Book 5: Chapter 23: Huey
Howard
August 2342
Trantor City, Big Top
Isighed theatrically as I closed the door to our apartment. Bridget looked up from her computer, gave me a brief smile, but didn’t otherwise comment.
Things had settled back into a routine for us, since the end of the Heaven’s River escapade. And I was glad to have my wife back full-time. Or as full-time as a career-obsessed exobiologist could be. There had been some casual talk of adopting another brood, since most of our latest batch of children were now becoming grandparents. But neither one of us was feeling a lot of enthusiasm at the moment. Instead, Bridget had latched onto Mario’s latest find, a planet harboring an intelligent species, and it was consuming most of her free time lately. And I had my human–manny interface project to keep me busy. It was generally considered a truism that immortality would make it harder and harder to fill the years and decades, but so far, the two of us still didn’t have a couple of spare minutes to rub together.
I came up behind her and peered at the screen. “Where’s my martini, dammit?” I said, overacting for all I was worth.
“Same place as usual. In the bottles. Make me one.”
Our ritual greeting having been satisfied, I assembled two martinis and handed one to her. “How’s it coming along?”
Bridget took a sip, made an appreciative sound, and leaned back in her work chair. The mechanism obediently swiveled out a leg rest, and she settled into a three-quarters recline. I whistled, and another chair scooted over and placed itself behind me.