Home Fires

REFLECTION 4: Winds

The wind has risen and the ship rolls. I don’t want to think of Chelle stumbling down that carpeted, cream-colored corridor with him, but the image returns each time I wipe it away. The roll throws them against one wall, then the other. Chelle giggles, and I know a deep despair.

Some of his clothes may still be here. If they are, his passport may be in them, in a jacket pocket, if he wore a jacket. Certainly his wallet will be in a hip pocket. It will have forms of identification, possibly a driver’s license. The Army must give its soldiers a picture ID, or so I would think. I shall know his name and face, but what good will that do? He fought bravely for us—for me and all humanity—and found a beautiful, willing comrade on this ship. Of what is he guilty? Were he guilty as sin, I would forgive him.

And did I really believe that a man of forty-nine could satisfy a girl of twenty-five? In daydreams, yes. Dreams have value, but they are not to be believed.

Could Tim satisfy Vanessa? For one night, perhaps. Perhaps if she really wanted love, and perhaps she did. Wanted it, and wanted a protector. Women must have a reason, men only want a place.

Chelle’s reason was…?

Anger might do it. She was angry at me and wanted to hurt me, as she did. That fits with the unbolted door. Or she longed to cling to the familiar, to men who were dirty of tongue and clean of heart—to the soldier’s world. She was drunk. How drunk? And forgot to bolt the door.

What does sex matter when you may be killed tomorrow?

Vanessa wants me, or perhaps only wants to free her daughter from me. Or both. Who are those officers? Two were attractive, she said, but taken. Am I not taken? I know nothing of this ship’s officers. Do they really work their seamen like slaves, those officers?

Wage slaves. What is any employee but a slave? When we contacted the agencies to get a flunky for Dianne, we got … What was the number? A thousand applicants? Two thousand? Susan told me.

One child per family in Greater Eastasia. One per family, and a male generation so that foreign women must be bribed or stolen.

Should we do that, too? Women from where, or would we abort boys? Another law, and decent men and women dragged into court for the second child they concealed and the lies they told on paper to make that forbidden child someone else’s, the legacy of a dead cousin, the child of a soldier fighting the Os.

Fighting as Chelle did.

How happy I would be to defend them! But what would the law do? Kill the second child? Surely not. Upload another’s mind into it, perhaps. Replace a legal child who had died.… We meddle and meddle, and wonder why it does not make us happy.

What of the woman whose body Vanessa wears? Who was she? Boris couldn’t get it, but the Z man might; and if Vanessa’s attackers were really after that nameless woman it could be important.

Suppose a woman wanted to hide? To disappear? Not as so many have, a new apartment and a new name, a new search for a new job they’ll never get.

A search for any job, brain surgery or blues singing because they’ll never get it, will never have to prove they can do it or even that they know something about it. No, not just that, but to vanish in such a way that the most dedicated searcher could never find her.

How many such people come to Reanimation?

Why did this one want to hide?