Laura frowned. "You don't really believe in that crap."
He shrugged. "No. Seeing your O.P. it's a fad. Like folks used to see UFO's, you know? Some weirdo in Oregon says he had an encounter with his personal archetype. Pretty soon, everybody and his brother's having visions. Mass hysteria, collective unconscious or some such. Stupid. But modern at least. It's very new-millennium." He seemed obscurely pleased.
"It's mystic bullshit," Laura told him. "If it was really your Optimal Self, you should have been building something, right? Not beachcombing for Nirvana."
David looked sheepish. "It was just a dream. Remember that documentary last Friday? The guy who saw his O.P. walking down the street, wearing his clothes, using his charge card? I got a long way to go just yet. ",He looked down at her ankle and started. "What'd you do to your leg?"
She looked at it. "I tripped over a piece of hurricane junk.
Buried in the sand. A VCR, actually." Loretta woke up, her tiny face stretching in a mighty toothless yawn.
"Really? Must have been there since the big one of '02.
Twenty years! Christ, you could get tetanus." He handed her the baby and fetched a first-aid kit from the bathroom. On the way back he touched a console button. One of the flat display screens on the wall flared into life.
David sat on the floor with limber grace and put Laura's foot in his lap. He unlaced her shoe and glanced at its readout. "That's pretty rotten time. You must have been limping, babe."
He peeled off her sock. Laura held the wriggling baby to her shoulder and stared at the screen, distracting herself as
David dabbed at her raw skin.
The screen was running David's Worldrun game-a global simulation. Worldrun had been invented as a forecasting tool for development agencies, but a glamorized version had found its way onto the street. David, who was prone to sudden enthusiasms, had been playing it for days.
Long strips of the Earth's surface peeled by in a simulated satellite view. Cities glowed green with health or red with social disruption. Cryptic readouts raced across the bottom of the screen. Africa was a mess. "It's always Africa, isn't it?"
she said.
"Yeah." He resealed a tube of antiseptic gel. "Looks like a rope burn. It didn't bleed much. It'll scab.
"I'll be okay." She stood up, lifting Loretta, and disguis- ing the pain for his sake. The rawness faded as the gel soaked in. She smiled. "I need a shower."
David's watchphone beeped. It was Laura's mother, calling from her guest room in the Lodge, downstairs.
"Ohayo, y'all! How about helping Granny surround some breakfast?"
David was amused. "I'll be down in a minute, Margaret.
Don't eat anything with the hide still on it." They went upstairs to their bedroom.
Laura gave him the baby and stepped into the bathroom, which shut behind her.
Laura could not understand why David actively liked her mother. He'd insisted on her right to see her grandchild, though Laura hadn't met her mother face to face in years.
David was taking naive pleasure in his mother-in-law's stay, as if a week-long visit could smooth over years of unspoken resentment.
To David, family ties seemed natural and solid, the way things should be. His own parents doted on the baby. But
Laura's parents had split when she was nine, and she'd been raised by her grandmother. Laura knew that family was a luxury, a hothouse plant.
Laura stepped into the tub and the curtain shunted shut.
The sun-warmed water washed the tension from her; she put family troubles out of mind. She stepped out and blew her hair dry. It fell into place-she wore a simple cut, short, with light feathery bangs. Then she confronted herself in the mirror.
After three months, most of her postnatal flab had suc- cumbed to her running campaign. The endless days of her pregnancy were a fading memory, though her swollen body image still lurched up sometimes in her dreams. She'd been happy, mostly-huge and achy, but cruising on motherhood's hormones. She'd given David some rough times. "Mood swings," he'd said, smiling with fatuous male tolerance.
In the last weeks they'd both been spooked and twitchy, like barnyard animals before an earthquake. Trying to cope, they talked in platitudes. Pregnancy was one of those arche- typal situations that seemed to breed cliche's.
But it was the right decision. It had been the right time.
Now they had the home they'd built and the child they'd wanted. Special things, rare things, treasures.
It had brought her mother back into her life, but that would pass. Basically, things were sound, they were happy. Nothing wildly ecstatic, Laura thought, but a solid happiness, the kind she believed they had earned.
Laura picked at the part in her hair, watching the mirror.
That light threading of gray-there hadn't been so much before the baby. She was thirty-two now, married eight years.
She touched the faint creases at the corners of her eyes, thinking of her mother's face. They had the same eyes-set wide, blue with a glimmer of yellow-green. "Coyote eyes,"
her grandmother had called them. Laura had her dead father's long, straight nose and wide mouth, with an upper lip that fell a little short. Her front teeth were too big and square.
Genetics, Laura thought. You pass them on to the next generation. Then they relax and start to crumble on you. They do it anyway. You just have to pay a little extra for using the copyright.
She lined her eyes, touched on lipstick and video rouge.
She put on hose, knee-length skirt, long-sleeve blouse in patterned Chinese silk, and a dark blue business vest. She stuck a Rizome logo pin through the vest's lapel.
She joined David and her mother in the Lodge's dining room. The Canadians, here for the last day, were playing with the baby. Laura's mother was eating the Nipponese breakfast, little cakes of pressed rice and tiny popeyed fish that smelled like kerosene. David, on the other hand, had fixed the usual: cunningly disguised food-oid stuff. Fluffy mock scrambled eggs, soybean bacon, pancakes from batter made of thick, yellow scop.
David was a health-food nut, a great devotee of unnatural foods. After eight years of marriage, Laura was used to it. At least the tech was improving. Even the. scop, single-cell protein, was better these days. It tasted all right, if you could forget the image of protein vats crammed with swarming bacteria.
David wore his overalls. He was going out house wrecking today. He had his heavy toolbox and his grandfather's old oil-company hard hat. The prospect of bashing up houses- filthy, crowbar-swinging muscle work-always filled David with childlike glee. He drawled more than usual and put hot sauce on his eggs, infallible signs of his good mood.
Laura's mother,. Margaret Alice Day Garfield Nakamura
Simpson, wore a Tokyo original in blue crepe de chine, with a trailing waist sash. Her woven-straw sun hat, the size of a bicycle wheel, was tied across her back. She called herself
Margaret Day, since she had recently divorced Simpson, a man Laura scarcely knew.
"It's not the Galveston I remember anymore," Laura's mother said.
David nodded. "You know what I miss? I miss the wreck- age. I mean, I was ten when the big disaster hit. I grew up in the wreckage down the island. All those beach homes, snapped off, washed up, tossed around like dice... It seemed infi- nite, full of surprises."
Laura's mother smiled. "That's why you stayed here?"
David sipped his breakfast juice, which came from a pow- dered mix and was of a color not found in nature. "Well, after '02, everyone with sense pulled out. It left all the more room for us diehards. We BOI's, Born on the Island folks, we're a weird breed." David smiled self-consciously. "To live here, you have to have a kind of dumb love for bad luck.