Worlds

  “Communists?”

  “Nothing so formal. Sort of radical antiestablishment, was all the people seemed to have in common. Some were communists, some plain anarchists, some even sounded like right-wing libertarians. Just people dissatisfied with your form of government” Jeff concentrated on peeling the shrimp. “No name?”

  “No, they used various ‘front’ names, but they were emphatic about not having a permanent name. Benny said that probably meant they did have a name, but we weren’t deep enough to be told.”

  “Sounds possible.”

  “You know something about them?”

  “No. Nothing from Washington. But you hear rumors.” He squeezed some lime over the shrimp. “A lot of politicians have died young lately. Conservative Lobbies, all of them.” He looked at me. “Why the hell did you get mixed up with them? I can see Benny.”

  “Research… I was curious.”

  “Dangerous kind of research.”

  “It didn’t seem so at first—more like a debating society with delusions of grandeur. But then there was a really suspicious coincidence.” I told him about Benny meeting Katherine on the way back from Washington, and her “suicide.” Then I showed him Benny’s coded messages.

  “You think Benny was more deeply involved than you were?”

  “I know he was. At least, he was doing something he couldn’t tell me about.”

  “Yet he went to the FBI. Or wants you to.”

  I nodded. “Can you check?”

  “I’m not sure you really want me to… did you ever do anything illegal for them, yourself?”

  “No, just some statistical analysis.”

  “Still, there might be trouble.” He looked thoughtful. “I think I can get around it; there’s no need to implicate you directly. Better wait till we get to Geneva, though. I can use the Interpol scrambler there.”

  “Scrambler?”

  “Safe telephone system.” He studied the two poems. “Speaking of that, have you called New New York lately?”

  “No. It’s terribly expensive.”

  “He might be telling you to. Why else would he capitalize ‘world’ here? Try calling on the World for peace of mind.’”

  “Worth doing.”

  “You don’t know this Katherine’s line name or last name?”

  “Nobody’s. We went by first names only.”

  “What about the day she died? Can you remember the date?”

  “I can get it from my diary.” It was the day after we’d seen Chloe.

  “The city might have done an autopsy. There will be a death certificate in any case, which could be useful. Is there anything else that might help identify one of them?”

  I told him about James’s bugeye prosthesis, and the address of the place we usually met. He made some notes while I tried to remember everything I could. It felt good to tell him. Benny had relieved me of a large burden. Maybe I would get into trouble with the FBI. I doubted that they would hold me down and poison me.

  When I’d. finished, he zipped the notebook shut and didn’t say anything.

  “You think I’ve been foolish.”

  “Not really. Naive, yes… you and Benny, too. What this sounds like is a handful of penny-ante thugs, fanatics with, as you say, delusions of grandeur. That doesn’t make them less dangerous than a large organization, not to you and Benny. It makes them more dangerous. They don’t have to answer to anybody.”

  He took a sip of wine and continued, quietly. “That Benny found the bug in his room is interesting. It could be that they were simply amateurish and low on resources. But you can get an invisible bug for less than a thousand bucks. It could be that they wanted him to find it.”

  “To test him?”

  “That’s right. And he did exactly the wrong thing, tip-toeing around it. He should have confronted James with it—been outraged. Instead, he gave them every reason to believe that he’s spying on them.”

  “Well, he should be safe now, I hope.”

  “You say he was going to Vegas for a dryclean, and then on to someplace secret. He probably will shake them that way, but it’s not perfect. My agency could find him, for instance, and they may want to.”

  “How could the FBI work in Nevada?”

  “We don’t, officially. But it’s an open secret that we have thousands of people there on retainer, so to speak. Some of them are in the laundry business. Benny doesn’t know enough about the underworld to avoid them. I’d give you odds there’s a file on him in Washington now, if there wasn’t one before.”

  I had a sudden intuition that James and his gang might be just the opposite of what they claimed; might be a clandestine arm of the government set up to monitor and control dissidents. I didn’t mention that to Jeff.

  He put the notebook back in his purse. “Feel like walking?”

  “Let’s go down to the beach. I’m a little light-headed.”

  The streets were gaily lit and full of wanderers. But within a block of the beach, all the streetlights were out of commission; the beach itself was dark as the inside of a closet. And full of people.

  We made love standing up under the sign SE DETIENEN PERSONAS DESNUDAS. To stay within the law we left most of our clothes on.

  I like the clinging-vine position, but it’s easier in low gravity. Afterwards, Jeff sat with Ids back against the sign and I lay down with my head on his lap. We panted to each other for a while.

  “This gravity,” I said. “It makes me feel like an old woman.”

  He stroked my damp hair. After a minute he said, “How old are you, Marianne?”

  “Twenty-two.” I’d guess Jeff to be ten years older.

  “Must be the youngest post-doctoral candidate at the university.”

  “I’m only post-doc for their own paperwork. Hard to translate New New’s certification ”

  He ran his large hand gently over my face, tracing its shape as a blind man would. had a… disturbing experience when I was your age. Nine years ago. I was starting my last quarter of undergraduate work, and found out I had missed one physical education credit Signed up for a quarter of wrestling.

  “It was frustrating. I was as strong as any man in my weight class, but I couldn’t win a angle match. Points, I’d get early points, but they’d always outlast me.

  “I went to the infirmary, finally, and they said I was in excellent shape. Then I asked the wrestling instructor about it and he sat me down and told me the obvious: everyone in the class was a few years younger than me. Up until your middle or late ‘teens, you’re still a growing organism.

  Then there’s a few years of stasis.” He paused. “In your early twenties, you start to die.”

  “Hey, thanks. I needed cheering up.”

  He traced his finger around my breast. “The funny thing is, in my case he was exactly wrong. Exactly.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, I kept getting weaker. Finally they sent me to a glandular specialist—the big clue was that my shoes were getting tight; my shirts seemed all to be shrinking around the shoulders.”

  “You were growing?”

  “That’s right I had a rare form of acromegaly. Pituitary gland thought I was a kid again. That’s why I’m so big. I actually grew eleven centimeters before medication stopped it.”

  I stroked him. “It must have been pretty short before that.”

  He laughed and returned the gesture. After a while he said: “Shall we do it like everybody else, lying down?”

  “Me on top, though.” I’d heard stories about the sand.

  The next morning I tried to call New New through the New York operator. I got a printed message advising me that all communications would be passed through a delay circuit and would be subject to censorship. Then a hard-looking male operator came on the cube.

  “Name and Social Security number,” he said.

  “Sorry. Wrong number.” I pushed off and looked up the number of the Cape shuttle office; punched it.

  A tired man stared
at me. “Before you say anything,” he said, “be advised that this call is being recorded and traced.”

  “That’s all right. I just want some information.”

  “Plenty of that.”

  “I’m a Worlds citizen touring Europe. I tried to call New New just now, from Spain, and got some blather about censorship. What’s going on?”

  “Harassment As far as we can tell, that’s all it is. You can sometimes get around the delay circuit thing by calling Tokyo. They can patch you into New New via Uchūden, if you get good operators; if the phase angle works out. I can compute optimum times for you, if you wish.”

  “No, it was just a social call. Say, if I were a U.S. citizen, they couldn’t censor me, could they?”

  “Not if you could prove you were calling another U.S. citizen. There can’t be a dozen left in the Worlds, though.”

  “A dozen! What about tourists?”

  He laughed bleakly. “Don’t get much news in Spain, do you? The last tourist came back two weeks ago. We can’t afford to send them anymore. It’s another piece of harassment, but a more serious one. You know we have to buy our fuel now, since we can’t trade with U.S. Steel.”

  “I know.”

  “Well, on December thirty-first, the government pulled the price controls off deuterium. Supposedly… actually, there was a long list of applications for which the controls still apply. Virtually everything but space flight. We have to pay ten times the fixed rate—but the amount we can charge for a ticket is still fixed by law! We’d lose a fortune on each flight if we shuttled tourists.

  “We have enough fuel stockpiled to get every Worlds citizen home, with a comfortable margin. But it has to be orchestrated—do you have a reservation?”

  “No, I don’t. It’s that critical?”

  He nodded. “It’s not just the shuttle. The tug that takes you through the Van Allen belts also runs on deuterium; it has to run with a full load of passengers. So we orbit five shuttle loads each Monday.” He studied a sheet of paper. “The earliest I can schedule you is May fourteenth.”

  “I’ll still be in school.”

  He shrugged. “If I were you, I’d take the earliest date possible. You can always cancel and reschedule—but if the situation doesn’t improve, there won’t be any more shuttles after mid-July.”

  “All right, put me down.” I gave him my name and number. “And I think I will try to call through Tokyo. What are those times?” I wrote them down on the back of my diary, thanked him, and pushed off. Translated to Spanish time and found I could call in forty-five minutes.

  Getting through to Tokyo was no problem, but the patch via Uchūden put purple blotches all over the cube. I tracked down Dan at the labs.

  He peered out of the cube. “Marianne?”

  “Yes, darling, we have to make it quick. Do you know about the fuel squeeze at the Cape?”

  “Of course. Didn’t you get my letter?”

  “I’ve gotten several; nothing about that.” Damn them. “They must be censoring letter transmissions.”

  “They are. You calling through Tsiolkovski?”

  “Uchūden. I’ve got a reservation for the shuttle on May fourteenth. If things don’t get better—”

  “Can’t you come home before then?” I shook my head. “Earliest date. Have to push off. So good to hear you and see you.”

  As his image faded: “I love you.” I bit my lip for not saying it myself. It was only a hundred pesetas a second.

  35

  Diary of a lover (excerpts)

  13 January. Jeff spent only a little more than an hour at Interpol. He said they had traced Benny—as they routinely do when somebody has his identity changed without taking the elementary precaution of bribing everyone in sight. He had gone to a farm in South Carolina, with the identity of Sheldon Geary.

  As to James’s bunch, he had only been told “not to worry.” He said this probably meant that they were well infiltrated.

  I’m glad Benny got away but wish that nobody knew where he was. Jeff didn’t know whether the FBI was going to pick him up for questioning. He had broken federal law in being accessory to the forgery of his documents, but the agency rarely bothered to arrest people for that. It was more useful simply to keep an eye on them. …

  Geneva isn’t as pretty as Lausanne, but it’s more impressive. All very neatly laid out and meticulously maintained. The weather field keeps it warm enough to walk around with just a light jacket, and the avenues are lined with green growing things. We went down by the lake and sat on the grass there, enjoying our picnic while a blizzard howled a few meters away. Swiss chocolate is remarkable. …

  I’m trying to taper off the Klonexine. Less tension so less medicine. Violet taught me a trick. Open the capsule and divide the powder into two piles; refill each half-capsule and plug the end with a bit of bread. So I’m still taking them with each meal, but at half dosage.

  Jeff has become very tender and solicitous since I dropped all my problems on him. I think he has a stronger mothering instinct than I do. Yet he has the most violent legitimate occupation in the world, and to stay alive must have a killing instinct equally strong. He’s full of paradox, keeps surprising me.

  (14 January-18 January: Berlin, Munich, Bonn, Rome)

  19 January. Pompeii is the most interesting place we’ve visited, in terms of history. I guess because of the ordinariness of it—old monuments are interesting, but they are monuments, culturally self-conscious, built for the ages. Pompeii was just an ordinary city, and what’s preserved here are ordinary houses, shops, pubs, brothels. Walking down the streets is a mundane trip through time.

  The Italian government had Pompeii thoroughly restored by the turn of the century, and they had the good sense to cover the city with a plastic dome, to protect it against the weather and the pollution that drifts down from the industry around Naples. So it looks just like a city of 2000 years ago, only slightly worn.

  In the museum outside the city, they have plaster casts of people, animals, and vegetation, preserved when they were entombed by the swift fall of ash from Vesuvius. The eeriest is of a dog, fighting to free himself from his chain. The human figures are pathetic, sometimes gruesome, preserved with their expressions at the moment of death.

  (Violet was fascinated by that, of course. She mentioned yesterday that she’d started school with a major in thanotics, studying to be a “death counselor.” Sort of like a hypochondriac getting a job as a druggist.)

  Back in our stuffy room in Naples, Jeff and I lay together in the dark for a long time, talking about death. He is matter-of-fact about it, and I think honestly not afraid. Just suddenly not-being. He was brought up in American Taoism, though he rejected it in his teens, and admits that the passive fatalism of that religion probably still affects him, or infects him. We were tired and made slow love with our hands.

  (20 January-26 January: Athens, Salonika, Dubrovnik, Belgrade)

  27 January. They wanted us to go through Maghrib before the Alexandrian Dominion because Maghrib is so much more modern and familiar. At least women can show their faces. They don’t execute criminals in the public square.

  It is still the most alien place we’ve been. We spent late morning to early afternoon in Tangier, which used to be a major port. Now its main industry is wringing money from European tourists, being picturesque.

  The foreignness is enthusiastic and unrelenting but it’s not fake. At least not in the Casbah, the native quarter. At midday, with eight or nine people in our group, we felt isolated, alien, in danger. Sinister-looking people stared at us, scowling, measuring. Beggars showed us their sores and stumps. In the open-air market, meat was hanging in the warm sun, crawling with flies. A small mob formed when one of our people resisted paying a man after taking his picture. He paid.

  The tourist part of town is all white beaches, colorful fluttering flags, music and dancing, high prices. For lunch I bought couscous, which had been so delightful in Paris, but here was an indigestible lump
of yellow starch. Cheapest thing on the menu, though.

  The train to Marrakesh was a fascinating antique. Polished wood and brass and agonizingly slow. We saw lots of desert and some camels, and herds of goats invariably tended by small boys who looked like they would rather be doing something else.

  We came in at sundown (the agent probably planned that) and Marrakesh was heartstopping beautiful. It’s an oasis, lush green after hours of desert, with the Atlas mountains behind it dramatic with snow, and all the buildings are red clay, more red in the setting sun. When we got off the train we could hear muezzins chanting from towers all over the city, calling faithful Muslims to prayer. There were evidently no faithful Muslims at the railway station.

  The hotel was rundown but fairly Western, sit-down toilets. When Jeff and I tried to register together we were coldly asked to show proof of marriage. So I spent a quiet night with Violet, reading. We were advised that there was no inexpensive nightlife in the parts of Marrakesh where you could safely go at night.

  The four of us set out early in the morning and, dutiful tourists, admired the Koutoubya mosque and the thousand-year-old walls that once protected the city from nomad invaders. Then we went to the Djemaa El Fna, which is the largest and most colorful market in Maghrib.

  In front of the actual market was a large packed-earth square full of exotic entertainment—snake-charmers, acrobats, mimes, musicians. The musical instruments were mostly strings, types unfamiliar to me, and they weren’t playing in anything like a diatonic scale. Or maybe some were and some weren’t, which would account for the weird discords they seemed to hit on every note. But it wasn’t unpleasant.

  Violet and I got tired of having every man we passed stare us in the crotch—Maghrib women don’t wear pants—so we went into the first clothing stall and bought loose kaftans. We bargained for five minutes, passing numbers back and forth on a tablet, since the man didn’t speak either English or French. We worked him down from 5000 dirhams to 2500, though we had to walk out of the shop twice to get the last 500 (a technique Violet had learned from a guidebook). Then we put the kaftans on over our western clothes and undressed underneath, the sight of which nearly gave the poor bugeyed man a stroke.