Slant (18 page)

But he has been very pleasant with her, playing the man's game, subduing his irritations not to drive her away as he waits for all the calculations of his own desire to tot up to one or zero, go or no go.

He watches her face in the diffuse light from the lantern hanging over their heads, its little mock flame flickering dull orange. Her skin is sweetly pale and clear of blemishes, her nose is something he would like to sidle up against with his own nose, her jaw is a little heavy but her lips are very sweet, particularly when she pauses and gives him her expectant look, those lips parted, small white teeth just inside.

Most of all it is a personal wager that those breasts are as lovely as he suspects, and that though her legs are thin in the calves and her waist too waspish for his tastes, that the conjunction of inner thighs and mons, pieced together, make a comely triskelion and she will not have messed with her pubic hair except perhaps to trim the boundaries in case Bill takes her swimming in the summer (but now that grooming might be neglected). All of this is in the background as he asks for the check. He will pay. She does not object.

"I've been talking your ear off," she says as they walk to the door. Outside, on the street, they are side by side and the moment has come to shove off or play the old game to the end. Giffey hopes his technique has not gotten feeble; it's been over a year and a half since he last played.

"Thank you for your company," he says. Then a pause. "I like the sound of

your voice," he says. "It's the prettiest I've heard in a good while."

"Well, thank you, Jack."

They face each other. It is really damned cold out here and the streetlights cast long shadows where they stand. He can barely see her face and his own face is starting to hurt. "You do a lot of things to me, Yvonne."

/ SLANT 107

"Yes, well you listen nice and you're no grandpa."

Giffey reaches out and strokes her arm. The fur collar is rising with her hair and making that dark halo again, and within, the center of a target, the oval of her face. Her very pretty face. Hell, it was all a pretense. All his doubts were faking him. He wants this woman and he even needs her because he is afraid of going up against Omphalos in the next few days. There probably isn't much time left. He can say farewell to the good food, the drinks, the landscapes and the skies; he can say farewell to the eyes and noses and breasts and hips, too.

He doesn't give a damn about Bill who does not take care of this woman the way she wishes and who is far away diddling himself with his Yox buddies and some karaoke curies in Thailand or India.

"You raise a powerful need," he says softly. "I'd like to make you think a little better of at least one man."

"Oh," she says. She's nervous now. The last man she played this game with was probably poor self-diddling Bill. "I don't dislike men, not at all. Don't mistake me. But you're special. You listen. I--"

She's starting with the words again. Giffey takes her arm and pulls her toward him, gauging by her automatic resistance to that pull the measure of how much more persuasion she will need before she admits she is committed. Not much. He zeroes into the pale oval within the halo and kisses her.

The kiss starts offgentle, and then she finally offers open lips and her tongue. He doesn't much like tongue kissing, but he plays that move through, and then up to the regions he is much more fond of, her eyes and her nose. She clings to him tightly, accepting this hungrily. No more resistance, at least as

long as they do only this, with their clothes on, in a public place. "Let's go," Giffey says. "All right," Yvonne says.

"Over to my apartment," Giffey says. "It's too cold to get naked here on the street."

"Yeah," Yvonne says. She chuckles--not a giggle, but a genuine, almost masculine chuckle, and that's fine.

She's added it all up and her answer is one.

TRIBUTARY FEED

LitVid Search Fulfillment (Backdata: FREE by bequest of the author): Text column of Alexis de Tocqueville II (pseudonym-?-) March 25 2049

The growing disaffected in America merit our concern. How do we describe them succinctly? Discouraged, cut loose from the cultures for which their intellect and character destine them, those cultures of spiritual conservatism and Bucktail bigotry which have been shown again and again to be politically incapa-

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economy. Their refusal to take advantage of educational opportunities, which they regard as corrupting, leaves them little to do but join the ominous numbers on the New Dole. Here, they sit with their families locked into specially tailored and highly "moral" Yox feeds, funneling their few resources into an obsequious entertainment industry that has ever believed "a hundred million people cannot be wrong." Here they relive the glory days of elitism and bigotry, or golden dreams of blue-collar solidarity and dominance. They hand their hearts and minds over to demagogues like spoiled children. They are a dead people, but still dangerous.

Alice orders the limo to let her out three blocks bet?bre her home. She is suffocating in the artificial lavishness of the limo cabin. Her eyes fill with tears. She feels insulted and abused and, for the first time in many long years, soiled. Flashes of hatred mingle with jagged, unhappy memories and a long-quiet sense of shame.

She walks along the deserted street, following the glowing lines in the walkway and the curb. A warmer wind is cutting between the buildings and the few houses, and brilliant, scary flashes of lightning play silently above the clouds.

She does not want to be protected. She feels the power of the wind and the

eclouds, thrills a little at the and blue effulgences, begins to reassemble

orange

her pride and her armor.

But at the front door, there are tears in her eyes again. She shivers at the thought of the faceless man trying to pry her loose from her protections, like a cruel beachcomber working at a limpet. "Why does he want to know anything about me?" she mutters. "What a creep, What a monster."

She spends thirty minutes in the shower, alternating between sonic micro-spray and steady stream. She feels as if she should scrub off all her skin and grow it new and clean. She feels between her legs briefly, wishing she could shed all her insides, everything the faceless monster's flesh and semen touched. She has never felt this way about a man before, and in a far recess of her self, she worries about the frightening strength of her revulsion.

It's only sex and it u,as only once and he got nothing special,' he didn't even ask for anything special. He didn't care. He wanted to ask questions.

Alice feels the sparks of anger ide, damped by exhaustion. All she wants now is to crawl into bed and sleep, straight sleep, without the pre-dream child vid she often uses, just simple sleep.

/ SLANT 109

And then she sees that dreadful facelessness again. Her breath quickens and she moans. She gets out of bed and walks in her thin silk robe into the living room, the spare and unadorned place where she seldom spends much time. Right now she wishes she had artwork all over the walls, a pet or a friend to talk to; all of her friends, until now, it seems, need her more than she needs them.

She has a few articles on a shelf that give her some comfort: a ceramic poodle, pink and ridiculous, that belonged to her grandmother; an antique folding razor her father gave to her when he first learned she was going on call-ins as a teenager ("to protect yourself," he said, "because the only thing that hurts worse than knowing what you're doing is the thought of losing you altogether'') that she had never carried on her person; a miniature plastic spray of flowers; a picture of her parents and brother. She has not thought of her brother in months. She picks up the picture and stares at it.

Carl is eleven years old in the picture and she is nine. Carl did not know what to think of his sister. He was straight-arrow, knightly. He signed up with the Marines to go to the Moon as part of a settlement effort and died in

a pressure drop five years ago.

She replaces the picture.

Five men have wanted to marry her. She wants to tell Carl that; she did not fail in the marriage department, not for lack of interest. She never felt it was necessary to get married, never felt strongly enough for the men who asked, with the exception of one...

Alice refuses to think of that one now. Putting him together with the facelessness she has just endured is more than she wants to deal with. It would be so nice to have someone like him here; but if he were here, she would never have gone off on a call-in.

Finally, Alice gives in and sits before the theater in the small family room. She orders the unit on and waits for it to find her eyes with its projectors. The swirling sound centers her in an opening space filled with selections. She chooses a mindless linear vid, a domestic drama. "What time is it?"

11:31 p.m. flashes in red before her eyes, over the faces of the participants. They are all part of a family in a comb coming to grips with a new son-in-law who is untherapied and works fixing internal combustion engines for illegal atavist car races. He is cute and muscular and chunky-rough and he says funny, eccentric, but wise things that make the therapied vanilla-smooth comb family look inept and foolish. Side notes on the image tell Alice she can convert this to karaoke for an extra ten dollars. "Live andplay the whole livelong story/ Be Amanda; let your S.O. portray Baxter/ All the story and twice the fun: available in straight flow, mixed doubles, wide field with random meets from around the world, or total gone-gone-gonzo/ Explore Amanda's world by strolling or in freezeframe/"

The house monitor chimes. Alice pauses the feed and asks who is it. "It's

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Alice cuts the feed, pays a partial rather than scheduling a replay, and goes to the door. Twist stands shifting from one leg to the other in the entry, knuckle between her teeth. Her knees are actually pointed toward each other, total gamin, vulnerable as hell. She comes in, straight silky black hair windblown, face all crinkled like a little girl. She looks stretched and terrible. Suddenly, Alice feels an outpouring of relief and affection for Twist. "My God," she says, "you look worse than I feel. What's happened?"

RIVERS

Some ideas are just lubricants to let troubled people slide through life. Not lies exactly--but very slippery.

In New Hope, Pennsylvania, a Baptist denomination anoints the re-born in a fountain of living light, guided by encoded data from the River. They will tell you, as you are so baptized, that by consuming the flesh and blood of Christ you absorb his data into your pattern. That makes Christ a virus. The community memes evolve and live on.

--USA BLISTER-FAST SPIN

Thirteen Coins is a hoary and very demod restaurant that used to serve the fourth estate. It sits in a re-done Commons district now, an island of tradition and antiquity in a rolling park filled with visibly moving, growing, and self-pruning topiary: lions, elephants, dinosaurs, as well as spaceships and ringed planets. The storm has turned the park into a forbidding dreamscape, the park's lighted pathlines contending with blue-green and orange flashes. In a high-packed, enclosed, mock-medieval booth near a broad window overlooking the gardens, Marcus sips a Lagavulin single-malt while Jonathan drinks a glass of Chilean Sangiovese. "I love the Stoics," Marcus says. "Don't misunderstand me, Jonathan. A finer and more dedicated group of philanthropists and civic-minded folk you'll never find. I've made more fruitful contacts there than anywhere else in my life--with the possible exception of my wife's relations." He draws up the

/ SLANT 111

ments of chagrin and resignation. Then he sips very delicately at the small ceramic bowl of Scotch. '"Sherry barrels for aging. Sixteen years old and purring like a tiger. Wonderful stuff."

"You wanted to shake them up," Jonathan offers, to get Marcus to come to some point.

"You catch me out exactly," Marcus says. "Get somebody like Torino in there and see what he knocks loose. But . . . Nothing. A few moths and some dust and crumbs. He's right, you know. This neural hypothesis stuff is dead-on. It's a practical and useful description of how society works. Screw nature. After all how many of us survive in the jungle any more? And anybody who follows the lines of the argument can . . ." He sips again. "Rise above. Survive the challenges."

"I need to study it some more, I think."

Marcus stares at him steadily, a little gravely. "Yes. But you're not here talking to me--I haven't invited you here to talk with me, and watch me drink good Scotch while you down a doubtful glass of unnatural vintage--Christ! A Chilean Chianti--because you might profit from Torino."

"You've always steered me in the right direction, Marcus. So why am I here?"

"Life's a little stagnant, isn't it, Jonathan?"

Jonathan inclines his head.

"You're an elegant fellow, sharp and well-bred. You have good pedigree--mentally and genetically. You could fit right in with the top comb managers now, if fate offered you a different situation."

Jonathan smiles thinly. "I enjoy living below the comb, Marcus." "Believe it or not, I agree--all those social expectations, all that ritual. It's tough staying on the high comb path, racing against America's self-perceived elites. They are so smug. Still, I wonder why so many of them are caught becoming Chronovores, hmm? I mean," Marcus continues, "they'd simply be playing the same life over and over again, the same round of ritual and challenge and expectation, until the future caught up with them... Not the best of situations. Hm?"

Jonathan does not know where all this is leading, but he nods. His class thinks of the high comb as superficial, despite the undeniable political and financial power they wield. Marcus is part of the X-class, as rich as most in the comb, but intellectually independent--or so he's led Jonathan to believe.

"By the way," Marcus says, glancing at his old twentieth Rolex, too demod

for words, "does Chloe know where you are? That you're with me?"

"I've told her I'm going to be late," Jonathan says.

"Good. Always be good to the women." He sips again. Jonathan has a glance at the charge on Marcus's pad: Sixteen-year Lagavulin, two hundred and fifty dollars a glass. Transie,t glories, he thinks. "Beate probably doesn't care where I am, as long as I'm not in her hair. Christ, romance is an old gray mare,

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Jonathan smiles but reveals nothing.

"I'll get down to it now, Jonathan," Marcus says. "I've recommended you

to a group that isn't new, a little off the expected spin, but very promising.

Your CV came up on a criteria search and I pulled you out in particular because

we know each other."

"What do they do?"

"They ask for discretion, that's what they do," Marcus says. His tone is

blunt and his face looks older. "It's tough to accomplish something new and

tougher to keep it secret, especially if it gives you a great advantage. A very

great advantage."

Jonathan tries to keep his chuckle sophisticated. "A secret society?"

"Yes," Marcus says, dead serious. "You get into it by degrees, and at the

end, you do not pull out."

Jonathan decides a suitably sober look is best now. Underneath, he stifles a

disappointed laugh. Marcus is either joking with him or is getting drunk on

his little bowl of Scotch.

"As I said," Marcus says quietly, "the advantages are enormous. So is the

COSt."

Jonathan can think of nothing to say, so he continues to regard Marcus with

a patiently straight face.

"But you fit," Marcus says, staring down at the bowl. "You're young and

strong and that's unusual in the group so far. Wisdom of our sort," he flicks

a finger between them, "finds a home in older frames. It's a tough load for the

young to bear."

Jonathan has enough self-respect left that this melodramatic display gives

him no option. He laughs and shakes his head. "My God, Marcus, you have rne going here, you?"

don't Marcus smiles a little sadly, but his eyes are bright and focused. He is not drunk and he is not fooling. "This is an old restaurant and I know the paint on its walls. Nobody would dare bug this place, because people like me know whose lapels to grab and which ear to shout in. It's safe here, comfortable here." "You're not having me on?" "Not a bit," Marcus says. "You either say yes, you want to go to the next stage, you trust me this far, or you say no, and never speak of this to anyone, including Chloe. And you'll never be offered the chance again." The female waiter comes by and asks how they're doing. Marcus tells her they're doing fine, and asks for a second bowl of Lagavulin. "Stagnation, pitfalls; the rules are changing," Marcus says after she leaves. "That's what you have to look forward to. Yox makes the temps and the disaffected more ignorant and more aggressive, bottom-up management is on the sly spin again, pffft! The collective is in place, grunting piglets all, and those of us with managerial talent are soon out on our butts in the snow and

/ SLANT 113

"Come on, Marcus, cheer me up," Jonathan says. He is not really prepared for this sort of nonsense, but as he looks at Marcus, and thinks of all he knows about this man, all the deals and sideshows he's rumored to be involved in, all the threads he rides straight into the statehouse and the most powerful executive caucuses, even into the Rim Council and the Southcoasr White House . . . It's hard to speck Marcus as a deluded old fool. "It's not a cheery subject," Marcus continues doggedly. "The therapied society rides around on too many crutches. It's crippled and corrupt. But the unknown is scary. The Stoics--they cling to class superiority and a sense that God will eventually clean out the gutters and the water will flow fresh and clear once more. It's not going to happen. We've made some major mistakes in learning how to dance, and now the floor is crowded with clumsy fools . . ." Marcus's phrasing strikes Jonathan as being too practiced, but undeniably persuasive. Still, Jonathan resists being drawn in too quickly. "I don't think things are so dark," Jonathan says. Marcus looks down at the table. The waiter brings another bowl of Scotch and asks Jonathan if he'd like more wine. "Coffee, please," Jonathan says. "Modcaff, regular, or de?" the waiter asks. "Regular," Jonathan says. "I'm not unlike you, Jonathan," Marcus says. "At your age, I thought I was living in the best of all possible worlds, taking into account a few pitfalls here and there. Beate loved me and I loved her, and we were building things together. But that was twenty years ago. We were heading toward the Raphkind showdown, and the so-called last hurrah of the super-conservatives. Raphkind killed us. Went overboard. May the bastard rot in hell. So now we have nambypamby New Federalists--a trendy name for a purely financial and expedient frame of mind. I'm one. I know you're one, as well. Are you proud of your creed?" "Within limits," Jonathan says. He suspects Marcus plays faithfully and slyly the tune of whoever's in power. "So what's in the future for you? Do you know that managers between the ages of forty and fifty suffer thymic disorders twice as often as temp employees? Society wears us down. We wear ourselves out. But if we turn ourselves over to the therapists, they adjust our neurons and glial cells, they stick microscopic monitors into us that are supposed to balance our neurotransmitters and reconstruct our judgment centers. They say we're as good as new. But you know what happens? We lose an edge . . . Therapied managers just don't cut it. The happy man lets down his guard. After a while, being happy becomes a kind of drug, and he avoids challenges because failure will make him unhappy. It's a fact. So more and more--we take our mental aches and pains and stay away from the therapists. "Oh, we want our employees therapied--we want them happy and creative

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We have a higher duty." Marcus glances at Jonathan. "You're not happy, are you?" Jonathan leans back against the cushion and holds out his hands, gives a little sigh. "I'm in between general contentment.., and deep unrest," he says. Marcus lifts his eyebrows. "Well put." "But I'm not desperately unhappy, Marcus." "Still, if an opportunity comes along, allowing great change and new opportunity, you'd go for it, wouldn't you?" So they are back to that. "That would depend on the opportunity." Marcus points his finger into the tabletop and thumps it several times. "The gold ring, Jonathan. Not the brass ring. Gold." Jonathan finishes the last drops of wine in his glass. Outside, the storm shows no signs of abating. "Have you offered this opportunity to anyone before me?" "Yes," Marcus says. "Many?" "Two. One accepted, one declined." "How long ago was that?" "In the last five years." Jonathan feels a twist, an almost physical churn in his chest. If he could just be rid of his present stagnation--breathe freely in a new phase of life, undo past mistakes and play out his better potentials... "If I say yes, can I turn back at a certain point later?" "No," Marcus says squarely. "It's yes or no. Here and now." "I have to put my trust in you." e That's the crux."