Edge of Infinity

THE PEAK OF ETERNAL LIGHT

Bruce Sterling

HE PROFOUNDLY REGRETTED the Anteroom of Profound Regret.

The Anteroom was an airlock of blast-scarred granite. The entrance and the exit were airtight wheeled contraptions of native pig-iron. In the corner, a wire-wheeled robot, of a type extinct for two centuries, mournfully polished the black slate floor.

One portal opened with a sudden pop.

Lucy was there, all in white, and rustling. His wife was wearing her wedding dress.

Pitar was stunned. He hadn’t seen this scary garment since they’d been joined in wedlock.

Lucy stopped where she stood, beside her round, yawning, steely portal. “You don’t like my surprise for you, Mr. Peretz?”

Pitar swallowed. “What?”

“This is my surprise! It’s my anniversary surprise for you! I carefully warned you that I had a surprise.”

Pitar struggled to display some husbandly aplomb. “I never guessed that your surprise would be... so dramatic! For my own part, I merely brought you this modest token.”

Pitar opened his overnight bag. He produced a ribboned gift-box.

Lucy tripped over, ballerina-like, on her tip-toes.

They gazed at one another, for a long, thoughtful, guarded moment.

Silence, thought Pitar, was the bedrock of their marriage. As young people, it was their sworn duty to fulfil a marital role. Every husband had to invent some personal mode of surviving the fifty-year marriage contract. Marriage on Mercury was an extended adolescence, one long and dangerous discomfort. Marriage was like sun-blasted lava.

Why, Pitar wondered, was Lucy wearing her wedding dress? Had she imagined that this spectral show would please him?

He knew her too well to think that Lucy was deliberately offending him – but he’d burned his own black wedding-suit as soon as decency allowed.

Seeing colour returning to his face, Lucy pirouetted closer. “You bought me a gift, Mr. Peretz?”

“This anniversary gift was not ‘bought,’” Pitar said, swallowing the insult. “I built you this gift.” He offered the box.

Lucy busied herself with the ribbon, then tugged at the airtight lid.

Pitar took this opportunity to study his wife’s wedding gown. He had never closely examined the ritual garment, because he had been far too traumatised by the act of marrying its occupant.

There was a lot to look at in a wedding dress. Technically speaking, in terms of its inbuilt supports, threading, embroidering, seams, darts and similar fabric-engineering issues, a wedding dress was quite a design-feat.

Also, the dress fit Lucy well. His wife was a woman of 27 years, yet still with the bodily proportions of a bride of 17. Was she conveying some subtle message to him, here?

Lucy peered into her gift box, and shook it till it jingled. “What are these many small objects, Mr. Peretz?”

“Madame, those golden links snap together. Once assembled, they will form a necklace. The design of the necklace is based on the ‘smart sand’ used for surface-mining. It’s rather ingenious engineering, if I may say that about my own handiwork.”

Lucy nodded bravely. Struggling with her wedding-skirt, she poised herself inside a spindly cast-glass chair. She tipped the gift-box and shook it, and an army of golden chain-links scattered, ringing and jingling, across the black basalt table.

Lucy examined the scattered links, silently, obviously at a loss.

“They all fit together, and create a necklace,” Pitar urged. “Please do try it.”

Lucy struggled to link the necklace segments. She had no idea what she was trying to achieve. The female gender was notorious for lacking three-dimensional modelling skills.

The ladies of Mercury were never engineers. The ladies had their own gender specialties: food, spirituality, child-rearing, life-support, biotechnology and political intrigue.

Two links suddenly snapped together in Lucy’s questing fingertips. “Oh!” she said. She tried to part the links. They swivelled a bit, but they would shatter sooner than separate. “Oh, how clever this is.”

Pitar stepped to the table and swept up a handful of links. “Let’s assemble them together now – shall we? Since you are wearing your wedding dress today – it would be surely be proper, thematically, if you also wore this newly-assembled wedding necklace. I’d like to see that, before we part.”

“Then you shall see it,” she said. “Mr. Peretz, a woman’s wedding necklace is called a ‘mangalsutra.’ That’s a tradition. It’s women’s sacred history. It symbolises devotion, and two lives that are joined by destiny. That’s from the Earth.”

Pitar nodded. “I’d forgotten that word, ‘mangalsutra.’”

The two of them sat in their glass chairs, and laboured away on the mangalsutra, joining the gleaming links. Pitar felt pleased with the morning’s events. He’d naturally dreaded this meeting, since a tenth anniversary was considered a highly significant date, requiring extra social interaction between the spouses.

Conjugal visits were sore ordeals for any Mercurian husband. To accomplish a visit to his wife, Pitar had to formally veil himself, arm himself with his duelling baton, and creep into the grim and stuffy ‘Anteroom of Delightful Anticipation.’

At this ceremonial airlock between the genders, Lucy would greet him – generally, she was on time – and say a few strained words to him. Then she would lead him to the Boudoir.

No decent man or woman ever spoke a word inside the Boudoir. They silently engaged in the obligatory conjugal acts. If they were lucky, they would sleep afterward.

In the morning, they underwent another required interaction, parting within this ceremonial Anteroom of Profound Regret. Marriage partings were commonly best when briefest.

Anniversary days, however, were not allowed to be brief. Still, assembling the necklace was a pleasing diversion for both of them. It kept their nervous fingers busy, like eating snack food.

When they said nothing, there were no misunderstandings.

Pitar noted his wife’s smile as her golden necklace steadily grew in length. No question: his clever gift plan had met with success. During their decade of marriage, his wife had let slip certain hints about traditional marriage necklaces. Womanly relics, once prized among the colony’s pioneer mothers, a sacred female superstition, vaguely religious, peculiar and mystical, whatever-it-was that women called it – the ‘mangalsutra.’

Of course Pitar had improved this primitive notion – brought it up-to-date with a design-refresh – but if Lucy had noticed his innovation, she had said nothing about it.

“Sit close to me now, Mr. Peretz!” Lucy offered.

“With that grand wedding dress, I’m not sure that I can!”

“Oh, never mind these big white skirts, my poor old dress doesn’t matter anymore! Wouldn’t you agree?”

Pitar knew better than to foolishly agree to this treacherous assertion, but he moved his glass chair nearer his wife’s chair. The chair’s curved feet screeched on the polished slates.

Lucy glanced at him, sidelong. “Mr. Peretz, do I look any older now?”

Pitar busied himself with the links of the necklace. He knew what he was hearing. One of those notorious female jabs that made male life so hazardous.

This provocation had no proper answer. To say “no” was to accuse Lucy of still being a callow girl of seventeen. This meant that ten years of their marriage were capped with an insult.

But to reply “yes” to Lucy, was to state that she had, yes, visibly aged – what a crass mis-step that would be! Lucy would swiftly demand to know what dark threat had wilted her beauty. Arsenical rock-dust fever? A vitamin imbalance in her skin? The ladies of Mercury were forever forbidden the radiance of the Sun.

The light gravity of Mercury shaped the very bones of its women. Lucy had narrow shoulders. A long, loose spine, and a very long neck. Her sleek, narrow hips were entirely unlike the broad, fecund, wobbling hips of a woman from Earth.

Pitar himself was a native son of Mercury. He too had long, frail bones, and had mineral toxins in his liver. As a man, he knew for a fact that he did look older, after ten years of marriage. He certainly wasn’t going to broach that subject with her, however.

Dangerous questions were a woman’s way to fish for insults. Hell lacked demons like Mercurian women scorned. Any rudeness, any act of dishonour, provoked endless feral scheming within the airlocked hothouse of their purdah. Intrigues would ensue. Scandals. Duels. Political schisms. Civil war.

“How very many golden links!” Lucy remarked, blinking. “Your mangalsutra necklace will reach from my neck to the floor!”

“Five hundred and seven links,” said Pitar through reflex.

“Why so many, Mr. Peretz?”

“Because that is the number of times that you and I have occupied this Anteroom of Profound Regret. Including this very day, our tenth anniversary day, of course.”

Lucy’s hands froze. “You counted all our conjugal liaisons?”

“I didn’t have to ‘count’ them. They were all in my appointments calendar.”

“How strange men are.”

“We did miss some scheduled appointments. Because of illness, or the pressure of business. Otherwise, logically, there would be five hundred and twenty links on our tenth anniversary.”

“Yes,” Lucy said slowly, “I know that we missed some appointments.”

Another silence ensued. The mood had darkened somewhat. They busied themselves with the marriage chain. At last it was complete.

Lucy linked the open ends with the catch that Pitar had provided – a modest, simple loop of big studded rubies. One long, golden, serpentine, female adornment. Lucy draped the chain repeatedly around her tapered neck.

“Madame,” said Pitar, seizing the moment, “that mangalsutra necklace, which I built for you with my own assembly devices, is as yet incomplete. As you can see. One end remains open, deliberately so. That is so that you, and I, can add new links to it, in the future. Many new links to this golden wedding-chain, Madame – from this fortunate day, until our final, fiftieth, Golden Anniversary. This is my pledge to you, in bringing you this gift. Deeds, not words.”

Lucy turned her blushing face away. She tugged the billowing skirts from the glass chair, and tiptoed toward a framed portrait set in the granite wall.

Pitar followed Lucy’s gaze. The personage in the portrait was, of course, famous. She was Mrs. Josefina Chang de Gupta, one of the colony’s great founding-mothers.

Mother de Gupta was a culture-heroine for the women of Mercury. This forbidding old dame had personally nurtured sixty-six cloned children. She was the ancestress to half the modern world’s million-plus population.

Clearly, Mother de Gupta dearly loved motherhood – mostly, for the chance that it offered her to boss around small, helpless people. Pitar had been taught the grand saga of Mother de Gupta in his crèche-school. A school where domineering women controlled every detail of childhood, preserving and conveying society’s cultural values.

Pitar had never forgotten his stifling days in that airless nursery school. Mother de Gupta’s husband, the equally-famed Captain de Gupta, had been the author of Mercury’s purdah laws of gender separation. It didn’t take genius to understand that old man’s motives.

Lucy was serenely ignoring the savage old matriarch behind the glass. She was studying her own reflection in the tilted, shining pane.

“I have earned every link in this chain,” she declared. “Five hundred marital liaisons! How awkward my postures were, and my body damp with secretions... But now I truly understand why marriage is a sacrament! Look! Look at my beautiful mangalsutra! I always wanted one! It is classical! I have dignity now! With a chain around my neck, I can hold my head up high!”

With a heroic effort, Pitar made no response to this strange outcry. First, Lucy had miscounted their number of liaisons; and second, he had always suffered far worse from the burdens of marriage than she.

Women had it easy in marriage. Basically, all that was required from women was to lie on a bed and point their knees at the ceiling. Society forced him to wrap himself in a veil, to skulk like an assassin into the women’s quarters – as if his identity, and his purpose there, were dreadful secrets.

A custom of total secrecy, for actions that were legally required! When incompatible worldviews collided, these were the monsters engendered. Ten dutiful years of marital intercourse, creeping in and out of airlocks – and yet women called men hypocrites.

“I have done my duty for ten years,” Lucy declared to her own reflection. Suddenly, she turned on him, eyes flashing. “Sometimes it’s all I can do not to laugh like a fool.”

“At least, after ten years of marriage,” offered Pitar, “they don’t make us listen to those silly love-songs, any more.”

A thoughtful silence passed, and then she fixed her gaze on his. “This arranged marriage is a vehicle of political oppression!”

Pitar tightened his lips. The women of Mercury were particularly dangerous when they started harping on their alleged ‘oppressions.’ They rarely died of being oppressed, but men were frequently beaten to death for that subject.

“You told me, once,” she said, “once, here in this very Anteroom, that marriage was an oppressive moral debt that we owe to the founders of this world.” Lucy stroked her gleaming, golden neck. “I never wept so much! But, of course, you were telling the truth – the truth as men see it, at least.”

Stung, Pitar rose at once from his dainty chair, which toppled to the stone floor with a discreet glassy clink.

“Our ancestors must have been insane,” Lucy said, with the serene expression of a woman uttering things no man would dare to say aloud. “They gave us this bizarre, twisted life – a life we would never have chosen for ourselves. Our marriage – our oppression – is not our fault. I don’t blame you, Pitar. Not any longer. You shouldn’t blame me, either. You and I are victims of tradition.”

Pitar steepled his fingers before his face and touched them to his moustache. “Mrs. Peretz,” he said at last, “it’s true that our ancestors had profound, creative ideas about a new society. They tried many new things, and many experiments failed. It was hard to create this world, our world, the living world, from bare rock. I myself have huge technical advantages over our ancestors – and yet I make mistakes, building this world, every day.”

Lucy gazed at him, blinking. “What? What are you talking about now? Aren’t you listening to me? I just told you that none of this is your fault! You, being my husband, that is not your fault! Can’t you understand that? I thought you’d be happy to hear that from me, today.”

“Mrs. Peretz, you are not taking my point here! I have a larger point than any merely personal point! I’m saying that we can’t blame our ancestors, and vilify them, until we come to terms with our own human failings! Consider the legacy that you and I are leaving to our own future! You can see that, can’t you? That is just and fair. That’s obvious.”

Lucy was not seeing the obvious at all. Or rather, Lucy was seeing the obvious in some alien, feminine way, in which his denial of their immediate suffering was an evil lie. He had offended her.

“Did we surrender too much?” Lucy demanded. “Did we say ‘yes’ too often?”

“Do you mean, Mrs. Peretz, that day, ten years ago, when I said ‘yes,’ and you also said ‘yes’?”

“No, no, you never understand anything that’s important... All right, yes, fine. Fine! That’s what I meant.”

“Do you mean to say that I should have rebelled? That I should have refused our arranged marriage?” Pitar paused. He attempted to look composed and solemn, as he thought furiously.

Lucy spoke up meekly. “I meant to suggest that I should have rebelled.”

“What, you? Why?”

Lucy said nothing, but she was clearly marshalling her thoughts for another unplanned outburst.

The anniversary morning, which had started so calmly, had taken a dreadful turn for Pitar. If men knew that he was talking in this way to a woman – especially his own wife – he would be challenged to a duel. And he would deserve that, too.

“All right,” Pitar said at last, “since this is our anniversary, we need to discuss these issues. It was brave of you to bring those up. Well, I happen to think that the two of us are excellent at marriage.”

Lucy brightened. “You think that? Why?”

“Because it’s an established fact! Look at the evidence! Here we are – you and me, husband and wife – living four kilometres under the surface of the North Pole of the planet Mercury. Our air, water, food, our gender politics, everything that we value, is designed and engineered. And yet, we thrive. We are prosperous, we live honourably! We are two respectable married people! Anybody in this world would say that Pitar Peretz and Lucy Peretz have a normal, solid, and fruitful relationship. We gave the world a son.”

His wife scowled at this firm reassurance. “They’ll want other children from us. No day passes when the lady elders don’t nag me about procreation.”

“They have to say that to us. They did their part, and now that duty is ours.” Pitar raised his hand, to forestall another outcry. “Now, I know – before Mario Louis Peretz was built – I felt some qualms about my fatherhood. Maybe I over-expressed those emotions to you. That was my mistake. I was young and foolish then. I didn’t know what fatherhood was. We can’t always know what is good for us in the future. If you asked a boy or girl to consent to puberty, of course children would never grow up! They’re just children, so they would rebel, and say no.”

His wife made no reply to his wise and reasonable discourse. Instead, Lucy was gazing, with a damp look of dawning surprise, at the blast-scarred stone wall. The idea of annulling puberty seemed to have fired her imagination.

“Even though our children are built, it’s a wise social policy that children should have two parents,” Pitar said doggedly. “Maybe we were forced to conform to that tradition, for the sake of futurity. But the truth is, fatherhood was good to me. Today, there’s a boy, eight years old, who depends on me for guidance in this world. So now I realise: life can’t be all about me. Me, and my own favourite things: interaction design, aesthetics, robotics, metaphysics... When you and I built a child, that forced me to realise how much this life matters!”

This heartfelt, responsible declaration would have gone over splendidly in any male discussion group; with Lucy, though, it had simply dug him into deeper trouble. Lucy looked bored by his worthy sentiments, and even mildly repelled. “So,” she said at last, “the boy made you happy?”

“I wouldn’t claim that I’ve achieved the Peak of Eternal Light! But who among us has?”

“I’m glad that you’re happy, Mr. Peretz.”

Pitar said nothing. He recognised one of those passive, yet aggressive remarks that women deployed for advantage.

Whenever women said the opposite of what they so clearly wanted to say, hell was at hand.

It was no use reasoning with women. Their brains were different. He had to change his tactics.

“How can I be happy,” Pitar offered at last, “when I’m sitting here in the ‘Anteroom of Profound Regret’?”

“Husbands never regret leaving their wives here. The formal name of this Anteroom is merely a social hypocrisy. One lie among so many in this world.”

“Mrs. Peretz, please stop being so politically provocative. Who can’t be sorry in this miserable Anteroom? Can you deny that this room is gloomy, stuffy and in very poor taste? Be reasonable.”

“Well, yes, this ugly Anteroom of yours is ugly, but not in the way you think... This room is harsh, and cold, and repulsive, but that’s all the fault of you men.”

“We men never asked for this Anteroom! Never! If it was up to us men, we’d go straight to the Boudoir. The Boudoir is augmented and ubiquitous, and it has beer and snacks, too!”

“Mr. Peretz, you are living in pure male delusion,” Lucy said sternly. “That Boudoir, where you and I have conjugal relations, that isn’t even my room! I have a private room of my very own. It’s much nicer than that tacky bordello where we have to interact.”

Pitar was dazzled by this brazen assertion. “Other men sleep in my own marriage bed?”

“Sir, that is not ‘your’ bed! And anyway, it’s very sturdy.”

“Sturdiness is not the issue there!”

“Well, it is to us women.”

“Fine, be that way!” Pitar cried. “If you want a surprise, you should see my barracks! We men live in luxury now! We have gymnasia, saunas, tool-sheds, anything anyone would want.”

“I’ve never seen your male barracks,” said Lucy thoughtfully. “That place where you sleep, without me.”

This was a dreadful thing to say. Only the lowest, most dishonourable woman, a woman lost to all shame, would violate purdah, risk everything, and creep into a man’s room.

The remark shocked Pitar, so he retreated into silence. His wife said nothing as well. The silence between them stretched, as their silences always did, and Pitar realised, with a long, tenuous, ten-year stretch of his imagination, that he liked it when Lucy shocked him.

It touched something in him. He felt metaphysically authentic. Shock put him in stark confrontation with life’s unspoken realities. It took daring to become real.

This was like that vivacious disaster, eight years ago, when he’d been in a duel for Lucy’s honour.

Pitar was a thinking man, but sometimes even the most reasonable man couldn’t back down from an insult. Pitar had not won that duel – in fact, he’d gotten a solid beating from his punctilious opponent. But in standing up for her, and for honour, he’d won a moral victory.

Furthermore, after the duel, Lucy had been allowed, by a long unspoken tradition, to leave her female purdah, and visit him in his clinic. Lucy came there publicly, flaunting herself, sometimes twice a day, to ‘heal the defender of her honour.’ She could stay there in the medical ward as long as she pleased, and express herself on any topic, and no one would dare to object.

Neither of them had known quite what to do with this unexpected intimacy, for they were only nineteen years old. But that incident had been truly exciting – a different side of life. Another mode of being. The scandal had changed him, and she had changed too, in her own way. A marriage under threat had depth, breadth and consequence.

Sometimes, there was a steep price to pay for self-knowledge – young men learned about themselves in a hurry. Mature men learned from experience.

“Lucy,” he ventured at last, in a low voice, “if I asked you to visit my barracks room, what would you do?”

“I didn’t mean to suggest anything disgraceful,” she said. “But men always come here, through these Anteroom airlocks. Women never visit your half of this world, not at all. How can that be fair?”

“Fair? The rules of decorum are very clear on those matters.”

“Please don’t look at me like that,” Lucy begged. “Truly, I’m proud that my husband has decorum and defends my honour. It would be awful if you were some vile coward. But anyone – man or woman – can see there’s something very strange about our customs! Men inside other planets don’t duel!”

“Men on other planets don’t live ‘inside’ of their planets,” Pitar corrected. “Mercury’s moral code may not be perfect – I will grant you that. It may even be that the men of this world, who are just so many fools like me, are all stupid brutes. But even if that’s so – at least the ladies here are true ladies! You can admit that much to me, can’t you?”

“Well,” said Lucy, “being a ‘lady’ doesn’t work in the way that you imagine it does, but... All right, fine, I married you, I’m your lady. I can see you’re angry now. You’re always angry when I’m not a lady, when I talk about what’s just and fair.”

“Let’s be objective,” said Pitar. “Let’s consider those sleazy women who orbit Venus. No one ever calls them proper ladies!”

“Well, no, of course not,” Lucy admitted. “Those women can’t even fly down to their own planet’s surface! That’s quite sad.”

“And what about the Earth, that so-called motherworld? Earth women were all Earth-mothers once, and look what became of them! They’re polluted, they’re filthy, a laughing-stock! Don’t get me started on those Martian women! Preening around on Mars, freezing on red sand, pretending that they can breathe!”

“I’m sure those women are doing their best to be decent women.”

“Oh come now. Those women orbiting Saturn and Jupiter? Let’s not be ridiculous here! And I hope you’re not defending those post-female entities around Neptune and Uranus.”

“Foreign women live quite properly inside the asteroids.”

“Not like ladies live in our own society! Asteroidal women don’t have our giant canyons, and our polar water-glacier! I will grant you – the asteroids have some fine resources. They have ice, and some metals, they’re upscale in the gravity well. But us, the genteel people here inside Mercury, we have much purer, finer metals than they do! Metals, in planetary quantities! And we possess tremendous solar energy! Every Mercurian day, our robots harvest more power than some puny asteroid could generate in ten years!” Pitar drew a deep breath of the Anteroom’s stuffy air. “You certainly can’t deny all those facts!”

Lucy said nothing, and therefore denied nothing.

“I don’t want to be ungallant,” Pitar concluded, “but those women bred in the asteroids, they have no gravity! Not one trace of decent gravity. So they are grotesque! What decent man could be doomed to marry some flabby, blob-shaped, boneless woman, with hands on her legs, instead of human feet? I shudder at the thought! Their lives are unimaginable.”

Lucy ran both her hands along her elongated skull and through her lustrous, thin, white hair. “Pitar, that’s all true. Those foreign people are contemptible.”

“I’m glad that you can see that. And there’s an important corollary to your conclusion,” said Pitar in triumph. “If those foreigners are grotesque – and we both agree, they certainly are – then that proves that we are not. Maybe we suffer – me, and you, too, we both suffer some oppression, maybe – life, and honour, and decency, they aren’t all about fun and amusement... But when it’s all it’s said and done, you and I are Mercurian people. I am who I am, and so are you.”

“I am a Mercurian woman,” Lucy said. “But too much is always left unsaid.”

Lucy gazed suggestively at the airlock, but he did not leave, having become too interested.

“Mrs. Peretz, it’s all mere custom,” Pitar said at last. “Sometimes, we behave so proudly here, as if we owned the Peak of Eternal Light... And yet, the texture of our existence is mere tradition. The truth is, speaking metaphysically, it’s all social habit! Once, in the past, this whole world was like this sorry Anteroom that we’re stuck in now...”

Pitar lifted his arms. “I know that life isn’t just and fair. And I wish I could change that, but how? If you want to reform gender relations, you should take up those issues in the political councils of your elder ladies. What can you expect me to do? Those old witches treat men of my age as if we were larvae.”

“I didn’t ask you to do anything,” Lucy pointed out. “I even told you that it wasn’t your fault.”

“Well, yes, you said that, but... isn’t it strongly implicated that there’s something I should do? Surely we don’t meet in here, face to face, it’s our anniversary... We can’t just whine.”

A very long silence passed. Pitar began to regret that he had complained about complaining. This act of his was meta, and recursive. No wonder she was confused.

“We have bicycles,” Lucy offered.

“What?”

“We have bicycles. Transportation devices, the ones with two wheels. Men and women can meet outside of the purdah, when they ride on bicycles. No one can accuse us of impropriety when we’re seated on rolling machines.”

“Mrs. Peretz, I have seen bicycles – but I’m not taking your point.”

“Suppose that we say,” Lucy offered haltingly, “that we’re exploring the modern world. There are lots of new mineshafts where only machines have gone. If we ride a few kilometres – I mean together, but on bicycles – how can they say that we’re harming custom? Or offending decency?”

“What do you mean now, bicycles? Aren’t those contraptions dangerous? You could fall off a bicycle and break your neck! Bicycles are mechanically unstable! They only have two wheels!”

“Yes, it’s hard to learn to ride a bicycle. I fell off several times, and even hurt myself. But I learned how! Bicycles are perfect for low-gravity planets. Because bicycles stress the legs. They strengthen the bones. Bicycles are a healthy and modern invention.”

Pitar considered this set of arguments. Of course he’d seen women riding on bicycles – and the occasional man as well, maybe one in ten – but he’d paid no real attention to this fad. He’d considered bicycling some girlish affectation – those women in their faceless helmets and their black, baggy clothes. Speeding about on these gaily coloured devices...

But maybe it made engineering sense. Bicycles had appeared in the world because the mine-shafts were expanding. Ever-active robots, steadily gnawing new courses through the planet’s richest mineral seams. The world was growing methodically.

Modern Mercury was no longer that old, cramped world where people lurked in chambers and airlocks, and walked only a few hundred metres. Robots were ripping through the planet’s crust, and behind them came human settlers, as always on Mercury. That was common sense, and no conservative could deny that.

“I could build a bicycle,” Pitar declared. “I could fabricate and print one. Not a ladylike kind, of course – but a proper transportation machine.”

“With your bicycle helmet, you wouldn’t have to wear your veil anymore,” Lucy said eagerly. “No one would know that it was you, on your bicycle... except for me, of course, because, well, I always know it’s you.”

“Then it’s settled. I’ll set straight to work! I’ll give you a progress report, next time we meet.”

They shook hands, and departed through their separate iron doors.


AN OFFICIAL DAY of mourning had been declared for the late Colonel Hartmann Srinivasan DeBlakey. As a gesture of respect toward this primal Mercurian pioneer, his mourning period occupied an entire ‘Mercurian Day.’

Colonel DeBlakey had been an ardent calendar reformer. To thoroughly break all cultural ties with Earth, DeBlakey had struggled to reform Mercurian pioneer habits around the 88-day ‘Mercurian Year’ and the 58-day ‘Mercurian Day.’

Of course, DeBlakey’s elaborate, ingenious calendar scheme had proved entirely hopeless in practice. Human beings had innate 24-hour biological cycles. So, the practical habits within a sunless, subterranean city had quickly assumed the modern, workaday system of three 8-hour shifts.

But DeBlakey had never surrendered his cultural convictions about calendar reform, just as he had fought valiantly for spelling reform, gender relations and trinary computation. DeBlakey had been an intellectual titan of Mercury. In acknowledgement of his legacy, it was agreed that gentlemen would wear their mourning veils for one entire Mercurian Day.

Being a mere boy of eight, Pitar’s son, Mario Louis Peretz, wore only a light scarf, rather than the full male facial veil. Mario had his mother’s good looks. Mario was a fine boy, a decent boy, a source of proper pride. Life in his juvenile crèche was entirely ruled by women, so Mario had refined and dainty habits: long hair, painted fingernails, a skirt rather than trousers, everything as it should be.

Through his mother’s gene-line, young Mario was closely related to the late Colonel DeBlakey. So it was proper of Mario to attend the all-male obsequies, up on the planet’s surface.

Of course Pitar had to accompany his son as his paternal escort. The blistering, airless surface of Mercury was tremendously hostile and dangerous. It was therefore entirely proper for children.

Pitar hadn’t worn his spacesuit in two years – not since the last celebrity funeral. For his own part, young Mario Louis sported a brand-new, state-of-the-art suitaloon. His mother had bought this archigrammatical garment for him, and Lucy had spared no expense.

The boy was childishly delighted with his fancy get-up. The suitaloon had everything a Mercurian boy could desire: a diamond-crystal bubble-helmet, a boy-sized life-support cuirass, woven nanocarbon arms and legs, plus fashionable accents of silver, copper, gold and platinum. Mario was quite the little lordling in his suitaloon. He tended to caper.

The crowd of male mourners queued to take the freight elevators to the Peak of Eternal Light.

“Dad,” said Mario, gripping Pitar’s spacesuit gauntlet, “did Colonel DeBlakey ever fight duels?”

“Oh, yes.” Pitar nodded. “Many duels.”

“Martial arts are my favourite subject at the crèche,” Mario boasted. “I think I could be pretty good at fighting duels.”

“Son,” said Pitar, “duelling is a serious matter. It’s never about how strong you are, or how fast you are. Men fight duels to defend points of honour. Duelling supports propriety. You can lose a duel, and still make your point. Colonel DeBlakey lost some duels. So he had to apologise, and politically retreat. But he never lost the respect of his peers. That’s what it’s all about.”

“But Dad... what if I just beat people up with my baton? Wouldn’t they have to do whatever I say?”

Pitar laughed. “That’s been tried. It never works out well.”

Thanks to some covert intrigue – his mother’s, almost certainly – Mario was allowed into the elevator along with the casket of his revered ancestor. DeBlakey’s casket was simply his original, pioneer spacesuit. This archaic device was so rugged, solid and rigid that it made a perfect sarcophagus.

The old elevator, like the old spacesuit, was stoic and grim. It was crammed with suited gentlemen and boys, veiled behind their faceplates.

No one broke the grave solemnity of the moment. At last, the shuddering, creaking trip to the surface was over.

Pitar followed the economic news, so he was aware of the booming industrial developments on the surface. But to know those statistics was not the same as witnessing major industry at first hand.

What a vista of the machinic phylum! He felt almost as much sheer wonderment as his eight-year-old son.

The cybernetic order, conquering Mercury, algorithmically pushing itself into new performance-spaces... It had crisply divided its ubiquity into new divisions of spatial and temporal magnitude!

The roads, the pits, the mines, the power-plants and smelters, the neatly assembled slag... The great, slow, factory hulks... the vast caravans of ore-laden packets... the dizzying variety of scampering viabs, and a true explosion of chipsets.

And, at the nanocentric bottom of this semi-autonomous pyramid of computational activism, the smartsand. Amateurs gaped at the giant hulks – but professionals always talked about the smartsand.

Entropy struck these machines, as it did any organised form. Machines that veered from the wandering Mercurian twilight zone were promptly fried or frozen. Yet the broken systemic fragments were always reconstituted, later. No transistor, gasket or screw was ever abandoned. Not one fleck of industrial trash, though the cratered landscape was severely torn by robot mandibles.

The human funeral procession marched toward the solemn Peak of Eternal Light.

This grandiose polar mountain never passed within solar shadow. The Peak of Eternal Light was the most famous natural feature of Mercury, the primal source of the colony’s unfailing energy supply.

At the Peak’s frozen base, which was never lit by the Sun, was a great frosty glacier. This glacier was the only source of water on or within the planet.

This glacier had been formed over eons by the bombardment of comets. Steam as thin as vacuum had accumulated in this frozen shadow, layering monatomically. Those towering layers of black ice, the product of billions of years, had seemed enough to quench the thirst of a million people.

Nothing left of that mighty glacier today but a few scarred ice-blocks, slowly gnawed by the oldest machines.

The polar glacier had, in fact, vanished to quench the thirst of a million people. This ancient ice had passed straight into the living veins of human beings.

This planetary resource was whittled down to a mere nub now. Yet one had to look here, to know that. The polar glacier existed in permanent darkness. Only the radar in Pitar’s suit allowed him to witness the frightening decline.

Most of the men ignored this ghastly spectacle. As for his own son, the boy took no notice at all. The shocking decline in polar ice meant nothing to him. He had never seen the North Pole otherwise.

And what had the old man, the dead man, said about that crisis? Ever the visionary, he’d certainly known it was coming.

The dead pioneer had said, in his blunt and confrontational way, “We’ll just have to go fetch some more ice.”

So, they had done as the dead man said. The people of Mercury had built a gigantic manned spacecraft, a metallic colossus. A ship so vast, so overweening in scale, that it might have been an interstellar colony – were such things possible.

Robots had hauled this great golden ark to the launch ramp, and sent this gleaming dreadnought hurtling off toward the cometary belt. There to commandeer and retrieve some vast, timeless, life-enhancing snowball.

Of course, there had been certain other options – rather than a gigantic, fully-manned spacecraft. Simpler, more practical tactics.

For instance, thousands of tiny robots might have been launched out in vast streams, to go capture a comet.

Then as the comet whirled round and round the blazing, almighty bulk of the Sun, the robots could have chipped off small chunks of comet frost, and sent those modest packets to the Mercurian surface. At the cost of a few small, fresh craters – nothing much, compared with the giant mining pits – clouds of cometary steam would have arisen. Puffs of comet vapour, drifting north, to freeze onto the original great glacier, there at the base of the Peak of Eternal Light.

This would have been a quiet, tedious, patient, and gentle way to replenish the vanished glacier. A nurturing restoration of the status quo. Mercurian women favoured this tactic.

But to espouse this idea had some dark implications. It implied, strongly, that Mercury itself should never have been settled by human beings. Were men worthless, was that the idea? Why not abolish mankind, with all its valour, its honour, its urge to explore – and have Mercury remain a mine-pit infested with the mindless and soulless machinic phylum?

That idea was blasphemy – and there was no reconciling these factions. The civil division there was as distinct as frozen night and blazing day. This tremendous struggle – a primal issue of resources and politics – had almost broken the colony.

As tempers rose, a compromise was urged by certain moderates, whom everyone ignored. Why not just buy some ice? Admit that Mercury faced a water crisis beyond its power, and buy ice from foreigners.

The asteroids had plenty of ice. What sense did it make to design a weird horde of ice-robots? Why create some swaggering Mercurian flagship, at such crippling cost? Just abandon honour and autonomy, abandon foolish pride, and pay foreigners. There were merchants out there already, willing to trade for metals. If one could call those weird entities ‘people.’

After much bloodshed, feuding, disgraces, regrettable excesses, the manned explorers had won the civil war. Why? Because they had claimed the mantle of the traditional values. Then these conservative fanatics had climbed aboard their new golden spacecraft, and promptly abandoned Mercury with all its long traditions.

The field of honour had settled nothing, thought Pitar. Because those traditions were fictions – irrational retrodictions, modern political interpretations of lost historical realities.

The values of Colonel DeBlakey were much wilder than anyone cared to remember. DeBlakey, and the men of his generation, were fantastic visionaries. DeBlakey, the Mercurian hero, cared nothing for colonising Mercury. He saw Mercury as a mere stepping-stone to colonising the Sun.

In his arcane, two-hundred-forty-year lifespan, this great man had advanced his philosophy in vast, scriptural detail. Endlessly writing, preaching, planning, designing, and theorising. Pitar had read a few million of these hundreds of millions of words. Very few ever did.

As the mourners gathered in their artificial twilight at the mountain’s base, Pitar realised that he was attending the last public airing for DeBlakey’s great pioneer ideology.

Mercurian celebrities delivered their funeral orations – eloquent, careful, and well-considered. Yet DeBlakey’s titanic legacy was much too large for their tiny gestures. The mourners clearly desired to be brief – for the radiation on the surface made that wise. Yet a lifespan of a quarter of a millennium was no easy thing to summarise.

DeBlakey’s schemes had to do with interstellar settlement: mankind’s manifest destiny in the galaxy. “Taming the stars,” as he put it. Such were the progressive visions that racked the great man’s brain, as the early Mercurian colonists crouched in their stone closets, half-suffocated and sipping toxic comet water.

DeBlakey was scheming to mine Mercury, fully develop the machinic phylum, and then march gloriously forth to mine the Sun. To dwell within the Sun, living in Eternal Light. To thrive in Eternal Light, without any shadow of any planet’s bulk, forever.

Because, while Mercury certainly had gold, silver, platinum, and transuranic metals – sometimes scattered on the cratered surface in gleaming pools – the Sun possessed every element.

Imaginary star-redoubts would whip through the Sun’s tenuous atmosphere at a hyper-Mercurian speed, sifting out water, carbon, metals – anything mankind needed – directly from the solar cloud. These visionary sun-forts would be vast magnetic bottles, all tractor beams and photon traps, with living, golden cores.

Once mankind had taught the machinic phylum to dwell within the atmospheres of stars, no further limits would ever trouble mankind. Above all, there would be no limits to the settler population. Dutiful women, living for centuries, would raise and acculturate hundreds of children, each one trained to star-spanning pioneer values.

At this singular rate of population explosion, the Sun would soon support hundreds of billions of people. Trillions of citizens, manning millions of colonies. So many colonies, so cybernetically capable, that they would seize command of the Sun.

With such titanic energy resources, interstellar flight would become a corollary, a mere logical detail. Tamed solar flares would magnetically fling new colonies, hurtling at near-light-speed, into the atmospheres of the nearest stars.

Any species that could dwell within stars would swiftly dominate the galaxy. Spreading algorithmically, exponentially, resistlessly, galactically. Men who understood this had no need to search for Earthlike planets, that illusion of meagre fools. They would dwell forever within the machinic phylum, each superhuman soul a peak of eternal light.

There was a certain fierce logic to DeBlakey’s cosmic plans. If not entirely pragmatic, they were certainly aspirational. Driven by such fierce and boundless human will, the machinic phylum would explode across the universe.

However, DeBlakey was mortal, and therefore dead. To the serious-minded, sensible people actually living today within the planet Mercury, his dreams seemed arcane, farfetched, absurd... And now, his funeral eulogists were trying to come to terms with all of that. To settle all of that, to bury all of that. They were gently folding this man’s wild pioneer dream into the harmless legendry of everyday Mercurian existence.

Pitar’s boy tugged at his gauntleted arm. These high-flown orations had the boy bored stiff. “Dad.”

Pitar opened a private channel. “What is it? Do you need a bathroom? Use the suit.”

“Dad, can I go fight now? That’s Jimmy over there, he likes to fight.”

“No sparring during funerals, son.”

Mario grimaced at this reproof. He rubbed exoatmospheric dust from his diamond bubble-helmet. “Dad, when they build the new colony at the South Pole, will we go there?”

“Mario, there’s no water at the South Pole. There are hills of Eternal Light there, so there’s plenty of energy, but fate put no glaciers for us in that place. It’s uninhabitable.”

“But our space heroes will come back some day, and bring us a water-comet. Then will we go?”

“Yes,” said Pitar. “We would go. There would be new opportunities there, more than in this old colony. The South Pole would mean a different life, new social principles. Yes, we would go there. I would take you with me. And your brothers, too – because you’ll have brothers someday.”

“Would Mom go with us?”

“Son, in nine years you’ll be married yourself. I’ll arrange that. And believe me, that’s sure to complicate your agenda.”

“Mom would go to a new colony. She wants to invent a new way of life. She told me that.”

“Really.”

“Yes, she told me! She really means it.”

Pitar drew a breath within his helmet. “We are, after all, a pioneering people. That is our true heritage, and I’m proud that you are witnessing all this. You’ll live a very long time, my son, so be sure to remember this day, and all it means. This world belongs to you. It was given to you. And don’t you ever forget that.”

Another speaker took the rostrum at the funereal plateau. This elder had to walk with robot assistance, and though he said little enough, he spoke at the droning rate of the very wise. A dreadful thing to hear.

Mario could not keep his peace. “Dad, will there be other boys like me at the South Pole?”

Pitar smiled. “Of course there will. A society with no youth has no future. If the people of Earth had sent their children into space, instead of just foolish astronauts, they would have spread throughout the worlds. Instead, they sank into their mud. That’s not your heritage, because those people have no moral fibre. That’s why they don’t matter now, and we do.”

Mario struggled to scratch his nose through his bubble-helmet. Of course this feat was impossible. “Dad, do Earth people stink? Jimmy says they stink.”

“I’ve never met one personally, but they do have wild germs in their bellies. Earth people can emit some unpleasant odours, and that’s a fact.” Pitar cleared his throat inside his spacesuit. “The Earth people don’t care much for us, either, mind you – they call us ‘termites.’”

“‘Termites’, Dad, what does that mean?”

“Termites are subhuman social beasts. Wild animals. Never properly gardened like our animals.”

“Dad, how big are termites?”

“I really don’t know, about the size of a housecat, I guess. If some man ever calls you a ‘termite,’ you slap his face and challenge him, understand? That puts a swift end to that nonsense.”

“All right, Dad.”

“Stop chattering now, son. This is the climax, this is the great moment.”

Bearing their ceremonial staves and halberds, the male elders retreated, with slow step, from the funeral plateau. Sand rose up in waves below the dead man’s catafalque.

The smartsand formed itself into one grand, pixelated, seething, pallbearing wave.

An impossible liquid, it reverently rolled up the mountain, bearing the dead man.

The catafalque crossed the brilliant twilight zone, into Eternal Light.

The robots shifted their solar reflectors, in unison. The human crowd fell into dramatic, timeless, deep-frozen darkness. Pitar felt his spacesuit shudder, a trembling fit of holy awe.

The catafalque gleamed like a chunk of the unseen sun.

The dead man’s suit ruptured from the brilliant heat. Precious steam burst free. One brief, geyserlike, human rainbow, one visionary burst of glorious combustion, spewing like a solar flare.

Then the ceremony ended. Though the long Mercurian Day had scarcely begun, a spiritual dawn had appeared.


PITAR SAT ON the rim of a sandbox, within the Great Park of Splendid Remembrance.

To pursue his design labours, Pitar often came to this site, to carefully sip cognition enhancers and contemplate the metaphysical implications of monumentality.

The task of his generation was one of reconciliation, the achievement of a deeper understanding. This park had been the battlefield where the worst mass clashes of the civil war had occurred. Bitter, bloody, hand-to-hand struggles, between the polarised factions.

Some of the colony’s best, most idealistic, most public-spirited men, trapped by harsh moral necessity, had beaten each other to death in this cavern.

Even women had killed each other in here, when it became clear that the great burden of the ice-hunt would impinge on their personal politics. Women fought in feline ambush, and in martyr operations. Women killed efficiently, because they never wasted effort grasping at the honours of combat.

The civil war was the closest that the colony had ever come to collapse. Worse than any natural catastrophe: worse than the blowouts, worse than the toxic poisonings.

The Great Park of Splendid Remembrance was, by its nature, an ancient Mercurian lava tube. This cavern was a natural feature, unplanned by man, untouched by the jaws of machines.

So it was thought, somehow, that this bloodstained space of abject moral failure was best left to wilderness. To living creatures other than mankind.

The original settlers had brought genetic material from their homelands on Earth. These vials of DNA had been preserved with care, but never released inside the world, never instantiated as living creatures.

Today, the Park of Splendid Remembrance was thick with them. These thriving, vegetal entities had exotic shapes, exotic features, and exotic, ancient names. Banyans, jacarandas, palms, ylang-ylang, papayas, jackfruit, teak, and mahogany.

Unlike the homely, useful algae on which the colony subsisted, these woody species took on wild, unheard-of forms. Under the blazing growlights, rising in the light gravity, rooted in a strange mineral soil, they were the native Mercurian forest. Great, green, reeking, shady, twisted eminences. Bizarre organic complexities: flowering, gnarling, branching, fruiting.

This wilderness mankind had unleashed was not beautiful. It was vigorous, but crabbed and chaotic. It was, as yet, merely a colonial tangle, a strange, self-choking complex of distorted traditional forms.

Like all aesthetic issues, thought Pitar, the problem here had its roots within a poor metaphysics. To introduce this ungainly forest, so as to obscure a dark place where human will had failed – that effort was insincere. It had not been thought-through.

The Great Park of Splendid Remembrance had feared to face the whole truth. So it was as yet neither great nor splendid, because it had shirked the hard thinking required by the authentic Mercurian texture of existence.

This was Pitar’s own task.

Sitting in deep thought, Pitar idly drew squares, triangles, circles, within the childish play-box of smartsand. With each stroke of his duelling-club, the smartsand responded and processed. Arcane ripples bounded and rebounded from the corners of the sandbox.

The computational entities, with which mankind shared this planet, were never intelligent. The machinic phylum, which seemed so clever and vigorous to the untrained eye, was neither alive nor smart. The phylum was merely the phylum; it had no will, no pride, no organic lust for survival, no reason to exist and persist. Without human will to issue its coded commands, the phylum would collapse in an eyeblink, returning to the sunblasted, constituent elements of this world.

But although the phylum possessed neither life nor intelligence, it did possess an order-of-being. It was not alive, merely processual, yet it had transcended the natural. The phylum was a metaphysical entity, and worthy of respect. Something like the spiritual respect owed a dead body: a thing, yes, inert, yes, of ashes, yes – yet so much more than mere inert ashes.

The truth, beyond intelligence. There were those who said – the daring thinkers of Pitar’s own generation – that the Sun was self-possessed. Not in the old-fashioned, cranky, archaic, heroic way that visionaries like DeBlakey had once imagined. The Sun was never alive, nor was the Sun intelligent, but the Sun was an entity, metaphysically ordered. The Sun that loomed over tiny Mercury was one Object of the Order of a Star.

And these thinkers speculated – speculating furthermore, just as bravely daring as their ancestors, though in a more modern fashion – that there were many Orders in the cosmos. Life, and, intelligence, and the processual phylum were just three of those countless Orders.

These speculative realists held that the Cosmos was inherently riddled with unnatural Orders. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of independent, extropic Orders, each Order unknown to the next, yet each as real and noble as the next, each as important as life or thought.

Some Orders transpired in picoseconds, other Orders in unknowable aeons. Orders, each as deep and complex and unnatural as life, or cognition, or computation. Entities, autarchic ontologies, occupying the full panoply of every scale of space-time. From the quantum foam, where space disintegrated, to the forever-unknowable scale of the Cosmos, forever outside the light-cone of any instrumentable knowability.

That was reality.

There were those who called these idle dreams, but reality was neither neither idle nor a dream. Much scientific evidence had been carefully amassed, to prove the objective existence of extropic Orders. Pitar followed Mercurian science with some care – although he never involved himself in the fierce, bloody duels over precedence and citation.

Pitar understood the implications of modern science for his own creative work. Any true, sincere monument, any place of genuinely splendid remembrance, would be built in a manner that took reality into a full account. An enlightened peak of moral comprehension.

This Awareness would transcend awareness. It would respect that ordered otherness, in all its many forms, and do that Otherness honour.

It might well take him, thought Pitar, centuries to come to workable terms with this professional ambition. But since he had that time, it behooved him to spend his time properly. Such was his duty. This was something that he himself could do, to add to all that had passed before, as a legacy to whoever, or whatever, was to follow.

Pitar glanced up, suddenly, from the writhing sandpit. His wife had arrived. Lucy was on her bicycle.

Pitar mounted his own two-wheeled machine. He rode to join her. Pitar rode smoothly and elegantly, because he’d infested his bicycle’s frame with smartsand.

He hadn’t told his wife about this design gambit; Lucy merely thought, presumably, that he was tremendously good at learning to ride a bicycle. No need to bring up that subject. Enough that he had a bicycle, and that he rode it with her. Deeds, not words.

His wife’s head was fully encased in her black helmet. Her body was almost suitalooned by her black, flowing bicycle garb. Mounted on her bicycle, Lucy scarcely looked like a woman at all. More of a dark, scarcely-knowable, metaphysical object.

But, when Pitar wore his own helmet, he was as anonymous and mysterious as she. So, faceless and shameless, they rode together, tires crunching subtly, on the park’s long grey cinder-path.

“Mr. Peretz, you looked very thoughtful, sitting there in your sandbox.”

“Yes,” said Pitar, forbearing to nod, due to the bulk of his helmet.

“What were you thinking?”

A deadly female question. Pitar found a tactful parry. “Look here, I have created a new bicycle. See, I am riding it now.”

“Yes, I saw that you printed a new bicycle, and it’s more advanced now, isn’t it? What happened to your nice old bicycle? You rode that one so gallantly!”

“I gave that machine to a friend,” said Pitar. “I gave it to Mr. Giorgio Harold DeVenet.”

His wife’s front wheel wobbled suddenly. “What? To him? How? Why? He beat you in a duel!”

“It’s true that Mr. DeVenet is a duellist. And it’s true that I lost that duel. But that was eight years ago, and there’s no reason I can’t be polite.”

“Why did you do that?”

Pitar said nothing.

“Why did you do it? You had some reason for doing that. You should tell me that. He insulted me; I should know this.”

“Let’s just ride,” Pitar suggested.

Pitar had given the gift to the duellist, because he’d known that there would be trouble about the bicycles. This radical innovation – bicycling – it did damage the institution of purdah. Maybe it did not violate the letter of propriety, but it certainly damaged the spirit.

Pitar had been confronted on that issue; politely. So Pitar had, just as politely, referred that matter of honour to Mr. Giorgio Harold DeVenet, also the possessor of a bicycle.

Mr. DeVenet, a brawny and athletic man, was delighted with his new bicycle. As he scorched past mere pedestrians, pedalling in a fury, Mr. DeVenet’s strength and speed were publicly displayed to fine effect.

Skeptics had questioned Mr. DeVenet’s affection for bicycles. He had promptly forced them to retract their assertions and apologise.

In this fashion, the matter of bicycles was settled.

Mr. DeVenet was not so punctilious, however, that he had escaped being seen in the flirtatious, bicycling company of the notorious Widow De Schubert. She was the type who rode through life without a helmet. The widow’s late husband, outmatched and sorely lacking in tact, had already fallen on the field of honour.

To own a bicycle was not the same as understanding its proper use. At the rate that matters progressed these days, it wouldn’t be long before Mr. DeVenet joined the other victims of the Widow De Schubert. The duellist could batter any number of bicycle skeptics, but to defeat a woman’s wiles was far beyond his simplicity.

Men who lived by the club fell by the club, a trouble-story far older than this world. Pitar was at peace with these difficult facts of life. The notorious Widow De Schubert was one his wife’s best-trusted friends – but he did not inquire into that tangled matter. Certain things between men and women were best left unspoken.

His wife lifted her visor by a thumb’s width, so as to be better heard. “Mr. Peretz, I do enjoy these new outings that we have together nowadays. You have given me another gift that I long desired. For that, I am grateful to you. You are a good husband.”

“Thank you very much for that kindly remark, Mrs. Peretz. That’s very gratifying.”

“Are you also pleased by our situation today?”

Given the praise he had just received, Pitar ventured a candid response. “Although modernity has some clear advantages,” he told her, “I can’t say it’s entirely easy. In that very modest bicycle garb, I cannot see your face. In fact, I can’t see anything of you at all. You are a deep mystery.”

“Beneath this black garment, sir, I wear nothing but my beautiful, golden mangalsutra. I feel so free nowadays. Freer than I have ever felt as a modern woman.”

Pitar pondered this provocative remark. It had emotional layers and textures closed to mere men. “That’s an interesting data-point, there.”

“Mr. Peretz, although it was not our own will that united us,” Lucy said, rolling boldly on, “I feel that marriage is an important exploration of a woman’s emotional phase-space. Someday, we two – separated, of course – will look back on these years with satisfaction. You in your way, and me in mine, as that must be. Nevertheless, we will have accomplished a crucial joint success.”

“You’re full of compliments this afternoon, Mrs. Peretz! I’m glad you’re in such a good mood!”

“This is not a question of my so-called moods!” his wife told him. “I am trying to explain to you that, now that we possess bicycles, modernity is achieved. It’s time that I faced futurity, and to do what futurity requires from me, I will need your help. It’s time we built another child.”

“Since honour requires that of me as well, Mrs. Peretz, I can only concur.”

“Let’s build a daughter, this time.”

“A daughter would be just and fair.”

“Good. Then, that’s all settled. These are good times. A good day to you, sir.” She bent to heave at her whirring pedals, and she rapidly wheeled away.