Isobel hissed a little as the grappa hit her throat. “You followed me like a puppy, while I was desperately trying to hold it together. We all thought you were just a starstruck kid, but then on the last day you brought us that physics paper when we were all sitting on that sofa with the broken leg, watching Nine Inch Nails videos and crying.”
“The paper about gravity tunneling,” Laurence said. “I remember.” Some insane physicist from Wollongong had speculated about a method of interstellar travel. Milton had started to dismiss it, but then he’d read the paper a second time and started scribbling notes on his arm. And that had helped lead to Milton founding the Ten Percent Project, with the idea of getting 10 percent of the population off-world within a few decades.
“So don’t sit there and try to pretend that you’re just an innocent bystander,” Isobel said. “You helped start this. And maybe you haven’t been paying attention to the news: The world is on the edge of the cliff here.”
“I’m aware.” Laurence shifted backward and forward in his chair until the scuttling of the wooden legs became too annoying.
“So if you don’t want me to tell Milton that you’re pulling back, don’t pull back. Or if you want to go back to square one, you can tell Milton yourself. But don’t put me in the position of covering for you. And don’t try to have it both ways. Okay?”
“Okay,” Laurence said.
Isobel reopened her laptop so she could obsess over the satellite map some more, and the light from the screen gave her a spectral quality, like someone slowly phasing out of existence.
They sat without talking for a while. Laurence slipped away to get ready for bed. He got up in the middle of the night to get some water, and found Isobel still sitting at that table, weeping over a nearly empty bottle, her face wracked with tremors. He helped her up the stairs to her bedroom, supporting her on his shoulders, and got her into bed. He stayed with her long enough to make sure she slept on her side.
24
“ARE YOU SURE we should be doing this?” Patricia asked when they were both naked but not yet past first base.
“Lately I’ve discovered certainty can be a kind of curse,” said Laurence.
They were in Laurence’s bedroom, where Patricia had never been before. It was a sort of in-law apartment downstairs from Isobel’s apartment, with a view of a back garden out the window, behind the twin bed with a Mighty Mouse quilt. On the opposite wall, he had a workstation, with docks for a laptop computer and a 19-inch monitor, plus shelves and racks of cannibalized electronics. Including five Caddies, two of them jailbroken and two others shackled together with a mesh of crossover cables.
The remaining wall space, over by the door, was taken up with a small bookcase containing graphic novels, engineering texts, and a few science memoirs, like Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! Random action figures and toys in silly poses sat on the dresser, and one of Serafina’s robots, Jimmy, peered over Laurence’s bed frame.
Laurence was feeling pretty freaking nervous. He had been with a nontrivial number of girls—but at least half of those had been tipsy hookups where you had a certain amount of plausible deniability about sexual performance. He’d dated Ginnifer, an electrical engineer with a wicked smile, during sophomore and junior years in college, and she would devise contraptions that could stimulate Laurence’s prostate with varying levels of vibration while also enabling her to straddle his penis, and apply a similar variable-speed oscillation/vibrator function to her clitoris. Plus Ginnifer’s Sexoskeleton, which would take way too long to describe.
But this was someone he’d known half his life, with whom he had this whole labyrinthine history. He could not screw this up. Plus Patricia might be used to crazy magic sex. She and the other witches probably turned themselves into bats and had bat sex one hundred feet up, or had sex on the spirit plane, or with fire elementals or whatever. Even if none of that was true, she was way more experienced than him.