Free The Golden Space by Pamela Sargent

Vladislav, still living with Warner, had taken up with Chen Li Hua some time ago. Warner had begun seeing Chane a while later.
    Chane had not tried to deceive her and she had made no objections. Yet even after two months of this, Josepha still felt twinges. At least Warner and Vladislav knew how they felt about each other. Josepha knew only that she would be hurt if she lost Chane and that she missed him when he was not with her. But she did not know what he felt. Oddly enough, their lovemaking had improved. Jealousy was always a good aphrodisiac, but the price was too high.
    She sighed. She and Chane had lived in isolation from each other since the very beginning. Except for the children and their upbringing, they shared very little of real substance. Their other obligations and pursuits had been carefully divided into equal portions, everything from rooms to housework to time alone to time with friends. There had been nothing strange about that; it seemed reasonable and practical.
    But, looking back, she felt as if she had deceived herself. People grew closer, or changed, or grew apart; they were not capable of maintaining the same static arrangements day after day, year after year. Josepha, afraid to admit it to herself before, now knew that she was coming to love Chane.
    She put her hands, palms down, on the reader’s flat surface. She did not want to be alone any more, surrounded by walls of sensible arrangements which protected only a solitary mind reflecting endlessly on itself and its own uniqueness. She had deluded herself by thinking that she could preserve those barriers in this village. The children had already penetrated them, binding her to the future and the past.
    She recalled her pre-Transition life. It had not been that unusual in its isolation from family, demanding relationships, and any sense of continuity. The techniques guaranteeing personal immortality had preserved the individualistic society in which she had lived. Without that development, her fragmenting culture might well have been overrun by those who were unified and bound together in a common purpose. Only the attainment of the ancient dream of eternal life had been enough to save her culture and conquer the others as well. Small wonder, she thought, that Nola Reann and those like her felt threatened by the children, whose existence once more questioned everything.
    The sound of a laugh startled her. She sat up and pushed the reader to one side. The laugh was hollow, devoid of merriment. She got up and walked softly out of the study, peering around the stairway into the living room.
    The children were talking, lounging in various uncharacteristic attitudes around the room. Nenum stood slouching, hands on hips, looking quite pretty. A peculiar but familiar-sounding whine had crept in the child’s voice.
    “I don’t know why,” Nenum was saying, tucking a short lock of reddish hair behind an ear. “I just feel depressed, you know, everything seems …” Josepha recognized the voice of Warner and the words of one of her common complaints.
    Teno ambled over to Nenum. Her child’s face was contorted in an odd expression, eyes wide, mouth pulled down. “Don’t worry,” Teno said, putting a hand on Nenum’s shoulder. “Ah, you need to take a mood and you’ll feel better. Uh, sometimes I feel that way myself. It’ll go away.”
    “Why don’t we have a party?” Aleph said, mimicking Gurit’s tones. “I haven’t tied one on in a while.”
    “I have a headache,” Linsay growled, stomping fiercely around the room. Josepha recognized the tense but controlled voice of Edwin Joreme. “They get to me sometimes, they get to me.”
    “Oh, Edwin,” Teno replied, “you don’t mean that, ah, I know you. You dote on Linsay.” Josepha heard herself, the pauses, the hesitation, the rising inflection at the end of sentences, and shrank back near the wall. Was that how she sounded, that silly mixture of melioration and insecurity? Was that