“I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and the wording is so imprecise that it’s not even a promise, in any real sense. I’m supposed to keep you from getting an unrealistically high opinion of yourself—but if, say, I happen to believe that you’re the coolest person I know, then I’m unlikely to think you’re overestimating your own coolness. It’s dependent on my own opinion, plus my estimation of what your opinion of yourself is. That’s a whole bunch of subjective criteria, right there. Add to that the fact that I only said I would do my best, which is yet another subjective judgment. If I made it my life’s work to break that promise, I’m not sure I could find a way.”

“Huh.” And now Patricia felt dumb, so Laurence had succeeded in crushing her ego after all. She should have seen that Kawashima was just creating one of his intentionally flimsy traps, where the real trap is that you fool yourself into believing the snare to be robust. But she also felt better—and then the part where Laurence sort of hinted that he thought she was the coolest person he’d ever met sank in as well, even if it was just a rhetorical supposition.

“And you know these people way better than I do,” Laurence said, “but it strikes me that this thing about Aggrandizement is a way of controlling you. They don’t want you to use your power, except for however they tell you to.”

At last, the rain stopped and Patricia had dried out except for her shoes. They headed for two separate bus stops, although their route coincided for four blocks. They hugged goodbye. When Patricia got home she gazed at her Caddy while brushing her teeth, like a blank mirror, and it filled her in on everything she’d missed. Before she sank into her bed, she tossed the Caddy back in her shoulder bag.

Chapter 21

21

SOMETIMES LAURENCE ZONED out and imagined walking on another Earth-like planet. The weird gravity. The different mix of oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen in the air. Types of life that might defy our definitions of “plant” or “animal.” More than one moon, maybe more than one sun. His heart could burst, just with the newness of it: digging bare feet into soil that no human toes had ploughed, under a brazen sky that proclaimed all the things we had thought our limits were merely our prejudices. And then he snapped back, to the reality that his team was stuck: no closer to opening up the final frontier than a year earlier.

He would come out of his reverie to find another e-mail from Milton, who wanted progress reports that included actual progress. These e-mails contained phrases like “Humanity strides along a widening precipice.” Some days, Laurence struggled to motivate himself to go in to work, and once there, he couldn’t bring himself to leave.