The Loneliness of Distant Beings

Chapter Twenty-One

'You're coming tomorrow, right?' I ask Mariana, the day before my wedding, ignoring the sick feeling I have to swallow down.

She stops scrubbing at the dirty flap on the machine we're cleaning, which is up in Command, near the decryption office, and studies my face. 'You want me to?' she asks.

'Of course. You're my friend.'

She raises an eyebrow. 'In that case, I'll be there.' After she gets back to scrubbing the machine she asks, 'You looking forward to it?'

And I don't answer; I just study the wiry side of the sponge I'm supposed to be using until she says, 'You're doing the right thing, amiga. Toe the line. Anything else is just more trouble than you can handle.'

More silence, in which I notice the sound of the Epsilon signal that seeps out from under the nearest door and think about the people who sit in there for year after year of their lives wondering what it's trying to tell us.

'How is he?' I ask her.

She stops her scrubbing again, sighs, puts the sponge on the floor, then looks at me. 'What do you want me to say?'

I shake my head because I don't even know. 'That he's fine,' I tell the floor.

She pulls her hat off, swipes the sweat off her forehead with her arm. 'Then he's fine,' she says.

'I need to go,' I tell her, hearing the break in my voice. 'Remember I said I need to go early today.'

'Oh right, yeah - why?'

'I need to . . . it's my egg harvest.'

We watch each other in silence.

'You want me to come with you?' she asks.

I shake my head, force a smile. 'Thanks, though.'

Waiting outside the Fertility laboratory up in Science, a floor above Med, I watch the instructional video that plays on a loop, while this couple I've seen around sit next to me, hands loosely linked. The video's all a smiling woman and her two perfect smiling kids and there's this music and it keeps going on about how your optimum eggs will be selected and kept for you until the time that's right for you and how it takes all the risk and danger and pain out of the whole thing. And then there's this sleazy bit with the couple getting all frisky in their quarters and I guess the general vibe is that you get to pair bond with your husband now that you have a low risk of natural pregnancy. Not that it's a hundred per cent because they actually have to leave some of your eggs, which mean it's more like eighty-five. People do get pregnant with naturals from time to time, which means your foetus will be screened and deleted if necessary. And apart from anything else it's a pretty great way to make sure there's no way you'll ever think about sleeping with someone you're not supposed to.

I guess I think about Ezra then, and I realise that I am gradually getting over the idea of hating him. It's only when I start thinking about talking to him, about spending the rest of my life with him, that I feel all the oxygen rush out of the room.

BEEP. My name appears in red letters. Like something that once happened in a dream.

Inside, cold, colder than ever maybe, in a flapped-open Med-issue night dress and with my legs in glacial metal stirrups and blinded by this big round light, I am suddenly hopelessly and full-on crying, heaving sobs, while this nurse watches me, just two dead eyes over a surgical mask.

'Don't you want to get married?'

She is stroking at my ankle in a way that is just corrosive, and this is when the doctor walks in and says, 'OK, Miss Hemple, let's set you on the road to life as a happily married woman,' before watching me cry some more.