I slept poorly. Helen McIlwain haunted my dreams. I had never before dreamed that I was being circumcised by a redheaded witch garbed in a cloak of human hair. I trust I don’t have that dream again… ever.
SEVEN
At noon the next day the six of us — and Kralick — boarded the intercity tube for New York, nonstop. An hour later we arrived, just in time for an Apocalyptist demonstration at the tube terminal. They had heard that Vornan-19 was due to land in New York shortly, and they were doing a little preliminary cutting up.
We ascended into the vast terminal hall and found it a sea of sweaty, shaggy figures. Banners of living light drifted in the air, proclaiming gibberish slogans or just ordinary obscenities. Terminal police were desperately trying to keep order. Over everything came the dull boom of an Apocalyptist chant, ragged and incoherent, a cry of anarchy in which I could make out only the words “doom… flame… doom…”
Helen McIlwain was enthralled. Apocalyptists were at least as interesting to her as tribal witch doctors, and she tried to rush out to the terminal floor to soak up the experience at close range. Kralick asked her to come back, but it was too late: she rushed toward the mob. A bearded prophet of doom clutched at her and ripped the network of small plastic disks that was her garment this morning. The disks popped in every direction, baring a swath of Helen eight inches wide down the front from throat to waist. One bare breast jutted into view, surprisingly firm for a woman her age, surprisingly well developed for a woman of her lean, lanky build. Helen looked glassy-eyed with excitement; she clutched at her new swain, trying to extract the essence of Apocalyptism from him as he shook and clawed and pummeled her. Three burly guards went out there at Kralick’s insistence to rescue her. Helen greeted the first one with a kick in the groin that sent him reeling away; he vanished under a tide of surging fanatics and we did not see him reappear. The other two brandished neural whips and used them to disperse the Apocalyptists. Howls of outrage went up; there were sharp shrill cries of pain, riding over the undercurrent of “doom… flame… doom…” A troop of half-naked girls, hands to hips, paraded past us like a chorus line, cutting off my view; when I could see into the mob again, I realized that the guards had cut an island around Helen and were bringing her out. She seemed transfigured by the experience. “Marvelous,” she kept saying, “marvelous, marvelous, such orgasmic frenzy!” The walls echoed with “doom… flame… doom…”
Kralick offered Helen his jacket, and she waved it away, not caring about the bare flesh or perhaps caring very much to keep it in view. Somehow they got us out of there. As we hustled through the door, I heard one terrible cry of pain rising above everything else, the sound that I imagine a man would make as he was being drawn before quartering. I never found out who screamed that way, or why.
“… doom…” I heard, and we were outside.
Cars waited. We were taken to a hotel in mid-Manhattan. On the 125th floor we had a good view of the downtown renewal area. Helen and Kolff shamelessly took a double room; the rest of us received singles. Kralick supplied each of us with a thick sheaf of tapes dealing with suggested methods of handling Vornan. I filed mine without playing anything. Looking down into the distant street, I saw figures moving in a frantic stream on the pedestrian level, patterns forming and breaking, occasionally a collision, gesticulating arms, the movements of angry ants. Now and then a flying wedge of rowdies came roaring down the middle of the street. Apocalyptists, I assumed. How long had this been going on? I had been out of touch with the world; I had not realized that at any given moment in any given city one was vulnerable to the impact of chaos. I turned away from my window.
Morton Fields came into the room. He accepted my offer of a drink, and I punched the programming studs on my room service board. We sat quietly sipping filtered rums. I hoped he wouldn’t babble at me in psychology jargon. But he wasn’t the babbling kind: direct, incisive, sane, that was his style.
“Like a dream, isn’t it?” he asked.
“This man from the future thing?”
“This whole cultural environment. The fin de siиcle mood.”
“It’s been a long century, Fields. Maybe the world is happy to see it out. Maybe all this anarchy around us is a way of celebration, eh?”
“You could have a point,” he conceded. “Vornan-19’s a sort of Fortinbras, come to set the time back into joint.”
“You think so?”
“It’s a possibility.”
“He hasn’t acted very helpful so far,” I said. “He seems to stir up trouble wherever he goes.”
“Unintentionally. He’s not attuned to us savages yet, and he keeps tripping over tribal taboos. Give him some time to get to know us and he’ll begin to work wonders.”
“Why do you say that?”
Fields solemnly tugged his left ear. “He has charismatic powers, Garfield. Numen. The divine power. You can see it in that smile of his, can’t you?”
“Yes. Yes. But what makes you think he’ll use that charisma rationally? Why not have some fun, stir up the mobs? Is he here as a savior or just as a tourist?”
“We’ll find that out ourselves, in a few days. Mind if I punch another drink?”
“Punch three,” I said airily. “I don’t pay the bills.”
Fields regarded me earnestly. His pale eyes seemed to be having trouble focusing, as though he were wearing a pair of corneal compressors and didn’t know how to use them yet. After a long silence he said. “Do you know anyone who’s ever been to bed with Aster Mikkelsen?”
“Not really. Should I?”
“I was just wondering. She might be a Lesbian.”
“I doubt it,” I said, “somehow. Does it matter?”
Fields laughed thinly. “I tried to seduce her last night.”
“So I noticed.”
“I was quite drunk.”
“I noticed that too.”
Fields said, “Aster told me an odd thing while I was trying to get her into bed. She said she didn’t go to bed with men. She put it in a kind of flat declarative uninflected way, as though it ought to be perfectly obvious to anyone but a damned idiot. I was just wondering if there was something about her I ought to know and didn’t.”
“You might ask Sandy Kralick,” I suggested. “He’s got a dossier on all of us.”
“I wouldn’t do that. I mean — it’s a little unworthy of me—”
“To want to sleep with Aster?”
“No, to go around to that bureaucrat trying to pick up tips. I’d rather keep the matter between us.”
“Between us professors?” I amplified.
“In a sense.” Fields grinned, an effort that must have cost him something. “Look, old fellow, I didn’t mean to push my concerns onto you. I just thought — if you know anything about — about—”
“Her proclivities?”
“Her proclivities.”
“Nothing at all. She’s a brilliant biochemist,” I said. “She seems rather reserved as a person. That’s all I can tell you.”
Fields finally went away after a while. I heard Lloyd Kolff’s lusty laughter roaring through the hallways. I felt like a prisoner. What if I phoned Kralick and asked him to send me Martha Sidney at once? I stripped and got under the shower, letting the molecules do their buzzing dance, peeling away the grime of my journey from Washington. Then I read for a while. Kolff had given me his latest book, an anthology of metaphysical love lyrics he had translated from the Phoenician texts found at Byblos. I had always thought of Phoenicians as crisp Levantine businessmen, with no time for poetry, erotic or otherwise; but this was startling stuff, raw, fiery. I had not dreamed there were so many ways of describing the female genitalia. The pages were festooned with long streamers of adjectives: a catalog of lust, an inventory of stock-in-trade. A little of it went a very long way. I wondered if he had given a copy to Aster Mikkelsen.