Peter Hamilton - Pandora's Star

“Please sit down.” Leonard gestured to a spindly antique seat in front of the desk. “Matilda! Matilda, we have a guest. Would you like some tea? Or coffee? I’m afraid I don’t have any Commonwealth brands. I do have some passable sherry.” He looked around as if he were in a strange room until he saw an old grandfather clock. “Or maybe it’s too early?”

“Tea will be fine, thank you.”

A girl came through the door.

“This is Matilda,” Leonard said. The adoration in his voice was almost embarrassing to hear. His face had taken on a dreamy quality as he smiled at her.

Paula, who was used to the sequenced and modified women of the Commonwealth, was surprised by how beautiful Matilda was. She was in her early twenties, with delicate cheekbones that still managed to give her strong features complemented by wide ice-blue eyes that allowed her an unnervingly piercing stare. Her hair was the fairest blond, and she’d let it grow very long, right now it was gathered into a single braid that fell all the way along her spine to the top of her narrow hips. She was also tall, with long legs whose perfect shape was produced by muscles that any dancer would envy. Paula could see that easily; all Matilda wore was a small pair of red bikini bottoms and a cutoff white T-shirt. Her skin had a rich healthy tan.

When Paula looked out of the open French doors again, she saw the towels in the garden where the two of them must have been sunbathing.

“I’d like you to meet Paula Myo, our very distinguished guest from the Commonwealth,” Leonard said.

“Hi,” Matilda said. “What can I get you?”

“Just some tea, thank you,” Paula said.

“Sure.” Her smile was guileless. Paula found herself smiling back.

“Isn’t she lovely?” Leonard asked when the girl had left. He was as shy and eager as a teenager who’d unexpectedly found himself dating the prom queen. “I’m going to ask her to marry me. I think. There’s nothing I want more, but… I’m a little bit older than her. Not that she’s ever said anything about that.”

“Don’t wait too long,” Paula said. “There’ll be another hundred men wanting to ask the same question if you don’t. And she’s where she wants to be. That ought to tell you something.”

“Yes, oh yes, you’re quite right.” He caught himself and sighed. “I’m sorry. I’m not supposed to be asking you for advice.”

“It’s okay. I’ve had a lot more experience with these kinds of things. And I’m used to seeing age differences over a century or more. Love normally wins out.”

“Yes, yes of course. I must say this is something of a shock having you come to me. That’s why I’m not handling this well. Your letters to my great-grandfather are around here somewhere.” He waved a hand at the library’s piles. “I read them when I took over from my father. You had just qualified to be some kind of detective in the Commonwealth government.”

Paula had forgotten the letters she’d written. At first they’d been a welcome contact with the one person in the galaxy who seemed to understand her; then when her insecurities had slowly abated she wrote out of politeness. Eventually of course, her job took up so much of her time… It was a very tired excuse. She should have realized Alexis would have kept the letters, it had been a very intense affair during the short time it lasted. “Yes, I qualified as an Investigator. I’ve been successful, too. No false modesty.”

He smiled in that proud way that stirred up a few too many old memories. “Of course you succeeded. You’d be the best they ever had. Not that they’d ever admit that.”

“I have your great-grandfather to thank. He was the one who told me to go. He knew that I wouldn’t be happy here, not after being exposed to so much of the Commonwealth.”

“I’d dispute that; but I’m not him, and you’ve obviously flourished. I have to ask, and I’m sorry if this is intrusive, but do you ever have any doubts about rejuvenation, you’ve obviously been through the process several times. I think you were a teenager when you left Huxley’s Haven.”

“No, no doubts. Not ever. There is so much crime out there.”

“And nobody else can do the job.”

She pulled a face. He was very similar to Alexis. “A few might manage,” she admitted.

“I’m asking because rejuvenation is the one thing that is debated endlessly by my caste. We simply cannot decide if we should adopt it here.”

“I’d say it was contrary to your whole ethos. This society was formed so people could live their lives and be content. A great deal of that contentment comes from a natural cycle which lies undisturbed, and was never sequenced in by the Foundation. They just gave you the ability to enjoy what was available within a relatively simple framework—at least compared to majority Commonwealth culture. There will always be a job for you whoever you are, a job, or purpose that you will enjoy, and you will be rewarded financially by it no more or no less than anyone else. If you introduce rejuvenation you will start to expand beyond the rate sustainable by your current economy. And your current technoeconomy is the only one suitable for fixed trait castes. The best the Foundation could sequence in was behavior suitable for a particular profession, along with a few extras like dexterity for doctors. But you simply can’t produce dedicated fusion techs or microbiologists, those kinds of professions have too many requirements, there’s no single recognizable aptitude. To support a more modern economy you’d have to despecialize the traits to the point where they’d effectively be dissolved. You’d wind up with normal humans living in an economy that was ideologically driven rather than needs related. There’d be nothing to stop them going and getting a better-paid job on another planet, especially after a couple of centuries of going in to work in the same office.”

“Goodness me, and I thought freethinkers such as myself were the only ones who could put together solid logical arguments.”

Matilda returned with a tray carrying mugs of tea. “Don’t let him distract you,” she said as she gave Paula her mug. “He’s a very bad freethinker. He always asks questions, he never answers them.”

“To think about things, I have to know about them first.”

Matilda gave Paula a told-you-so shrug as she gave Leonard his mug.

“What do you do?” Paula asked.

“I’m a nurse. I work at the maternity ward of the local hospital. I like children.” She gave Leonard a meaningful glance. He blushed.

Paula wanted to snap at him: For God’s sake ask her. There was way too much recycled history in this house. A static, timeless society was one thing, but you could take it to extremes. At the time, over a century and a half ago, she’d been younger than Matilda, while Alexis had been older than Leonard. It had broken Alexis’s heart having her leave, and he’d been the one who pushed her out knowing it was the only way for her to have a future. Although if she could have been happy anywhere on Huxley’s Haven it would have been here with him. That was the trouble with freethinkers, they had overactive imaginations that made them uncertain. Maybe that’s why they’re always men, the Foundation just amplified their natural inability to make a commitment.

Matilda looked from her lover to Paula. “I’m going to leave you two alone to talk. Let me know if you need anything else.” She kissed Leonard on the forehead, and went back out into the garden. As she slipped out of her scraps of clothing to lie on the towel, Paula had a memory flash of Mellanie and Morton, a couple she could really do with forgetting about.

“Aren’t you the perfect counter to your own argument, though?” Leonard said.