Worlds

  “I don’t mean morally… I mean I wouldn’t be able to hit the floor with it. I’ve never touched a gun before in my life.”

  “I could show you how to use it. Once your clothes—”

  “No.” I put the gun back and closed the box. “I appreciate the thought But if it comes to shooting people I don’t have a chance anyhow. It’s not like the Greeks or westerns, where I’d want to take some of them with me. I don’t have that gland.” Those glands, I thought.

  “Then what do you plan on doing?”

  “I have to think… I have a pass for unlimited tube and rail travel for forty-five days. I might just keep moving around.”

  “That might be a good idea.” He poured coffee and I accepted a cup, to warm my hands.

  “What about you?” I asked. “Why do you stay here?”

  “I’ve given that some thought. In the first place, I couldn’t get far; don’t have much money. Also, I’m out in the open here, nobody’s going to sneak up on me. Mainly, though, if they haven’t got me by now, they must not be especially interested.

  “And this is the best time of year. No crops to worry about I just sit in here and read. My reward for cracking ass nine months.”

  We sat for an hour or so, reminiscing about Benny. When my clothes were dry he brushed them off outside and brought them to me.

  “Do you mind if I don’t turn away? I don’t see a woman too often.”

  “I don’t mind.” I let the blanket fall and dressed without hurrying, in front of his sad and hungry eyes. I normally might have done the friendly thing, but was too depressed and upset I suspected he was, too.

  Perkins walked me out to the bicycle and we exchanged awkward goodbyes. I assured him that I would come by if I was ever in the area again, but we both knew I wouldn’t.

  38

  Storm gathering

  When I got back to the dorm there was a hand-delivered note in my box. Not from James, to my relief, but from the Worlds Club. Special meeting tonight, about Cape Town, whatever that was.

  I might as well go. I’d have to be in New York tomorrow, anyhow, when Jeff got back. I did some laundry and repacked my suitcase, then went down to the Liffey to read until the meeting started. I didn’t want to be in my room.

  Reading has always been an escape activity for me, whether the subject matter is light or difficult. This one was difficult but absorbing, an economic history of the United States from Vietnam to the Second Revolution. I immersed myself in it to keep from thinking, by thinking, though it should have been obvious by then that my academic career was over.

  Traveling around the world, I wasn’t really aware of the extent to which relations between the Worlds and America had degenerated, and the last three days had been so full of personal terror that I wouldn’t have noticed if the Sun had started rising in the west.

  There were only thirteen people at the meeting. Most of them had already moved to Cape Town, but had come back to New York to tie up loose ends. Everyone else was either down in Florida or home in the Worlds. They explained: Nine days before, the United States had put a temporary prohibition on the sale of deuterium for space flight, even at the astronomical price U.S. Steel had been getting.

  Steve Rosenberg, from Mazeltov, explained it to me. “New New York found two more CC deposits on the Moon; they may be rather common. So they got a little aggressive. The Import-Export Board increased the price of satellite power. They gave the U.S. a schedule of monthly increases that would continue until the price of deuterium went back to normal. So the U.S. cut it off.”

  “Which was no surprise to the Coordinators,” I said.

  “I imagine not. But we have enough deuterium in storage to get everyone back, with some to spare. They’re trying to get everyone back as soon as possible, which is why Cape Town.”

  I’d learned that Cape Town was a collection of tents and shanties inside the entrance to the Cape. Worlds citizens were going up in order of reservations, and they were up to May first. I could be home in a week.

  But it wasn’t quite as orderly and comfortable an evacuation as had been planned. They were using only one shuttle, the high-gee one, to save fuel. People were allowed only seven kilograms of baggage, including clothes. The rest of the payload was seawater.

  “Why salt water?” I asked.

  “Well, there are valuable chemicals in it, and salt for food. But mainly it’s the heavy hydrogen: deuterium and tritium.

  “We found out that all of the water U.S. Steel was giving us was light water’—all of the heavy hydrogen had been processed out of it. That wouldn’t normally make any difference, since it’s always been cheaper for us to buy heavy hydrogen from Earth, than to set up a plant to make our own. It’s different now. Jules Hammond pointed out last week that there’s enough deuterium and tritium in a tonne of seawater to boost forty tonnes to orbit.”

  “So we’ve built a plant?”

  “It’s not the sort of thing you can do overnight. But they’re in the process. In a month or so, it’s possible we’ll be able to ‘bootstrap’ water into orbit, without using any earth-made fuel.”

  “Do the Lobbies know this?”

  “Yes… it should make them more cooperative.”

  I wasn’t so sure.

  The meeting was strained. A lot of talk concerned what to take along as your seven kilograms. I resolved to go naked and barefoot, so as not to leave my clarinet behind. Actually, though, I didn’t have much beyond the clarinet and my diary. I’d fed guilty taking things that were just souvenirs. Some cigarettes for Daniel and some Guinness for John. Benny’s picture. What of Jeff’s?

  When the meeting was breaking up, I mentioned that I didn’t want to go back to my dormitory room, saying it had just been painted. The only one who wasn’t going straight to the Cape was Steve Rosenberg; he offered me a couch.

  When we were “alone” on the subway, he asked whether I would rather share his bed. I said I was in too complicated an emotional state for sex, and he understood. So I lay awake for some hours on his couch, mostly worrying about seeing Jeff, partly wishing I were in the next room. There’s no better sleeping pill, and Steve seemed gentle as well as pretty.

  39

  I want to be in that number

  I tried to call Daniel the next morning but was told the equipment was “not functioning.” Went back to the dorm and found a note, unsigned, saying there was an urgent meeting that night, be at the Grapeseed at eight. I planned to be a couple of thousand kilometers away.

  I closed my account at the credit union and went to a broker and converted most of the cash into twenty ounces of gold, always scarce in the Worlds. Put two changes of clothing in my bag, then loaded everything else into the trunk, took it down to Penn Station and had it sent to Cape Town. Then I met Jeff for lunch.

  He was stunned at the news of Benny’s death. He couldn’t argue with the necessity of my going to Cape Town and getting home as early as possible.

  “But marry me first,” he said.

  “You keep asking me that in restaurants,” I said. “You know I love you, Jeff, but… it would just make both of us unhappy.”

  He shook his head and clasped both my hands. “A symbol, that’s all. It doesn’t even have to be permanent. We could get married in Delaware, make it a one-year renewable contract. Then when I get to New New York we can make whatever arrangement seems right.”

  A one-year contract didn’t sound much like marriage to me. But it would make it easier for him to emigrate. “I guess there’s no harm in it Could we do it right away?”

  “I have two days off. We could even squeeze in a little honeymoon, in Cape Town.”

  “New Orleans,” I said. “I’m not going back without seeing it.”

  We spent about an hour in Dover, thirty seconds of which was taken up by a bored notary reciting the marriage statute to us. Better than a Devonite ceremony, I guess, but not exactly moving.

  It was a good time to visit New Orleans. The week before ha
d been the annual sustained riot of Mardi Gras, and things were getting back to normal—a sustained wild party, that is to say.

  Gambling and prostitution are legal in the old French Quarter; the gambling confined to one large casino but the prostitution is everywhere. It was handled better than on Broadway. To keep his or her license, a whore had to submit to a daily medical inspection. Prices were fixed by law, and any crime against a customer was cause for automatic and permanent revocation (a “ticket to Nevada,” I found out they called it). Most of the whores wore conspicuous costumes—a “slave girl” in rags and chains gave me a shiver—but some wore regular clothes, with license prominently displayed. Many transvestites and people whose orientation was ambiguous or, more likely, flexible. Some gorgeous chunks of male meat that gave me unwifely urgings.

  But mainly it was music. It wasn’t pure Dixieland everywhere—in fact, there were even a few places with that mindless Ajimbo noise—and even where there was Dixie-land, it was usually not the classical raucous polyphony, but smoother modern variations. But Preservation Hall had the real stuff, and Jeff dutifully sat with me for hour after hour there. He claimed to enjoy it, but I’ve seen ‘his music collection, and it runs to urban ballads with a little light opera, no jazz.

  In a spirit of evening things up, I went to the Casino with him, and watched him play for a couple of hours. He went in with five hundred dollars and said he’d play until he’d doubled it or lost it. He lost it, mainly on blackjack, though he dropped about a hundred on I-Ching, the rules for which I never did figure out.

  We made love often and with some desperation, and walked the quaint streets saying obvious and important things. We ducked out of the rain into an antique store on Decatur Street, where my foolish mudball cop bought me a ring that must have cost several weeks’ salary, a fire opal surrounded with diamond chips. Later, when he was sleeping, I slipped out and went back to the same place, and traded an ounce of my gold for a man’s ring, a small gold nugget set in black onyx, and slipped it on his finger without waking him. Saying goodbye was very hard. Afterwards I sat in our room, my room now, for a long afternoon of staring and thinking.

  Finally I had to get out, and I walked through the mist rain to a place on Bourbon Street, Fat Charlie’s, where we’d heard some real Dixieland. It was a small place and not clean, sawdust on the floor, mismatched hard chairs tucked under random tables. But the music was loud and beautiful.

  What changed my life was this: after one fine set I gave the waiter a ten and asked him to buy a drink for Fat Charlie, who was the group’s clarinet player, and a good one. Fat Charlie brought the drink over and sat with me, and he was rather fascinated to find a Dixieland lover who was a woman, a white woman, a white woman from another World. When I admitted I played the clarinet, he was even more fascinated, and brought over his machine. He gave me a fresh reed to suck and asked me to “show my stuff.”

  I amazed myself. His clarinet was a century-old LeBlanc, bored out for jazz. The sound was hard and bright and sexy. I did a few scales and intervals and then part of the wailing introduction to “Rhapsody in Blue.”

  I looked at the clarinet. “Incredible machine.”

  “How long you been playing, girl?”

  “Thirteen years now.”

  “Be damned.” He touched my elbow. “Come on up here.” He led me to the platform, where the other band members were lounging, nursing drinks.

  “I’ve never played jazz with a live group before.”

  “No problem. These fuckers won’t be alive till the sun goes down.” He gave a sideways signal with his head and the men picked up their instruments and did the reflex things with the spit valves and slides and tuning pegs. The pianist did a sarcastic arpeggio. “Saints in B-flat?” he said to me.

  “Sure.” He was giving me the easy one.

  Fat Charlie snapped his fingers like four sharp pistol shots and the drummer banged out a two-bar street beat introduction. We started clean and I went through the first verse and chorus almost automatically, not trying anything fancy. In this kind of pure Dixieland the cornet carries the melody and the clarinet rides an obbligato over him, subordinate but with more improvisational freedom than any of the others. After the first time around, each chorus is given to a different instrument, to improvise over a muted background of chords and rhythm. Fat Charlie gave me a nod for the second chorus; I closed my eyes and tried to forget there was an audience and waded right in.

  It was good. It’s been a long time since I had any difficulty with the mechanics of improvisation, anticipating the march of chords and choosing appropriate notes, but this was better than I had ever done—feeding off the other players, trying to get out in music something about losing Benny and Jeff leaving, and about going home, and all the wonderful and terrifying things that had happened over the last half-year. All in sixteen bars, sure.

  The eight or nine people in the audience applauded my solo, and Fat Charlie smiled and nodded. While the drummer was doing his sixteen, Fat Charlie came over and whispered, “Last chorus all together, in E-flat, okay?” It’s not my favorite key, but I managed to get through without too much pain.

  Afterwards Fat Charlie held up two stubby fingers to the bartender and steered me back to the table. “Will you be in New Orleans awhile?” He said the name of the town as one three-syllable word.

  “Only two days.” I explained about Cape Town and waiting for the shuttle.

  “How ’bout sitting in here a couple of times? The novelty’d bring in business and you know you’d enjoy it.”

  “I’d love to, if my lip holds out” You lose embouchure fast if you don’t practice every day. “We can switch off.” The bartender brought over two drinks in tall frosted glasses. “You tried a julep yet?”

  “No, I usually drink beer or wine.” The cold sweet taste of it brought a double memory shock: mint tea in Marrakesh, with Jeff; bourbon in coffee at Perkins’s rough table.

  “You don’t like it?” Fat Charlie looked at me-with a worried expression. I guess I’d paled.

  “No, I do. It—it just reminded me of something.” I could almost remember something Benny had said about the force behind art.

  He found a rumpled piece of paper and a pencil stub. “We don’t have enough violins for ‘Rhapsody in Blue.’ You got other favorites?”

  I could fake anything from “Basin Street” to “Willy the Weeper.” But I gave him a list of nine or ten I was most familiar with.

  “I’ll call and have some handouts printed up. What’s your name?”

  “Marianne… Mary Hawkings.” I hadn’t taken Jeff’s name, but it didn’t seem smart to put my own on handbills.

  “You have a picture we can use?”

  “Please, I’d rather you didn’t.” I couldn’t think of a lie fast enough. “Don’t ask me why.”

  “Sure, that’s all right. Mystery woman from outer space. Give you five hundred a night?”

  I would have paid him twice that, for the experience. “Fine. What time?”

  “Eight or nine. Well be playing till ‘round three.” He left to have the handouts made. I finished the drink and went out to walk off the nervousness. The rain had gone away.

  So I had to come to Earth to be a soloist. There was a certain boy from school, a first clarinet, I wished could have been in the audience.

  I went up on the levee to watch the sun set over the Mississippi and then went to a place Jeff and I had enjoyed, an old brick building by the levee that served only coffee and beignets, a kind of sweet fried bread dusted with powdered sugar, the coffee rich with chicory and heavy real cream. I felt so alive, so sad-and-happy, so full of expectation. I walked all of the Quarter, up and down and across, humming and whistling the songs I’d be playing, straightening out the melodies in my mind. In a Bourbon Street sitdown place, I felt like having a fish dinner, so I ordered crayfish, crawdads, and was nonplussed when the waitress brought out a large tray with a mountain of red-black insectoid creatures heaped on it. She
showed me how to dissect them, a tiny pinch of meat in each one. Delicate taste.

  For another hour I wandered up and down Bourbon Street, loitering in the doors of places that had music, stealing tricks. Then I went on to Fat Charlie’s. I passed dozens of handbills with my “name” on them.

  There wasn’t an empty seat in the place. The bar was shoulder-to-shoulder and there were customers nursing drinks, leaning against the walls. Fat Charlie came out of nowhere and put his arm around my shoulders.

  “This is a big crowd, girl,” he said quietly. “They came to see you.”

  “I can’t believe that—what, two hours? Three?”

  “It’s a small town. These’re not too many tourists … like I say, you’re something different. They come by to see.” He handed me five crisp bills. “Here’s some confidence. You go back in the kitchen and warm up a bit Machine’s behind the piano.”

  “What will I be playing, what order?”

  “You just name it We prob’ly know it.”

  Well, that was an interesting challenge. I picked up his clarinet and went into the kitchen, trying to think of the most obscure piece I knew. The kitchen was barely big enough for me and the cook, since the only prepared food they sold was fried potatoes with lots of salt. The cook was a little fat white man who never looked up from the potato slicer, but said, “Bottle’s in the refrigerator.”

  I didn’t usually eat or drink anything before playing, because of the saliva problem, but this wasn’t exactly Mozart, and I was nervous enough to appreciate a little liquid courage. The bottle turned out to be bourbon, of course. I poured a couple of centimeters into a rather clean glass and drank it in one gulp. Shuddered from the fire and memory.

  I worked out a little opening line for “Stavin’ Change,” which they couldn’t possibly know. Feeling mischievous relieved some of the tension. Then I did fast and slow arpeggios, lowest note to highest, in all the keys we could possibly use.