When you told me you had contracted as a
You said you were doing it because of your great boredom—and because of the money, the fortune you’d have when you returned. The fertboss position was driving you crazy, you said. Even with the antidepressants The Farm’s headmeds were giving you (I knew nothing of this), your days were leaden with despair, you said.
You said, too, that you’d talked it over thoroughly with three who’d just come back. Two
Willi, who was eight then, said the only thing he could have: he didn’t want to leave. He didn’t want to give up his school, his teams, his clubs, his counselor, his center, his world. I had no choice. I had to respect it. He would not be our son fifteen years later when Jory returned and I awoke, but it was Willi’s life, too, and to take him with us to a future where he would have only the two of us was all wrong. I believe that still. I do.
My mother was ill. She probably would be for the rest of her life. He could not stay with them. It was Clara and Bo, our friends from Cedar Falls, who at last agreed to take him. He would live with them during the school year until he was eighteen; he would spend summers with Jory’s sister in Missoula or my parents in Cedar Falls. Whichever he preferred.
That was the best I could do, and as I did it, I wept.
You signed your contract. Quanta responded, depositing fifteen years of executive salary with the Citibank trustees. While you slept in the starlocks and did your business on Climago, the capital earned. When you finally returned, you were (like the others) a millionaire and (like the others) so happy.
I slept for you, Jory, because that was my adventure, an adventure I believed was as noble as yours. All around us men and women were doing such things for their departing lovers, and I knew we would meet again—you and I—in a distant, idyllic future, to begin life anew like a modern Adam and Eve.
I slept for you, and my sad but loving parents paid for the suspension care without complaint, though they knew they were burying me.
I’ve seen my father only once since I awoke. Mother is dead. He had nothing to say.
I will not do that to him again.
Time marries. Time reconciles. “It is a recombiner like no other,” as my mother used to say quietly. It has only been two weeks since Jory’s announcement, and I have already begun to believe, to accept what I know cannot be true.
I must be prepared. I cannot afford not to be. If what Jory claims is true, if indeed we are about to have a visitor, I must begin to prepare this house physically—and myself psychologically—for its arrival. Whatever
After all, the notion of a visitor is, in its own way, appealing. Anything that makes the days feel different is, in its own way, appealing.
I give it the better part of each day. I give it so much that the headaches are excruciating. But they are a small price to pay for being prepared.
1. I’m actually quite qualified to receive the creature, whatever it may be. I received a decent formal training in biology, zoology, and physiology, and I’ve educated myself in recent years in invertebrate and marine biology, malacology, conchology. Jory would be the first to admit this, I’m sure.
2. If the creature is indeed intelligent, I cannot afford to make it feel unwanted. Jory will insist, I am sure, that it remain with us indefinitely, and I will have to abide by that as graciously as possible.
I cannot guess his exact needs. I can only prepare for a variety of contingencies. I know, for example, that Climagos do not need daily intakes of atmosphere, that their integumentary system is “closed,” that they require infusions of oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, and other elements only occasionally—once a week, say. And though the notion doesn’t reconcile easily with hemophagia, their nutrional needs (according to the one reference tape I’ve been able to locate) follow a similar periodicity.
