"He brought it up—I didn't!"
"I don't care who brought it up. I feel like you're his spy or something, Raji. Just—don't talk to him about me, okay? And if he tries to talk about me, tell him I've asked you not to."
"Oh, all right. I don't know why you're so mad at him, that's all. He's a cool guy."
"Raji, he's not a cool guy. He's a cool program. We've been over this. I don't want to talk about it."
"All right, all right," Raji said. "You're getting as bossy as Gwyn! Anything else?"
"Yeah, Dana's right. Use your headphones when you listen to your music!" Raji seemed to think that if he could just get everyone else to listen to his techno-bop, they'd love it as much as he did. As far as Meredith could tell, that would have been about as easy as loving an orchestra of jackhammers. She also found herself sharing Anna's annoyance at Gwyn and Dave, who frequently engaged in acrobatic and alarming sex, producing thumps and moans and ululating shrieks that rattled the walls and made even Raji's music seem preferable.
Johann, meanwhile, tried to enlist Merry in his battle to get Fergus out of the novitiate. "Now be honest," he said to Meredith one morning over breakfast, while Fergus was still in the shower. "Don't you think he's just a little too absorbed in organic liturgy? Do normal people spend so much time thinking about how to make their bowel movements sacramental? Does this strike you as healthy?"
Gwyn, spooning out oatmeal, gave Johann a black look and said, "Must you discuss bowel movements over breakfast? Honestly!"
"Fergus would. He'd quote Julian of Norwich on the subject."
"Yes, well, Johann, he's not here, is he?"
Johann sighed. "I'm sorry if I offended you, Merry."
"You didn't. But I hope you don't expect me to answer the question. I barely know either of you. I've only been here four days."
"Relax," Gwyn said. "It's all rhetorical. These two wouldn't know what to do with themselves if they weren't bickering. They'd be bickering if they were home too—wouldn't you, Johann?"
"Wouldn't he what?" Fergus said. He'd walked into the kitchen toweling off his hair, and now he shook it like a dog who'd just been rolling in a puddle, spattering the kitchen with shampoo-scented drops.
"Oh, Fergus!" Johann threw his hands in the air. "Not in the kitchen!"
"Can't take him anywhere," Gwyn said.
"He's just showing off because he still has hair," Johann said.
"Meredith," Fergus said, "what were they saying about me behind my back?"
"The usual," Gwyn answered. "Complaining about your insistence on blessing your turds, dear."
Fergus, to Merry's astonishment, looked genuinely annoyed. "Well, we're supposed to bless everything, aren't we? Isn't that the point? And what better to bless than fertilizer, that helps things grow? And if it weren't emerging from you properly, you'd be cursing, Johann!" He turned to Meredith and said, "What am I going to do with him? We've been here for a year and he still acts like he's never heard of ecological consciousness. You're as bad as the old Christians, Johann! You want everything to be pure and celestial, not grounded at all."
Johann made a rude noise. "You're the one who keeps quoting Julian of Norwich."
"Well, she was different! Gwyn, Merry, how can I bring him to a more highly evolved ecological consciousness?"
"You might try to stop being so damn boring about it," Gwyn said. "Or at least less stilted. 'More highly evolved ecological consciousness'—you sound like Papa Preston trying to channel Matt, and it's not a very happy combination."
Meredith grimaced. "Can we not discuss my father, please?" Papa Preston was what the popular press called him, now that he'd started dispensing free advice to anyone—like Raji—who visited his website. She'd never called him Papa in her life, and she wasn't about to start now.
Fergus shook his head. "Honey, you'd better get used to it. There are going to be cults forming around your father, just mark my words."
"Yeah, well, I'd rather not think about it over breakfast. I'd rather talk about your holy turds, if you don't mind."
"Holy turds?" Dana said, walking into the kitchen. "Is that what we're having for breakfast? Mmmm, oatmeal—yeah, just about. Good morning, all."
Gwyn glared. "Ooooh, look, Dana's in purple today. That's midway between pink and blue, right? You're not giving us very helpful clues, Dana."
And so it went. They were all hard workers and devoted to the Temple, which was the only thing that made the personality mix tolerable. During those first few months, Merry constantly wondered when the first dorm murder would take place. She stuck it out, stubbornly determined to disappoint all the people who expected her to give up and go home.
And even in those early days, novitiate life offered plenty of advantages: the constant access to animals, the beautiful setting, the weekly lunar rituals, when everyone gathered in the clearing overlooking the Bay and sang hymns of praise to the Goddess, community irritations temporarily washing away in the harmony of common worship. Whatever clifferences Merry might have had with the people around her, they also shared core assumptions about what was important. Gwyn could be a bitch, Fergus annoying, Dana impenetrable, but at least they were neither shallow nor vapid. In comparison, the other kids at school began to seem more and more two-dimensional, obsessed with clothing and dates and who had the fanciest hardware. Every morning she dutifully went to school and studied Net design and physics and global economics, but she only really felt engaged in the afternoons, doing Temple work. She accompanied the therapy dogs to schools and nursing homes and hospitals, helped trap feral cats to be spayed and neutered—she hated trapping them, but reminded herself how many more of them would otherwise lack food and shelter and love—and matched families who wanted to adopt animals with the dogs and cats the Temple had on hand. She also spent two afternoons a week in the SPCA's pet adoption center.
It was real work, important work, but, true to Matt's warnings, none of it was easy. Meredith quickly learned, to her shame, that she didn't like being around sick people, which made her trips to the hospitals and nursing homes particularly uncomfortable. She kept hoping that she'd get over her distaste, her instinctive repulsion for people whose bodies and minds weren't working properly, but if anything it only got worse, especially once Hortense became incontinent and had to start wearing diapers. All too often, sections of the dorm smelled like a nursing home, making Merry sick to her stomach. "Matt shouldn't be keeping her here," she told Raji. "She can't be happy."
"She seems perfectly happy. We're not happy having to clean up after her, but if she winds up having to leave, it will be for her sake, not ours. She's not hurting anything. She's a little smelly sometimes, that's all."
Meredith could have gone to Matt and complained about Hortense, could have requested different Temple duties, but she was determined not to make waves, certainly not during her first three months. And at least the hospitals and nursing homes reminded Merry to be grateful for her own health. The SPCA was her most draining duty, because it reminded her so much-more even than the actual hospitals did—of being in isolation.
The Maddie Pet Adoption Center, in a soaring building many law firms would have envied, housed stray animals in accommodations far more luxurious than anything available to the city's homeless humans. Twenty-one dogs and sixty-seven cats were displayed in soundproofed individual quarters decorated with artwork, real furniture, televisions, and, in some cases, windows. The cats had scratching posts and plots of grass; some could watch goldfish in aquaria. The dog rooms opened into courtyards for supervised canine play. All the animals, in addition to time with people, had special play bots who threw balls for the dogs, wiggled bits of string for the cats, and cleaned up messes. The animal rooms were kept under negative pressure to prevent unpleasant smells from reaching the potential adopters outside; the dog rooms had "sniffing holes" at nose level so the dogs could smell the people, even if the people couldn't smell them.
It was a beautiful facility, and the animals were lucky to be there, but Meredith felt starved for air whenever she was in the building. She knew that the SPCA had a firm no-kill policy, and that the animals were here, displayed in this comfortable environment, to attract the largest number of adopting humans. People who wouldn't have gone to an ordinary animal shelter, with cramped cages in dark rows, cheerfully came to the Maddie Center, which sometimes offered free popcorn and lemonade as an extra incentive. She knew that the bots were playmates and that they didn't administer veterinary care, which was provided in a separate building. She knew that the animals who left here—and most did; the place had an adoption rate envied by every other program in the country—went on to happy lives. But the place still triggered the fear and claustrophobia she'd felt in isolation, where every day had been an exercise in confronting death.
Meredith told herself that spending time here was her job; she told herself that her own anxiety gave her added empathy for the animals, many of whom had also been traumatized and were frightened and wary. As a socialization volunteer, her main task was to help the feral cats become adjusted to humans. Newly arrived felines were assessed by behavioral experts on the SPCA staff and assigned a number from one, for very undersocialized and not yet a good adoption risk, to five, for very well socialized and ready to go home with a family. Meredith's job was to spend time with the one and two cats until they became fours and fives. This involved long stretches of simply sitting in the individual cat rooms until the animals decided that perhaps she was trustworthy and began to approach her, sniffing at her cautiously before shyly butting her with their heads or patting at her with their paws. Only when they made such overtures could she begin to interact with them, petting and playing. Sometimes it took weeks, and the boredom of sitting in a small, hermetically sealed room while a cat cowered in the corner didn't give Meredith much distraction from her own memories. It was worse when other people wandered along and stood outside, looking in; she always flashed back to Constance's face peering through the windows of the iso unit. She told herself that she was helping the cats get out of their cages, get out of isolation, but even so, she could never wait to get back to the Temple, to the peace and quiet and open air of the meditation grove overlooking the Bay.
The trip back to the dorm was traumatic in its own right. Too often, it involved running a gamut of reporters and remote-controlled helibots. ScoopNet and the rest of the vulture press had fastened tenaciously on to the Walford soap opera, and someone at the SPCA had evidently tipped them off to Merry's schedule. They couldn't reach her at the Temple or the SPCA itself, since neither place admitted uninvited journalists; Constance's house had anti-snoop security, effective against everyone except Preston. That left the reporters no choice but to waylay Meredith between the Maddie Center and the Temple. "Merry, how do you feel about your mother's relationship with Jack Adam?" "Merry, is it true your mother's having a baby?" "How do you get along with your father these days?" "What's it like being a Temple novice?" "Do you think your dad's going to found a new religion?" "Meredith, are you going to get a recording rig?" She tried changing her schedule, tried ducking out different doors to her waiting car-programmed to return to the Presidio, and secured against electronic intrusion—tried telling them all to go away. Nothing worked. Finally Constance obtained an injunction against the harassment of her daughter, and the reporters backed off.
Meredith was grateful that no one at MacroCorp had insisted that she actually grant an interview, especially since she wasn't sure how to answer most of the questions. Her mother was definitely having a baby, a boy; that was the only easy one. How did she feel about Constance's relationship with Jack? Happy, excluded, ambivalent. How was her relationship with her father? As minimal as possible. What was it like being at Temple? Better than being in her mother's house, or in isolation, but some days not by much. Was her father going to found a new religion? Well, maybe. Certainly people other than ScoopNet, people like Fergus, thought so too, but Merry didn't think Preston was doing it by design. There were already people who claimed to worship him, but they were crackpots, the kind of enthusiasts who in earlier eras had worshiped psychedelic drugs and quartz crystals and plaster statues rumored to weep blood, and to the best of Meredith's knowledge, her father hadn't actually suggested to anyone that he was a deity.
That left the most charged question: Was she getting a rig? Not if she could help it.
Halfway through Meredith's trial period, Jack and Constance did get rigs, intricate cranial and central-nervous-system implants that stored sensory and cognitive data in uploadable chips. The upload sockets, tiny indentations in the earlobe easily disguised by jewelery, were the only visible signs of the equipment. Supposedly the implant procedures were fairly safe and painless, but there had still been extensive discussion of whether Constance should undergo the procedure while she was pregnant. She argued adamantly that she wanted her post-translation memories to include the birth of her second child, and the MacroCorp medical team finally agreed. But once Constance and Jack had the rigs, Merry found herself becoming even more self-conscious around them; not only was Preston always potentially present in the house, but she couldn't convince herself that he didn't also have access to Jack and Constance's perceptions of her. It was singularly unnerving, and made Meredith's weekend dinners at home yet another dreaded chore.
She couldn't understand her mother's sudden change of heart. "Mommy, you wanted nothing to do with it before!"
"I know, honey, but I thought and thought about it and finally decided, you know, it's insurance. I don't have to be translated if I have this thing, but if I don't have it, I can't be. And I really think you should think about getting one too."