I love her so much.
Erin Larimore:
My baby, I don’t know when you’ll get this. Maybe it will only be after I’m gone. You can’t skip over the next part. It’s a recording. I want you to hear what I have to say.
Your father misses you.
He is not perfect, and he has committed his share of sins, the same as any man. But you have let that one moment, when he was at his weakest, overwhelm the entirety of your life together. You have compressed him, the whole of his life, into that one frozen afternoon, that sliver of him that was most flawed. In your mind, you traced that captured image again and again, until the person was erased by the stencil.
During all these years when you have locked him out, your father played an old simulacrum of you over and over, laughing, joking, pouring his heart out to you in a way that a seven-year old would understand. I would ask you on the phone if you’d speak to him, and then I couldn’t bear to watch as I hung up while he went back to play the simulacrum again.
See him for who he really is.
-Hello there. Have you seen my daughter Anna?
BREAKAWAY, BACKDOWN
James Patrick Kelly
You know, in space nobody wears shoes.
Well, new temps wear slippers. They make the soles out of that adhesive polymer, griprite or griptite. Sounds like paper ripping when you lift your feet. Temps who’ve been up awhile wear this glove thing that snugs around the toes. The breakaways, they go barefoot. You can’t really walk much in space, so they’ve reinvented their feet so they can pick up screwdrivers and spoons and stuff. It’s hard because you lose fine motor control in micro gee. I had . . . have this friend, Elena, who could make a krill and tomato sandwich with her feet, but she had that operation that changes your big toe into a thumb. I used to kid her that maybe breakaways were climbing down the evolutionary ladder, not jumping off it. Are we people or chimps? She’d scratch her armpits and hoot.
Sure, breakaways have a sense of humor. They’re people after all; it’s just that they’re like no people you know. The thing was, Elena was so limber that she could bite her toenails. So can you fix my shoe?
How long is that going to take? Why not just glue the heel back on?
I know they’re Donya Durands, but I’ve got a party in half an hour, okay?
What, you think I’m going to walk around town barefoot? I’ll wait—except what’s with all these lights? It’s two in the morning and you’ve got this place bright as noon in Khartoum. How about a little respect for the night?
Thanks. What did you say your name was? I’m Cleo.
You are, are you? Jane honey, lots of people think about going to space but you’d be surprised at how few actually apply—much less break away. So how old are you?
Oh, no, they like them young, just as long as you’re over nineteen. No kids in space. So the stats don’t scare you?
Not shoe repair, that’s for sure. But if you can convince them you’re serious, they’ll find something for you to do. They trained me and I was nobody, a business major. I temped for almost fifteen months on Victor Foxtrot and I never could decide whether I loved or hated it. Still can’t, so how could I even think about becoming a breakaway? Everything is loose up there, okay? It makes you come unstuck. The first thing that happens is you get spacesick. For a week your insides are so scrambled that you’re trying to digest lunch with your cerebellum and write memos with your large intestine. Meanwhile your face puffs up so that you can’t find yourself in the mirror anymore and your sinuses fill with cotton candy and you’re fighting a daily hair mutiny. I might’ve backed down right off if it hadn’t been for Elen—you know, the one with the clever toes? Then when you’re totally miserable and empty and disoriented, your brain sorts things out again and you realize it’s all magic. Some astrofairy has enchanted you. Your body is as light as a whisper, free as air. I’ll tell you the most amazing thing about weightlessness. It doesn’t go away. You keep falling: Down, up, sideways, whatever. You might bump into something once in a while but you never, ever slam into the ground. Extremely sexy, but it does take some getting used to. I kept having dreams about gravity. Down here you have a whole planet hugging you. But in space, it’s not only you that’s enchanted, it’s all your stuff too. For instance, if you put that brush down, it stays. It doesn’t decide to drift across the room and out the window and go visit Elena over on B deck. I had this pin that had been my mother’s—a silver dove with a diamond eye—and somehow it escaped from a locked jewelry box. Turned up two months later in a dish of butterscotch pudding, almost broke Jack Pitzer’s tooth. You get a lot of pudding in space. Oatmeal. Stews. Sticky food is easier to eat and you can’t taste much of anything but salt and sweet anyway.
Why, do you think I’m babbling? God, I am babbling. It must be the Zentadone. The woman at the persona store said it was just supposed to be an icebreaker with a flirty edge to it, like Panital only more sincere. You wouldn’t have any reset, would you?
Hey, spare me the lecture, honey. I know they don’t allow personas in space. Anyway, imprinting is just a bunch of pro-brain propaganda. Personas are temporary—period. When you stop taking the pills, the personas go away and you’re your plain old vanilla self again; there’s bushels of studies that say so. I’m just taking a little vacation from Cleo. Maybe I’ll go away for a weekend, or a week or a month but eventually I’ll come home. Always have, always will.
I don’t care what your Jesus puppet says; you can’t trust godware, okay? Look, I’m not going to convince you and you’re not going to convince me. Truce?
The shoes? Four, five years. Let’s see, I bought them in ’36. Five years. I had to store them while I was up.
You get used to walking in spike heels, actually. I mean, I’m not going to run a marathon or climb the Matterhorn. Elena has all these theories of why men think spikes are sexy. Okay, they’re kind of a short term body mod. They stress the leg muscles, which makes you look tense, which leads most men to assume you could use a serious screwing. And they push your fanny out like you’re making the world an offer. But most important is that, when you’re teetering around in heels, it tells a man that if he chases you, you’re not going to get very far. Not only do spike heels say you’re vulnerable, they say you’ve chosen to be vulnerable. Of course, it’s not quite the same in micro gee. She was my mentor, Elena. Assigned to teach me how to live in space.
I was an ag tech. Worked as a germ wrangler in the edens.
Microorganisms. Okay, you probably think that if you stick a seed in some dirt, add some water and sunlight and wait a couple of months, Mother Nature hands you a head of lettuce. Doesn’t work that way, especially not in space. The edens are synergistic, symbiotic ecologies. Your carbo crops, your protein crops, your vitamin crops— they’re all fussy about the neighborhood germs. If you don’t keep your clostridia and rhizobium in balance, your eden will rot to compost. Stinky, slimy compost. It’s important work—and duller than accounting. It wouldn’t have been so bad if we could’ve talked on the job, but CO2 in the edens runs 6%, which is great for plants but will kill you if you’re not wearing a breather. Elena painted an enormous smile on mine, with about eight hundred teeth in it. She had lips on hers, puckered so that they looked like she was ready to be kissed. Alpha Ralpha the chicken man had this plastic beak. Only sometimes we switched—confused the hell out of the nature lovers. I’ll tell you, the job would’ve been a lot easier if we could’ve kept the rest of the crew out, but the edens are designed for recreation as much as food production. On Victor Foxtrot we had to have sign-ups between 8:00 and 16:00. See, the edens have lots of open space and we keep them eight degrees over crew deck nominal and they’re lit twenty hours a day by grolights and solar mirrors and they have big windows. Crew floats around sucking up the view, soaking up photons, communing with the life force, shredding foliage and in general getting in our way. Breakaways are the worst; they actually adopt plants like they were pets. Is that crazy or what? I mean, a tomato has a life span of three, maybe four months before it gets too leggy and stops bearing. I’ve seen grown men cry because Elena pulled up their favorite marigold.
No, all my plants now are silk. When I backed down, I realized that I didn’t want anything to do with the day. My family was a bunch of poor nobodies; we moved to the night when I was seven. So nightshifting was like coming
