Trip’s hands grew cold, his cock shrank to a damp spot between his legs. He glanced away, then back again. Still she stared at him, her expression unchanged. The stars faded, and with them the reassuring recorded voice of the planetarium’s narrator. For an instant the room was absolutely black, save for the dull crimson lozenge of an EXIT sign. Trip could hear snorts and nervous laughter from the schoolchildren, their teacher’s loud hush. In the silence the air-conditioning’s breath became the sound of waves receding from an infinite shore. He stared at the darkness where the blond girl sat, trying to muster up some memory of what he had felt just minutes before. But his desire was utterly gone. In its place he felt a desperate queasiness, a growing certainty that if he were to extend his hand to her chair, he would find it empty. He felt like an idiot, but that’s just what he did, willing his hand to be steady as he groped tentatively at the seat.
There was nothing there. His neck prickled as his fingers ticked along the edge of the chair, the plush cloth like cool skin, but she was not there, she wasn’t there, and in a horrible moment of clarity he knew that she never had been there. He looked around frantically. Could she have left without him seeing? Had she crawled over the back of the seat and fled? His fingers clawed the soft velvet as he pulled himself up. His mouth opened to call out when he saw in the darkness before him two pale glowing orbs. At first he thought they were astral images projected upon the wall behind the rows of seats. But then they moved closer to him, and he knew that they were her eyes.
“No,” whispered Trip.
He had no hint whatsoever of a face or body. Two deathly white globes. A bit of nonsense spurted into his consciousness, something he had heard or read in school—
—and then the air was split by the ringing thunder of a gong. The dome blazed white and gold, the constellations suddenly visible in all their primal glory. Superimposed across this radiance was an immense rotating wheel and the words AS ABOVE, SO BELOW.
“SUPERSTITION DIES HARD.” No longer the soothing tones of the astronomer, but a man’s voice, boomingly confident.
“EVEN THE HIGH-RESOLUTION IMAGERY OF THE HUBBLE AND DESCARTES TELESCOPES CANNOT DESTROY CENTURIES OF IGNORANCE AND FEAR. YET EACH DAY CONTINUES TO BRING US NEW DISCOVERIES, NEW SKILLS, AND NEW TOOLS TO MASTER THE UNIVERSE. ASTRONOMERS AND ASTROPHYSICISTS PREACH A GOSPEL OF HOPE, NOT DOOM. WE MUST LOOK NOT TO THE DISTANT PAST BUT TO THE FUTURE AND A NEW MILLENNIUM: A NEW AGE FOR HUMANITY.”
The constellations faded. A scarlet banner of words rippled across the dome.
The words faded into darkness and in their place another banner rose.
Trip gaped: had this happened at the earlier show? If so, he had no memory of it. Maybe that was what sex did to you. With one last fanfare of gongs and drums, the planetarium went dark and the house lights came up. Trip blinked, and found himself staring into Marz’s waifish face.
“Hey.” He scrambled to his feet, confused. “Ouch. Where’d you go?”
She shrugged. “Nowhere. You know. Here.”
Trip waited for something more in the way of an explanation. She said nothing, just stood and leaned over the seat to retrieve her raincoat. Her jodhpurs were slung so low about her waist that when she bent he could see the top of her ass. To his shame and amazement, his cock began to swell again. A giddy wave of desire swept through him. When Marz turned around he grabbed her and kissed her, the raincoat crushed noisily between them. Her mouth parted, but she felt limp and all but weightless. He might have been kissing a cloth doll. On the far side of the room someone snickered. Trip drew back, blushing, and stared at the floor.
“I guess we better go,” he mumbled, and took her hand. She nodded and followed him out of the planetarium, dragging her raincoat behind her.
The limousine was waiting outside. A thin icy rain nicked at the sidewalk, but the blond girl didn’t put on her raincoat. Silently the driver emerged to hold the car door open. Trip waited until she’d slid all the way over to the far window before he stepped inside. They sat without speaking at opposite ends of the car as it drove crosstown, music droning from the speakers.
“Check out the dinosaurs?” the driver asked as they swung into traffic. Trip shook his head. The driver shot him a disbelieving look. “No dinosaurs?”
“No,” Trip snapped.
The driver shrugged. “Next time, huh? Where to now?”
Trip gestured weakly. “Back to GFI, I guess.”
They started crosstown. Trip stared at the flood of yellow cabs turned livid by sleet slanting down from a distempered sky. Just a short time ago he had seen it all for the first time, sitting beside Jerry Disney in another hired car and laughing in amazement at the legions of taxis (private cars were outlawed now, except on weekends, when the affluent fled the city and the streets were jammed with decrepit vehicles of every type), the buses with kids hanging from the doors. Kids everywhere. More feral children than he had ever seen in Nashville or Austin or even Seattle, begging and skating and stumbling out of icehouses, pink and orange wires tangled in their disheveled hair, or accompanying the youthfully middle-aged and wary, who paid them to serve as escorts and so deflect the attentions of other young thieves. Runaways and prostitutes, John Drinkwater said—though some of them looked Trip’s age, so they couldn’t really be called runaways, could they?—but Jerry told Trip that they were fellahin.
“That’s an Arab word,” he explained as they stared out their hotel window at a dark-haired boy in kilt and football helmet, panhandling on the sidewalk. “I saw it on Radium. It means, like, whore” he added, staring in disgust as the kilted boy leaned into the window of a cab.
Actually, the original meaning was closer to peasant, as Trip learned when he mentioned this newfound bit of esoterica during his interview on Radium with Lotte Sa’adah. But as Lotte said,
Hey! whore z-head fux populi wtf! f *ck! whatever! so ok areet?!
Back then even the runaways had seemed exotic—romantic even, because pitiable—to Trip. Now, with a girl he barely knew slouched silently at the other end of the hired car, the fellahin seemed more sinister. Trip dug his hands into the pockets of his jeans and sank farther into his seat.
It was late afternoon. Sandbagged sidewalks were jammed with pedestrians and cyclists crowding subway entrances and storefronts to keep out of the rain. In the bright aperture between skyscrapers Trip saw a writhing shape like an amoeba, one of the city’s solex shields come loose. He glimpsed the brass-colored capsule of one of GFI’s famous fleet of advertising dirigibles, fresh from its factory in Northern Japan, moving slowly across the sky.