My Real Children

by Jo Walton

  The home stood on the moor overlooking the town and the bay beyond. It seemed clean and the nurses were friendly. Flora met them there. Pat had a room to herself, with navy blue curtains, a hospital bed, an armchair, and a little bookshelf. Jinny arranged the books on the bookshelf and Pat arranged her mother’s china on the little knickknack shelf on the wall. “I want Michael’s photo of Bee there,” she said.

  “It’s broken, remember? Philip’s mending it for you.”

  “Oh yes.” Pat had forgotten. “I keep forgetting things.”

  “We know,” Flora said.

  “It’s all right,” Jinny said, and Pat dissolved in tears because Jinny sounded so much like Bee saying that.

  “Put my little Madonna of the Magnificat on that shelf,” she said, when she had recovered.

  “You didn’t bring it, Mum,” Jinny said. “But it’s in the book, isn’t it?”

  Jinny found it in the Uffizi book and Pat looked at it, hardly able to see. How had she forgotten to bring the print?

  “We’re going to sell the Cambridge house,” Flora said.

  “Yes, and divide the money between you and Philip,” Pat said, absently. That was what they had agreed.

  “Well, the money may go to keep you in here. This isn’t cheap,” Flora said. “There used to be state homes for old people, but not any more.”

  “Bee’s insurance will help,” Jinny said. “I’ll put it into an account for this.”

  “We’re grateful,” Flora said, stiffly, her back to Jinny. “It’s very good of you.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Jinny said. “Of course I want to help as much as I can.”

  Jinny went over to Pat then and hugged her. “Now Pat, you remember where the bathroom is? Just outside here to the left.”

  When they left Pat alone at last she sat down and wept. She couldn’t remember if there had been a funeral for Bee, but she couldn’t forget that she was dead. Maybe she could forget? Maybe she could pretend that she was here temporarily, that Bee would come and rescue her? But she knew that was dangerous, because it wasn’t true, and she was so unclear on what she remembered now that if she started to pretend things that weren’t true she could entirely lose her grip on reality. She found her notebook and her pen. She should make a list.

  “Madonna of the Magnificat,” she wrote. “Photo of Bee. Philip will bring.”

  She settled into the routine of the home. There were meals at regular times. She could see trees outside the window, and sometimes there were birds, when she could find her glasses and the binoculars at the same time. She read the chart on the end of the bed to see how confused they thought she was. She read her books, and books Flora brought her from the library. She made friends with the other residents, as best she could. She remembered her mother and tried hard not to be like that, not to attack people, not to scare them.

  She became deaf and needed hearing aids, which were one more barrier to communication and one more thing for her to constantly lose. “You were lucky to be spared this,” she told the photograph of Bee.

  Flora visited every week, occasionally bringing Mohammed and the children. Flora also took her out sometimes—to the park, or down to the shore, and at Christmas to Flora’s house. Sammy sometimes came alone, and Pat tried to be interesting when she did, telling her about Florence, showing her pictures and reminding her. Flora’s family went to Turkey most summers to see Mohammed’s family, but they never went back to Florence. She tried to encourage Sammy and Cenk to remember it, but she never knew how successful she was.

  Sanchia’s baby was a boy, Karl Ragnar. The next baby, two years later, she thought might be Philip’s, but she didn’t ask. That was a girl, Anna Louise. She wrote the names down and tried hard to remember them. Philip brought her mended photograph back, and she put it in the center of the shelf. He came to visit every few months but he seldom brought the rest of the family. His career as a composer seemed to be taking off, but she found it hard to keep track. She had given up on the news entirely now, especially after the nuclear exchange in the Middle East.

  “They got Tel Aviv and the Assam Dam, but they didn’t take out any of the Seven Wonders,” Sammy told her. “Mummy said that’s because of you and our grandfather.”

  “Bee used to say using them at all was unconscionable,” Pat said. “And all the fallout.”

  “Well, people have them, they’re going to use them,” Sammy said, shrugging. She showed Pat a photograph on her phone of a boy she liked at school. “Isn’t he smooth?”

  Jinny had two children, a boy and a girl, Domenic Michael and Beatrice Patricia. She sent photographs of them, which Pat stuck in the back of her album with their names written on the back. It meant a lot to her that Bee had genetic descendants, however much they both had truly believed that all the children were all of theirs. Bee had been so interested in genetics—mostly plant genetics, true, but human genetics too. Jinny visited only very occasionally, because she had small children and Florence was a long way. She wrote often, and Pat treasured her letters. Jinny wrote that an elm tree had been planted in a dome on Mars in memory of Bee by one of her old pupils. Pat wrote that on all her lists so that she wouldn’t forget. She did forget, but she kept finding it again. (“Was that the best you could do, St. Zenobius? Well, I suppose it was better than nothing.”) Jinny sent her postcards of Florence, which she kept on her bedside table and looked at until they became crumpled and the nurses threw them away.

  Sometimes she dreamed that Bee was dead and woke with a sense of relief that it had been a dream, and then remembered that it was true. She forgot that she had tried to kill herself and wondered why she had not. She beat her head on the pillow and bit her lips, and sometimes she called out for Bee, although she knew she would not come.

  34

  Choices: Patricia 2015

  “Very Confused Today” her notes read.

  She lay face down on the bed, her eyes buried by the pillow. If she sat up and looked around she might see something to anchor her in one life or the other, her MacTop, or her photograph album, Doug’s gold disk or her framed picture of Bee with the babies. Lying like this she could hold herself between them, hold all the memories, both lives, both worlds. The life where she had married Mark and the life where she had lived happily with Bee for forty years. The life where she had been Tricia and then Trish, and the life where she had been Pat. It occurred to her as she lay there that in the world where she had been Trish she could have married Bee, there had been marriage equality there from the early Eighties onwards. That was so deeply and bitterly unfair that she could hardly bear to think of it.

  In the world where she married Mark, she could have married Bee. If she had ever met Bee in that world. She couldn’t make it make sense. Bee had been in both worlds, though she hadn’t realized it. Sophie had worked with her in both worlds. Bee’s work on plants for space had been the same—but in one world it had been for an international space station and moonbase, and in the other it had been for a European one, hostile to the Russians and the Americans. She could remember both things at the same time, as if both things were true, but they couldn’t be. How could it be possible?

  Could Bee still be alive, in Trish’s world? A Bee who had never known Pat, a Bee who still had her legs? There hadn’t been a Kiev bomb so there wouldn’t be any thyroid cancer. She was two years younger than Pat. But even if she was there, and alive, and if there was a way to contact her, she wouldn’t know who Trish was. And she knew there was no way somebody as wonderful as Bee wouldn’t have found another partner.

  A nurse came in and disturbed her, giving her medication—the same medication in both worlds, the stuff that kept her traitor heart beating evenly. She took her glasses off and put them on the bedside table. That way she couldn’t see anything that would tip her into one world or the other. “Lie down and try to sleep now,” the nurse said.

  She lay down obediently. The nurse switched off the light as she left, leaving only the little nigh
tlight by the door, enough for her to see if she needed to go to the bathroom. Was it to the left or the right? She was perpetually confused about that.

  She had been so happy as Pat. Even with everything, her life had been so good. Despite the nuclear wars and the violence and the tyranny. As well as having Bee in her life, she had had Florence. Though of course Florence must have existed in the other world as well, except that she hadn’t known except in the most abstract terms. In the one world she had known Italy well, written books about it, even spoken Italian, and driven regularly through France and Switzerland. In the other she had only been out of Britain twice, once to Majorca and the other time to Boston. There was no comparison, when it came to the richness of her own life. She had no desire to be Trish, when she could be Pat. Pat and Trish both had Donne and Eliot and Marvell, but Pat had Bee and Botticelli as well.

  Then she thought about her children. Which were her real children? Poor Doug and dear Helen and brilliant George and troubled Cathy? Or sensible Flora and wonderful Jinny and talented Philip? Was Sammy or Rhodri her favorite grandchild? Only one set of them could possibly be real, but which? She loved them all, and there was no real difference in the quality of her love for them. She remembered Helen nursing Tamsin and Philip asking Michael whether he was half Jewish. She loved them all and worried about them all. If she had favorites, and what mother didn’t, then she had favorites in both sets.

  It was when she thought about the world that she wept. Trish’s world was so much better than Pat’s. Trish’s world was peaceful. Eastern and Western Europe had open frontiers. There had been no nuclear bombs dropped after Hiroshima, no clusters of thyroid cancer. There had been very little terrorism. The world had become quietly socialist, quietly less racist, less homophobic. In Pat’s world it had all gone the other way.

  She tried to imagine why. She couldn’t imagine that anything she had done had changed anything. In Pat’s world she had started Seven Wonders, but in Trish’s world, which still had the United Nations, they had their own program like that. She had marched for peace in both worlds. She had written more letters as Trish, but surely that couldn’t have achieved anything? She hadn’t been important, in either world, she hadn’t been somebody whose choices could have changed worlds.

  But what if she had been?

  What if everyone was?

  She remembered years ago when George had been a boy reading science fiction, he had talked about tiny events having huge effects. A butterfly flapping its wings in Lancaster could cause a hurricane in China. He had flapped his wings like a butterfly and she had sent him out into the garden. What if her actions had been like that butterfly’s wings? What if by marrying Mark she had tipped the world into peace and prosperity? Perhaps the price of the happiness of the world was her own happiness?

  She groped to her feet and went over to the window. She could see the moon through the branches. Which moon was it? Were George and Sophie there, happily working on science together? Or was it the other moon, the one with the deadly cargo of rockets ready to rain down on the planet? She rested her forehead against the cold glass and tried to think. She knew she was confused. She wanted to ask somebody for help, but she knew that even the most sympathetic listener would assume she was crazy. She couldn’t be sure she wasn’t crazy, except that what she remembered was so completely contradictory. She remembered the United Nations calming everyone down over Suez, and she remembered the Suez war coming almost to the nuclear brink. Those things couldn’t both be true. And she did get confused and she did forget things, but she didn’t remember extra things.

  She was just an old woman with memory problems. Or maybe two old women with memory problems. She laughed to herself. She was herself, whether she was Pat or Trish. They knew different things and cared about different people, but she was the same person she had always been. She was the girl who had stood before the sea in Weymouth and in Barrow-in-Furness, the woman who had stood before Botticelli and before hostile council meetings. It didn’t matter what they called her, Patricia or Patsy or Trish or Pat. She was herself. She had loved Bee, and Florence, and all her children.

  Could she slide the worlds closer together? Get rid of the wars? Or would one world end and the other go on? Would Pat’s world end in fire and she would forget it and go on as Trish? Would she forget Bee and Flora and Jinny and Philip and the sky over the Palazzo Vecchio and the taste of gelato? She wondered who owned her house in Florence in Trish’s world, and whether they loved it as much as she and Bee had. The door wouldn’t have been widened for the wheelchair, and there wouldn’t be rails in the bathroom. For that matter, who owned her Lancaster house in Pat’s world? It wouldn’t have her mother’s ashes in the garden, or Doug’s or Mark’s. She felt herself drifting. She leaned harder against the cold glass to hold herself there.

  As Trish she had lost all faith in God. As Pat she had gone on believing. Now she didn’t know what she thought. She didn’t believe in Providence, in a loving God who did what was best for everyone. That wasn’t compatible with the facts. But she did remember both worlds. Maybe God, or something, wanted her to choose between them, make one of them real.

  She had made a choice already, one choice that counted among the myriad choices of her life. She had made it not knowing where it led. Could she made it again, knowing?

  She sat down carefully on the edge of the bed and looked up at the blur that was one moon or the other. How many worlds were there? One? Two? An infinite number? Was there a world where she could have both happiness and peace?

  All those deaths, all that destruction, all those cancers, and also that slide to the right, that selfish dangerous pattern. Or the open world, the world with hope and possibilities and Google.

  Mark. Those letters. How had she been so young, so naive? How had she been taken in by him? Mark or Bee. No choice, except that she wasn’t choosing only for herself. And whichever way she chose she’d break her heart to lose her children. All of them were her real children.

  But she took a breath and smelled again that corridor in The Pines, the smell of summer sweat, of chalk, of hot dust and iodine disinfectant. She saw the late evening sun coming in through the little window at the end and catching all the dust in its beam. She felt her strong young body that she had never appreciated when she had it, constantly worrying that she didn’t meet standards of beauty and not understanding how standards of health were so much more important. She bounced a little on her strongly arched young feet. She felt again the Bakelite of the receiver in her hand and heard Mark’s voice in her ear. “Now or never!”

  Now or never, Trish or Pat, peace or war, loneliness or love?

  She wouldn’t have been the person her life had made her if she could have made any other answer.

  Acknowledgments

  First I must thank my husband Emmet O’Brien for love and support and putting up with me when I am writing. My aunt Mary Lace read the book as it was being written and was helpful and encouraging. I had useful conversations as it was being written with Rene Walling and Alison Sinclair. I also had a great deal of help on all sorts of odd questions from my Livejournal correspondents—papersky.livejournal.com, where I post wordcount and queries as I am going along. I really appreciate this help—there are still some things you just can’t Google, and having a community to ask has meant that I have been able to come much closer to answers. Thank you.

  I especially want to thank Ada Palmer for Florence, and also for being supportive and perceptive about this book both in progress and in revision.

  After the book was done it was read by Caroline-Isabelle Carron, Maya Chhabri, Pamela Dean, David Dyer-Bennet, Ruthanna and Sarah Emrys, David Goldfarb, Steven Halter, S. Kayam, Madeleine Kelly, Naomi Kritzer, Marissa Lingen, Elise Matthesen, Lydia Nickerson, Emmet O’Brien, Doug Palmer, Alison Sinclair, and Tili Sokolov.

  Ruthanna Emrys and Lila Garrott helped me write more confidently about sexuality. Doug Palmer was immensely helpful on matters relating to amputation. M
aya Chhabri was a godsend when it came to Italian affairs. Lesley Hall was terrific on many things medical and sexual. Marissa Lingen gave me wonderful help with tech, and not the kind people usually mean when they say that.

  I’d like to thank the Evans Library at Texas A&M for allowing me to do my copyedit in their space.

  Patrick Nielsen Hayden and everyone at Tor have been supportive and worked hard on this book, as always. I really value that and try not to take it for granted.

  BOOKS BY JO WALTON

  The King’s Peace

  The King’s Name

  The Prize in the Game

  Tooth and Claw

  Farthing

  Ha’penny

  Half a Crown

  Lifelode

  Among Others

  What Makes This Book So Great

  About the Author

  JO WALTON won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2002 and the World Fantasy Award for her novel Tooth and Claw in 2004. Her other novels include the acclaimed Small Change alternate-history trilogy, comprising Farthing, Ha’penny, and Half a Crown. Her novel Among Others won the Hugo and Nebula awards in 2012. She blogs at papersky.livejournal.com and as a columnist on Tor.com. A native of Wales, she lives in Montreal.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  MY REAL CHILDREN

  Copyright © 2014 by Jo Walton

  “Sonnet Against Entropy” copyright © 2003 by Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden

  All rights reserved.

  Cover photographs by Irene Lamprakou/Trevillion Images

  Cover design by Jamie Stafford-Hill

  Edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

  A Tor Book