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Barbra and Ari. I have the full permission of Y-S to take Ari with me. Unless you can get clearance to Pacifica, you’ll have to wait till we return to earth at the end of our tour of duty. The standard two years. Josh Rogovin out.”
    She sat stunned. Then she ran upstairs to Ari’s room. It was stripped. Y-S must have let Josh move Ari’s little bed, his play desk, his toys, his koala robot. She ran through the house, calling hopelessly, futilely. Then she flung herself at the terminal and replayed Josh’s message.
    “You really took revenge on me. You really did,” she said to his face frozen on the screen at message’s end. She went on sitting there while the room darkened. Lights here would not turn on unless she requested it, and she made no request. How dingy and small the house felt around her, devoid of any traces of their marriage beyond wear and tear on the furniture, anoccasional stain not yet cleared from the wall. Ari was gone. He was not even on earth.
    It all came down to the simple fact that Josh’s skills were more valuable to Y-S than hers. They had been trying to transfer plasma state physicists to Pacifica Platform, but according to the rights of Y-S citizens, no one could be relocated off-earth without consent. Everyone suspected that there was more hard radiation on Pacifica than the multi was letting on. Josh had never been interested in working in space. Life on a platform was claustrophobia fully realized. Josh had no right to take Ari to spend his childhood in such a place. He had done it to punish her. There was nothing, absolutely nothing she could do.
    She hated Y-S. Her boss had not fought for her hard enough. She had been sacrificed to the need of the multi for scientists willing to spend two years in a large tin can. Two years. The tears slipped down her face. She did not want to cry in this abandoned house that had witnessed the last phase of her stupid misbegotten marriage. She blew her nose hard and went home.
    For what it was worth, she logged a formal protest to Y-S. Then quite openly she sent a message to Avram. She did not speak to him but sent it through the Net, the public information and communication utility that served the entire world. She told him she would accept the position in his lab. As soon as she could clean up her affairs here, she would be with him and go to work at once. She had squandered her accumulated credit on legal battles.
    She had no idea why Avram wanted her to work with him, but a temporary job in Tikva would give her time to think which way to jump, time to negotiate with multis, time to heal. It would be a pleasure to be home again, where Malkah would light the Sabbath candles and they would say the ancient blessings, where she would be free to be who she was. How grim to be returning torn from her child, whom she had so often imagined bringing to Tikva. She anticipated no trouble in resigning. Had Y-S wanted to keep her services, they would have ruled she might share custody of Ari. Had they wanted her as badly as they wanted a plasma physicist on Pacifica, she would have sole custody. Company justice. She was going home.

THREE

Malkah Tells Yod a Bedtime Story
    Once upon a time is how stories begin. Half artist, half scientist, I know that much. A mother and a grandmother, I have been telling stories for fifty years. As the children grow, so do the tales, from line drawings in motion to the full range of colors and shadings, layered thickly as plaster or blood. Some moral tales belong to kindergarten, the age of being afraid of the dark, the age of venturing from the house alone for a short distance, admonitory fables in primary crayons. But other tales are always with us. We tell them to ourselves in midlife and in old age, different each time, accreting as stalactites press toward earth, heavier with each drop and its burden of secret dissolved rock and minerals, the many salts of the planet.
    Thus, dear Yod, the story I am about to leave you in