by Emma Newman
“Oh, I know. I beg your pardon,” he said. “It’s just that I haven’t seen someone cooking on a hob since I visited my grandparents as a child. The smell is quite extraordinary. Is that . . . black currant?”
Charlie dipped a teaspoon into the sauce and gave it to the lawyer, whose eyes sparkled with delight. It was as if the years of bearing legal burdens were shrugged off him and he was a child again, accepting a spoon covered in uncooked cake mixture from a grandmother in some nostalgic mersive. He licked the sauce off the spoon and visibly shuddered with delight. “Lovely. Just lovely,” he said, handing the spoon back. “I do hope it goes well.” He headed for the door, following the security staff, but paused to look back at Charlie before he went through it. “With Mr. Gabor, I’ve found that being direct is always the best option. He knows this isn’t just a social visit. Get to the point quickly, get it out of the way, and then entertain him. And if his husband likes you, you have nothing to worry about.”
He closed the door behind him, leaving the three of us in silence.
“Well,” Drew said, “I don’t think you have to worry about the sauce anymore, Charlie.”
The icons disappeared from my visual field, sending Charlie into a panic as he realized he couldn’t access the recipe he’d been following anymore, before realizing he’d done it all anyway. Five minutes of frantic last-minute checks and then came the knock on the door.
Stefan Gabor was bigger than I thought he’d be, in every sense. He was overweight, but so tall his large belly looked merely proportionate. He filled the room and made me want to retreat into the corner. His handshake made me feel tiny and I could see how intimidated Charlie was when that blast of wealth and epic confidence was fired at him. “Call me Stefan, please,” he boomed, as if any of us would dream of it.
I didn’t notice his husband, Travis, enter. Eclipsed as he was by his spouse, it was only when there was a loud, theatrical gasp that I even realized he was there. Charlie and I, alert for any signs of unhappiness in our guests, froze, waiting to see what had made Travis so shocked. Was it the tablecloth? The mismatched chairs? The comparable poverty?
“It is you!” he said, but he was staring at one of the canvases. “I hoped it was but I couldn’t be sure and I am so thrilled!”
Travis Gabor was more handsome in person, his auburn hair so perfectly coiffed and face so beautiful that I wanted to run out of the flat and go find someone else’s body to wear instead of my own. He dodged past his husband and headed straight for me, throwing his arms around me as if I were some long-lost sister. He let me go to stand by my side, arm around me. “Darling,” he said to Stefan. “This is ArtyGeo359!”
The flush that spread up my neck and into my cheeks was hot enough to flambé one of Charlie’s dishes. When Stefan frowned in confusion, Travis sighed as if the weight of the world was upon his perfect shoulders. “I told you about the feed last week, darling. This is the lady who teaches the world how to paint!”
“It’s not anything so grand,” I stammer. “I just film while I’m painting and talk people through how—”
“Don’t be all small about this!” Travis said. “I watched every single one and I swear I am going to die from how exciting this is. And look! There’s my favorite, right there, with little Curiosity in the corner there. Do you see it, darling?” He released me to go and point out the detail to his husband. “Oh, it’s so much more than I thought. The texture! Oh . . . and look, when you move from left to right, there are the tiniest shadows here and . . .”
“He wants me to buy it,” Stefan said, as if this was something that often happened.
“It’s not for sale,” I said, and Stefan laughed as if I’d made the funniest joke he’d ever heard. But I meant it. And I wanted, in that moment, for him to feel like he couldn’t just walk into any room, anywhere in the world, and buy whatever he saw there.
“Let’s eat,” he said. “Then you can tell me how much you want for it.”
“I want five years’ worth of funding for our lab,” I said. “And if you give us the full five years in a cast-iron contract, I’ll throw in another couple of paintings for free.”
Charlie’s mouth hung open as he peered past Stefan’s shoulder, staring at me in horror. Drew’s eyes had taken on the intense gaze of a person watching another play Russian roulette.
The moment stretched ever more taut until Stefan gave a hearty laugh and clapped his hands down on my shoulders. “Deal. Do I smell garlic?”
Drew and I exchanged a grin and sat down as Charlie talked the Gabors through the menu. I felt light-headed with relief and poured the wine Travis had brought with them; I drank half a glass before they even sat down. Real wine, made from real grapes! And despite what people say, it really did taste different.
“End immersion,” I say, but even as the words leave my lips I realize I’ve made a mistake. That was just a memory. I’ve been sitting at this table on Mars the whole time. I can see Dr. Elvan’s concerned frown as I blink myself back into fully appreciating my surroundings. “No, wait. I didn’t mean that,” I say and force a laugh, but it’s too late.
Dr. Arnolfi stands. “I think you need to get some rest, Dr. Kubrin.”
5
I SLEEP HEAVILY, thanks to the sedative Dr. Elvan gives me in an effort to help me adjust my cycle to base time. I tried to do that on the journey over, but it clearly didn’t work. He said nothing about my mistake at the dinner table and I didn’t raise it either. I didn’t want to invite a discussion; I just wanted to rest and be fresh the next day to pass the next physical and be signed off for my first trip outside.
There’s a message from my mother waiting when I wake, and one from Charlie too, and I realize with a jolt that I didn’t record a message for Mia. I brace myself for the guilt trip and play Charlie’s message first.
He looks tired, which is unsurprising, seeing as his last message demonstrated how little sleep he’s been getting, but he looks a bit more composed than before. He’s sitting in the living room, recording with our cam drone by the look of it, and I can hear Mia’s babble coming from off screen.
Through the window I can see that it’s raining in Manchester, which is nothing new, but I can’t pull my eyes from it. How many times have I cursed that weather, only to find myself craving it now? There’s a temptation to go back to the mersive I recorded of the storm we were caught in about a week before I left, but I resist it. Messages first. Then breakfast. Then storm.
“Hi, love,” Charlie says with a wave. “I was so relieved to get your message. Thanks. The room doesn’t look too bad. Are you going to put some pictures up? It’s a bit impersonal.” He keeps looking away from the cam, keeping an eye on Mia, I suppose. “Anna, I don’t resent you being happy. Why did you say that? I can’t stop thinking about it. Is that how you felt here, at home?” He sighs and rubs his forehead in the way he does when he’s got a headache. No doubt he’ll print something for it once he’s finished the message. I can see him shrug off the moment of self-pity, rallying himself to be the cheerful one, the counterbalance. The familiarity of it pains me. “I got a parcel from the Gabors today.” He gets up and the cam moves with him, keeping his face fully in shot as he walks. I catch glimpses of the flat. The gaps left by the missing canvases haven’t been filled. I suspect he’s glad of the space. They need to be rearranged, positioned so that the white space looks designed rather than like an aftershock of things disappearing. It irritates me. Probably because I can’t do anything about it.
Is he leaving those gaps there deliberately? Is it some sort of statement? No, Charlie isn’t that calculating.
He’s crossed to the kitchen corner of the room and I can see dust on the hob, unused since the dinner party. Mia must be in her cot; I can’t see her anywhere. On the table there’s a basket with a lid, which looks like something out of a period-drama mersive, the sort of thing that rich Edwardians used to take on picnics
, if the one I played in was to be believed. I didn’t realize that they were still being made in the real world. It looks like it’s been woven out of thin sticks, and the imperfections in the weave scream out the fact that it’s been made by hand rather than printed.
“Look at this,” he says, flipping the lid open. “Champagne, caviar, chili jam—whatever that is—and this stuff.” He pulls out a package made of food-safe biopackaging containing pale brown cubes. I’ve seen something like that before but can’t place it. “This is called fudge,” he says, opening it up. “Seriously, love, this stuff is . . .” He leans closer to the cam, lowering his voice to a level outside of Mia’s hearing range. “This stuff is so fucking good. It’s made from . . . cream, butter, milk and sugar and . . . shit, is that it? I’ve never tasted anything like it. Honestly, it’s like someone made cubes of D-liite and made it taste like an orgasm.”
I chuckle. He’s never taken drugs, certainly not D-liite, which is banned pretty much everywhere, but I get the idea. He puts a chunk in his mouth and his eyes roll upward before he closes them. He gives a long, drawn-out sigh. “Seriously,” he says around the mouthful, “it’s like . . . there’s just so much stuff going on in the pleasure centers of my brain right now, that MyPhys is flagging up an alert, asking if I’ve taken an illegal substance.”
He laughs and I laugh too and then I suddenly miss him, painfully, an actual physical pain in my chest. I take a couple of deep breaths until it passes, trying to resist the tears that threaten to spill. He finishes the piece of fudge and rummages in the basket again.
“There’s chocolate in here too, but I’m saving that. I would say that I’m saving that until you come home, but I’m not that strong.” He grins at the cam. “And, you know, if this is the hamper we get when you land on Mars, imagine what we’ll get when you come back to Earth! That’s what this is called, apparently. There was a leaflet inside.” He rifles through the contents and swears beneath his breath. “I don’t know where it is, but it said something like ‘A hamper for connoisseurs of . . .’ something or other. And it had this thing about how in the twentieth century sending a hamper filled with luxury goods was something people did all the time. Weird. And get a load of this basket. Handmade from wicker, whatever that is. They’re being sold online for a small fortune, just in case we wanted to get a new sofa at some point. I thought you could keep your brushes and stuff in it, so I won’t sell it until you’ve seen it.”
He closes up the bag of fudge and puts it back in the hamper, buckling the cover closed. “These buckles are made from real leather. I mean, it’s just . . .” He shrugs. “I don’t really know what to make of it, you know? Gabor’s real-life personal assistant probably just sent this automatically through an APA. I mean, no real thought has gone into this I reckon, but still . . . it makes me feel weird. Like . . . why are they sending me a hamper? Is it like, ‘Sorry we sent your wife to another planet. Here are some “luxury comestibles” to ease the pain’? That was it! Luxury comestibles! That leaflet said it’s ‘a hamper for connoisseurs of luxury comestibles.’” He smirks, shaking his head. “They live on another planet. Whoa. You are literally living on another planet now.”
“Ream?” Mia’s little voice sounds much closer all of a sudden, accompanied by the sound of plastic tapping on a surface.
Charlie turns around and the cam swoops round to keep his face in shot, giving me a glimpse of Mia standing beneath the food printer’s slot in the wall, tapping it with a plastic bowl from her picnic set.
“No, no ice cream, Mia. We’ve just had breakfast!”
“Ream now!”
“No, no ice cream. Hey, want to send Momma a message?” He crouches down next to her and there she is, pink cheeked and still baby plump, wearing an all-in-one fluffy suit with orange fur and black stripes. She still likes tigers, then. Charlie points at the cam. “Say hello to Momma!”
She looks past the cam, confused. “Momma?” she calls. Then she points to the wall we project her games and shows onto, and where the projector displays me when I call her from work. “Momma?”
“No, sweetling, Momma isn’t at the lab; we need to send her a message.”
Mia gives the cam drone a cursory glance, then bangs the bowl on the wall again, looking at Charlie. “Ream, Dada. Ream now!”
With a sigh he picks her up. “Sorry, love,” he says to the cam. “She just doesn’t understand recording messages yet. I’ll film her when you send your first message to her. That wasn’t a dig at you, by the way. I understand there must be tons of new stuff to come to grips with there. Just, when you have a moment, you know.”
Mia drops the bowl and starts playing with his ear and then one of the curls that have grown above it. Then she wraps her arms around his head, covering his eyes, and kisses him right on the ear. He turns and kisses her back, then blows a raspberry on her neck, making a loud, gurgling giggle erupt from her.
I smile, but the old ache returns, the bittersweet witnessing of their ease with each other. I am, once more, an observer rather than a participant. At least this time there is a more acceptable reason for feeling this way.
A flare of anger at myself chases the heels of the sadness. Why am I this way? What is missing inside me?
Charlie puts her down and as she runs off to the bedroom, he rubs his ear, his nose wrinkling at the dampness her kiss left behind. “I’d better go now; I want to get some work done before Mum comes over later.” There’s a long pause as he stares at the floor. “She sends her love, by the way,” he adds and I know he’s lying. I hate that woman and it’s entirely mutual. She probably threw a party the day I left Earth.
I have the feeling there’s something else he wants to say, but whatever it is, he isn’t ready to share it. He smiles into the cam, doing his best to make it seem natural, but it’s not the same smile I see in the mersives I recorded myself, when he was looking into my eyes. The distance between us seems insurmountable. The message ends.
I sit for a while, weighing up whether to find an old recording to see that real smile again. How far back would I have to look? How many fake smiles would I have to pan to find gold? I decide against it. I have things to do and I don’t want Principia to report to Arnolfi that I haven’t been able to get through an hour without going back into a mersive. I call up the message from my mother instead.
The message begins with a pink blur that fills the screen, along with the muffled noise of something scraping against a microphone. “Bloody thing,” my mother mutters, and then the pink blur disappears as she releases her cam drone and steps back until I can see her nose and chin. “Hello, Sprout! I think this thing is working now. It wasn’t playing nicely with my tablet but I got there in the end. Oh, why is it beeping now?” She glances over at what I assume is the tablet screen and then takes another couple of steps back until I can see her whole face. It fills the screen. She looks tired and her eyes are still a little bit puffy, but her broad smile is the same as ever. “There! I think you can see me properly now. I thought it was supposed to do all the face-distance thing automatically. They make these things without considering people who use tablets, just like every bloody thing ever I suppose. It’s discrimination, dammit. Sorry. Hello, Sprout. I am so glad you arrived safely. I remember putting you on the train to Paris when you were fifteen and staying up all night worrying about you arriving, but that was nothing compared to this!”
Her face is so close to the cam I can’t see where she is exactly, but then there’s a loud yowl and I realize she’s at home, confirmed when she bends down to pick up the cat and goes out of shot. There are the rough walls of the house we all built together and she’s standing right by the bit where all of our handprints are pressed into the cob. Of course she is. She wants to remind me of what we all built together. She wants me to see four sets of handprints. To remind me of what we had before it was broken.
She doesn’t realize how that makes me feel. F
or her, it’s an anchor, but for me it’s like shining a spotlight on a broken vase. I suppose she still thinks it can all be mended. Optimistic to the point of stupidity, that’s my mum.
When she comes back into shot, the cat is being held up next to her face, oblivious to the expectation she’s placing upon him. “Say hello, Odin.”
It’s a testament to my mother’s physical strength that she can keep him held up like that. Odin is a Maine coon and his head looks almost as big as hers, especially with the dramatic fur. I can’t help but smile at the sight of him, looking effortlessly regal with his impressive ruff of fur. Odin, typically contrary, looks anywhere but at the cam and keeps quiet for once. Mum kisses his furry cheek, making him rub back against her jaw, his purr almost as loud as her voice. “He’s too busy looking for Frigg. She’s hiding under the bed. Can you hear the wind outside? It’s blowing a storm out there; we had some epic thunder and lightning earlier. It’s the third this week. Don’t worry about us though, Sprout—it’ll take more than the Atlantic’s moods to blow us away. Did I tell you that the house up on the other side of the loch lost its roof? Stupid buggers. We told them that design wouldn’t work. All those fancy-pants engineers and architects coming up with all these newfangled designs.” She shakes her head, unimpressed, as Odin starts to fidget. Mum tries to keep him in shot but it’s a short-lived struggle and he leaps down to continue his hunt. “She’s under the bed, silly,” Mum calls to him. “You know they laughed at our houses when they saw them. I invited them over for a drink when they started the build and when I told them how we made this place they thought I was winding them up. Now who’s laughing? Us!”
She chuckles and then frowns to herself. “I shouldn’t be mean though. Those poor sods. I drove over and brought them back here the night it happened. I shouldn’t have been on the road, really, it was fierce out there, but they only have one of those silly toy cars. I told them they needed a proper rover but they wouldn’t listen. They were in a terrible state. They went back to London yesterday. I don’t know what they’ll do about the house once they’ve finished suing the people who built it. Mud and straw and old tires—that’s all you need, and a bit of lime. But these people don’t want the old ways, do they? Do you remember when we built this place?”
