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complicated our lives, especially El’s. We agreed we’d be better off without it and tried to remember, from experiences in our youth, how to fix the feelings we were feeling. The one sure cure, guaranteed to make a man and a woman wish they’d never met, was for them to co-habitate. If there was one thing humankind had learned in four million years of evolution, it was that man and woman were not meant to live in the same hut.
    So, we co-purchased a town house in Connecticut. Something small but comfortable. It wasn’t difficult at all for us to stake out our separate bedrooms and work spaces, but decorating the common areas required diplomacy and compromise. Once in and settled, we agreed to open our house on Wednesday evenings to begin the arduous task of melding our friends and colleagues.
    We came to prefer her bedroom for watching the nets and mine for making love. When it came to sleeping, I was a snuggler, but she preferred to sleep alone. Good, we thought, here was a crack we could wedge open. We surveyed each other for more incompatibilities. She was a late night person, while I rose early. She liked to travel and go out a lot, while I was a stay-at-homer. She loved classical music; I could stand only neu-noise. She worked nonstop; I worked in fits and starts. She was never generous to strangers; I simply could not be practical in personal matters. She could get snippy; I could be silent for a long, long time. She had a maniacal need for total organization in all things, while for me a cluttered mind was a fruitful mind. Alas, our differences, far from estranging us, seemed only to endear us to each other.
     
     
    DESPITE EL’S PENCHANT for privacy, our affair and wedding had caused our celebrity futures to spike. The network logged 1.325 million billable hours of wedding viewership, and the guest book collected some pretty important sigs. Confetti rained down for weeks. We planned a five-day honeymoon on the Moon.
    Eleanor booked three seats on the Moon shuttle, not the best portent for a successful honeymoon. She assigned me the window seat, took the aisle seat for herself, and into the seat between us she projected her Cabinet members one after another. All during the flight, she took their reports, issued orders, and strategized, not even pausing for liftoff or docking. Her Cabinet consisted of about a dozen officials, and except for her security chief, they were all women. They all appeared older than El’s apparent age, and they all bore a distinct Starke family resemblance: reddish blond hair, slender build, the eyebrows. If they were real people, rather than the personas of El’s valet system, they could have been her sisters and brother, and she the spoiled baby of the brood.
    Two Cabinet officers especially impressed me, the attorney general, a smartly dressed woman in her forties with a pinched expression, and the chief of staff, who was the eldest of the lot. This chief of staff coordinated the activities of the rest and was second in command after El. She looked and spoke remarkably like El. She was not El’s eldest sister, but El, herself, at seventy. She intrigued me. She was my Eleanor stripped of meat, a stick figure of angles and knobs, her eyebrows gone colorless and thin. But her eyes had the same predatory glint as El’s. All in all, it was no wonder that Henry, a mere voice in my head, admired El’s Cabinet.
    The Pan Am flight attendants aboard the shuttle were all penelopes, one of the newly introduced iterant types who were gengineered for work in microgravity. That is, they had stubby legs with grasping feet. They floated gracefully about the cabin in smartly tailored flight suits, attending to passenger needs. The one assigned to our row—Ginnie, according to her name patch—treated Eleanor’s Cabinet members as though they were real flesh and blood. I wondered if I shouldn’t follow her example.
    “Those penelopes are Applied People, right?” El asked her chief of staff.