We think now that we knew the why for all these things once upon a time at the beginning but then the things ensued and the reason got left. At the starting gate? asks the interrogator with his idiomatic pedantry from the next room knowing no more about the future than we except fingering his well-wired (solid-state import) Persuasion Button which inclines us to give not a double answer to one question yet neither one to two—but . . . one to one, that’s it! Yet we’ve got such a staff working on this we can forget responsibility almost, there’s such a wealth of history and we are making it, and by all continually processing ourselves into one we are transcending the old outmoded individual responsibility thus not passing buck but saving it. We wanted to tell our friends that we were pregnant.

O.K., I got the point: I am only the second person you’ve told these things to. So who was the first, if it wasn’t your wife? (It’s good you had some practice!)

A journalist named Mayga Rojas Rodriguez.

The one who died, the Chilean.

I don’t know that she was mainly a journalist. She lobbied for liberal politics back home and she had some big friends who weren’t friends, and she didn’t talk about all that.

You cared about her. But go on, what kind of settlements were they? They sound quite real, routine like they’re based on mature technology.

I wouldn’t know. Yes, I guess so.

Maybe not planned out with all these sophisticated alternatives we can think about now, but when you were fourteen or fifteen the agriculture and the torus-shell stress stuff wasn’t even in Galaxy I bet.

I wouldn’t know.

I know.

I simply saw a giant silver doughnut with spokes.

You keep saying you don’t know, Jimmy. But thirteen, fourteen? that was when these daydreams began.

Who knows where they came from.

I couldn’t care less about that; but what kind of settlements were these Earth-Moon stations?

My father would say, Don’t say "kind of."

To you?

I recall him saying it to my mother, too. I mean, he was harmless, he had a weekly quota of discomfort he had to absorb from us, from my mother’s irony and so forth. But he would say, Don’t even say the noun kind by itself, because it’s always more than you honestly mean.

Now, torus shape you said.

I didn’t know the name then.

It’s been arrived-at as the best shape for the space stations. I mean mathematically. And it gives you horizons and it gives you the option of building up from small units which are more fun, instead of macro—

I don’t know if that’s true of toruses alone.

I’m sure you don’t. Your mind sneaks out, Jim.

In 1945 I didn’t know any math. I had a geometry teacher who stood up in front of the board and looked like he had lost his next-to-last friend. He used to go in to New York to the opera and would tell us about it when he walked into class in the morning with gray-green moons under his eyes.

So the doughnut came from your mother’s kitchen.

God no—it might as well have come from my wife’s.

Joy didn’t do much cooking?

No, she did it all. All except doughnuts, but that’s asking a lot. And I never asked her.

You wouldn’t dream of it.

Homemade doughnuts were out of fashion. Pop-up waffles were what validated Flick and Andrew’s Weltanschauung hold the italics. But you were making a point. I got it. But of course Joy and I talked about dreams. Like any other couple.

You are funny.

Apparently, with you.

But you can’t kid me: you didn’t dream.

Didn’t read books either, to speak of.

But you did.

You make me say funny things.

So the truth comes out: you and Joy swapped dreams, and you did dream, all those years.

Not in the least. These were dreams that all came via her.

You make her sound like they didn’t come all from her.

It’s where they get to that matters.

Aren’t you a smug old thinker, really.

Now, you’re sounding like a slinky vulnerable intellectual lady I met actually in Bloomsbury when I was writing a piece on English breakthroughs in waste-disposal.

I can see why your marriage didn’t last.

No, I don’t think you can.

Well, help me.

Oh, it lasted. It would have lasted longer if I had said these things to Joy instead of you.

I’d rather go back to L5 and check out the future from your daydreams and forget where they came from.

I’d just as soon retreat to us.

No, you can’t do that. You said "via," and you have to say what that means.

Some came through her from her occasional paramour, a man named Wagner, a dog I once almost cured of his habits.

Through her from him?

Some dreams she had and some he had. And they would tell them to each other, according to her. It was like her going back into her family history for the whole last year we were married, a glut of family lore, she read some old letters that had been stuck inside her father’s piano and she found she had some close relations she didn’t even know about and it was big drama for several months and took her mind off—

What about her and Wagner and their dreams?

I reckon some were made up.

Do you?

It was the use they were put to.

They were telling each other things through these dreams?

How did you know?

Maybe the gods were communicating with them.

Let’s get back to us.

Or communicating with each other.

You’re some scientist.

Was it raining upward at the pole?

I myself have no memory of that and cannot be made to confess to ever having believed it. Not even at the South Pole does it rain upward.

Amy told me—

Oh yes, you said you knew her.

—that in your grandmother’s day, when I gather she claimed to have been pursued all the way across the continent by an Indian you never told me about, they had winds that blew straight up from the ground; so why not rain?

I do recall an overhead mirror in an indoor pool someone took us to in New York once. I went off the high board and thought what if I spring high enough to reach the pool in the ceiling, there were these huge oblong panes of tarnished mirror-glass. Later I entertained some daydream of very-low-gravity swimming pools.

In your space doughnut?

What’s more it can’t be held against me.

You spoke to me of Nansen, the Norwegian polar explorer, one night at Cape Kennedy.