have something I need to tell you.”
Jack tried to keep the panic out of his voice. “What’s that?”
“I think I’m going to move out. There’s an apartment that Raisa and I can move into opening up in the old section of the south wall.”
“Raisa? I thought you didn’t even like her.”
“I think I was just projecting; she’s really a good person. She’s never mean.”
Jack wanted to argue, but was intimidated by Eva’s presence. Eva had put this idea in Roz’s head.
“Come with me,” he said to Roz. “We’ll take a walk. Do you mind, Eva? We need to talk this over father to daughter.”
“Go right ahead.”
Roz looked sullen, but she came with him. They descended from the apartment, down the pathway toward the crater floor. The inside of the dome was a brilliant cloudless sky. On the field below them a harvester sprayed soybeans into a hopper truck. “Is this because of Carey?” Jack asked.
Roz crossed her arms over his chest and looked at her feet. “I don’t want to talk about Carey,” she said.
“You know it was an accident, Roz, I-”
She bounced on her toes and leaped five feet into the air, coming down well ahead of him. A woman going the other way looked at her and smiled. Jack hurried to catch up.
Roz still wouldn’t look at him. “I will not talk about Carey, Dad. This isn’t about him. I’m fourteen, and a Cousins girl at fourteen who won’t leave home is sick.” She bounced again.
He didn’t know what to say. He knew she was lying, that it had to have something to do with Carey. But he wasn’t going to beg.
“You’re going to tell Eva the truth,” he said when he caught up.
“Don’t be stupid!” Roz said. “I’ve given up too much for this. I don’t want to move again.”
Stupid. How stupid he had been to come here. “I brought you here to keep us from drifting apart.”
“Dad, did you think I was going to be with you forever?”
He rubbed his palms up and down his forearms, but that only made the itching worse. “Will you call me?”
“I’ll see you every day.”
Jack stopped following her. Roz continued down the path toward Sobieski Park, and did not look back.
“What do you think, Carey?” he whispered aloud as he watched his daughter walk away. “Is this one of those Earth things? One of those sexual ownership practices?”
Jack tried to imagine what it would be like to be alone with Eva in one of the largest apartments in the colony. Perhaps it would not be so bad. He could plant a dozen junipers on the balcony. He could prepare all their meals. Hell, he could bring in a bed of Carey’s soil and sleep in it.
He began meeting Jamira Tamlasdaughter in the sauna at the gym. They would claim one of the private alcoves and fuck. The heat of the sauna made him forget his burning skin. There was nothing wrong with it. There was nothing right about it. Roz was always out. Eva stayed away even longer at the labs, sometimes not coming back at night until he was asleep. The mysterious absences grew until one night it had been a full twenty-four hours since Jack had last seen either Eva or Roz. It was fertile ground for worry. Someone had found Carey’s pressure suit. Roz had not hidden it well enough, and now she was in trouble. Or Eva had tricked her into an admission. She had broken down, given in to guilt.
His phone rang. He touched the contact on his wristward.
“Dad? Can you meet me at Fabrication Research?”
Roz’s voice was charged with excitement. He hadn’t heard her sound so young in months. “What is it, Roz?”
“You won’t believe it. All our troubles are over! We’re resurrecting Carey!”
“What?”
“The assembler. I can’t tell you more now, someone might hear. Come at 0300. If anyone asks, tell them that you’re going somewhere else.”
“Is Eva there?”
“Yes. I’ve got to go now. See you at 0300.”
“Roz-”
He felt sick. Resurrecting Carey? Roz must have told Eva what had happened.
Still, what could he do but go? Jack paced the rooms for hours. He left after somatic midnight. The perimeter road to the north airlock was quiet; there was a slight breeze, a hum of insects around the lights. He told the lock attendant that he was going to biotech.
When he sealed up his suit he felt he could not breathe. He checked the readouts repeatedly, but despite the evidence that nothing was wrong, he felt stifled. Sweat trickled down his neck into his collar.
Outside the sun hammered down and the glare of the baked surface hid the stars. He upped the polarization on his faceplate, but still his eyes hurt. He followed the road from the airlock, between the fields of solar collectors, to the ramp entrance to the Fabrication Research Lab. He passed through the radiation maze, opened the outer door of the lab airlock. When he stripped off his suit his shirt was soaked with sweat. He wiped his arm across his brow, ran his fingers through his sweaty hair. He waited.
He did not open the inner door.
And if, by some miracle, they did re-create Carey? Roz said that all their troubles would be over. They could go back to who they were.
Fat chance. He had hoped that coming to the Society would offer Roz a freedom that he could not earn for her on Earth. No one on the Moon knew him. And even if he did fail again, among the Cousins a father’s faults would not determine how others saw his daughter. Roz could be herself, not some reflection of him.
As he stood there, poised before the inner lock door, he had a sudden memory of Helen, on their honeymoon. On the beach at St. Kitts. Helen had surprised him by wearing a new bikini, so small that when she pulled off her shorts and T-shirt she was clearly self-conscious. But proud, in some way. He remembered feeling protective of her, and puzzled, and a little sorry. It hit him for the first time that she was fighting her body for his attention, and how sad that must be for her-on the one hand to know she had this power over him that came simply from her sexuality, and on the other that she, Helen, was someone completely apart from that body that drew him like a magnet. For a moment he had seen himself from outside. He’d been ashamed of his own sexuality, and the way it threatened to deform their relationship. Who was she, really? Who was he?
At the time he had taken her in his arms, smiled, complimented her. He had felt sure that with time, they would know each other completely. How pathetic. After the breakup, he had at least thought that he could know his daughter. That was why he wanted Roz-to love someone without sex coming in the way. To love someone without caring about himself.
How stupid he had been. Whether they’d come or not, inevitably she would have seen him differently, or been destroyed by trying not to. Whether he’d killed Carey or not, Roz would have to fight to escape the mirror he held up to her.
With a sick feeling in his gut, he realized he had lost his daughter.
He was so hot. He was burning up. He shut his eyes and tried not to see or hear anything, but there was a roaring in his ears like a turbulent storm, and his eyes burned and flashed like lightning.
He would feel better if he went outside. Instead of opening the inner door, he put his pressure suit back on and opened the outside door. It was bright and hot out on the surface-but in the shadows of the rocks it would be cool. He stepped out of the shadow of the radiation baffle, up the ramp to the dusty surface. Instead of following the path back to the colony, he struck off between the rows of solar collectors toward a giant boulder that loomed on the horizon. As he walked, on his sleeve keyboard he punched in the override code for his suit’s pressure failsafes.
By the time he had reached the chill shadow of the rock, all that remained between him and relief was the manual helmet release. He reached up to his neck and felt for the latch. He was so hot. He was burning up. But soon he would be cool again.
Happy Ending When the indicators showed the airlock was occupied, they waited for Jack to enter the lab. Instead, after a few minutes the outer lock of the airlock opened and he left again. Roz was worried.
“I’m going to see what he’s up to,” she told Eva.
She pulled on her pressure suit and waited the maddening few minutes it took the lock to recycle. As soon as
