Within months of my arrival I had become well-acquainted with Mica’s closest professional associates. They found me an amusing distraction from their work-related discussions, and I began to feel definite echoes of my old association with the Lamu Rainmakers. The last thing I had been contemplating as I planned my return to Earth had been a third marriage, but when Mica and two of her most intimate allies in the new continental cause began to talk about possibilities of that kind I quickly became interested. What better way could there be to support my insistence that humans really did benefit from roots and that the Earthbound really were progressive in their outlook?
The marriage that Mica and her friends wanted to form was, of course, different in one very significant respect from the one the Lamu Rainmakers had organized. That had been an exploratory union of young people, whereas this was a purposive association of mature individuals. Mica had decided that she was old enough and wise enough to be a foster mother, and I was ready and willing to reason that if that were true, then I was old enough to be a foster father.
When Mica and her prospective co-parents began to discuss the spectrum of qualities they would to need to support an application for parenthood, it was easy enough to persuade them that my record as an ex-lunatic historian would add vitally necessary variety. Given that there was no one else on Neyu who could contribute such a striking set of exceptions to the local rule, I went right to the top of their list of candidates.
The further negotiations remained delicate and complicated because all of the people who would ultimately be welcomed into the company had to be acceptable to all the others, but once the determination was there the process pressed ahead with all possible speed. As the thirtieth century dawned the matter was settled. I was to be married again, and would very soon be a co-parent, following in the footsteps of Papa Domenico, Papa Laurent, Mama Eulalie, Papa Nahum, Mama Meta, Mama Siorane, Mama Sajda, and Papa Ezra. I thought—as I suppose almost everyone must think—that no matter how difficult it would be to do better job than they had done, I would make certain that I did it.
SIXTY-TWO
Long afterward, Mica confessed that my inclusion in the marriage had not been unopposed when she first raised it with Maralyne, Ewald, and Francesca, and that when their preliminary debate reached its critical point the item that swung it was the moral credit that I was presumed to have accumulated by virtue of once having saved Emily Marchands life.
I was moved by a sense of injury to respond, somewhat dishonestly, that I had had to think long and hard before accepting the invitation, and that the item that had eventually swung my own internal debate was simple economic anxiety. It was a plausible story. Having readapted myself to Earthly life I wanted to press on as hard as was possible with the remaining volumes of my History, and the flow of income from the earlier sections had dwindled to a point at which meeting my living expenses and financing my continuing researches would not have been easy had I not married when I did. Now, I wonder whether I was entirely honest with myself when the idea of the marriage first came up.
However good or bad the reasons might have been on either side, though, the marriage was a success, at least in terms of its primary objective.
Four of the eight members of my new aggregate household were committed Continental Engineers. Like Mica, Maralyne Dexter was a traditional gantzer, while Ewald Knabl and Francesca Phénix were of the newer school of Organic Engineers. All four were involved in various island-building projects. The remaining three had, like me, been chosen for the sake of apparent variety, although Banastre Trevelyan was an economist-turned-politician strongly allied to the new continental cause and Tak Wing Ng was a geomorphologist whose interests were in the same area. The only one whose concerns were as blatantly peripheral as mine was Tricia Ecosura, a medical technician specializing in functional cyborgization. It quickly became apparent, however, that although our specializations might be disparate, Tricia and I shared with the other members of the group a particularly intense zeal for our work.
Throughout the twenty-eighth and early twenty-ninth centuries most groups of applicant co-parents had taken the view that parenthood ought to be a full-time job for at least some of the co-parents, and it was by no means uncommon for entire parental groups to spend twenty years living on saved-up capital. By 2900, however, the tide of fashion had swung decisively against that theory on the grounds that it introduced children to a distinctly freakish lifestyle. The only extreme that was tolerated as the thirtieth century began was the other, by which children were introduced to a work-centerd existence in which direct parenting became a matter of strictly regimented individual turn taking. This was the kind of unit my new family set out to be.
Although I was married to my seven companions for more than thirty years, from 2902 to 2935, I never became as intimate with any of them as I had been with the co-parents of my first marriage. Except for Mica and Tricia I cannot say that I ever got close to any of them. It was clear from the outset that five of my new companions were only interested in the parental aspects of the union, and they were determined to be businesslike about the whole thing. When Bana suggested that flesh-sex should not merely be excluded from any mention in the the marriage agreement but formally proscribed he might have obtained a majority decision had it not been for the fact that Mica and I threw our support behind Tricia when she argued that the child would derive far more benefit from a less monastic environment.
Even though the vote went our way, there was a residual consensus that if we three were so keen on providing examples of supposedly healthy physical relationships, then we were the ones responsible for their construction and maintenance. Although Mica played her exemplary part with commendable enthusiasm Tricia was the only one of my co-parents with whom I shared any real emotional intimacy, and it is a pity that our affection for one another was severely prejudiced in later years by philosophical differences.
Fortunately, the careful mutual distancing of the majority of her co-parents did not affect the bonds we formed with the child committed to our care. She was born in January 2912, less than a year after the publication of the seventh part of my History of Death, although not so soon that the two processes of gestation became tangled in my mind.
We gave her the name Lua Tawana.
Biologically speaking, Lua was drawn from ancient Polynesian stock—as narrowly local as could be contrived, given the limitations of the Crash-stocked gene banks. She bore no conspicuous physical resemblance to any of her co-parents, although she promised to be even more beautiful than Francesca, who was the only one of us to have taken a serious interest in the aesthetics of cosmetic enhancement. The uniqueness of her appearance only served to increase the sense we all had that Lua was one of a kind, as well as being a crucial part of a future yet to be created and shaped by humankind, which would be better than the present.
I wish I could say that I took to parenthood like a duck to water, but any vestigial instincts that I might have inherited had withered in four hundred and some years of adult life. I had a lot to learn, and even though I was more able to put my work temporarily aside than most of my companions I felt that I was painfully inept. From an objective point of view it must have seemed that the others were no better, but no one can be objective in such circumstances and I was awkwardly terrified by the thought that a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity might be spoiled by my inability to cultivate the requisite skills with the requisite alacrity.