“It’s not very far,” shouted Karl from the opposite dome from which Karl had just entered. Selene, peering through the connecting biolock, could see him busy at work, his fingers encrusted with a yellow dust from pollinating the wall for the coming season’s sculptures. “No, it’s not very far at all. But then, these days, what is?”
“Good,” said Selene. “Then let’s go.”
She tossed the pill in her mouth and swallowed too quickly; the pill stuck in her throat. She took the drink Karl held out to her, swirled the sheer cup until the thick liquid began to spark, and forced the pill quickly down.
That was that, then. Her choice had been made. There’d be no more thinking, no more worrying. Not for today, at least.
“This will be fun,” she said quietly, almost to herself. She licked away the last of the sticky blue residue that remained in the folds of her palm. “I love you, Karl.”
“And I love you,” said her husband.
“And I love you,” said her husband.
“And I love you,” said her husband.
The joyful harmony of his voices caused her heart to skip a beat, its pulsing overwhelmed at being the focus of her husband’s love.
“Let’s get started then,” she said, jumping to her feet.
“Right now?” asked Karl. He flung the bedsheet toward the ceiling and then, as it billowed, stepped beneath it. As he lifted his arms, the flowing fabric descended to wrap itself tightly around him. Mere molecules thick, his garb was less clothing than a second layer of skin, as if his nude form had been dipped into a vat of multicolored paint. He snatched the second mug from Karl’s tray.
“Why not?” asked Selene. “I see no reason to wait. There’s something to be said for spontaneity.”
“Yes, something,” said Karl, dropping his empty tray to the floor, where it was quickly reabsorbed into their dome. “I’ve never been sure exactly what that something
is
, though.”
“Which flitter should we take?” asked Selene, strong enough now, as she might not have been before, to ignore her husband’s joke. She looked into the sky and tried to see past the moons above.
“Why a flitter?” asked Karl. He left a yellow trail of powdery footprints that suffused with red behind him as his steps germinated. “All we need to do is simply think our destination, and we’re there.”
“No,” said Selene firmly, still intent on the distant Earth that hid somewhere in the sky. “This is something that must be done real, or at least as real as anything
can
be done these days.”
“As if projecting our way to Earth wouldn’t be real,” said Karl, shaking his hands by the wrists until the bedsheet extruded opalescent gloves that grew to his fingerstips. “As if the new choices are any less real than the old ones. It’s all real, Selene. You have too much love of old-fashioned things.”
“Which explains why I keep you around, I guess,” she said.
Her husband reached out simultaneously to swat her on the rump. Karl’s hands collided one-two-three before they continued on the final few inches to make contact with her, the sort of overlap that she knew only occurred in those rare instances when she touched a nerve. She smiled, and they hugged, his arms weaving together to embrace her at the center of a warm cocoon. She murmured peacefully. For a brief moment, she forgot about blue pills, about the endless red rock, about the pleasant, tickling memories of ancient Earth.
Then Karl had to speak, bringing them all back again.
“We should really ask Ursula and Tomas along,” said Karl, his words echoing wetly in the confines of their flesh.
“Oh,” said Selene, stepping outside of the curtain of Karl’s body. “I was hoping that we could all go alone.”
“All?” said Karl, looking from himself to himself.
“Why, yes,” said Selene. “All. All alone. It’s been so long since we’ve all been away alone together. Too long.”
“Too late,” said Karl, coming up behind her. “I’ve already invited them. It never occurred to me that you’d object.”
“You should have thought about it a little more carefully before you thought them an invitation, Karl,” she said, slowly turning away from her husband.
“You’re right, Selene,” said Karl, from beside her. “But it’s too late for that now, unfortunately. You know how Tomas and Ursula are. I wouldn’t want to hurt their feelings. I’m sorry, Selene.”
But what about my feelings?
she thought, and then, almost before that emotion could claw its way to full consciousness, the feeling effervesced, as all such feelings did, if only she made the right choice each morning. She turned back to Karl and touched her husband’s cheek, while by the dome’s outer window, Karl watched as a flitter blossomed from the rocks around them. A jagged skeleton slowly rose up that was but a whispered promise of the vehicle that would carry them light-years away. Molten ore feathered through the air like spun sugar and wrapped about the flitter’s core.
“Look,” Karl said, as the process completed and Selene’s name etched itself into the finished skin of the ship.
“Hello,” tickled Tomas in her ear.
Selene smiled, perhaps at the flourish her husband had provided, perhaps at the arrival of her friend. Perhaps both. She felt the familiar good mood wash over her as the nanobots massaged the chemistry of her bloodstream.
“Thank you, Karl,” she said. “Hello, Tomas.”
“Ursula will be along shortly.”
“But never shortly enough for you, Tomas, right?” said Karl.
“I can be a patient . . . man,” he vibrated, everywhere and nowhere. If he had chosen to sneak up on them, they wouldn’t even have known he was there. “Someday, she’ll grow tired of a material existence, and then, there won’t be anything left for me to have to be patient
about
.”
“Other than enjoying your practice of such restraint, Tomas,” asked Selene, “how have you been?”
“Bored,” he vibrated. “The universe continues to hold far too few surprises. So I’m glad that you asked us along.”
“How could you possibly be bored with all this?” asked Karl, as he stepped through the iris back to his wall work. “I can’t remember when I’ve last been bored.”
“Oh, it’s more than just that, Karl,” said Tomas. “It’s that you can’t remember, period. I never have been able to figure out how you manage to keep yourselves straight.”
Before Karl or Karl or Karl could answer, the ground rumbled, and Selene jumped in quickly. She needed the day to go smoothly.
“That would be Ursula,” she said, as the dome compensated for the clamor outside, and the room regained its silence. “You know, Tomas, for someone so willing to take the greatest of leaps, your emotions can be awfully old-fashioned.”
Ursula plodded toward them from the short horizon, her robotic feet crushing rocks into crimson sprays of dust. It wasn’t until she arrived at the flitter, overshadowing it in a tower of chrome, that Selene was able to judge the size that Ursula had chosen to carry that day. Ursula had felt like being a giantess, and so she was.
“We’re all here, then,” said Selene. She had made her own choice about what she was to be that day, and she intended to stick to it. “Let’s go.”
Selene walked in the direction of the flitter, and when she arrived at the dome wall, she kept walking and flowed effortlessly through it, passing as if through the fragile skin of a bubble. A thin membrane clung to her as she continued walking, and stretched the wall outward, and as she drew closer to the flitter, the connection snapped, and the skin sealed shut behind her. The flitter extended a tongue in her direction, and as she mounted the walkway, she waved up at Ursula from within a self-contained atmosphere.
“Are you feeling any better today?” said Ursula, her faraway speakers booming deeply.
“How I’m feeling doesn’t really matter,” said Selene. “It’s how I’m
doing
. And right now, I seem to be doing something at last.”
Selene paused near the top of the walkway. She turned and gestured back at the dome, making the assumption that her movements were being watched.
Karl seemed to be the first to follow her and vanish inside the flitter, though with Tomas around, she could never be completely sure. Once her husband was inside, Karl then followed. He brushed past Selene on the walkway and stopped at the hatch. While she looked up at him, Karl came along, stepping up behind her and wrapping his arms about her waist. Karl smiled down at the two of them from above, then turned and vanished inside the ship.
“Do you really need all of me?” Karl whispered. The pliant membrane allowed her to feel his breath hot in her ear.
“Yes,” said Selene. “This time, I do. Please, Karl.”
Arms locked, they strolled up the rest of the walkway together and entered the ship. Karl and Karl were already seated within a teardrop-shaped room otherwise bare of furniture, a compartment larger than the ship in which it was contained. At the narrowest point of the teardrop, Karl and Selene dropped back off their feet, trusting that a couch would ooze up from the floor to catch them.
“Ursula?” called out Selene.
The opaque wall which curved about them grew steadily transparent until Selene could see her friend framed by the landscape outside. She swelled even larger, and was soon crouching down above them, her head alone as big as one of their dome rooms.
“I have a feeling that this is going to be fun,” said Tomas. “Yes, darling, it’s time. You know what to do.”
Ursula scooped up the flitter, growing even taller as she hugged the vehicle to her chest, carrying them to where the atmosphere was even thinner. Staring into her friend’s ever-more-enormous face, Selene felt as if she were instead shrinking away. At times like this one, she always found it hard at first to tell which one of them was actually doing the changing. Ursula lifted the flitter behind her head for a moment and then pitched it high into the air. As it neared the top of its arc, great flames spouted from the soles of Ursula’s feet, and she rocketed after her friends. She overtook them and slammed into the rear of the ship, adding the thrust they needed to escape the gravity of the small planet.
Once Ursula and the ship she’d propelled were both fully free of the atmosphere, the gleaming plates that made up her body receded into each other. As they overlapped, she shrank until she was down to a size capable of entering the airlock. As she fell back into the circle of her friends, a seat sturdier than the others grew up to greet her.
“How long do you think this will take?” she asked with a dull buzz, as she brushed meteor dust from one shiny shoulder.
“That all depends,” said Karl, looking out at the stars.
“It will take however long Selene wants it to take,” said Karl, looking intently at his wife. “That isn’t something that can be timed.”
“Then I think I’ll have a drink,” said Selene.
Karl pressed his hands against the front wall of the small ship, which extruded mugs that he handed to Karl and Selene and Karl. Ursula pressed a few buttons on her wrist, and a small door slid open in her chest. She took the offered drink and poured its contents down into a permaglass funnel. Karl offered Ursula a second mug, which she balanced on the flat of her knee joint as liquid gurgled pneumatically within her. As the level in that beverage dropped, Selene could hear a gentle slurping.
“Thank you,” said Tomas. “So tell us, Selene—why Earth?”
“And why now?” buzzed Ursula. “I don’t remember Earth being so thrilling the last time that it was worth this kind of effort.”
Selene stared off ahead of them through the clear hull of the flitter and then looked at the empty mug in her hand, unable to remember having drained it.
“I’m not entirely sure,” said Selene. “It just seems like the thing to do.”
“It’s those movies, you know,” said Karl, refilling her drink with a pass of his hand. “She’s become hooked on them. I have no idea why she wants to go there
now
, but she loves those movies.”
“We could have watched them at home,” said Karl.
“We could have watched anything at home,” said Tomas.
“I don’t quite understand the attraction of those dead art forms,” said Karl. “They’re so simple. Simple and simplistic. Like children’s stories.”
“As if you remember children’s stories,” said Tomas.
“As if
you
remember children,” said Ursula.
“There’s more than one kind of simple,” said Selene, struggling to put the static that warred in her head into words. “It doesn’t always have to be derogatory. What I liked was that those people had their limits.”
“Maybe they only seemed to,” said Tomas, playfully. “Maybe you only thought they did. You only know them from their movies. Maybe they were just like us.”
“They weren’t like us,” said Selene. “They couldn’t do everything. They couldn’t rewire their bodies or dissipate their souls or wear whatever flesh suited their moods or . . . or just take a pill. They had to deal with whatever they were dealt.”
“And you think that makes us any different?” asked Ursula. “You’re getting lost in the details. They were just like us.”