III
Their island was roughly kidney-shaped and no more than a mile and a half in length. Of its two shallow ponds, one was nearly deep enough for bathing. The ground was covered with soft moss, and the air was filled with the indistinct voices of whisper ferns. The Brinko palms were half the height of their counterparts on the planetary surface, for the thinness of the air at that altitude was stunting to floral growth, dizzying to human minds. The luscious purple fruits of the palm were still out of reach, but by leaning all his weight on the rubbery trunk. Nick could lower them right into Hali’s hands.
That night they gorged themselves until the purple sap ran down their chins, and they laughed and spat pits at each other, and served each other rainwater in the hollowed shells. There was a new freedom to their relationship, now that they had swept away the artifices of society. They were open and ingenuous, like puppies at play. And when, that evening, Nick called her “Ms. Hasannah,” she cried, “For the love of God, call me darling or space blossom or snookum nookums, but please, please, no more Ms. Hasannah!”
And Nick laughed and promised to refrain.
He tried to feed the fruit to Althea, but she refused to eat. She wouldn’t speak to Nick or even look him in the eye. He gave up in frustration and tied her to a palm so that he could sleep peacefully without worrying about her trying the rock trick again.
Then he and Hali made a bed on the moss, him sheltering her from the night with his broad body, feeling her warmth and smelling her smell, which was unlike any smell on the planet, yet somehow familiar, as though he had known it many many years ago. Both moons were visible, Schleiden white and still as an ancient civilization, Schwann racing madly across the heavens like a young culture, drunk with its own power. Stars winked through the fronds while whisper ferns made their secrets almost intelligible.
Althea’s crying woke him an hour later. Listening to her 105 there in the dark, Nick came to his senses: he recalled that she was more than a tool for achieving his own ends, she was a thinking, feeling being. The fear and uncertainty to which he had subjected her, through no fault of her own, appalled him.
He disentangled himself from Hali’s limbs and crept across the moss to where he had tied her. A twig cracked under his foot and she cried, “Who’s there?”
“It’s okay, it’s only me. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” Silent, suddenly. She wasn’t going to show any weakness.
“Come on, Althea, tell me. I’m sorry about this. Look, I’ll probably get snuffed before the week is out and you’ll have your vengeance soon enough. In the meantime we might as well—”
“Don’t want vengeance,” she whispered. “Don’t want you snuffed.”
“Well, what do you want? Brinko fruit? Some water?” “No.”
“If I untie you do you promise not to try to kill me again?” She sniffled a reply.
Nick undid all the bonds. Althea stretched, then curled in a fetal position and cried and cried. Her hair was filled with twigs and leaves, and her underwear was torn. Nick took off his cape and covered her with it. Still she cried.
“I said I was sorry. Won’t you tell me what it is?”
She murmured something.
Nick bent closer. “What?”
“My Raslow . . .”
“What’s RaslowT'
“It’s a skin preparation. ... If I don’t use it every night I break out ... I get pimples and blackheads and I look horrid. . .
Nick tried not to laugh. What he had anticipated as a problem of human dignity had turned out to be only skin deep. Still, it was obviously important to Althea, and who was he to sit in judgment of another’s priorities?
“Hali has something in her shoulder bag she uses on her face. We could find out if . . .”
Althea stopped crying.
“How dare you suggest I use alien cosmetics! I’d sooner rub dirt on my face. All my skin would probably peel off and then she’d be happy, ’cause you’d get sick just looking at me and she’d have you all to herself. . . .”
Tears returned, burning trails down her cheeks.
“So that's it,’’ Nick said.
“What’s it?”
“You’re jealous.”
“Of an alien? Never!”
Nick stroked her hair. “Don’t cry.”
“Not jealous,” she mumbled.
“You must be so tired. Try to sleep.”
He kissed her on the top of the head and crept away.
IV
“You people understand psi powers,” Nick said next morning. “How would you go about opening a transdimensional window? I don’t know if the replicon Scolpes gave me has taken effect, but I might as well start trying.”
He was resting his head in Hali’s lap while she fed him slices of Brinko fruit. Cradled on her soft thighs, with a warm breeze against his face and a palm rustling overhead, it was difficult to worry about the fate of worlds; but to Nick’s credit, he forced himself.
“Ah,” she said, kissing the juice off his lips, “the mysterious transdimensional window. The fact is, I know nothing except what I’ve seen at the Lifestyler Temples. Perhaps if you can tell me more I can be of help.”
“Fair enough,” Nick said. He took a moment organizing his thoughts. “Well, the early Lifestylers didn’t have transdimensional windows. The TD gene wasn’t invented until long after Marvin Goldstein’s death. You remember Marvin Goldstein?”
Hali nodded. “The Father of Lifestyling?”
“Right. But it was his partner, Lebachuck, who thought up the TD gene. . . .”
During Goldstein’s lifetime his primary interest was, despite what the glorifying historians of Mutagen may have written, turning a buck. His tastes—or what he assumed were the tastes of the galaxy—had been shaped by his early experiences making porn films. He thought Lifestylers should be glamorous and well endowed, since that was the basis of Supplicant wish fulfillment. He believed that the concepts they embodied had to be extraordinarily simple, since the Supplicants were extraordinarily simpleminded. In other words he believed that, as a noted twentieth-century humorist once put it, “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.”
When Goldstein passed on, control of the company passed to Lebachuck, who, in a strange way, understood the public better than his predecessor. Instead of imagining what the public wanted, he acted upon what he himself wanted, assuming himself a fair representative of the public.
And what he wanted was not Lifestylers as superstars.
What he wanted was Lifestylers as gods!
He wanted them to be immortal, or at least incredibly long-lived, and he wanted them to have extraordinary powers. He wanted them to be worshippable. The way he saw it, as the galaxy grew increasingly technological, it left less and less room for magic. The human spirit was being strangled by its own tools. People needed to see a miracle now and then, they needed to know that existence was more than a narrow corridor between the cradle and the crypt, particularly now that the corridor was equipped with a slidewalk to hasten their passage.
Lebachuck was a man of curious contradictions: a brilliant scientist with an unyielding appetite for the truth—a skeptic concerning any new scientific theory until it had been proved experimentally and replicated countless times—yet also a Theosophist, a follower of the notorious Madame Blavatsky, the nineteenth-century Russian mystic who had spent much of her life in India learning the occult secrets of the fakirs and yogis. When asked to explain this wedding of opposites, he would say, “Science is a game, and to play a game well we must observe the rules. But if we step outside the game, we find a universe where anything is possible. The advent of anything, as we have learned from observing quantum particles, is limited only probablistically.”