Roz stared at him a long moment. “I can help.”
Jack felt chilled. “I don’t want your help! I’m your father, damn it!”
She sat there, her eyes welling with tears. It was a nightmare. He sat down next to her and put his arm around her. She cried against his shoulder. A long time passed, and neither of them spoke.
Finally she pulled away from him. “It’s my fault,” she said. “I should have told you I loved him.”
Jack closed his eyes. He could hear his own pulse in his ears. The soil of the reservoir smelled as rich as ever. “Please, don’t say anymore.”
“Oh, god, how could you do this?” he heard her whisper. “Carey…” She cried against Jack’s shoulder some more.
Then, after a while, swallowing her tears, Roz said, “If we get rid of his suit…if we get rid of his suit, they’ll think he got lost on the surface.”
He opened his eyes and looked at her. Now he was scared. Who was this girl? “What do you mean?” he asked.
Eating Eva expected Jack would turn up at the festival eventually, and she didn’t want to miss the partying. Her mother came by with some of her cronies, and then Eva found herself dancing with Angela Angelasdaughter, the colony’s most notorious artist. Ten years ago, any gossip session in the sauna would devote ten minutes to the sexy sculptress and her physicist lover. Since then Angela had gained a potbelly, but her smile was as wicked as ever.
During a break in the music, Eva shared a drink with Jamira Tamlasdaughter. Jamira told Eva she had seen Jack earlier. “He’s so handsome, Eva,” Jamira said. “You’re so lucky. He’s like a god.”
Eva smiled, thinking of Jack’s taut body stretched across her bed. “Where did he go?”
“I don’t know. I expect he’s here somewhere.”
But Jack did not show up. What with one thing and another it was well after midnight when Eva returned to her apartment. Jack was sitting on the floor with a glass in front of him.
“So here you are,” Eva said. “I thought we would meet at the festival.”
He looked up at her, and his blue eyes were so soulfully sad that she melted. “I couldn’t find you,” he said quietly.
She sat down next to him. “I got caught up at the lab.” She and Victor had been working overtime on assembler programming. “Are Carey and Roz here?”
“No.”
“Good. Then we can entertain ourselves-unless this stuff you pour into yourself makes that unnecessary.”
Jack put his arms around her, pulled her to him, and rested his forehead against hers. “You know I always need you,” he whispered. Eva could smell spiced alcohol on his breath. She pulled him back onto the floor, and they kissed furiously.
They eventually found their way to the bedroom. Afterward, she was ravenously hungry. As a member of the Board, she had earned the privilege of a small kitchen: she padded in, naked, and returned to the room with a plate, a knife, an apple, and a hunk of cheese.
Jack was stretched across the bed just as she had imagined him, the muscles of his belly thrown into relief by the low light. She sat cross-legged beside him, cut a slice from the apple and offered it to him. “Here we are, in the Garden. Eve offers you an apple.”
“No, thanks.”
“Come on, Adam. Have some fun.”
His eyes flicked away from her, the corner of his mouth twitched. “I’ve had too much fun already,” he said to the ceiling.
She drew the apple slice across his chest, down to his navel. “There’s always more where that came from.”
“I’m worried about Roz. She shouldn’t be out this late.”
“Your daughter’s too sensible to do anything risky.” Eva heard the door to the apartment open, the sound of someone coming down the hall and entering Rosalind’s room. “See?” Eva said. “There she is.”
“What about Carey?”
“Carey, on the other hand, is no doubt busy getting into some sort of trouble. We’ll deal with him in the morning.”
She brushed her hand over his penis, and it stiffened. He said nothing, but eventually his hand came up to touch her hair, and then he pulled close and made love to her with an intensity that left her breathless and relaxed. He fell asleep beside her, and she lay watching the plate and the apple slices in the faint light.
Soon, she thought, soon, they would be able to reproduce anything. She would prove that the Cousins were not some backward-looking, female-dominated hive. They would stun the world. Dreaming of this, Jack’s arm around her, she fell asleep.
In the morning Carey had not returned.
Over breakfast-Eva finished the apple, now turned brown-she asked Roz what had happened after hockey practice. After denying anything, Roz finally admitted that Carey and some others had used the cover of the festival to sneak out of the colony onto the surface. The “First Imprints Club.” In the dead lunar surface their markings in the dust would last as long as if etched in stone.
That sounded like Carey, right down to the wasting of water. Eva called Carey’s friends. She discovered that Carey had left them at the festival, telling them he would catch up with them at the airlock. After waiting for him, they had gone out without him, expecting that he’d meet them on Shiva Ridge.
Carey’s pressure suit was not in his locker at the north airlock. Eva tried not to panic. She alerted colony security. Hundreds of volunteers joined in a search of the surface. With the assistance of Carey’s friends they found the footprints of the party, but none for Carey. Lunar Positioning Satellites could not raise his suit’s locator. Parties scanned the prominent landmarks, but came up empty.
The next days became a nightmare. Eva spent all of her waking hours out on the surface with the search parties, coming inside only to recharge her air supply and catch an hour or two of sleep. Her eyes fell into a permanent squint from the brightness of the surface. For the first twenty-four hours Eva still hoped Carey might be found alive. He had fallen unconscious in the shadow of some rock, she told herself; hypothermia would keep his metabolism low so he wouldn’t exhaust his oxygen.
As the hours passed she kept despair at bay by driving herself even harder. The third day found her a part of a line of twenty Cousins, at hundred-meter intervals, sweeping Shiva ridge for the fourth time.
Something was wrong with her faceplate: it was breaking all the gray landscape into particles, no piece of the Moon connected to any other piece, and all of it was dead. The voices of the other searchers calling to each other sounded in her ear button. “Nothing here.” “Where’s here?” “I’m on the east end of the ridge, below Black Rock.”
Eva felt numb. She came to the edge of a lava tube whose roof had fallen in. It was fifty meters to the shadowed bottom. Even in lunar gravity the fall would be fatal. She swayed on the edge, having trouble breathing. Her mouth was dry, and her eyes itched.
Someone grabbed her arm and pulled her away. “No,” his voice came over her ear button, as close as her own thoughts. It was Jack. He wrapped her in a bear hug, drew her back. He made her return with him to Fowler, to eat a meal, to take some pills, and sleep for fourteen hours.
After that Eva no longer tormented herself with impossibilities. Jack stayed with her every minute of her time on the surface. Despite her heartache, she still hoped Carey’s body would turn up so she could figure out what had happened. But when a further week of searches still brought nothing, she asked that they be called off. The official inquest ruled Carey missing, presumed dead by hazard of fortune.
She turned to her work. The project was her only hope now. It was more than a matter of demonstrating the value of Cousins’ science. Over the next months, the first assemblies using scans of organic compounds were completed. They produced edible soy protein and worked their way up toward apple sauce.
At meetings in the boardroom that looked out over the green fields of Fowler basin, the other matrons watched her out of the corners of their eyes. Eva controlled her voice, operated her body as if by remote. Everything is normal, she told herself. Some mornings she would wake and listen for Carey thumping around the apartment, only to hear silence. She hid his pictures. Although she would not empty his room, she closed its door and never went inside. She went to watch the hockey team play. Other Cousins sat beside her and made a show of treating her
