breakup with Helen. The fight over Roz, ending with him taking her against the court order. The succession of jobs. The forged vita.
Eva, newly elected head of the board, chaired the environmental subcommittee. She had come by the biotech lab in the outlying bunker. Jack did not know who the tall, striking woman in the webbed pressure suit was. She asked questions of Amravati, the head of the project, then came over to observe Jack, up to his ankles in muck, examining bacteria through an electron microscope visor.
Flirting led to a social meeting, more flirting led to sex. Sex-that vortex women hid behind their navels, that place he sometimes had to be so badly that every other thought fell away and he lost himself again.
Or was it finding himself? Eva’s specialty was physics, some type of quantum imaging that he did not understand and whose practical benefits he could not picture. But a relationship that had started as a mercenary opportunity had, to Jack’s surprise, turned to something like love.
As Jack sat on the edge of the fountain, hoping he might find Eva in the crowd, instead he spotted Roz.
Her face was clouded; her dark brown eyes large with some trouble. “Roz?” he called.
She heard his voice, looked up, saw him. She hesitated a moment, then walked over.
“What’s the matter, sweetheart?” he asked.
“Nothing.” She sat down next to him. She was bothered by something.
Across the plaza, two of the acrobats juggled three children in the low gravity the way someone on Earth might juggle bean bags. The kids, tucked into balls, squealed in delight as they rose and fell like the waters of the fountain.
“Isn’t this amazing?” Jack asked.
“‘Amazing,’ Dad-that’s very perceptive.”
“What?”
“This place is disgusting. Look at that old creep there feeling up that girl.”
“We talked about this, Roz. The Cousins do things differently. But they don’t do anything against anyone’s will.”
“It’s all OK with you, just as long as you’re getting laid every night.”
He put his hand on her leg. “What’s going on?”
She pulled away. “Nothing’s going on! I’m just tired of watching you take advantage of people. Mom would never have brought me here.”
Roz never mentioned her mother. Jack tried to focus. “I don’t know, girl. Your mom had her own problems fitting in.”
“The only reason we came here is that you couldn’t get a job back on Earth.”
He tried to get Roz to look at him, but she was fixed on her outsized plastic shoes. “Aren’t we hostile tonight,” he said. She didn’t answer. He saw for the first time how much her profile had become that of a grown woman. “I’ll admit it. The job had something to do with it. But Roz, you’ve got a chance to become someone here you could never be on Earth-if you’ll make an effort. Women are important here. Hell, women run the place! Do you think I like the idea of being a second-class citizen? I gave up a lot to bring you here.”
“All you care about is getting into Eva’s bed,” Roz told the shoes. “She’s using you, and she’ll just dump you after she’s had enough, like all these other Cousins.”
“You think that little of my choices?”
That made her look at him. Her face was screwed into a furious scowl. The music of the drum band stopped suddenly, and the people applauded. “How do you know Eva’s not going to try to get me into bed with her, too?”
Jack laughed. “I don’t think so.”
She stood up. “God, you are so smug! I can’t tell you anything!”
“Roz, what is this-”
She turned and stalked off.
“Roz!” he called after her. She did not turn back.
Next to him, a thin black woman holding a toddler had been eavesdropping. Jack walked away to escape her gaze. The band started another song. Inwardly churning, he listened to the music for a few minutes, watching the people dance. Whatever his failings, hadn’t he always done his best for Roz? He didn’t expect her to agree with him all the time, but she had to know how much he loved her.
The amused detachment with which he’d entered the plaza was gone. The steel drums gave him a headache. He crossed the plaza. Before he had gone ten paces he saw Eva. She was in the crowd of dancers, paired with a round-faced woman. The woman was grinning fiercely; she bumped against Eva, slid her belly up against Eva’s. Eva had her arms raised into the air and was smiling too, grinding her hips.
As Jack stood watching, someone sidled up to him. It was Hal Keikosson, who worked in Agriculture.
Hal was in his forties and still living with his mother-a common situation among the Cousins.
“Hey, Jack. Who was that girl I saw you talking to? That red hair? Cute.”
Jack kept watching Eva and the woman. Eva had not noticed him yet. “That was my daughter,” he told Hal.
“Interesting.” Hal swayed a bit, clutching a squeeze cup in his sweaty hand.
Jack ought to let it go, but he couldn’t. “What does that mean?”
“Nothing. She must be fourteen or fifteen already, right?”
“She’s fourteen.”
“And maybe she isn’t your daughter.” Hal giggled.
Jack stared at him. “What?”
“I mean, how could her mother be sure-or maybe she lied to you.”
“Shut the fuck up before I belt you.”
“Hey, it’s none of my business who you sleep with.”
“I’m not sleeping with her.”
“Calm down, calm down, Cousin.” Hal took a sip from his cup. He looked benignly over at the figures writhing in the shadows beneath the trees. “Too bad,” he said quietly, and chuckled.
Jack stalked away to keep from taking a swing at him.
The drum band was louder now, and so was the babble of the increasing crowd. He passed a group of drunken singers. Near the amphitheater he saw one of the acrobat children staggering around in circles, giggling. Jamira Tamlasdaughter, a friend of Eva’s, tried to say hello, but he passed her by with a wave.
Jack’s head throbbed. Beyond the trees that marked the border of Sobieski Park he followed a path through fields of dry-lands soybeans, corn, potatoes. There was no one out here-most of the Cousins were at the festival now.
A kilometer later the path turned upward into the open lands of the crater slopes. Low, hardy, blue-white grass covered the ground. But the sound of the band still floated over the fields, and turning, Jack could see the central tower lit by the colored lights. The foliage was side-lit only by that distant light and the projected starlight from the dome. Somewhere off to his left a night bird sang in a scraggly pine. He turned his back to the festival.
It was an easy climb in one-sixth gee, and when he hit the concrete rim of the crater that supported the dome he followed the perimeter road around toward the north airlock. He wanted out. The best refuge he could think of was the biotech lab.
Because of the festival, the airlock was deserted. Jack took his pressure suit from his locker, suited up, and cycled through the personnel lock. He passed through the radiation baffles to the surface.
Although it was night inside the dome, out here it was lunar afternoon. Harsh shadows lay beneath the fields of solar collectors lining the road to the labs. Jack skipped along the tracked-up roadway, kicking up a powder of fines. Over the throb of his headache he listened to the sound of his own breathing in his earphones.
The fight he’d had with Roz was just like one of his final spats with Helen, full of buried resentments and false assumptions. Roz’s accusations stung because there was an element of truth in them. But Roz was wrong to say Jack didn’t care about her. From the moment of her birth Jack had committed himself to Roz without reservation. Clearly he hadn’t paid enough attention to her troubles, but he would do anything to protect her.
Roz didn’t understand that things were hard for Jack. “All men are boys,” the Cousins said. In the case of a jerk like Keikosson, he could admit the saying’s truth. But it was as much a product of the way they lived as of the men themselves. The women of the Cousins indulged their boys their pleasures, kept them adolescents far into their
