“What was that mob all about, anyway?” Madelon asked Bowie.
“I don’t know, miss. Not many food riots here. It may have been a Work Week bunch, or some of the Zeropop people protesting that new rule. It’s hard to say. Sometimes folks just go zongo over nothing definite, just a sort of sum of everything.”
Madelon sighed and struck her belt to move closer to me.
“Help,” she said as we reached for each other’s hand.
When we arrived at Earth, Fire, Air and Water, Bowie called me back apologetically as I was going through the door. I told Madelon to wait and went back to get the report on the interphone. When I joined Madelon inside she smiled at me and asked, “How was my report?”
When I looked innocent she laughed. “If Bowie didn’t have a dossier on me from your Control or whatever it is I’d be very much surprised. Tell me, am I a dangerous type, an anarchist or a blaster or something?”
I smiled, for I like perceptive people. “It says you are the illegitimate daughter of Madame Chiang Kai-Shek and Johnny Potseed with convictions for mopery, drudgery, and penury.”
“What’s mopery?”
“I haven’t the faintest. My omniscient staff tells me you are nineteen, a hick kid from Montana and a half-orphan who worked for eleven months in Great Falls in an office of the Blackfoot National Enterprises.”
Her eyes got big and she gasped. “Found out at last! My desperate secrets revealed!” She took my arm and tugged me into the elevator that would drop us down to the cavern below. She looked up at me with big innocent eyes as we stood in the packed elevator. “Gee, Mr. Thorne, when I agreed to baby-sit for you and Mrs. Thorne I never knew you’d be taking me out.”
I turned my head slowly and looked at her with a granite face, ignoring the curious and the grinning. “The next time I catch you indulging in mopery with my Afghan I’m going to leave you home.”
Her eyes got all wet and sad. “No, please, I promise to be good. You can whip me again when we get home.”
I raised my eyebrows. “No, I think wearing the collar will be enough.” The door opened. “Come, my dear. Excuse me, please.”
“Yes, master,” she said humbly.
The Earth part of the club was the raw ground under one of the many San Francisco hills, sprayed with a structural plastic so that it looked just like a raw-dug cave, yet quite strong. We went down the curving passage toward the maelstrom of noise that was a famous quiver
group and came out into the huge hemispherical cave. Overhead, a latticework of concrete supported a transparent swimming pool filled with nude and semi-nude swimmers. Some were guests and some were professional entertainers.
There was a waterfall at one end and torches burned in holders in the wall, while a flickering firelight was projected over everything. The quiver group blasted forth from a rough cave hacked into the dirt walls halfway up to the overhead swimming pool.
As I took her arm to guide her into the quivering mob on the dance floor I said, “You know there is no Mrs. Thorne.”
She smiled at me with a serene confidence. “That’s right.”
The night swirled around us. Winds blew in, scented and warm, then cool and brisk. People crashed into the water over us with galaxies of bubbles around them. One quiver group gave way to another, tawny animals in pseudo-lion skins and shaggy hair, the women bare breasted and wanton.
Madelon was a hundred women in a hundred minutes, but seemingly without effort. They were all her, from sullen siren to goshwowing teenie. I confess to a helpless infatuation and cared not if she was laying a trap for me.
The elemental decor was a stimulant and people joined us, laughed and drank and tripped, and left, and others came. Madelon was a magnet, attracting joy and delight, and I was very proud. We came to the surface at dawn and I triggered a tag-along for Bowie. We drove out to watch sunup over the Bay, then went to my hotel. In the elevator I said, “I’ll have to make that up to Bowie, I don’t often stay out like that.”
“Oh?” Her face was impish, then softened and we kissed outside my door. She began undressing as we entered, with great naturalness, and laughingly pulled me into the shower even as I was learning the beauty of her lithe young figure. We soaped and slid our bodies over one another and I felt younger and more alive than I had in godknows. We made love and music played. Outside, the city awakened and began its business. What can you say about two people making love for the first time? Sometimes it is a disaster, for neither of you knows the other, and that disaster colors the subsequent events. But sometimes it is exciting and new and wonderful and satisfying, making you want to do it again and again.
It changed my life.
I took her to Triton, the bubble city beneath the Mediterranean near Malta, where we marveled at the organic gill research and watched the plankton sweeper-subs docking. We donned artificial membrane gills and dived among the rocks and fish to great depths. Her hair streamed behind her like a mermaid, and we dipped and rose with a school of swift lantern fish. We “discovered” the crusted remains of a Phoenician war galley and made love at twenty fathoms.
At Kos, the birthplace of Hippocrates, Hilary gave a great party at her villa, and we “premiered” a tape by Thea Simon, and ate fruit on the terrace and watched the ships go into space from Sahara Base.
“That’s so beautiful,” she said, looking at the firetrails of the shuttles, left behind by the arcing ships. The trails were twisted and spread by the jet winds, becoming neon abstracts in the early evening light.
I nodded in the faint light. Behind us I heard Respighi’s Fountains of Rome replace the dreamy Bird of Visions. Madelon and I sat in the companionable night silence.
The calligraphic neon scrawls had almost faded away when someone turned on a computerized kinetic sculpture in the garden below. It was a wildly whirling dazzle of lights and reflections by Constantine 7, a currently popular kineticist. Its many dipping, zipping, flashing parts were controlled by a random numbers tape, so that it was never repetitive.
Madelon looked at it awhile, then said, “My life used to be like that. Oh, yes. Running around, rushing about, getting nowhere, very bright and au courant. I suppose I was trying to find out who I was. I was . . . am . . . very ambitious, but I felt guilty being so.”
“Don’t be,” I said. “Without ambition nothing ever gets done.”
“I’m still not certain . . . that I know who I am. Or even what I want.” She reached out a hand and touched me. “I know I love you and I want to be with you—”
“But—” I said.
“You are not the world, but you give me the biggest world I know about.” Her voice was serious and low as the kinetic sculpture was dialed into darkness, probably by someone putting it out of its misery.
“You have always been different,” she said. “Because you are always the same. You’re . . . a rock.”
I grinned at her in the night. “I sprang full-grown from Jupiter’s forehead.”
She smiled back at me, and patted my arm. “You know, trying to find out who you are is the loneliest thing there is. If you are not you, who are you?” She sighed, and was quiet a moment. “I have been many people,” she said. “But each of those roles was me, a facet of me. But you are always you. I’ve watched you talk to the famous and the infamous, the nobodies and the somebodies. You’re just the same. I’ve only seen you impatient with the fools and the time wasters. You share your joy and you hide the hurt, but you are always you.”