Free Game Control by Lionel Shriver

tea?'
      She stumbled through something about the kitchen, leaving him in no doubt that contact with another human being was the most fearsome thing that had ever happened to her.
      He returned with his cup to find her on the veranda as if they had an assignation. 'Astonishing sky, isn't it?' A moan of assent. About her frantic desire that he should go away he had no illusion. But winning her from a bogus trip to the loo was a snap. 'Sorry,' he introduced, after an unencouraging but obligatory exchange about where she was from and where she lived. 'I'm Wallace Threadgill. And yourself?'
      That was all it took. She stopped leaning over the railing and gaping dolefully at the Jasper Johns Equatorial skyscape and faced him with keen reassessment. 'Eleanor Merritt.' Though she needn't, she shook hands, and he was struck by the fact that now, far from wishing he would disappear, she was suddenly worried he might leave.
      'And what brings you to this blithe bacchanalia?'
      She laughed, dry. 'Awful, aren't they. I always promise myself I won't go. And then the alternative is staying home…'
    'What's wrong with home?'
      'Malicious furniture.' Her eyes kept darting to his face, then back over the rail.
      'I'm surprised you're not attending to our charming ersatz host. Funny, you'd never know, would you, that this wasn't his house? And how high are the chances that he and his whole band of cronies weren't even invited?'
      'Some people are very—comfortable, socially.' A diplomat. 'I'm not. I like to think I've improved, but I doubt it. Every time I walk into a party I feel thirteen: dressed like a ninny, terrified of dancing and wishing I'd brought a book.'
      'How does such a shy creature come to be in Africa?'
      'Family planning,' she groaned.
      'Ah.' That explained the shift.
      'And you—you're the heretic.'
      He smiled. 'Quite. And how long have you—?'
      'Nearly twenty years. I was with the UNFPA before Pathfinder, and the Peace Corps before that.'
      'Peace Corps I could have predicted.'
      She stood more upright. 'Everyone finds the Peace Corps so hilarious. That we're a sad little sort. But it's done some fine—'
      'Look at you. You're already getting kali .'
      'I just don't think it's fair—'
      'Perhaps you and I are such natural enemies that we should acknowledge irreconcilable differences and skip the fisticuffs.' He made a motion as if to part.
      'No, please—' She touched his arm. 'I have always wanted to talk to you. More than ever now.'
      'Why? Are you questioning your faith?'
      'Let's say my convictions have been challenged. They are not bearing up well.'
      'But you have a life's work to defend. No doubt you believe in its merit and conduct it conscientiously. But in my experience, your kind find my message unsettling. They listen only just so long as it takes to invent all the reasons I'm a hairbrain. They march off with their fences built even higher than before, having learned nothing. I'm a little tired of wasting my time. It's more than likely we have little to say to one another.'
      'I'm not afraid of information.'
      'Then you are a brave young lady. The entire population industry is mortified by information. That's why they make it up. So they can live safely in their fairy-tale future, where we are all balancing tiptoe on one leg in the remaining three square inches apportioned to us, packed on all sides by the seething, copulating ruck, fallen angels on the head of a pin. But look around you.' He waved his hand at the Ngong Hills as a voluptuous breeze ruffled her soft brown hair; indeed, from here there was not a glimmer of human habitation in sight.
      'My confidence in what I do has been shaken,' she admitted. 'We've had so little effect.'
      'Large families will persist. But you can make people ashamed of their children, just as Jesuits made women ashamed of their breasts. You see, I don't simply believe that population