“Oh, God!”
“How old?”
“Two thousand?”
“I’m fifty-eight. I won’t live to see fifty-nine. Here, smoke one of these.”
With trembling hands he offered her a tiny ivory tube. There was a Gothic monogram near one end—FXB—and a translucent green capsule at the other. She pressed the capsule, and a flickering blue flame sprouted. She inhaled. “What is it?” she asked.
“My own mixture. Soma Number Five. You like it?”
“I’m smeared,” she said. “Absolutely smeared. Oh, God!” The walls were flowing. The snow had turned to tinfoil. An instant hit. The corpse had a golden halo. Dollar signs rose into view like stigmata on his furrowed forehead. She heard the crash of the surf, the roar of the waves. The deck was heaving. The masts were cracking. Woman overboard! she cried, and heard her inaudible voice disappearing down a tunnel of echoes, boingg boingg boingg. She clutched at his frail wrists. “You bastard, what did you do to me?”
“I’m Francis Xavier Byrne.”
Oh. The billionaire. Byrne Industries, the great conglomerate. Steiner had promised her a billionaire tonight.
“Are you going to die soon?” she asked.
“No later than Easter. Money can’t help me now. I’m a walking metastasis.” He opened his ruffled shirt. Something bright and metallic, like chain mail, covered his chest. “Life-support system,” he confided. “It operates me. Take it off for half an hour and I’d be finished. Are you a Capricorn?”
“How did you know?”
“I may be dying, but I’m not stupid. You have the Capricorn gleam in your eyes. What am I?”
She hesitated. His eyes were gleaming too. Self-made man, fantastic business sense, energy, arrogance. Capricorn, of course. No, too easy. “Leo,” she said.
“No. Try again.” He pressed another monogrammed tube into her hand and strode away. She hadn’t yet come down from the last one, although the most flamboyant effects had ebbed. Party guests swirled and flowed around her. She no longer could see Nicholson. The snow seemed to be turning to hail, little hard particles spattering the vast windows and leaving white abraded tracks: or were her perceptions merely sharper? The roar of conversation seemed to rise and fall as if someone were adjusting a volume control. The lights fluctuated in a counterpointed rhythm. She felt dizzy. A tray of golden cocktails went past her and she hissed, “Where’s the bathroom?”
Down the hall. Five strangers clustered outside it, talking in scaly whispers. She floated through them, grabbed the sink’s cold edge, thrust her face to the oval concave mirror. A death’s-head. Parchment skin, nightmare eyes. No! No! She blinked and her own features reappeared. Shivering, she made an effort to pull herself together. The medicine cabinet held a tempting collection of drugs, Steiner’s all-purpose remedies. Without looking at labels Nikki seized a handful of vials and gobbled pills at random. A flat red one, a tapering green one, a succulent yellow gelatin capsule. Maybe headache remedies, maybe hallucinogens. Who knows, who cares? We Capricorns are not always as cautious as you think.
Someone knocked at the bathroom door. She answered and found the bland, hopeful face of Martin Bliss hovering near the ceiling. Eyes protruding faintly, cheeks florid. “They said you were sick. Can I do anything for you?” So kind, so sweet. She touched his arm, grazed his cheek with her lips. Beyond him in the hall stood a broad-bodied man with close-cropped blond hair, glacial blue eyes, a plump perfect face. His smile was intense and brilliant. “That’s easy,” he said. “Capricorn.”
“You can guess my—” She stopped, stunned. “Sign?” she finished, voice very small. “How did you do that? Oh.”
“Yes. I’m that one.”
She felt more than naked, stripped down to the ganglia, to the synapses. “What’s the trick?”
“No trick. I listen. I hear.”
“You hear people thinking?”
“More or less. Do you think it’s a party game?” He was beautiful but terrifying, like a Samurai sword in motion. She wanted him but she didn’t dare. He’s got my number, she thought. I would never have any secrets from him. He said sadly, “I don’t mind that. I know I frighten a lot of people. Some don’t care.”
“What’s your name?”
“Tom,” he said. “Hello, Nikki.”
“I feel very sorry for you.”
“Not really. You can kid yourself if you need to. But you can’t kid me. Anyway, you don’t sleep with men you feel sorry for.”
I don’t sleep with you.”
“You will,” he said.
“I thought you were just a mind-reader. They didn’t tell me you did prophecies too.”
He leaned close and smiled. The smile demolished her. She had to fight to keep from falling. “I’ve got your number, all right,” he said in a low, harsh voice. “I’ll call you next Tuesday.” As he walked away he said, “You’re wrong. I’m a Virgo. Believe it or not.”
Nikki returned, numb, to the living room. “… the figure of the mandala,” Nicholson was saying. His voice was dark, focused, a pure basso cantante. “The essential thing that every mandala has is a center—the place where everything is born, the eye of God’s mind, the heart of darkness and of light, the core of the storm. All right. You must move toward the center, find the vortex at the boundary of Yang and Yin, place yourself right at the mandala’s midpoint. Center yourself. Do you follow the metaphor? Center yourself at now, the eternal now. To move off-center is to move forward toward death, backward toward birth, always the fatal polar swings. But if you’re capable of positioning yourself constantly at the focus of the mandala, right on center, you have access to the fountain of renewal, you become an organism capable of constant self-healing, constant self-replenishment, constant expansion into regions beyond self. Do you follow? The power of… ”
Steiner, at her elbow, said tenderly, “How beautiful you are in the first moments of erotic fixation.”
“It’s a marvelous party.”
“Are you meeting interesting people?”
“Is there any other kind?” she asked.
Nicholson abruptly detached himself from the circle of his audience and strode across the room, alone, in a quick decisive knight’s move toward the bar. Nikki, hurrying to intercept him, collided with a shaven-headed tray-bearing servant. The tray slid smoothly from the man’s thick fingertips and launched itself into the air like a spinning shield; a rainfall of skewered meat in an oily green curry sauce spattered the white carpet. The servant was utterly motionless. He stood frozen like some sort of Mexican stone idol, thick-necked, flat-nosed, for a long painful moment; then he turned his head slowly to the left and regretfully contemplated his rigid outspread hand, shorn of its tray; finally he swung his head toward Nikki, and his normally expressionless granite face took on for a quick flickering instant a look of total hatred, a coruscating emanation of contempt and disgust that faded immediately. He laughed: hu-hu-hu, a neighing snicker. His superiority was overwhelming. Nikki floundered in quicksands of humiliation. Hastily she escaped, a zig and a zag, around the tumbled goodies and across to the bar. Nicholson, still by himself. Her face went crimson. She felt short of breath. Hunting for words, tongue all thumbs. Finally, in a catapulting blurt: “Happy birthday!”