Chapter 6

There’s one of these unwritten rules, more a tradition really, that the bed in a married household is the woman’s. She’ll say ‘our’ bed, but what she really means is ‘my’ bed, and she’s the one who decides who shares it, if anyone. If you’re a man, heaven help you if she starts referring to it as ‘my’ bed. Sometimes sleeping alone is a tacit decision—a couple falls into a habit due to something happening outside the house—sometimes this is an internal decision. But she is the one who decides.

Of course, what’s really at stake isn’t where people lay their head when they’re asleep, but love and intimacy. When someone is let into a woman’s bed, she’s letting them into the core of her life, her role as a woman, and the progenitor of the future. When we had been three, it had been that way. Amy and I made the sleeping arrangements, and Chris accommodated himself to them (like he had a choice in the matter). Sometimes that meant all three of us, which can be fun, but most of the time it was the two of them, or Chris and me, or even us two girls. It was about sharing, and intimacy, and goofiness, and love, but mostly it was about being together with the world locked out.

What were we going to do when Amy came back? We had enough room. We’d bought the house with the thought of kids, a home office or two, a workshop for Chris, and maybe in the back of our minds, Amy. Whether this house would really include Amy was up in the air, but we had kept the possibility in mind. Chris and I had a bedroom, Jenny was next to us, and we had two other bedrooms on the main floor. This house had a basement, most didn’t, and we could put two rooms and a bathroom down there. It also had a semi-detached building in back that Chris used for his workshop. With some rearranging, that could be turned into an apartment.

That weekend, as we took the train to Terminus, I did the math in my head. We were using two bedrooms out of four, or six. Amy had two kids. Would they stay with her? Or together? Or would each get a room of their own? Would Amy sleep with us? I wanted her to, but ... but a small part of me didn’t want her to, either. That was my bedroom, and my bed, and our bedroom and bed. It was all confusing, and we’d work it out somehow, just like we had when we were first married. At least I hoped we would.

When Three Valleys was founded, you got to Center by going to Terminus, stepping through a gate to some place in the old USA, making a several-hour trip on a bus to some large city, and then stepping through another gate. There was all sorts of risk inherent in that, and a better way had to be found.

The whole area of Three Valleys is mountainous. The valleys are flat and grow our food. The only exceptions are the few towns that were founded at the start, before people began thinking of the geography. That’s why Terminus and Valley’s End are on the valley floor. Every other town is on the hillside. And those hillsides, or valley-sides, are where people live. If you look around, you’ll see a lot of houses tucked into the trees.

We use the rivers to move a lot of goods, but there are some things you need roads for, harvesting equipment mainly, and so there are a few that run the length of the valley. Most people use the tram or railroad. The rails connect the valleys together and link the towns within the valleys. If roads tied the Roman Empire together, then rails do the same thing in Three Valleys. The rails are electric, mostly because we don’t have the infrastructure to handle oil or coal. We have a lot of rivers, a lot of dams, and therefore, a lot of hydroelectric power; every river in the area has its power plant.

Several of the people who graduated from college with me were employed by the Water & Power Company. I didn’t envy their task. After all, the water was at the bottom of the hill, and people lived at the top. I understand there are a lot of pumps and some very clever pipes and aqueducts to get the water where it’s needed.

But transportation was a critical component. They developed plans and a site survey for an airport. But it would take too much rich land out of food production, infrastructure, and intermediate airports would have to be established, and aircraft that could make the trip would have to be bought or designed and built. All of that would require money and time, and access to the old USA, something the government didn’t want to do.

Sensible heads prevailed, and people began to use the gates, only without the long road trips between transits. To get to Center now, we took the morning train to Terminus. We got there just before noon, bought tickets at the Gate Center, and stepped through the first one. That landed us in some building or whatever on another timeline; I think it was an underground cavern from the echoes I heard. A short walk took us to a rotunda where we were directed to yet another gate. This deposited us in a building in Center. We had done a trip of nearly 3,500 miles (my estimate) in just under 20 minutes, and never broke out of a medium walk.

There was a kiosk in the lobby, and a woman gave us bus schedules and a map of the city. We stepped out of the flow of people to puzzle through things. We hadn’t been here in several years, and things had changed.

“There’s our hotel,” Chris said, pointing to a place on the map. “It looks like we take the #23 bus.” He stared out the front window of the gate building. “Maybe we should have stayed at the Complex instead.”

“We didn’t, so that’s water down the spillway.” I checked the schedule. “The bus should be passing out front in about 15 minutes. I think. This schedule isn’t the easiest to read.”

Chris picked up our luggage, I picked up Jenny, and we walked out the door. We paused on the front steps to take everything in. It was summer in Center, and a rainstorm was either just starting or just ending. The streets were wet, the air was very humid, and there were a lot of dark clouds overhead. The bus stop was covered, and from the actions of the people huddled there, that was a good thing.

It’d been four years since we’d been here, and I was curious to see what had changed. There were several new buildings in the downtown core, and a lot more people. I wondered where they were coming from. Was there a baby boom going on? That was possible; a lot of the people I saw were young, and I knew we weren’t bringing in people from Zero Phase, not like we had during the Immigration Years. There were a lot of apartment buildings going up on all sides of us, smaller ones with six or eight apartments. There were more shops, too, and a couple of schools.

“I hope the ice sheet doesn’t come any farther south,” Chris said quietly. “Everything would have to pack up and move.”

“Even if that happened, we’d be safe.” Three Valleys was a long way from the ice sheets, and not that far from the equator; the ‘little latitudes’ as someone once put it. We did have glaciers, but they were nowhere near the continent-spanning ice sheets only a hundred miles or so to the north of Center.

We eventually got off the bus, ‘de-bussed’ as some wag once put it. The hotel had our reservation—they should have!—and we were soon in a two-bedroom suite with an okay view of the mountains to the north. We unpacked, read through the amenities, and then stared at each other. We were supposed to see Amy the next morning. That gave us the rest of the day to kill.