Nan paid her check and dodged cautiously across Gallow-gate among the towering buses that so mischievously raced along the wrong side of the street. The diesel stink made her cough, and coughing made her headache worse.
And she was late. She was to be picked up for the airport at one, and it was past noon already. She walked virtuously past the shops (so bright and gay!) without looking in a single window. There were styles here that Sofia would not see for another year. But why bother? It would have been nice to buy new clothes to wear for Ahmed. With him so many billions of kilometers away, Nan wore what was easiest to put on and least likely to attract attention. Evenings she spent alone when she could, listening to music and studying grammar. Her best treat was to reread the sparse letters he had returned for her prodigious outflow — although they were not stimulating. From what he said, Son of Kung sounded a grim and awful place.
She cut through a corner of the Green to walk along the riverside toward her hotel, hoping to avoid the noise and the invisible, but not unsmellable, exhaust from all the vehicles. No use. Lorries rumbled along the embankment, and the sludgy surface of the Clyde itself was pocked with oil tankers and barges and creased with the wakes of hydrofoils. How did one live in a place like this? And it all could have been avoided. A little forethought. A little planning. Why did they have to put oil refineries in the middle of a city? Why stain their river with waste and filth when it could have been a cool oasis? Why be in such a rush to pump the oil from the bottom of the sea when it could have provided energy, even food, for another hundred generations? Why use oil at all, for that matter — especially in these packs and swarms of cars and lorries — when the city could have been built around public transportation, electrically powered, or powered with the hydrogen that Iceland, not so very far away, was so eager to sell.
But on Son of Kung…
On Son of Kung it could be all different. She wished she could be there. With Ahmed. Not just to be with Ahmed, she told herself stoutly, but to be part of a new world where things could be done properly. Where the mistakes of Earth could be avoided. Where one’s children would have a future to look forward to.
Hers and Ahmed’s children, of course. Nan smiled to herself. She was an honest person, and she admitted that Kung-son seemed all the finer because Ahmed was there. If only she were not here! There were worrisome things between the lines of what he wrote. So many of his expedition had been sick. So many had died, just in the first days — and his only letters had been in those first days. Why, he himself could have — No. She would not countenance that thought. There was enough else to fret about. For example, the picture he had sent of himself. He had looked worrisomely thin, but what she had noticed most about the picture was the hand on his shoulder. The person who owned the hand was not visible, but Nan was almost sure it was a woman’s hand. And that was even more worrisome.
“Miss Dimitrova! Hoy, there. Nan!”
All at once she perceived that her feet had carried her into the lobby of the hotel, and she was being greeted by a man she almost recognized. Dark, short, plump, a little past middle age, he had a diplomat’s smile and wore clothes that, even across the immense old lobby, she was sure were real wool — if not cashmere.
He filled in the blank for her. “I’m Tam Gulsmit. Remember? We met at the FAO reception last month.” He snapped his fingers for a forkboy. “Your bags are all ready — unless you care to freshen up? Have time for a drink?”
Now she recalled him well. He had been persistent in his attentions, even to the point of lying in wait for her as she came out of the powder room and drawing her into an offensively close conversation in the hall. She had explained to him that it was no use. It was not merely a question of being in love with someone else. That was not his concern; she did not have to tell him her reasons. It was a matter of socialist morality. V. I. Lenin had said it. Free love was all very well, but who would want to drink from a glass that every passerby had fouled with his lips? (And yet in Moscow, she remembered, the public drinking fountains had just such glasses chained to them, and each one surely smeared with a thousand lips.) Let the Fuel powers do what they liked — partner swapping, group orgies, whatever. She was not there to pass judgment, but a socialist girl from Sofia did not even smoke in the street, because she had been taught certain principles of behavior that did not leave her when she grew up.
“Sir Tam,” she began — she remembered that he had one of those quaint British handles to his name — “it is a pleasure to see you again, but I must fly now to New York for the United Nations debate. I have no time—”
“All the time in the world, sweets, that’s what I’m here for. Boy!”
Tardily the bellboy rolled up with his forklift, and that was scandalous, too: her one little zipper bag did not need a fuel-guzzling machine to carry it; she had toted it a kilometer at a time herself.
Sir Tam chuckled indulgently. “Aren’t we quaint? This great, rambling old ruin — that’s the Britishness of it, isn’t it? We’re great at backing a losing horse long past the point where anyone else would have chucked it in. Lucky for us we can afford it! Now, is there anything else you need to bring?”
“But truly, Sir Tam, a car is being sent to take me to the airport. It will be here any minute.”
“Here already, sweetie. I’m it. Our Government have provided me with a Concorde Three, and I’d just rattle around in it by myself. When I heard that a friend of God Menninger’s needed a lift I took the liberty of coming for you myself. You’ll like it. There’s plenty of room, and we’ll make New York in ninety minutes.”
Scandalous, scandalous! Of course the British could afford anything, ocean of oil under the North Sea, their octopus tendrils already grabbing at the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. But morally it was so wrong.
She had no chance to refuse. Sir Tam overcame all objections, and before she knew what was happening she was lifted gently by cherry picker into — dear God! — a supersonic hydro-jet.
As soon as they belted up, in deep, foam armchairs with a suction-bottomed decanter and glasses already on a little table between them, the aircraft hurled itself into the air. The acceleration was frightening. The way the ground dropped away beneath them was not to be believed. Strangely, there was less noise than she had expected, far less than the warm-up roar of a clamjet.
“How quiet,” she said, leaning away from Sir Tam’s casually chummy arm.
He chuckled. “That’s five thousand kilometers an hour for you. We leave the sound far behind. Do you like it?”
“Oh, yes,” said Nan, trying to prevent him from pouring her a drink. She failed.
“Your voice sounds more like ‘oh, no.’ ”
“Well, yes, perhaps that is so. It is terribly wasteful of oil, Sir Tam.”
“We don’t burn oil, sweetie! Pure hydrogen and oxygen — have to carry them both, this far up. Not an ounce of pollution.”
“But of course one burns oil, or some other fuel, to make the hydrogen.” She wondered if she could keep the conversation on propellant chemistry all the way across the Atlantic, decided not, and took a new tack. “It is frightening. One can see nothing from these tiny windows.”
“What is there to see? You get turned on by clouds, love?”
“I have flown the oceans many times, Sir Tam. There is always something. Sometimes icebergs. The sea itself. In a clamjet there is the excitement of the landfall as one approaches Newfoundland or Rio or the Irish Coast. But at twenty-five thousand meters there is nothing.”
“I couldn’t agree with you more,” said Sir Tam, unstrapping and moving closer. “If I had my way there’d be no windows in the thing at all.”