“And what do you think?” Anna asked.
Nami shook her head and scooped up a last spoonful of almost-beans. “It’s dumb to break it up like that,” she said around her food. “Like it’s one thing or it’s something else. That’s not how it ever is. It’s always that there’s somebody who does whatever it is. You know, conquers Europe or decides that it’s a great idea to line aqueducts with lead or figures out how to coordinate radio frequencies. You never have one without the other. It’s like nature versus nurture. When do you ever see one without the other?”
“That’s a good point,” Anna said. “So how does the project work?”
Nami rolled her eyes. Oh God, they were in eye-rolli
ng ages now. It seemed so recent that her little girl had been free of contempt. “It isn’t like that.”
“What isn’t like what?”
“Mother. Saladin isn’t my boyfriend. His parents died in Cairo, and he’s here with his aunt and uncle. He really needs friends, and anyway Liliana likes him, so even if I did, I wouldn’t. We have to be careful. We’re spending our whole lives together, so we need to be really gentle. If we mess it up, it’s not like we can just change schools.”
“Oh,” Anna said. “Is that something you talk about at school?”
The eye-roll again. Two eye-rolls in one night. “That was you, Mom. You’re always saying that.”
“I guess I am,” Anna agreed.
After they were done, Nami took their bowls and spoons and drinking bulbs back to the galley for them, an echo of the way she used to clean up after dinner back at home. When that had been home. Then she was off to study with Liliana and, for all Anna knew, Saladin as well. Nono took her turn being alone in the room. Anna made her way toward the lift and deck two for the Humanist Society, her hands touching the walls at either side of the corridor as if to steady her. It is necessary to renounce a freedom that does not exist, she thought, and to recognize a dependence of which we are not conscious. And it was true, as far as it went.
But it was also a mistake to lose sight of all the individual lives and choices and flashes of pure dumb luck that brought humanity as far as they’d come. History, she thought, was perhaps better considered as a great improvisation. A thinking-through of some immense, generations-long thought. Or daydream.
The problem, of course, with the idea of nature versus nurture was that it posed a choice between determinisms. That was something Nami seemed to grasp almost instinctively, but Anna had to remind herself of it. Maybe history was the same way. Theories of how things had to have happened the way they did only because, looking back, they’d happened that way.
Tomás Myers, a short, thick-set man in a formal white shirt, held the lift for her, and she trotted to it so as not to seem ungrateful. It lurched a little as it rose.
“Going to the Humanist meeting?” he said.
“Once more into the breach.” She smiled back.
As they rose, she felt the first inklings of the week’s sermon starting to fall into place. It revolved, she thought, around Tolstoy’s idea of an invisible dependence and the choice they’d all made to come to the Abbey, and Nami saying, We’re spending our whole lives together, so we need to be really gentle.
Because that was always true. The Abbey and Eudoxia were small enough it became impossible to ignore it, but even among the teeming billions of Earth, they were spending their lives together. They needed to be gentle. And understanding. And careful. It had been true in the depths of history, and at the height of Earth’s power, and it would still be true now that they were scattering to the more than a thousand new suns.
Maybe, if they could find a way to be gentle, the stars would be better off with them.