A stab of pain lanced his forehead over his left eye; the hangover pill wasn't, obviously, a hundred per cent efficient. He gulped more coffee and wondered wistfully what would have become of America if it had socialized cannabis instead of alcohol.
Resuming: In that case, the hungry Huns at the gates of the Empire are-
"Oh, stop it!" he said aloud, and slapped his bare thigh. One didn't wear pajamas or night shorts here; according to his briefing, the mere possession of such garments was taken as proof of lack of confidence in one's ability to secure a partner for the night . . . of one sort or another. (He still didn't entirely believe the cover which, .Turpin
had assured him, excused his overnight absence from home in order to collect a spy from the sea. The story was that Turpin now and then liked to sleep with a man, and because of his professional standing preferred to travel a long way from Lakonia to look for one. And never talked about where he had spent the night, and never asked what his wife had done while he was away.)
Did that brown-skinned "reb" Danty slip me a psychedelic drug last night? 1 feel as though . . .
But a glance at his watch, not removed because he'd been briefed concerning Americans' attitudes to time and knew he would be suspect if he were caught without a watch even while making love, confirmed that since he swallowed the first mouthful of his coffee only two minutes had gone by. The illusion that he had spent ages musing like this stemmed simply from the impression that he had been shouted at, non-stop, since he came ashore. He had met more people last night, for instance, in a shorter space of time, than ever before in his life, and digesting such a storm of information was like eating a nine-course banquet directly after fasting for a week. Mental eructations interrupted every argument he tried to think through to a conclusion.
One more tryl
His coffee-cup was empty. He thought about pressing
the buzzer by his bed, which would bring back Estelle _ to
see what he wanted. That was among the reasons why an
apartment in the Lakonia towers was so expensive; no
other dwellings had been erected in the United States for
over twenty years that incorporated a room for a servant
and facilities for summoning her. Besides, there was
almost literally nowhere else where anyone willing to be
a servant would voluntarily seek employment. No native
American would do so; Canadians were scarce; Mexicans
were allowed in only on sufferance, by way of consolation
for having their country policed by U.S. soldiers, and so
many Cuban saboteurs had sneaked in by posing as
Puerto Rican valets and chambermaids that a total ban
had been imposed.
(It was like being the focal point of a beam of light split up between the facets of a jewel, then reflected back towards a center by a ring of distorting mirrors. He was
aware, simultaneously, of the things he had been told in his briefings Back There, and of the things he had seen
that matched his briefings, and also of the things that didn't-and these last were terrifying.)
Get your head straight (And, superimposed, awareness of the fact that the phrase was older than he was.) Take It from the top!
So where is the top? Government level? Good enough. Here 1 am: the cherry on the sundae of the Frozen War.
Was anyone still trying to break that twenty-year-old international log-jam? Since they recalled and jailed the American negotiators in Canberra for collaborating with the enemy, surely someone must have had another go? Tonga? Was that where the conference last-?
Oh, never mind. For all practical purposes, you had to compute with the status-quo. In other words, these people knew that their country had been the first to put men on the moon, and capped that achievement by doing it a second time, and then discovered that there were two billion other people who didn't give a damn about the moon. Too late. Just in time to pull the troops back and assign them to the streets of American cities. If they'd waited a year longer, there wouldn't have been troops to pull back. Whole army corps had been decimated by desertion, exactly as happened to the Tsarist armies in 1917.
Then there was a slump, which rendered American corporations unable to meet overseas commitments. Then, because of the slump, there was a witch-hunt, and the possession of an American passport became the (high-priced) excuse to apply for political asylum elsewhere. The end result was, simply, that no one wanted to know the Americans any more, and the Americans stuck their noses in the air and said, "Stuff you, Jack, we're self-sufficient."
Like the Byzantine Empire after the loss of the rich Western provinces to the barbarians.
But only like that. Not the same True, they talked in similar terms, forever complaining about the foreigners who bit the hand that fed them, and they treated their fellow-creatures as objects-thus to lie with a woman was a mere discharge of tension, not the gage of a genuine liking. But there hadn't been an empire. The tentacles of what might have become one had been chopped off just in time-by the Vietnamese, the Cambodians, the Burmese, the Filipinos, all of them with help from Peking.
Nonetheless the kalpa was cycling. He could feel it. He had studied Marx; he had studied Toynbee and Sorokin; he
had studied the Rig-Veda. It was his firm conviction that the resources of human beings were limited, and that implied that-even if there were no precise repetition-a man now, in a predicament analogous to that of a man ten thousand years ago, would react in an analogous manner. The Hindu notion that the universe repeated itself was a poetic truth, like the Toynbeean parable of the progress of civilization. He, like everyone else, was carried on a wave in the middle of an ocean too vast to discern the shores of, and ...
it was making him sea-sick. He got off the bed with a grunt of anger and went to see whether a cold shower would "straighten his head."
(r) X,
Where . . . ? Oh, Oh, yes. 1 think 1 remember. Or do 1?
And, the moment after recollecting why she was in this strange, shabby room that shook and trembled, Lora wished she hadn't woken up enough to do so. Her mouth tasted filthy, her stomach was sour, and there was a dull gnawing pain between her eyes.
She was stretched out naked on a hard couch covered with a sheet: old, but intact and fairly clean. It had been far too hot last night to bear any covering. It had also been too hot to go on lying next to Danty after they finished screwing. A mere touch made. sweat erupt from the skin like a strike of water in a desert. So he was on the other couch; at right angles to hers.
So 1 finally had a black. Funny. It didn't feel any different. It was dark, of course . . .
She reached out and brushed Danty's toes with her own. His response was to bury his face deeper in his pillow.
We meant to go night-riding, didn't we? And then .... Did he talk me out of it? 1 guess so, because we came here.
Not important. Not as important as the fact that her bladder was bursting. She sat up, and nearly cracked her head on a wall-hung bookcase. There were a lot of books here, she realized. On the floor, too. When she swung her legs off the couch, she trod on one and picked it up and read the title. It said: The Calculus of Mysticism.
Not only the books were peculiar. She saw a curious trefoil-shaped piece of plastic with furniture castors underneath, hung on string from a nail, and a plastic battery driven ornery, one of the big ones that cost a thousand bucks, and a Bonham's top, and a tape-recorder with a Buddha on the lid. The Buddha looked as though it might be Japanese.
Hmm! So this was Danty's home! Last night she hadn't really noticed; her attention had been elsewhere. Half eager to relieve herself, half anxious to find out more about him while he was asleep, she wandered the long way around the room towards the curtain at the end which,
because it was next to an obvious shower-cabinet, she assumed to conceal the toilet. The only other door, apart from the entrance, was ajar and revealed a tiny kitchen.
A violin, for goodness' sake Or is it a viola? 1 wonder if he plays it-reaching to twang one string of it faintly or if it's simply decoration.
Curtain. She pulled it back. And discovered that it did not give on to a toilet, but an alcove just wide enough for a single bed, on which a dark-haired woman was asleep.
She stared for a long frozen moment. Then she let the curtain fall and spun on her heel. Spotting her dress tossed over a chair, she ducked into it-a slow job, because her arms kept coming out through the wrong openings. But she managed it in the end.
Shoes? Oh, yes: left them in the car. But where the hell had she left the car with them in?
She rushed to the window: grimy, reinforced with wire, veiled with cheap semi-translucent curtains. Below, on the opposite side of the street, a car that looked like hers the right make and model, anyway. Thank goodness.
Toilet?
The reeky turd! I'll use his shower!
She turned it on, reluctantly, when she'd finished, and got splashed. The noise of running water aroused Danty, and he gave her a sleepy grin and said, "Hello, Loral" "Good-bye!" she snapped, and stormed out. The exit door gave a satisfactory slam.
That was what woke Magda. When she pushed aside the curtain, she found Danty at the window, watching Lora on the way to her car. She said, "Hi, Danty. Was it the Turbinate?"
"Hi, Magda." He didn't look around. "Yes."
"Slumming, hm?" She approached and gave him a peck on a cheek stubbly with new beard.
"Yes, I guess so. And apparently regretting it this morning. But last night she had a terrific time." He uttered a sad chuckle. "You'll never believe this, but it's gospel. She managed to have me photographed with Prexy!"
Magda drew back half a step, staring. Abruptly she burst into helpless laughter.
"Dantyl Oh, baby! That's the end, the ultimate end"
"Shit, you'll be a White House consultant yet, honey," Danty said. The car below moved off, and he turned back
from the window. "Fix some coffee, hm? I'll go take a shower. I need one. That kid has-uh-variegated tastes in BCT."
"She doesn't call it that, does she?" Magda demanded in disbelief.
"No, she doesn't. But she confided that her mother does -or did, at least, to explain her lovers to her kids when they were young. `Body contact therapy,' straight up." He yawned and stretched. "Tell you about it in a moment."
By the time he was through showering and shaving, there was coffee in big mugs and Magda had put on a robe. She said as Danty sat down, "Tell me, did it work out?"
"Yes." Sipping his coffee, he suddenly unfocused his eyes in the disconcerting fashion he had, which made him seem to be peering into another world.
"You don't sound very happy about it."
"Hell, no It gets bigger and more terrifying. It's like being in a car witl- 'he governor shorted out, and some crazy fool at the wheel who wants to prove he's as good as a machine at a hundred-fifty. I mean-hell! I knew I had to be at the scrap yard, but I didn't know why until I saw Josh and Shark and Potatohead getting ready to strip, and kill her. So I fish her out of trouble with this busted rifle, so she invites me to this party, so I meet this Canuck who's a house-guest of her father's. Says he's in timber up in Manitoba. Piss on that. He can quote the Gita. I heard him. Hell, I made him And I looked around the garage while Lora was getting out her car, and right next to it was her father's, and I saw it before. It was the car waiting to pick up the man from the sea."
"You think it's Holtzer."
"It's Holtzer, no shit." Danty drew a deep breath; when he let it out again she heard his teeth rattle. "Magda, I am goddamned scared now! I do weirder and weirder things for subtler and subtler reasons, and I daren't not do them, and what frightens me worst-"
He broke off. Magda reached across the table and clasped his hand.
"Well, this," he said after a pause. "What do I do when I reach the point where I feel what I must do, and I can't do it, because I'm like sick, or weak, or tired out? Won't I know I'm-well-trapped?"
"You ever felt that's come close to happening?" Magda asked in a commonsensical tone. Danty pondered for a moment.
"I guess not," he said eventually. "I guess with luck it may not. If I go on getting better at using the talent, I may be able to take precautions. I could avoid exhaustion, for instance. Illness, though . . . I don't know."
"The way I see it," Magda said firmly, "is that anything that made you sick and weak would probably screw up the talent anyway. It uses up a hell of a lot of your energy, that's for sure. I mean, look at you! You're not just lean, you're scrawny I can count your ribs."
Danty gave his body a self-conscious glance.
"I'll fix you a good big breakfast," Magda said, rising. "After that I'll have to stash you behind the curtain. I have a customer due at noon."
"No need for that," Danty said. "I guess I can relax a bit today. I don't feel there's anything I have to do at once."
He added, stretching, "Christi Does that make a change"
Sunday was spreading slowly across the nation. The super ways, of course were packed to capacity-literally millions of people knew no more enjoyable way to spend their free time than hurtling from place to place at high speed. Many people routinely did a thousand miles every weekend, and a few notched up double that.
Buzzing low over one stretch of superway close to the Atlantic coast there came a flight of plain gray helicopters, their only distinguishing mark a big white number: 33. Recognizing them, people in cars below began to wind down windows and wave, and probably also shout, only the traffic-noise drowned out their cries.
