by John Kessel
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 pressure was equalized she slid open the outer door and ran up the ramp. There was no sign of her father on the path back to Fowler. But as she followed the footprints away from the ramp, she spotted a figure in the distance heading out toward the hills.
Roz hurried after, skipping as fast as she could without lurching off onto the collectors.
When she caught up, he was on his knees in the shadow of a big rock, jerking about spasmodically. The strangeness of his motion alarmed her. She had never seen anyone move like that. Before she could reach him he slowed, stopped, and fell, slowly, onto his side. Calmly, quietly. Less like a fall, more like the drift of a feather. She rushed to his side, and saw that he had broken the seal on his helmet.
“No!” she screamed, and the sound of her voice echoed in her ears. Jack's face was purple with broken blood vessels, his eyes bloody. He was dead.
High-G, they called her, and it was a good thing, as she carried her father's body back to the fabrication lab.
* * * *
It was Roz's idea to put Jack's corpse into the assembler, to add the materials of his body to the atoms used to recreate Carey. There would be hell to pay with security, but Eva agreed to do it.
The assembly took seven days. When the others at the colony discovered what Eva was doing, there was some debate, but they let the process continue. At the end of the week the fluid supporting the nanomachines was drained off, revealing Carey's perfect body. Carey shuddered and coughed, and they helped him out of the assembler.
To him it was six months earlier, and his mother had just completed his scan. It took him a long time to accept that he had not fallen into some dream only seconds after he had been placed in the marble, to awaken in this vat of warm fluid. He thought he was the original, not the copy. For all practical purposes he was right.
Later, as they were finding a pressure suit they could adapt to Carey's size to take him home, he asked Roz, “Where's Jack?”
* * * *
The Juniper Tree
All this happened a long time ago.
Nora Sobieski founded the Society of Cousins to free girls like Roz of the feeling that they must depend on their fathers or boyfriends for their sense of self, and incidentally to free boys like Carey of the need to prove themselves superior to other boys by owning girls like Roz. Girls still go through infatuations, still fall in love, still feel the influence men as well as of women. But Roz and Eva in the end are actually in the same boat—a boat that does not contain Jack, or even Carey.
The young junipers stand ghostly gray in the night. The air smells fragrant with pinon. In the thin, clear starlight Roz can see wildflowers blooming beneath the trees—columbine, pennyroyal, groundsel. She sits on the slope and pulls Carey's ring from her pocket. The ring is fashioned into the image of two vines that twine around each other, each with no beginning and no end, each eternally separate from the other.
Roz holds the ring in the middle of her palm, wondering if she should get rid of it at last, knowing that she can never give it back and keep her father's secret.
