Janus (15 page)

Martin shook his head, started to turn away. Grebbel raised his voice, and the man stopped.

“Tell me, will you. Why are you offended? Because you’re having to crawl in the mud with the rest of us? Because you’re not up there above it all? Please tell us, tell us all.”

Martin drew a breath, then shook his head and headed for the kitchen.

“Ah,” said Grebbel loudly, “the burden of knowledge.”

Elinda caught his eye. “Take it easy,” she whispered. “And hello again.”

There was sweat in the roots of his hair. He looked at her, then swallowed his drink and moved to face her, with his back to the others. Closing his eyes, he gestured vaguely. “I don’t know why I did that, any of it.” His voice was low now, and strained. Abruptly he swung away from her and vanished into the crowd.

She sipped at her drink, found it was empty. Someone was talking to her, telling her about his plans for the next spring. She was captivated by the whiteness of her fingers on the empty glass. The tendons in her wrist stood out, quivering. The man said something about another drink, and prised the glass out of her hand. She remembered Barbara saying
It’s all right, whatever you’ve left behind there, it’s another life, another person, let it stay forgotten,
and the secret warmth the words brought. A guilty warmth, like swallowing booze to drown a bad conscience. Guilt? She shivered and pushed her way out of the room.

Grebbel was not in the kitchen, but she saw a group outside in the back. She got her coat and boots and went out. They were huddled around what looked like a length of thirty-centimetre-diameter pipe angled towards the sky. One of the men was crouched over, apparently examining the surface of the pipe, which she belatedly realised was a telescope. Someone else was pointing out some of the brighter stars, visible though a large gap in the clouds. “. . . those three are the methylene group, and then there’s the hydroxy—there, and there. It’s the constellation Booze, just waiting to be named.”

The man at the telescope straightened up from the eyepiece. “Anyone else?”

“What are you looking at?” she asked.

“Chronos, the gas giant. The moons are too bright to see much else. One of his satellites just came out of eclipse, I think, but it’s hard to be sure.”

“What about the Knot? Could you see that?”

“Not with any instrument here. Remember, it went undetected for centuries back on Earth. Have a look at Chronos here, anyway.”

In the eyepiece, a silvery yellow ball bounced and shivered against a deep blue background. After a few moments, her eyes adjusted enough to pick out two lighter arcs across the disc and a dusky band between them. When she asked about them, the man explained that there were fairly regular cloud patterns on the surface, but the darker band was the planet’s rings and their shadow on its surface, which were overlapping in their line of sight.

She relinquished the eyepiece to another watcher, confirmed that Grebbel was not among the crowd here and went back inside.

She finally found him crouched in the dark at the foot of the basement steps. Lengths of firewood as thick as her wrist lay snapped at his feet, their splintered ends like needles. He had another piece in his hands and was straining at it, his teeth bared, his forearms quivering with the pressure. The wood snapped with a sound like a gunshot and the breath came out of him in a snarl.

He saw her then, and let the wood clatter onto the concrete floor, and put his face in his hands.

“Why does it matter that much,” she asked, “what you’ve lost?”

“A dark, empty box,” he whispered through his hands. “It’s like that—like an empty cellar. Like a nightmare . . . caves, tunnels, things snuffling . . . I haven’t got the words.” He fell silent for a few moments, then lifted his head and looked at her. “And how are you enjoying the party?”

“Oh,” she said, and took a step forward. “I haven’t been here long. I was working. I’ve been getting behind at work; I didn’t get in at all this morning.”

He nodded. “The clinic. Any news?”

“Yeah. They still don’t have a goddamned clue what’s wrong.” She shook her head. “I was there for ten minutes, maybe. There wasn’t any point in staying. She didn’t know where she was, she didn’t even know I was there.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, “if that helps at all. What about the other thing, the investigation?”

“A few hints, not much more. I’ll try something else tomorrow. We can talk about it later. You must have bruised your hands. Those sticks are strong.”

Grebbel shrugged. “They’ll mend. I don’t know where all that came from. And that’s the point. I don’t know—so much . . . Christ, why did I come down here?”

“It doesn’t seem to be doing you any good, does it? Let’s get some air.”

The party sounds faded behind them. Under the light of the twin moons the clouds boiled and the mountaintops gleamed like icebergs in a frozen raging sea.

“And when she told me my tubes had been tied,” Elinda said, “I just panicked. I couldn’t imagine that I’d do that—have done that. It was like having a stranger in my own body. . . . Perhaps I do know some of what you were going through tonight. Do you want to walk a bit further up the hill? I’m not looking forward to going into an empty home again, after seeing her like that. I haven’t been doing much housekeeping lately, but I can probably find us something to drink.”

At the front door, Grebbel watched her fumble a key from her pocket. Her shoulders were stiff and the tendons in the nape of her neck were caught by the moonlight as she bent towards the lock. An insect strummed, making a sound like over-taut wires in a wind; and the wind itself sounded among the trees—a long breath deeply indrawn, held, then lingeringly exhaled.

The door opened onto darkness. Stepping into it, she turned, her face a blur of moon-shadow, and gestured without speaking. He followed, and they brushed together as they pulled off boots and coats—arms and shoulders, awkward elbows.

He was in the living room, with something softer than wood under his feet. He could make out a table by the window, a dark painting on the wall, a couple of armchairs, a couch—and she was moving quietly to one wall, bending over something. A match sputtered and flared, flung her shadow against the ceiling, and left him with a vision of scalloped gold from ear, cheek and hair. Then there was a steady, paler glow. She straightened, holding an oil lamp, and put it on the corner of the table. “Emergency lighting,” she said softly. “We don’t open the blinds at night and I don’t have candles. And I think this is an emergency, don’t you?”

The light caught her cheek and hair, picked out two creases between her eyes. Her lower lip was held between her teeth, giving her a pensive look. Since they had met this evening, something had changed, but he could not have said how or when. She lifted her head a fraction and swallowed, “I can get you a drink now,” she whispered. Her eyes were large and very dark. “If you want.”

He shook his head, and found he could not speak.

As he reached for her, she was already moving towards him.

They held each other, and at first the warmth was enough, the weight and pressure against arms and chest. Then, almost without volition, came the need to touch, to explore. Through layers of clothing, fingers traced the curves of spines, the bulky shapes of shoulder, ribcage, scapula—moved to the skin of nape and ears, and the cushioned roundness of the skull. Lips brushed forehead, felt the softness of a cheek, worked against other lips that opened for the tongue, then moved to the throat, where teeth nipped at the skin beside the hurrying pulse, and came to rest in the smooth hollow at its base.

There was a pause, filled with the sound of breathing, as they stood on the edge of familiar, unknown realms. Leaning together, they hardly seemed to move. Then their fingers began to work on buttons and clasps, slowly, teasingly at first, then more hurriedly, getting in each other’s way, until the urgency became too great, and they had to break apart and pull off what still separated them.

Again, a pause, while they looked at each other in the lamplight, a time for anticipation, for thoughts of vulnerability and delight. Slowly they moved back together. Now the explorations began again, seeking, for him, the secret touch and slide that would bring sensation, would reveal the key to her joy; for her, the ache of needs once known and fulfilled and then forgotten. Palms stroked, fingers teased and probed, and were followed by the liquid flicker of a tongue.

They had found their way to the couch, and lay face to face, one above the other. But their faces were transformed. Expressions of remote concentration intensified as their bodies worked—became gapes of astonishment protracted almost to pain. For each of them, time had ceased to flow. Space and awareness contracted to the sensation of the other and the rising tension. The world shrank to the darkened room and their two bodies. Time had stopped and yet stretched to eternity. And then it burst. One of them moaned, and then the other. As they shuddered against each other, a wave of unbeing swept them away.

The light was grey. Without moving, Grebbel let it filter through his eyelids, while awareness crept back. Whatever had passed between them was spent for now, and he tried to understand it. The sense that something had taken control of him—of his actions, of even his wishes and desires—was disturbing. He felt that the direction of his life had been changed, perhaps taken out of his hands. And yet . . . he let his eyes open enough to look at the woman whose vulnerability to pleasure had given her into his power. He saw only the turn of a shoulder, the lobe of an ear emerging from a dim tangle of hair, but knew he was at the mercy of her weakness.

“You’re awake, aren’t you?” she said. “I’ve been listening to you breathe.”

When he looked, she was watching him steadily.

“I dreamt of snow,” he said. “I dreamt I was holding you and the snow was blowing outside, piling up, and I thought we might be able to hide under it for as long as we liked. Then there was a sound. . . .”

“I remember your arm,” said Elinda. “I could feel the scars. And when you were asleep, you woke me up. You were holding your wrist and trying to say something. I thought you were crying at first, but it was something else.”