There was no theatre, she thought. We are just ordinary, living people in extraordinary circumstances.
I asked the ship’s doctor about her last job. It turned out she’s a dietician, a gerontologist, and a genetic engineer, and she’d recently been perfecting the vaccine for that very virus. I kept quiet about “The Yoke” for now. That evening I put her in a car and asked for her parents’ address.…
I never take home what I work with: not “The Yoke,” not “Beastmaker,” not any other concoction from our department. My visit to the “parents” was purely theatrical. And he saw through it in five minutes. Clever. And he said the word “theatre” in a way that hurt. There is no theatre.…
I was called in to play a parent, with half an hour to prepare. He greeted me as “Vladimir Vladimirovich”: either totally uninformed or a very good actor. He asked about hobbies, pets, and old boyfriends. Then he asked for childhood photos, and I knew we’d been caught. Still, I gave an honest character reference: dietician, trainer, pharmacist, ex-Special Forces intelligence, spits, whistles, and curses with artistry.…
She tested him, and he tested her. Now they know too much about each other to be mere partners and too little to be friends. On the TV series the familiar music will play again, and a maternity-ward scene will show a tiny baby. And the countdown to launch will be measured in days.
Read the complete story in “Putin in Space.” This page contains only a short excerpt; the book has the rest.
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