“Nothing wrong with that,” Dan said. It’s what he’d wanted in the first place.

“But he doesn’t want me to use the sperm from you guys. The gamete splice isn’t an exact science, and we’d probably wind up with another … another death.”

“So who will be the lucky guy?” His voice had the calm precision she heard at Cabinet meetings when he was trying not to show anger.

“I thought about it. There are thousands of candidates, of course. Maybe even one all four of us could agree on. Finally I decided on myself.”

“Parthenogenesis,” Evy said. Dan repeated the word with a question mark.

“They take one of my ova and put a false moustache on it, or a false tail, so it looks like a sperm, and whack it into another, unsuspecting, ovum. Mitosis begins. It’s a little more complicated than that, actually.” O’Hara leaned back. “And of course then I could have the dividing cells implanted, try try again. Carlucci says there’s a good chance for another miscarriage. No thanks. I’ll go for the Petri dish.”

“Does it take the regular nine months, ex utero?” Dan asked.

Evy shook her head. “Five, six, seven; depends.”

“I wonder how we’ll get along, after she grows up. Being exact genetic duplicates.”

“Twins tend to be close,” Evy said. “They’re usually about the same age, though.”

“I hadn’t thought of it that way.” O’Hara smiled but wiped both eyes. “A twin sister thirty-six years younger than me.” She stood up abruptly. “You know, I really feel awful.”

Both Dan and Evy started to rise. “Let me—”

“No. I’ll be all right.” She turned and half ran out of the dining room.

Dan and Evy looked at each other. “I suppose she will be,” she said. “Just too many things happening all at once.”

“Damn right,” he whispered. “Her and you and me and everybody.” He drained his wine and slid O’Hara’s cup over.

O’Hara spent a few minutes sitting in a stall at the nearest toilet, until she was sure dinner would stay put. Then she went down to the humid darkness of the ag level and walked a maze of exactly this many steps and turns right and left, which she’d memorized in the daytime. The path led to a bench beside a tank of herbs, where you could sit blindly bathed in fragrances of basil and oregano, thyme and marjoram. She filled her lungs over and over, until she saw blue blotches and sparkles in the darkness. Then she gave herself a quiet orgasm, remembering Jeff’s largeness, remembering New Orleans.