For a time he was able to maintain his business on the momentum of his reputation. Then, as word got around that he had been hurt and was no longer any good, clients stopped coming. Even the contingency basis for fees failed to attract them. Within six months he found that he was lucky to find a client a week. He reduced his rates, and that seemed only to make things worse, so he raised them to something not far below what they had been at the time of the overload. For a while the pace of business increased, as if people were getting the impression that Skein had recovered. He gave such spotty service, though. Blurred and wavering communions, unanticipated positive feedbacks, filtering problems, information deficiencies, redundancy surpluses—”You take your mind in your hands when you go to Skein,” they were saying now.
The fugues added to his professional difficulties.
He never knew when he would snap into hallucination. It might happen during a communion, and often did. Once he dropped back to the moment of the Coustakis-Nissenson hookup and treated a terrified client to a replay of his overload. Once, although he did not understand at the time what was happening, he underwent a flashforward and carried the client with him to a scarlet jungle on a formaldehyde world, and when Skein slipped back to reality the client remained in the scarlet jungle. There was a damage suit over that one, too.
Temporal dislocation plagued him into making poor guesses. He took on clients whom he could not possibly serve and wasted his time on them. He turned away people whom he might have been able to help to his own profit. Since he was no longer anchored firmly to his timeline, but drifted in random oscillations of twenty years or more in either direction, he forfeited the keen sense of perspective on which he had previously founded his professional judgments. He grew haggard and lean, also. He passed through a tempest of spiritual doubts that amounted to total submission and then total rejection of faith within the course of four months. He changed lawyers almost weekly. He liquidated assets with invariably catastrophic timing to pay his cascading bills.
A year and a half after the overload, he formally renounced his registration and closed his office. It took six months more to settle the remaining damage suits. Then, with what was left of his money, he bought a spaceliner ticket and set out to search for a world with purple sand and blue-leaved trees, where, unless his fugues had played him false, he might be able to arrange for the repair of his broken mind.
Now the ship has returned to the conventional fourspace and dawdles planetward at something rather less than half the speed of light. Across the screens there spreads a necklace of stars; space is crowded here. The captain will point out Abbondanza to anyone who asks: a lemon-colored sun, bigger than that of Earth, surrounded by a dozen bright planetary pips. The passengers are excited. They buzz, twitter, speculate, anticipate. No one is silent except Skein. He is aware of many love affairs; he has had to reject several offers just in the past three days. He has given up reading and is trying to purge his mind of all he has stuffed into it. The fugues have grown worse. He has to write notes to himself, saying things like You are a passenger aboard a ship heading for Abbondanza VI, and will be landing in a few days, so that he does not forget which of his three entangled timelines is the true one.
Suddenly he is with Nilla on the island in the Gulf of Mexico, getting aboard the little excursion boat. Time stands still here; it could almost be the twentieth century. The frayed, sagging cords of the rigging. The lumpy engine inefficiently converted from internal combustion to turbines. The mustachioed Mexican bandits who will be their guides today. Nilla, nervously coiling her long blonde hair, saying, “Will I get seasick, John? The boat rides right in the water, doesn’t it? It won’t even hover a little bit?”
“Terribly archaic,” Skein says. “That’s why we’re here.”
The captain gestures them aboard. Juan, Francisco, Sebastián. Brothers. Los hermanos. Yards of white teeth glistening below the drooping moustaches. With a terrible roar the boat moves away from the dock. Soon the little town of crumbling pastel buildings is out of sight and they are heading jaggedly eastward along the coast, green shoreward water on their left, the blue depths on the right. The morning sun coming up hard. “Could I sunbathe?” Nilla asks. Unsure of herself; he has never seen her this way, so hesitant, so abashed. Mexico has robbed her of her New York assurance. “Go ahead,” Skein says. “Why not?” She drops her robe. Underneath she wears only a waist-strap; her heavy breasts look white and vulnerable in the tropic glare, and the small nipples are a faded pink. Skein sprays her with protective sealant and she sprawls out on the deck. Los hermanos stare hungrily and talk to each other in low rumbling tones. Not Spanish. Mayan, perhaps? The natives have never learned to adopt the tourists’ casual nudity here. Nilla, obviously still uneasy, rolls over and lies face down. Her broad smooth back glistens.
Juan and Francisco yell. Skein follows their pointing fingers. Porpoises! A dozen of them, frisking around the bow, keeping just ahead of the boat, leaping high and slicing down into the blue water. Nilla gives a little cry of joy and rushes to the side to get a closer look. Throwing her arm self-consciously across her bare breasts. “You don’t need to do that,” Skein murmurs. She keeps herself covered. “How lovely they are,” she says softly. Sebastián comes up beside them. “Amigos,” he says. “They are. My friends.” The cavorting porpoises eventually disappear. The boat bucks bouncily onward, keeping close to the island’s beautiful empty palmy shore. Later they anchor, and he and Nilla swim masked, spying on the coral gardens. When they haul themselves on deck again it is almost noon. The sun is terrible. “Lunch?” Francisco asks. “We make you good lunch now?” Nilla laughs. She is no longer hiding her body. “I’m starved!” she cries.
“We make you good lunch,” Francisco says, grinning, and he and Juan go over the side. In the shallow water they are clearly visible near the white sand of the bottom. They have spear guns; they hold their breaths and prowl. Too late Skein realizes what they are doing. Francisco hauls a fluttering spiny lobster out from behind a rock. Juan impales a huge pale crab. He grabs three conchs also, surfaces, dumps his prey on the deck. Francisco arrives with the lobster. Juan, below again, spears a second lobster. The animals are not dead; they crawl sadly in circles on the deck as they dry. Appalled, Skein turns to Sebastián and says, “Tell them to stop. We’re not that hungry.” Sebastián, preparing some kind of salad, smiles and shrugs. Francisco has brought up another crab, bigger than the first. “Enough,” Skein says. “Basta! Basta!” Juan, dripping, tosses down three more conchs. “You pay us good,” he says. “We give you good lunch.” Skein shakes his head. The deck is becoming a slaughterhouse for ocean life. Sebastián now energetically slits conch shells, extracts the meat, drops it into a vast bowl to marinate in a yellow-green fluid. “Basta!” Skein yells: Is that the right word in Spanish? He knows it’s right in Italian. Los hermanos look amused. The sea is full of life, they seem to be telling him. We give you good lunch. Suddenly Francisco erupts from the water, bearing something immense. A turtle! Forty, fifty pounds! The joke has gone too far. “No,” Skein says. “Listen, I have to forbid this. Those turtles are almost extinct. Do you understand that? Muerto. Perdido. Desaparecido. I won’t eat a turtle. Throw it back. Throw it back.” Francisco smiles. He shakes his head. Deftly he binds the turtle’s flippers with rope. Juan says, “Not for lunch, señor. For us. For to sell. Mucho dinero.” Skein can do nothing. Francisco and Sebastián have begun to hack up the crabs and lobsters. Juan slices peppers into the bowl where the conchs are marinating. Pieces of dead animals litter the deck. “Oh, I’m starving,” Nilla says. Her waist-strap is off too, now. The turtle watches the whole scene, beady-eyed. Skein shudders. Auschwitz, he thinks. Buchenwald. For the animals it’s Buchenwald every day.