying to remedy my desperate ignorance of dark ages reproductive politics. Which I sense is putting me at a dangerous disadvantage.
The next day is the first of four days off. I sleep until well after Sam's departed for the office. Then I go downstairs and work out. Of the nine other houses on our stretch of road, one is now occupied by Nicky and Wolf—but Wolf has a job and Nicky, who is lazy beyond my wildest aspirations, sleeps in until noon. So I get in a good hour-long run, by the end of which I'm sweated up but not breathless or aching anymore. It's spring in our biome, and the trees and flowers are beginning to blossom. The air is full of the airborne seminiferous dust shed by the hermaphroditic vegetation. It tickles my nose, making me sneeze, but some of the scents that accompany it—attractants for insects—are nice.
After exercise I shower, dress in respectable clothes, and head downtown to the hardware store to spend some of my money. I feel better about spending it, knowing it's not Sam's money, even though I realize this is stupid because it's just meaningless scrip issued to keep the experiment working, not real currency. I come away from the store with abrazing torch, flux, solder, lots and lots of copper wire, and some other odds and ends. Then I go shopping for domestic items.
I hit the drugstore first, armed with a shopping list of things I'd never heard of until yesterday—things the encyclopedia listed under sexual health. Unfortunately, just knowing what to ask for doesn't translate into being able to buy it, and I gradually figure out that the omissions make a pattern. I can understand them not having progestogen-based medications on general sale. But why are there no absorbent sponges? Or the plastic penile sheaths I read about? After about half an hour of searching I conclude that the drugstore is useless by design. I ran across a rather shocking article on religious beliefs about sex and reproduction, and it looks like our drugstore was stocked on the basis of instructions from eclecticist hierophants. Something tells me that the lack of contraceptives is not an accident. I'm just surprised I haven't already heard people grumbling about it.
I have better luck in the department store, where I buy a new microwave oven, some clip-on spotlights, and a few other items. Then I go hunting for a craft shop. It takes me a while to find what I'm looking for, but in the end I discover one tucked in a corner of the shop, inside a pulp carton—a small wooden loom, suitable for weaving cloth. I buy it along with a whole bunch of woolen thread, just so nobody raises any eyebrows. Then I catch a taxi home and install my loot in the garage, along with the unfinished crossbow and the other projects.
It's time to get things moving. It's time I stopped kidding myself that I can fight my way out of here, and time that I stopped kidding myself that they're going to let me go in (I checked the calendar) another ninety-four megaseconds. Forget the crossbow and the other toys I've been playing with. I've got a stark choice. I can conform like everyone else, go native in the pocket polity they've established, settle down and get on with the job of creating a generation of innocents who don't even know there's another universe outside. Who knows? After a gigasecond, will I even remember I had another life? It's not as if my presurgery self left me much to hold on to . . .