Ellis had a dozen more questions. What was this Grand Council? How were people made? What did ISP stand for? Why were they underground? What was Hollow World? He thought of himself at that moment like some three year old about to drive an adult crazy with endless questions. Pax probably had questions too. Ellis realized that in his deluge of inquiries he’d been an ungrateful lout.
“Say, I’d like to thank you for taking care of me,” Ellis said as he wound up a forkful—two thousand years and still no better way to eat pasta. “I would have probably died if you hadn’t.”
Pax smiled, showing perfect white teeth that would have put any twenty-first-century model to shame. “It’s the least I could do for the first-ever time traveler.”
“Why do you suppose that is?” Ellis asked. “I mean, if I could do it, I would have thought there would be others. I kind of figured it would be commonplace these days.”
Pax shrugged. “Alva?”
“Let me run a check, dear. One moment.” A few minutes later she was back, although Ellis guessed she really hadn’t gone anywhere. “No, I’m sorry. There’s nothing about time travel except fictional references in books and movies.”
“Weird,” Ellis said. “It really wasn’t that hard, all things considered.”
“Perhaps you are just underestimating your abilities.”
“Maybe.”
“In any case, here we are, and since we don’t have any experience with such things, it brings up a question,” Pax said. “What do you want to do? Should I announce you to the world or would you rather I not?”
Ellis hadn’t thought about it. He had just assumed sunglass-wearing men in black SUVs would be showing up to whisk him away to some debriefing or research lab. “I assumed you already had—that you were required to report me to your boss. You work for the government, right?”
Pax appeared to have trouble understanding, and while his host pondered this, Ellis took his first mouthful. It was marvelous. The complex flavors were hard to place. Tomatoes were in there somewhere, as were onions, but the rest was a mystery, and a wonderful one at that. “This is really good,” he blurted out.
“Ha! See! I told you it was good,” the vox said, her voice booming across the meadowland like God.
“You’ve made a friend of Alva,” Pax noted.
“I can really taste the tomato, it’s…” Ellis struggled to explain. “It actually tastes like a tomato—I mean the way they used to taste when I was a kid.”
“They changed?” Pax asked.
“Oh—yeah. They mucked genetically with all sorts of foods. Made them larger, more rugged, resistant to disease, and uniform so they’d sell and transport better, but in the process they ruined the taste and texture. In my time, tomatoes had all the flavor of cardboard.”
“With Makers, we don’t have those problems. Food designers focus on taste. They are as much an artist as any other.”
“Speaking of artists, I’m sorry I upset Vin.” Ellis wasn’t disturbed in the slightest and overjoyed to be eating alone with Pax, but Vin was Pax’s…friend? Lover? “Are you two…um…?” He had no idea how to say it and settled for “Roommates?”
Pax was lifting a fork of food and halted, looking uncomfortable. “We both—live here together—yes.” Pax lowered the fork and proceeded to rearrange the pasta on the plate.
“When you say together, what does that mean? Are you a couple?”
“Couple? I don’t understand.”
“Well, in my day most people who lived together were usually married. My wife’s name is Peggy, and we’ve been married for thirty-five years. But there were those who lived together before getting married, and some people considered that immoral. There was an even bigger stigma when people of the same sex lived together for romantic reasons, so they sometimes would claim that they were no more than roommates. You see, the term roommates didn’t suggest anything more than the sharing of living expenses. When I left, there was a big push for same-sex marriages, and, well…I was just wondering if you and Vin were married.”
“No, Ellis Rogers. There’s no such thing as marriage. My relationship with Vin is…unusual. People don’t live together anymore. Everyone has their own home. Two people never share the same living space—well, they do, but not permanently, you understand.”
“Why? Don’t people like each other? Fall in love, that sort of thing?”
“Certainly, but people also need time to be alone to work, to reflect, to think, to rest. We can always be with someone simply by opening a portal. Hollow World is like one big house where everyone has a private study or office separated by a single doorway. The rest is the shared space. Didn’t people in your day ever spend any time by themselves?”
Ellis thought about his garage. He’d spent more time in it than with Peggy. He also remembered some absurd statistic claiming that married couples actually spent no more than seventeen minutes a day with each other.
“People come together all the time. But with Vin and me, it’s…well…it’s complicated.”
Ellis knew he was missing something. Pax meant more than was said, but he couldn’t figure it out. Everything was hard to understand even when there was no pretense at diversion. Making guesses was almost useless. All he could do was draw on the past. There weren’t men and women anymore, but that didn’t mean relationships didn’t have the same dynamics. Maybe Pax was like one of those impressionable young girls who moved in with a prominent older man whom they saw as worldly. The way Pax spoke in such awe of Vin’s profession, maybe artists made the big bucks these days. Pax had certainly appeared subservient.
“Is this—” Ellis wanted to say his place, because Vin seemed like a man, and Ellis found it annoying to dance around the pronouns. “Is this Vin’s home?”
“We share it.”
“But it was originally Vin’s place, right? Vin took you in? That’s why you need permission to—”
“No—no, this is my home.” Pax chuckled. “Vin would never tolerate a vox like Alva.”
“Really? It’s huge.”
“There’s never been any restriction on size in Hollow World. That’s one of the benefits.”
“Well, it’s very nice.”
“Thank you.” Pax beamed. “Vin helped a lot, of course.”
“Oh—so he paid for a lot of it? Or do arbitrators make a lot of money?”
“Money? What’s money?”
“What’s money?”
“Alva?” Pax called. “Can you explain money, please?”
“Money is an old English word that referred to anything used to represent a standardized object of agreed value that was traded for goods and services.”
Pax looked stumped. “Could you simplify that?”
“You want something someone else has, so you trade something you have for what they have. You understand that, right?”
“Not really.”
“This was before the Maker was invented. It made it easier for everyone to agree on relative values of things. Trading becomes a matter of math—so many of one thing equals so many of something else—understand? Historically shells, salt, metals, and paper promissory notes were used before digital currency was adopted in the twenty-first century. Of course, the whole monetary system was discontinued in the late twenty-third century with the advent of the Three Miracles, which is why you sound so dumb right now. Didn’t they teach you anything at Bingham?”
“Oh wait.” Pax thought a second. “Gold was once used, right? And silver? They made little round disks with them. I saw some at a museum once.”
Ellis nodded. “Coins.”
“Okay, yeah. Wow, being with you is making me wish I paid more attention to ancient history. Who could predict I would need to know all that stuff?” Pax’s head shook. “No, we don’t have money anymore.”