Mysteries of Motion (61 page)

It had seemed just the right wedding anecdote, in their case. “We three just got married,” Rhoda said. The barkeep stood them a round. “Three’s a crowd—” he said, “though if you ever need four—?” Gilpin smiled at Veronica. “A crowd, yes. That’s why we did it.”

She’d nodded back, twirling her glass; it was the last of the Bejan. She’d worn white, but then she often did. “Now I know what to do,” she said. “Now I can lead a proper life.” The aura at their table came of knowing one’s own reasons and each other’s. Rhoda had squinted at the barman for all of them. “But it’s not the Village.” Then they had each gone home, alone.

Here they’re four, the room’s tolerance, but by a convention fallen into the first week, privacy is always ceded the new occupants. Wert, if he wants this, would never say. Even in a fatigue suit he looks too fine-boned for authority, one who would exert it a mite too politely and maybe a little slowly—but in long sieges of any kind, still a man you’d like to have in the room. At the moment watching his wife, who’s bent to the opposite wall, scanning it. “She checks every computer setup she can here. Of course, it’s her field.”

So she’s that Soraya. Where’s the one who went to Switzerland, by now? Surely not back in Iran. The minute Gilpin mentions countries to himself he experiences a strange dislocation. Since he’s been aboard, no one’s mentioned any. Once he’d spent nine weeks in Southern California without ever hearing the word Europe. But this is his first plane without travel talk. How could there be? “We had a little trouble with the air mix. Not enough to call for help.” Had it been? “Seems all right now.”

Soraya turns from the wall to focus on him. Yes, the eyes are brown. How she focuses. Now on Wert. What she murmurs must be Farsi. Are they very much married, or not?

“We’ll be off now,” Gilpin says, loud enough for Mulenberg to take the hint. “Time for the bicycle. I must have pumped halfway to Betelgeuse.” All three men glance at the window. Such glances come like tics here. Then for hours they forget to. Whatever stars they see are nameless, any time they look. And that’s distance for you.

Wert’s been gazing out there the longest. “My wife wants me to tell you something. But first, I’ve news of my own. I’m not to be your civil administrator out there.”

“Why not?”

“Protests from home.”

“Home?” Gilpin horse-laughs, jerking a thumb at the window.

“We’re still wired to it. With bands of steel, I’d say.” Wert’s tired smile, so attractive, is really a facial mold, years in the forming. It won’t release him even in stress. “I’m not surprised. What surprised me was being appointed.”

“Wrong politics?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t mind that. Spent my life at it. And when I had to leave the Department a university gave me a chair for it. Seems it’s my private life as well. I live with two women. Openly. Or did.” Wert’s smile does relax—when he regards his wife. Whose eyes are concealed again. “That’s all right. You can’t take them to state parties—but that’s all right. Just don’t have it occur that some scruffy, well-intended avant-gardists make a cause of you—which finally reaches Washington.”

“Wash-ing-ton,” Gilpin says, as if in some Hopi dialect. He’s still eyeing the window.

“It’s still there. As I’ve been informed.” Wert’s hand, held by his wife, twiddles itself from her grasp, opens and shuts, slaps his thigh. “My worry-beads. Had to leave them behind of course. But it’s like cigarettes, breaking yourself. Even the voyaging is not enough.” He says something under his breath.

“Eh?”

“I said, ‘As I should know.’”

“Oh, there’re things we should.” It seems to Gilpin that everyone present aboard is linking these, pooling them, socializing each other down from the first peaks of the journey, when any remark had been as significant as a mountaineer’s move. “We’re going to bring down all the marvels to take tea with us. It’s what the human animal does so well.”

Seat Six is touching Wert’s arm. “William.” The rest is in a tongue soft and twirling as an awl.

“My wife thinks we should know the computer was programmed. For your air change. A rise in oxygen. Twenty minutes of it. Can you read computers?”

“No.”

“Can Mulenberg?”

“I doubt it.”

Mulenberg, still in his corner with his back to them, is coming out of his barrier of dossiers, slowly returning them one by one, like a man working himself out of an aberration.

And Wert and I? Why’ve we lowered our voices?

“She could be wrong. Not on the reading—she’s tops. On the interpretation. She’s been so upset all day.”

How has this dignified man, who looks fifty but must be nearing sixty, got in the habit of speaking for his wife? What happened in that throwback household which must have come out of the events Gilpin’s read of? What age would she be now—pushing forty? She still looks young, but not the way American women do. Nor like Veronica—delayed. He can’t put his finger on it. “That the reason you won’t speak English?” Gilpin says to her directly.

A half grave smile from her. A soft American “—No.” But a shrug for the triviality of it.

“She reverted to Farsi the second we heard she was pregnant. I tell her she must be programming a son.”

One sees how Wert’s reverted, too. Handsome and straight-backed enough to impregnate a younger wife, maybe two, with mutual pleasure, he’s newly, fussily rheumy at the eyes—a more than middle-aged first-time father, who’ll become elderly the minute the child’s born.

“What’s upset her?”

“I can’t—I scarcely know how to say—she’s got this singular idea.” Wert draws himself up. “I must tell you she’s the least paranoid person I know. All her dangers have been real.”

“I know of her background.”

Mulenberg has glided up behind the three of them. “I don’t know it.” He turns to her. “Something about this—ve-hickle? Some naggy long-eared delusion buttin’ you in the back? Like one of your burros in the back streets of Tabriz or Rezaiyeh, eh? I said ‘Beg pardon’ to one of those once.” His drawl’s suddenly Western American—and his bow to her. “Jack Mulenberg, Cabin Six. Your cabin. Like to tell us what’s botherin’ you?” Tell Daddy. He doesn’t say that, but the womanizer magic is there. What a scare that may have been—for daughters.

“She—”

She hushes Wert. Speaking with her hand still in his of course, “Soraya here. Okeh, listen. I am often in the Hygiene Unit. I have to bathe for the back. Old troubles there.” Her voice is low enough to please Shakespeare but matter-of-fact. “Yet for the baby I must not soak too much. So I must balance, I must think ahead. I am there often in the Jacuzzi, doing that.” Her teeth are exceptionally white. What will the baby do to them, on the diet they all have here—does she supplement? Her polite smile doesn’t compromise her, nor inform. Gilpin, having once held her very life story in his hand, is moved to see her.

The brown eyes aren’t on him but on Mulenberg. “You know our Hygiene Unit—how it has the four doors? Three to our section—and also the door which would lead to the next cabin’s Hygiene Unit?”

Each cabin has access to its unit from its galley, from the cabin proper and from the general corridor—and so on down the line, making each cabin an autonomous section, linked to the one ahead or behind only by their adjoining Hygiene Units. Bathrooms, for God’s sake. Locked. As linking bathrooms often are in a house. Bordering all is the general corridor for access forward or aft and so to the general vehicle, enterable only on schedule, for it, too, has a set capacity.

“That’s right.” Gilpin enjoys going over it. Helps. “So we’re the only cabin with a Hygiene Unit only on one side—the forward one. Since we’re the last cabin in the tail. Excuse me—aft.”

“So that door—” Soraya’s saying. “That fourth door. To the next cabin’s unit. Not used. Locked. Why? What a design. Multiple capability, but they don’t allow.” She flashes a competent look at her computer wall. Her very English gains ripple from it. “So I sit in my bath, or not in my bath, and I think of how we are not to see the other passengers until the last week. And how now and then the red light in the unit comes on over a door. Only never that door.”

While the unit’s video screen will warn you of someone’s approach, though in vague outline. Whereupon, though the room’s set up for two, you exit as soon as possible through one or another access doors. Doing this not for privacy really but because that was what one had once habitually done. And perhaps because there aren’t that many such habits one may still exert?

Always remembering meanwhile—if you’re returning cabinward, you’ll change first from fatigue suit to the non-gravity one with its cumbersome life supports, taking yours from the hooked line of them. Or vice versa. Maybe cursing Congress for insisting on the heaviest model suit—which some say is like requiring every seat in a jet not only to have its personal oxygen mask but to wear it.

Always remembering also to rid yourself of other impedimenta. Such as the couple of Personal Wipes, so inscribed and luckily unsoiled, which had once come back to cabin with Gilpin, floating and sticking everywhere. The cabin being empty at the time, he’d never owned up to it.

“So I sit on that ledge. And because of the baby, in my head it bubbles like a fairy story, along with the Jacuzzi. I think—who is the person on the other side of the wall? A person from another cabin? I tell me maybe they do come into our Hygiene Unit, when we are not there. I tell me—maybe—I will stretch a hair across that door. Like in the old palaces, for the wife’s lover. But really I do not feel that anyone will ever come.” She breaks off, taking in the other two men, then homing back—to Mulenberg. “In prison one has eyes in the back of the head. Even on the skin. One can always tell if there is no one. Or someone. On the other side of the wall. What you call that?”

There’s a hair stretched between her eyes and Mulenberg’s.

“Subliminal,” Gilpin says, breaking it.

She turns at once to Wert. Like in the traces, a matched pair? “So—tell them, Beel.”

He hesitates. “Why—burden them?”

The buzzer rings. Time’s up.

“Come on, Mulenberg—” Gilpin says uneasily. “I’ll race you on the ergometer. Let’s go.”

“Allow us to.” Wert’s extended his hold on his wife to her arm. “Enclosures are difficult for her at best—but she would come along with me. She’s easiest in the bath, because in prison they didn’t have them. Or in the cabin, because we’re all there.” When he comes to speak plainly, he does it well. “Now of course, we could go home. On the turn-around flight.”

She flashes him a long look, but is silent.

“So you’ve been in prison,” Mulenberg bends to her. “I’m sure for good reason. Like with this one, eh, Gilpin?…Gilpin thinks this is a prison, and the living-station will be, but he’s going anyway. Wouldn’t miss it.” Mulenberg smiles hard at him. I’ve read you, Tom. You didn’t think me capable of it. “So tell us, little Seat Six. Your delusion. And I’ll tell them mine.”

“Seat Six?” Slipped from Wert’s arm and leaning forward, she looks sturdier, stronger. Though not quite as young.

“What we call you. Because he keeps you to himself.”

“Not him. I.” She won’t sparkle for Mulenberg. “Because I am not to myself.” She means her belly. “So. You, too, have an impression. Tell me.”

Under the video screen which is now jerkily rating their progress for them in coarse print, the intercom squawks.
Mmmrrrher-rher-guh. Fwah
—
deck.
They’re all learning to interpret it.

“For Mulenberg, I fancy. They’ll be wanting you on flight deck. They told me so.”

“Why me, Wert?”

He already knows but it annoys him that Wert knew it first. He wants to make Wert say it. A hard man. When on business.

“I fancy they’ll want you to take my place.”

Always the gentleman. Misfortunately? Gilpin’s not so sure. Wert seems to get what Wert wants. What he may want is to get that willful girl home.

“Will they now.” Mulenberg is toneless. “Well, bully for them. But let them first explain this.” The shelf he goes to has six of the black folders segregated. Some are as thick as books. “Here we all are. All with our names on the back, just like at the motel: J. Cohen-Lievering, T. Gilpin, V. Oliphant, J. Mulenberg, W. Wert. And S. Wert.” All lettered in gold-leaf. “All in order. I looked. And now—these others.” With a backhand sweep he riffled the two long shelves of folders below, bringing most of their contents to the floor again. “Look at them.”

Books tumbled every which way are like women with their legs in the air. Gilpin peers. That one. That there. Over there. All of them.

“Blank—” Gilpin says, kneeling, scholar-horror in his voice. “They’re all blank.”

“All sixty-five of them. I counted. And yes—empty. All but ours. So I think—well, budget reasons. Four Free Rooms—they didn’t Xerox for all. But then why have the folders? Or they didn’t want us to spend the time here that way. Or even—they want us to work for it. The info. There’s no crap like a psychologist’s. Somebody’s sold them a bill of it.”

I say: blank, Gilpin thinks. He says: empty. He passed a hand over the folders, almost gently. “These don’t have any names on them at all.”

A cry from Soraya—a long Farsi moan.

“She’s right to wonder. But Allah won’t help.” An almost libidinous satisfaction plays on Mulenberg’s lips. “All right, then, girl. Tell me.”

“No,” her husband says. “Do not. It’s destructive. We’re all on a thin edge here. Until we arrive. But this is not prison. We’re connected.”

Gilpin stands up, tilting toward Wert. Does the vehicle help him there, though gravity’s near normal? Maybe the
Courier
itself gets confused. “With, say—the military?”

Wert’s long upper lip twitches—amusement at a child’s plaint. “Let’s say—” He bites the lip. “Let’s say—I am not connected with it.”

So was that the screw? But who’s applied it to who? Who protested what? What would Wert not
do?
“You agree then—some factions might be very glad to see this mission disorganize?”

Wert shrugs, maybe back in his old world of honorably negotiated checks and balances.
Let’s say
—that Wert would be a fine man to have at your side in a crisis, but can he ever be brought to it? “Gilpin, you and I might have our vanities of principle. I admire yours. But we’ll never be the real enemy.”