She was certainly unconventional, but she was magnificentlyunconventional, and I loved her for it. The fact that she funded much of the research I put into the second part of my History, and funded it lavishly, did not figure in my calculations at all. I would have married her if she had been as poor as I was—although she, admittedly, would not have married me had those been our circumstances.

I found in Sharane a precious wildness that was unfailingly amusing in spite of the fact that it wasn’t truly spontaneous. Her attempts to put herself imaginatively in touch with the past— literallyto stand in the shoes of long-gone members of the Old Human Race—had a very casual attitude to matters of accuracy and authenticity, but they were bold and exhilarating. For a while, at least, I was glad occasionally to be a part of them, and when I was content to remain on the sidelines I enjoyed the spectacle just as much.

From her point of view, I suppose I was useful in two ways. On the one hand, I was a font of information and inspiration, offering her a constant flow of new perspectives. Thanks to me, she was able to revisit old exploits with a new eye, so that she could remake them in interesting ways. On the other hand, I provided a kind of existential anchorage whose solidity and mundanity prevented her from losing herself in the flights of her imagination. Neither of those roles was infinitely extendable, but they were valuable while they lasted, and she loved me for the style as well as the efficiency of the manner in which I fulfilled them.

It would have been convenient if we had both come to the end of our infatuation at exactly the same time, but even the best pair-bonds rarely split as neatly and as gently as that. As things turned out, I was the one who suffered the disappointment of losing a love that I still felt very keenly, after a mere twenty years of acquaintance and eighteen of formal marriage.

Sharane and I talked for a while, as even young married people do, about the possibility of recruiting half a dozen more partners so that we might apply to raise a child. It would not have been impossible, or even particularly unusual, given that the Decimation had made licenses much more freely available. We settled, however, for filing our deposits in the local gamete bank with a polite recommendation that some future group of co-parents more than a thousand years hence might consider them appropriate for combination. It was the romantic option—and when we split up, neither of us hated the other enough to rescind the recommendation.

What eventually drove us apart was, I suppose, the same thing that had brought us together. The opposite tendencies of our characters fused for a while into a healthy whole, which seemed greater than the sum of its parts—but the robust tautness of the combination eventually decayed into stress and strain.

“You’re too serious,” Sharane complained, as the breaking point approached, echoing Mama Eulalie’s anxieties about my suitability for alliance with such a mercurial creature. “You work too hard, and you’re too hung up on details. Historical research should be a joyful voyage of discovery, not an obsession.”

“I’m not against joy,” I replied, a trifle defensively and more than a trifle resentfully, “but I’m a serious historian. Unlike you, I have to discriminate between discovery and invention.”

“All history is fantasy,” she quoted at me. “Truth is what you can get away with.”

“The fact that all history is fantasy doesn’t mean you can just make it up”I insisted. “It means that even at its most accurate and authoritative, history has an irreducible element of creativity and imagination. Julius Ngomi might have taken that as a license to propagandize, but I’m a real historian. I have to search for the truth that stands up to skepticism and doesn’t simply fold up into a pack of feeble pretenses.”

“You’re such a pedant”she riposted, exasperatedly. “You go on and on about farming being a reluctant and degrading response to ecological disaster, but you’re a farmer through and through. Most people think backbreaking labor is a thoroughly good thing—motor of progress and all that—but you know perfectly well that people were a lot better off when they hunted and gathered for six or seven hours a week and spent the rest of their time sitting under the acacia tree telling one another tall stories. You know it, but you don’t doit. That’s not merely stupid, Morty, it’s perverse”

I tried to resist, but her eyes were flashing.

“To see hard work for what it really is and then to devote your life to it anyway is protracted suicide,” she went on. “Unless the New Human Race can rediscover the delights of play and throw away its whips and spurs we’ll never be able to adapt to emortality. I’ll say one thing for your late Mama Meta: at least she knew that the work ethic belonged in outer space. Okay, so we had to rebuild after the tidal waves—but we’ve done that now, thanks to your little friend’s shamirs. Now, it’s time to get back to the Garden, to begin the Golden Age again. Homo faberis essentially a spacefaring species; those of us who are keeping our legs should accept that we’re Homo ludens.”

“I’m not sure about that,” I countered, reassuming my usual palliative tone. “I was never happy about those war-addicted fools hijacking the label Homo sapiens.We’re the ones who have the opportunity to be true sapients, and I think we ought to take it. Play is great, but it can’t be the be-all and end-all of emortal existence. Those legs that the fabers are discarding are the price we pay for the luxury of keeping our feet on the ground.”

“You think I need youto keep my feet on the ground,” Sharane came back, “but I don’t. I need somebody who doesn’t think that keeping our feet on the ground is a luxury.”

“Touché,” I conceded. “But…”

I knew that the break between us had been completed and rendered irreparable when she wouldn’t even hear my rebuttal. “I’ve been weighed down long enough,” she said, callously. “I need to soar for a while, to spread my wings. You’re holding me back, Morty.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

My first divorce had come about because a cruel accident had ripped apart the delicate fabric of my life, but my second—or so it seemed to me—was itself a horrid rent that shredded my very being. It seemed so vilely unnecessary, so achingly unreasonable, so treasonously uncaused. It hurt.

I hope that I tried with all my might not to blame Sharane, but how could I avoid it? And how could she not resent my overt and covert accusations, my veiled and naked resentments? Once the break became irrevocable, the relationship was rapidly poisoned.

“Your problem, Mortimer,” Sharane said to me, when her brief lachrymose phase had given way to incandescent anger, “is that you’re a deeply morbid man. There’s a special fear in you: an altogether exceptional horror that feeds upon your spirit day and night and makes you grotesquely vulnerable to occurrences that normal people can take in their stride, and which ill befit a self-styled Epicurean. If you want my advice, you should abandon that history you’re writing and devote yourself to something much brighter and more vigorous.” She knew, of course, that the last thing I wanted at that particular moment was her advice.

“Death is my life,” I informed her, speaking metaphorically, and not entirely without irony. “It always will be, until and including the end.”

I remember saying that. The rest is vague, and I’ve had to consult objective records in order to put the quotes in place, but I really do remembersaying exactly those words.

I won’t say that Sharane and I had been uniquely happy while we were together, but I had come to depend on her closeness and her affection, and the asperity of our last few conversations couldn’t cancel that dependency. The day that I found myself alone again in a capstack apartment in Alexandria, virtually identical to the one I had formerly occupied, seemed to me to be the darkest of my life so far—far darker in its mute and empty desolation than the feverish day when Emily Marchant and I had been trapped in the wreck of the Genesis.It didn’t mark me as deeply or as permanently—how could it?—but it upset me badly enough to make it difficult for me to work.