Kate Wilhelm in Orbit - Volume Two (2 page)

“I almost wish we never had come here, you know? Lee would have been fine. He had a job at Berkeley all lined up. He would like to teach, I think. But probably not now. Not after this kind of freedom and so much money.

“He can always quit,” Eliot said more brusquely than was called for. He liked Mary. Mary and Gina were the only ones that he did like. Neither was a threat to him in any way.

“At least we can always say that, can’t we?”

They paused at his house and he remembered that he was supposed to bring some mixer. “I’ll be over in a few minutes,” he said, and left her as Lee and Ed drew near. He put the drawing down, but he didn’t want to look at it again yet. Not until he was sober.

He stared at himself in the bathroom mirror and thought, thirty. Good Christ! Back in April Beatrice had become thirty, and had cried. Then, furious with him for taking her, with herself for needing solace, she had run away from him, and since then had been cool and pleasant, and very distant. If he cried now, would she appear from nowhere to put her arm about his shoulders, to pat him awkwardly as she maneuvered him into bed and reassured him that he still had most of his life ahead? He laughed and turned away, not liking the mirror image. He was deeply suntanned, and his eyes were dark brown, his eyebrows straight and heavy, nearly touching, like a solid, permanent scowl.

“Just one thing more, Mr. Pitcock. Why me? Why did you select me for this project?” The contract was signed, the question made safe by the signatures.

“Because you’re avaricious enough to do it. Because you’re bright enough to see it through. Because you’re cynical enough not to get involved personally no matter what the data start to reveal.”

That’s me, he thought, searching his kitchen for mixer. Avari­cious. Bright. Cynical.

Donna was seated at the round table, across from an empty chair, his chair. He put the mixer down and looked at them. Ed Delizzio, twenty-five, a statistician from Pitcock Enterprises. Dark, Catholic, observed all the holy days, went to mass each Sunday, had a crucifix over his bed, a picture of Mary and Jesus on his wall. Marty Tiomkin, atheist, twenty-four. Slavic type, tall, broad, serious, with a slow grin, a slower laugh, thick long fingers. Probably could swim to England, if the spirit ever moved him. Very powerful. He was the computer expert. He could program it, repair it, make it go when it was sick, talk it into revealing cor­relations or synchronicities where none seemed possible. He treated it like a wife who might fly to a distant lover at any time unless she received unswerving loyalty and devotion. Marty and Ed had been hired at the same time, almost two years ago. At first they had had separate houses, like the rest of the staff, but after a month they had decided to share one house. Inseparable now, they went off on weekend trips, during which they picked up girls from one of the northern islands, or made a tour of the houses of Charleston. Now and then they brought girls back to the island with them.

Donna was next to Marty, and on the other side of her was Leland Moore. He was tall and intense, probably the most honest one there, tortured by the futility of what he was doing, but also by the memory of a fatherless childhood in a leaky fifteen-foot trailer that his mother kept filled with other people’s ironing. He wanted land, a farm or a ranch, with hills on it, and water. Slowly, month by month, he came nearer that goal, and he wouldn’t leave, but he would suffer. Sitting by him was Mary, who worried about her husband too much. Who couldn’t understand poverty as a spur because she never had experienced it, and thought only black people and poor Southern dirt farmers ever did. Beatrice wasn’t there.

“I can’t stay,” Eliot said. “Sorry. Too much booze too early tonight, and the champagne didn’t help. See you tomorrow.”

To sit across from Donna all night, to watch her peer at her cards, and watch those pale fat fingers fumble… He waved to them and shook his head at their entreaties to stay at least for a while.

“Will you show me the offices tomorrow, Eliot?” Her voice was like the rest of her, just wrong, too high-pitched, little-girl cute, with the suggestion of a lisp.

He shrugged. “Sure. Eleven?”

He walked up the beach. The tide was coming in fast now, the breakers were white-frosted and insistent. In the woods behind the dunes night life stirred, an owl beat the wind steadily, a deer snorted, the grasses rustled, reviving the legend of the Spaniards who walked by night, bemoaning the abandonment of the fort they had started and left. The air was pungent with the sea smells, and the life and death smells of the miniature jungle. He walked mechanically. Whatever thoughts he had were dreamlike in that he forgot them as quickly as they formed, so that by the time he turned at the end of the island and retraced his steps along the beach, it was as if he had spent the last hour or more sleepwalking. He stopped at the pier and then walked out on it to the end where he was captain of a pirate ship braving the uncharted seas in search of unknown lands to conquer. It was flat and stupid and he let it go.

The pier was solid, a thousand feet out into the ocean; it seemed to move with the motion of the sea and the constant pressure of the wind. Eliot leaned against the end post where a brown pelican roosted every day to watch the sea and the land, alert for subversives, immorality, unseemly behavior, including littering of the beach…

Lee Moore’s house had a light; the others were all dark. Eliot wondered if they were still playing poker, if Donna Bensinger had won all their money, if Lee and Ed were singing dirty sea chanteys yet. He flicked his cigarette out into the water. Thirty, he thought, thirty. Forty thousand dollars in the bank, more every day, and no one to tell me to do this or that, to come in or stay out. Freedom and money. The dream of a sixteen-year-old washing dishes after school in a crummy diner. Buy a boat and go around the world after this is over. Or start traveling on tramps and never stop. Or—get a little place somewhere and let the money draw interest, live on the dividends forever. Or… He heard voices. Two pale figures running along the sand toward the waves. The tide had turned again. The urgency was gone. Proof, he thought, right here before our eyes day in and day out. Never changing, eternal cycles; he didn’t know if he meant the tide or the couple. He looked at the nude figures. It had to be Donna, pale hair, white body. The man could have been any of them, too far up the beach to see him clearly. They ran into the surf and she shrieked, but softly, not for the world to hear. The man caught up with her and they fell together into the shallow water.

Eliot watched the laughing figures, rolling, grappling, and he felt only disgust for the girl, and the man, whoever he happened to be. Too quick. Everything about her was too quick. He started to move from the post, but there were others now coming from the dunes, running together so that it was impossible to say if there were two or three, or even four of them. The light from a crescent moon was too feeble, he couldn’t make them out. Now there was a tight knot in his middle, and he felt cold. He looked down at the swells of the sea, black and hard looking here, but alive and moving, always moving. When he looked again at the beach he knew that there were six people, dancing together, running, playing. All naked, all carefree and happy now. They paired off and each couple became one being, and he turned away. Without looking again at the figures, he left the pier and hurried home. He was shivering from the constant wind on the pier.

Strange, fragmented dreams troubled his sleep. The night witch came to him and tormented his flesh while he lay unable to move, unable to respond, or refrain from responding when that pleased her. Then he was crawling up a cliff, barren and rocky, windswept and cold. He was lost and the wind carried his voice down into crevices when he tried to call for help. His hands hurt, and he knew his toes were bleeding, leaving strange trails, like the spoor of an unidentified animal. He was on a level plain, with a walking stick in his hand, weary and chattering with cold. The wind was relentless, tearing his clothes from him; the rock-strewn field that he traversed was like dry ice. He kept his eyes cast down, so he wouldn’t lose the nebulous trail that he had to follow, strange reddish wavery lines, like blood from an unknown animal. He tried to use the walking stick, but each time he struck it on the boulder, he felt it attach itself, knew that it rooted and sprouted instantly, and he had to wrench it loose again.

Eliot sat on his porch drinking black coffee, a newspaper on the table ignored as he stared over the blue-green waters. The sun was hot already, the day calm, the water unruffled. Another perfect day in paradise. He frowned at the sound of light tapping on the screen door. Donna Bensinger opened it, called, “Hello, are you decent? Can I come in?”

“Sure. Around the corner on the porch.” He didn’t stand up. She had on shorts, too short for her bulging pale legs, and a shirt that didn’t conceal her stomach at all. Her hair was pulled back with a yellow ribbon; there were bright red spots on her cheeks, and her nose flamed, as did the tops of her bare feet and forearms. One morning and she was badly burned already. By the end of the day she’d be charred and by the next day, probably in the hospital, or at least on her way home again. He motioned for her to sit down.

“Coffee?”

“Oh, no, thank you. This is all so fantastic, isn’t it? I mean, the island, the houses for all of us, people to bring you groceries and anything you need, boats we can use. I never dreamed of a job like this. It’s right out of a movie, isn’t it?”

He turned from her to resume his contemplation of the quiet ocean. She continued to talk. He finished his coffee and stood up. “Let’s go. I have a date at twelve. I can show you the offices and explain briefly what you’re to do in half an hour or so.”

Eliot was six feet tall, his stride was long and quick, and he made no pretense of slowing it for the girl. She trotted at his side. “Oh, I know that people have planted all this stuff, that it didn’t just happen like this, I mean the orchids in the trees, and the jasmines and hibiscus and everything, but doesn’t it look just like one of those dream islands where the heroine wears a grass skirt and sings and the hero dives for pearls, and there’s a volcano that erupts in the end and they all get away in those funny boats with the things sticking out of the sides of them? Who started to build something here?”

“Spaniards. They brought in the rocks to build a fort, then abandoned it.”

“Spaniards! Pirates!” She stopped abruptly, then had to run to catch up. “I can see the ships with all those sails, and slaves hauling the blocks all roped together, a Spaniard in black with a long whip…”

The pink stucco building that they were approaching was lav­ishly landscaped with tropical and semitropical plants imported from around the world: travelers’ palms, fifteen-foot-high yucca plants, Philippine mahogany trees, a grouping of live oaks hung with gray-green Spanish moss that turned the light silver. A small lake before the building mirrored the trees, swans gliding through the water hardly distorted the images.

“The office building used to be a guest house,” Eliot said. “It has its own kitchen, a hurricane-proof basement. Come on.” There was another of the wide porches; then they were inside, in the cooled air of the lobby. This had been converted into a lounge, with a coffee maker, tables and chairs, a color television, a fire­place. Eliot showed her through the building quickly. Her office was small but well furnished, and she nodded approval. The old dining room had been equipped with a computer, several desks and chairs, a typewriter desk, drawing table lighted by a pair of fluorescent lamps. Next door was the file room, cabinet after cabinet, with library tables in the center of the room, all covered with folders and loose papers. “Marianne usually kept it up to date, but these last weeks she really wasn’t well enough.”

She sounded put-upon. “I have to file all that stuff?”

“Beatrice will come over a couple of hours every day to show you the system, help you get caught up. She’s Pitcock’s private secretary, but she knows this work too.”

He showed her the rest of the first floor, then they went down­stairs to the recreation room, where he sat down and lighted a cigarette. “Any questions?”

“But you haven’t told me anything about what I have to do, except the filing. And what you’re doing here, all of you, I mean.”

“Okay. I didn’t know how much Pitcock told you. You’ll handle correspondence, type up reports, keep the files up to date. We are studying the effects of cycles. First we establish the fact of cycles, correlate synchronous cycles, check them back as far as you can find records for, and predict their future appearance. We collect data from all over the world, Marty feeds it into his computer and the monster spits out answers. The snowshoe hare and the lynx have the same cycle. There are business cycles of highs and lows that persist in spite of wars, technological discoveries, any­thing that happens. Weather cycles, excitability cycles in man. War and peace cycles. There are cycles of marriages in St. Louis, and cycles of migrations of squirrels in Tennessee.” He stopped and stubbed out his cigarette hard, mashing it to shreds.

After the silence had lengthened long enough for him to light a new cigarette and for her to start fidgeting, she said, “But—why? I mean, who cares, and why?”

Eliot laughed and stubbed out the new cigarette. “That’s the best damn question anyone’s asked around here for over two years.”

At noon he picked up Gina to take her to Charleston. Beatrice was dressed, as if she too would go, if he only asked again. He didn’t look directly at her, nor did he ask. The day was not a success, although usually he enjoyed taking the child to town. He kept wondering what Beatrice was doing, what the others were doing, if they were all together. He returned to the island with Gina at six thirty. Pitcock and Bonner were talking on the dock when he brought the small boat in.

Pitcock reached for Gina’s hand. “Have a good time, honey?”

“Eliot bought me a see-through raft. And a book about sea shells. And we went on rides at a carnival.”

Eliot handed the parcels to Bonner, checked the boat again, then climbed out. The motor launch was gone. Pitcock stood up, still holding Gina’s hand. “Come over to dinner later, Eliot? The others have gone out fishing. I’ll see Gina home.”