I argued the other hand. If Vanity were accurate in her portrayal of Boggin's tone of voice, his supercilious expressions, and lilting sarcasm, it was clear to me that Boggin had no intention whatsoever to cooperate with Mavors. The Laestrygonian had expressly said that the Lamia would not attack us while we were still on the estate grounds; Boggin said his mission was to prevent us from being attacked.
All he had to do was continue to make one excuse after another to Mavors, saying, whenever he was asked, that the escape attempt was not quite ready yet. He could play such delays interminably. I thought we had escaped all on our own, and everyone but Victor seemed willing to believe me.
My main argument was this: If Boggin had helped us escape, he would have put some sort of tracking device on us.
Vanity said slowly, "But he did. He has one on you. Your promise to him acts as a consent to be found by him."
I put my hand toward her. We held hands. I asked, "Is he tracking me now?"
Vanity closed her eyes. For a moment, I thought perhaps the champagne had sent her to sleep, but then she stirred and said, "Maybe he is still in the hospital, or maybe he's not thinking of you. He's not aware of you. Not right now."
Victor handed Vanity the little box that controlled the television. He turned his back to her and asked her to point the little box at him. She did, giggling, and we all joked she was raising and lowering Victor's volume and so on.
He turned and came back. "Could I sense you when you were not sending a beam toward me?"
Vanity pouted. She said, "He's right. If they have a bug on us, or on our clothes, and it's not broadcasting at the moment, I would not sense that we were being watched. If they were tape-recording our conversations, and they hadn't gotten around to playing the tapes back yet, I do not think I would sense that either."
Victor said coldly, "We would be fools to assume, after a warning such as this—a warning which, by the way, we can assume Boreas could arrange fate to make us stumble upon—we would be fools to assume we are safe. The next attack is going to be lethal. We don't know when it will come, or where. We are like the farmers who lived on the slopes of Vesuvius: We know the eruption is coming. I suggest we stand watches tonight and that we do not go out of this cabin for the remainder of the voyage.
Furthermore…"
But the rest of us were not as worried as Victor. Colin, for example, had already nodded off; Quentin was yawning, and Vanity had put her head on his knee and had her eyes delicately closed, her soft lips parted, her own red tresses a thick pillow beneath her ear.
I leaned over and tugged Vanity's shoulder till she stood up, blinking. I said, "Okay, Victor. You boys stand watch over us helpless girls. If anyone comes into our bedroom, we'll both scream. How's that?"
Three days of sailing passed without incident. Surrounded by the luxuries and entertainment of what was certainly the finest ship afloat, we simply could not take Victor's worries seriously. We tried to keep watches at night, and the boys did not mind taking turns staying up late, watching the miraculous television.
There were two or three channels that had nothing but rock-and-roll, to which half-nude starlets jumped up and down to truly primitive jungle-drum music. Colin was fascinated, and spent hours absorbed in music television.
Quentin thought the act of casting his circle of silence might attract more attention than it deflected, and he asked us to rely on Vanity to tell us if the wind were listening to us. And yet he also seemed relaxed; he dreamt he read his book at night, and his book hinted that, over the sea, the gods of land had less authority, less power.
At Victor's insistence, we always traveled in pairs, or stayed within shouting distance. More or less. I mean, a person can really shout a long way, right? This was not really a burden, either; Vanity and I did not want to be alone when we explored the ship, and we sort of needed each other's protection to ward off the gallantries of passengers and crew, all of whom seemed old, so very old to me.
1.
It was our own fault. Vanity had bought us both bathing suits in Paris. Hers was a peach bikini the hue of her skin, that made her seem nude at five paces; mine was a black one-piece, but hardly demure, for it had lace panels down the sides, with a neckline that opened almost to the belly button. And it tied up the back and front with such a thorough web of laces that I am sure Grendel's opposite number among human bathing suit designers had drawn up the plans.
We went swimming the first day in a nearly empty pool. By the afternoon, the pool was crowded with onlookers and men and boys splashing near us and trying to show off. The handsome young lifeguard came by every few minutes to make sure I hadn't drowned. I also caused a sensation just by swimming laps. I do not know what I did wrong or did differently from anyone else, but if I could swim faster than a human being, or hold the pace longer, or hold my breath longer, it might have been obvious to them and not to me.
I jogged on the deck and played some games they had there; I visited the spa; I played racquetball with a handsome young man named Klaus, who owned his own business doing something with computers or telephones, or both, which he tried to explain to me while he was trying to get Vanity to go away so he could molest me.
I saw a movie in a real movie theater, and found out I could borrow movies on tape from the ship's library and watch them in the stateroom.
There was one, a black-and-white Western starring Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly, about a man who has to save an ungrateful town from four bad guys coming to kill him. Everyone tries to talk him out of it, his friends, his newlywed wife, everyone. She leaves him. In the end, when he does away with the bandits, they don't even thank him. It made me cry. I don't remember the name of the film, but I hope it won an Academy Award for its year. Marshal Kane was the character's name. I told Vanity that this was the way I wanted to act: to do what was right without fear of failure, without expectation of reward. The wife came back, in the end, Grace Kelly's character.
We rang in the New Year that night. The ballroom was splendid with decorations. I found the images of Father Time with his scythe a bit sinister, though. We went dancing, both swing-time dancing and formal ballroom dancing. Victor is always fun to waltz with because he never loses the beat and never makes mistakes, but Colin was fun to waltz with, too, and he seemed almost polished and polite when he spoke.
Colin and I spun around the dance floor to the lilting strains of "The Blue Danube" by Strauss, and I said,
"Have you been replaced by a Colin-shaped robot duplicate?"
"What's the matter, Amelia?" He smiled down at me. His eyes were blue and warm.
"A whole hour has gone by, and you haven't used the word 'breast' or even 'nipple' once in the conversation. You said 'Please' earlier this evening. I heard it. It's like seeing a wild boar use a litter box.
Has someone domesticated you?"
He grinned his normal the-devil-may-care-but-Colin-does-not-care grin and said, "Well, Amy, being poked by Dr. Fell and sneered at by Boggin and ear-pulled by the porcelain Daw, and ruler-whipped by baggy Mrs. Wren gets to a fellow after a while. I was never the teacher's pet like you were, and I couldn't be the iceman like Victor. And I couldn't even shut up and keep my head down like Big Q.
Vanity could hypnotize the male teachers and staff with her industrial-strength, king-sized breasts, of course, or threaten to hose down rioters with milk from her nipples. What did I have? I could take the heat for you guys. So I took it."
"Took what?"
"You know. When you guys got in trouble, I would throw myself on the hand grenade for you. When you broke some small rule, I'd break some huge rule, and you'd get off with a little delicate slap on your little delicate wrist while I went into the hotbox."