even though I didn’t share his beliefs, we had become friends. I would log-stuff my green calendar with his eco-facts so I would be forced to remember the names of his wives, and remember all his many children’s birthdays. Sometimes, I would ask him kindly if he wanted to take a vacation with Janet and me so we could have a joint trip together in Florida. There we could all be USB themselves into an Orlando holiday. When I would ask him about it, he would always say to me, “When my prayer-stick is occupied, but not until all the unused memory has been filled in it. Only then will Allah see that I’ve been faithful, and my work is complete. Chance, I have to use all he has given to me because I consider myself to be very blessed.”
“This one wasn’t…,” said Janet about the length of time it took her to read this year’s book or maybe it was the quality of it. I wasn’t sure, “I don’t know what I was expecting, but this wasn’t the book I wanted.” She had held the book quietly in her lap while she read until she finished it completely, and she hadn’t stopped reading until she had finished it. She would have plenty of time to read this one again if she wanted before it had to be returned to the recycle-librarian.
I had noticed Janet’s new haircut, and I liked it, but it was shorter than I was used to. I couldn’t honestly remember the last time she had gotten a new hair style. I could’ve asked her to get out her Social Contract ID for me if I wanted to remember what her hair looked like at the time when we first had signed our waiver agreement pledge to each other. If I would’ve asked her to get her SCID out for me she would’ve said, ‘Chance, my love, just go over to the photo-frame. You’re so silly sometimes.’ But there was something about holding her picture in my hand, and I always liked the way her SCID fit in it when I looked at it. That is why the two of us looked forward to the Last Book; she had finished hers, and I hadn’t even begun to read mine. In fact, I hadn’t read last year’s book either. Yet I had listened to the author’s notes, and I had skimmed daily reports from the Singularity Literature Scribes, and I had gone with Janet to listen to the Book-Talk Priests to understand all of the book’s deeper meanings that we laymen couldn’t readily understand on our own.
I hadn’t read the Last Book when it had been shipped from the distribution-library. I found I like to leave it as it was when it arrived, new, and I didn’t want to disturb it in any way. I knew reading the yearly book would destroy its newness for me.
Janet had never cared if I read my book, and she knew exactly how many footprints it had cost us, and how many indulgences we would have to pay back for those two copies. She would reread hers again and again until it was time for it to go back to the recycle-librarians. They always looked pleased when they got hers back because it would be worn and frayed. But would it be the last book Janet be allowed to read.
I could tell she wasn’t too happy with this selection, and she secretly hoped that next year would be better when it was time to place our household order again.
“I hope they select something different next year,” she said and after she said that she pulled aside the warm comforter she had brought to the couch with her earlier that evening. Our mandatory thermostat had difficulty making adjustments because it got easily confused after Daylight Savings Time. “I am still cold,” said Janet. I nodded and made a motion from the couch we were sharing together, to get up and get the universal remote so I could make a quick adjustment to the thermostat.
But she said to me, “Don’t you dare…don’t you remember that we are saving footprints for the Day of Solstice? Do you think this will be the last book?”
“It doesn’t seem to be the last. Every year there’s always one more published.”
“But they say it will be the last. One day it will be true.”
“I suppose you’re right. Everything must come to an end.”
I remembered. I knew that we had one more hour of programmed light, and I still hadn’t started reading my copy of the book. I didn’t want to tell myself that the book would remain by my side for a few more days, and eventually I would move it over to the coffee table, and maybe I would move it to my safe hiding place where I kept the rest of the books in my collection. The librarians must have known that I still had them, and for whatever reason they hadn’t wanted to collect back my many overdue volumes.
But I had them. At least I had the last ten years of them, and they hadn’t audited me or asked for any of them back.
I really wanted to read them all, and sometimes I wanted to be a law abiding citizen like my wife and return them when they were due, but for some reason it gave me more satisfaction to keep them for myself and hidden.
When I came back, Janet recited a passage to me of her favorite poem from a previous edition of the book.
You and I has no meaning. The I has vanished
like a drop into a river of honey – Rumi
“You don’t have to speak into it while you use it,” I said to Nestor as I could see him turning the communicator to an old-fashioned setting that many of our generation still like to use. The data flow had been switched off again while he took time trying to talk to his eldest daughter, and I could see that it took him awhile to get the adjustment he wanted on the communicator. I didn’t like to listen when he spoke to his family, but sometimes he does the stupidest things and he often hits the wrong control unless I’m there to help. He’s a theorist and not a guide. When the two of us work together, I take the lead paddle because I’m much better at it, and we have been doing it that way for so long that we don’t ask which one of us is going to direct our kayak on the river anymore.
He had finished talking with his daughter who was a half-a-world away from us, and I waited patiently for him so we could go back to work. I was in the front of the kayak; I turned around as much as I could and held up my two fingers so he could see that we only had a few minutes before the stream in front of us would be re-channeled. He nodded to me that he understood.
I hadn’t seen his daughter in three years, not since Janet and I had gone to Karachi on a rare overseas vacation splurge. I knew she had good marks and she was thinking of attending university. Nestor wanted her to attend the local one, but she wanted to go to England and attend Cambridge at the start of the next year. I could hear her voice and she was talking to her father about abandoning her current school’s Indonesian Tiger Saving Team that she was the captain of. She wanted to join a different team because the other one was going to the jungle islands to do a real tiger habitat survey during the next term.
“Do you know how much that’s going to cost? The carbon footprints in the airline ticket alone…” his tone was as firm as I had seen him ever get with her. Nestor didn’t like to talk about his footprints when I was so close and could listen so easily to his conversation, but I knew that his account balance of footprints was always tight before each Renewal Time, and he made sure his family hung to the last few with a very tight grip before their household account was replenished. Nestor hit the wrong button and the signal had disappeared, he had lost the connection between the two of them.
Nestor got mad at himself, and he finally said, “Sorry, she knows not to call back right away, but when I get home next week, she also knows I’ll give in quite easily to her wishes. I always do. She’ll go to bloody Indonesia if she wants,” said Nestor as he put his goggles back on and we got ready to take the kayak back out into the river again.
When someone beats a rug, the blows are not against the rug, but against the dust in it. -Rumi
I didn’t say anything, he was right she got what she always wanted, and sometimes I wondered what it was like to have a daughter to spoil. My wife and I had not had children. The cost. The waste. The footprints. Nestor and his wife had six so far and sometimes I wondered which one of us had made the right decision. I had the long blade of the kayak’s paddle in my hands, and I was ready to steer us again. I had chosen a life that was integrated and Nestor had chosen a fragmented one. The answer had been absolutely clea
r for Janet and me. We have no children. It was a finite future with a zero outcomes for the two of us. For Nestor, his life was too complicated with all of his wife and children; he could never fathom all of the results with its many cloudy futures.
Janet and I rode the shuttle line that would eventually connect to the longer and larger rail lines of automated cars of our city’s public transportation. Snow had fallen on the city, and it looked clean, white, and new. As we got closer to the downtown district, the snow became dirtier like it had been there since the beginning of time. “Do you think the sun will come out today?” asked Janet. She was sitting in one of the many vacant seats; I was standing next to her holding onto the hand rail even though I didn’t need to.
“The DRTV says there will be a chance for sunshine of twenty-three point six percent today,” said Janet who liked to quote the morning newscast to me. I never watch the DRTV because eventually Janet tells me all the major news stories after each connection-time with her personal broadcast reader. She had been very excited about the colonists at the South Pole who had just been killed by terrorists. Some of the colonists had been executed, and the rest had died while they had tried to fight back. The world’s