Miranda

Floordusk has come at a reasonable hour, this time. It has been four floordays since the Long One—as they’ve started calling it—and none of those subsequent floordays have been anywhere near as distorted. But they’ve still been off. One floorday only lasted six hours. One floornight was eighteen, and they all slept it through like babies, until the computer woke them up.

Miranda is slumped on her big couch, inattentively watching pseudo-medieval soldiers duke it out on TV. She’s seen this episode before, but the TV stores that came down in the final shipment have run out. They ended on a cliffhanger, and now no one will ever find out what was going to happen. No great loss, for Miranda anyway: she’d never particularly liked this show, and watched it mostly for solidarity with her crew, among whom it was quite popular.

Miranda has tried to do other things for recreation, but she simply can’t focus on, say, a book: her thoughts immediately drift. Better to leave the TV on, looping through this turgid fantasy again and again, this thing which goes ever on whether she is paying attention or not. Occasionally something new catches her eye—some glint in an actor’s eye, some ingenuity of set design only visible in one shot—and that’ll send her into a brief, blissful reverie before her mind returns to baseline.

Miranda really does not know what she is for, anymore. There are no heteropneums here to name. She’s managed to get her office in order—it’s amazing how efficiently one can work when there is no actual, important work that needs doing—and she has actually run out of paperwork to distract herself with. Martin seems to know what he’s doing, but god only knows what that is. And she keeps coming back to his last words: “Enjoy Maria while you can.” What could that have meant? “While you can” implies an end, but what is to change? Down here nothing changes anymore, except for the lengths of the days and nights. Not to mention that the predatory connotations of “enjoy” rankle.

Had she been enjoying Maria? Christ no. She had seen Maria in the cafeteria the floorday after the Long One—had seen her eating alone in the cafeteria, and had chosen to eat with her—and the interaction was many things, but enjoyable was not one of them. Asked how she had been feeling, what she had been doing, Maria was vague and evasive. There was some light in her eyes, something new, that Miranda didn’t like, although she couldn’t put her finger on why.

Maria had changed. There was a frayed, furious urgency to her, but she refused to explain it. She was hiding something from Miranda, and Miranda had no place or person to turn to in order to help her understand.

Miranda wished from time to time that she at least had a therapist to work these things out with, but EPRN rules had dictated that there would be no psychiatric professionals on the Sphere. Medication, if needed in the course of duty, was doled out at her, Miranda’s, wise if untrained discretion (which is how she picked up her Xanax and Valium habit). Something about psychiatric intervention having “unpredictable effects on the human pneuma that cannot be subjected to EPRN oversight.” Which makes a kind of sense, Miranda thinks—and is also deeply disturbing.

Miranda is thinking over whether to pour herself a drink—as if that’ll help, really now—when the doorbell rings. Now there is something new: Miranda’s quarters are not a popular place at floornight. Who could it be?

It’s Hermes Cept. He greets her, his voice wavering in an uncharacteristic way. He apologizes for “disturbing her” at this hour. Miranda laughs.

“It’s not like we can avoid being disturbed, what with these insane floordays we’ve been having.”

Cept nods curtly. He pauses in the doorway for a few beats, and then says, pronouncing the words slowly and deliberately as if in a foreign tongue:

“Can I come in? There is something I want to talk to you about?”

“Be my guest.” Miranda gestures to her couch, and Hermes stumbles over to it and sits.

“Miranda, I . . .” he begins. Several beats.

“Yes, Hermes?”

“Can you . . . can you call me ‘Herm’ from now on?”

Miranda can’t help smirking slightly at this bizarre request. Of all the things Hermes Cept, godfather of pneumatech, might want to talk with her about—he’s somehow decided he has something against the syllable “-es” now? What is going on here?

“Sure,” she says, having forcibly restrained her smirk. “Whatever you wish, Herm.”

Hermes—Herm—looks pleased, which is a rare sight. He begins to speak quickly now, as though “Herm” were some password that had unlocked his thoughts.

“It is my—my belief—that we are not meant to be in this place. It is a grave error, a sin, that we were brought here.” He looks closely at her. “You feel it too? That everything has been wrong since the reintegration?”

Miranda can’t deny it. “Something’s different, yes. And ‘wrong’ would be as good a way of putting it as any.” She thinks of her clean office, Maria’s evasions.

“I think that our presence here will cause terrible things. Greater and greater sins. This world is a good place; it does not deserve our foul touch.”

Miranda can think of no response to this bit of Cept-speak.

“The child told me—Miranda, she told me, I know now—that in this world I was a woman, a woman named Herm. And Mohammed—he was my brother, and he was named Selm. Herm and Selm.”

Something clicks now. Hermes sees this new world as good and the Sphere as bad, that much is clear. And so news of this world is news of a good thing, a thing he thinks the Sphere will defile. He is making at least a kind of sense.

“I almost thought of giving up. But I want to fight the sin. Fight it to the last. Will you be my ally in that fight, Miranda?”

Miranda has said “yes,” out of social instinct, before she can begin to think about what this strange pact might entail.

Cept smiles. “Miranda, there is one thing you can do to help me, right now. Because if this world is the right world, then I am not Hermes Cept, a man, but Herm, a woman. I am a partisan of this world, and as a partisan, I must don the garb of my true self.”

“Don the garb . . . ?” Miranda is unclear what this is a metaphor for.

It’s not a metaphor. Herm wants to borrow some of her clothes, some of her cosmetics. He—no, she—wants to be a woman, because she feels that her being a woman is the truth, the truth that opposes the great wrongness that both of them feel in their bones.

Living in the Sphere, one gets used to surprises, and Miranda finds herself quickly assimilating this one. Yes, she’s definitely never thought of Hermes Cept as feminine—in fact he’s always seemed a masculine archetype, the curmudgeonly scientific elder, making deep pronouncements in deep tones—but the sense of change that he (she!) is bringing to the table is invigorating. When faced with something that feels wrong in your bones, make changes. Do things. Yes—this feels right.

And what do you know, some of Miranda’s clothes fit Herm just right. They’re about the same height—Herm was no doubt taller in her prime, but having shortened with age, she’s now just Miranda’s height—and Miranda’s figure is more linear than curvy, which is no doubt part of why Herm came to her.

And, as they pull out skirts one by one from Miranda’s closet, as Miranda waits while Herm tries each on in the bathroom—there is a kind of wondrous intimacy to this. Not a sexual or romantic intimacy, not a parental one. But the intimacy of two allies in a very wrong world, pushing back in one concrete way against the wrongness. The world is a vale of falsehoods, and here they strike at one of them together, delicately putting into place the negation sign, the ~, which transforms a falsehood into a truth.

Then the alarm goes off.