Massimo wants to hear about Collette, he wants the story from its beginning. “With all sexy detail. Do not spare an old man.” He smiles. I begin telling him, and we soon get sidetracked in SciCom’s interest in me. So I tell him what I know about that, too, grateful that he’s willing to listen. In the shade of the canopy, eating a Roman squid salad, I relate my interview with Taylor yesterday, my confusion about Collette as well as my confusion about why they want me back on Guam.
He’s amused by my feelings for Collette, fascinated by our first meeting in what I had thought was the VIP lounge of the L.A. trans-port. A wonderful story; he smiles. He thinks Collette is probably not a malicious woman, but that I was a madman to trust her. The key, he tells me, to seeing her again, if that’s what I really want, is SciCom’s interest in her, which hinges back again on their deepest interest in me. So we loop even further back and I begin another story, the one which begins more than four years ago, out on range with the Daedalus.
I tell him how SciCom left us flying, for all practical purposes, blind; how the Committee Pilot, unable to decide on anything but the most general direction of our survey, left the tangent angle of event-horizon approach to the dome crew’s day-by-day response to prevailing macroweather. I tell him how we nervously sat out the lull, the circumstances I recall at the blow, the three who died, Maxine included.
“This is at black hole,” he says. “Fantastico.”
“Well off,” I tell him. “Theoretically, had we been near the event horizon, or blown there… well, I wouldn’t be telling the story. Of course we took precautions, we had a safety factor of more than ten. It’s only speculation, but do you know what the physicists say?”
“Yes, I know black hole. Prego, this is what I, Giroti, say—a star described by a poet, poeta romantico—where a traveler can lose his freedom in space and become trapped forever—where the traveler is given freedom in time instead. Amazing possibility.”
“We came as close as anyone has,” I tell him. “It was a pretty hairy trip—it’s still hairy.” I explain how Cooper, who had written up our report, became separated from us at recovery in the Pacific and later died, how the rest of us have been kept on Guam for a pointless month. Massimo is charmed by the way I managed to slip away, and we drink a toast to that day—for what it’s worth now, I think.
In the end, given the circumstances, he doesn’t think that Collette is a SciCom employee assigned to watch me from the beginning of the trip; rather, someone they’ve used, who used me in turn.
“But who can finally tell?” he wonders. “Only this woman knows, if she would tell you. If you could trust her.”
When I tell him that I’ve tried to get in touch with Collette by trying to get in touch with Eva Steiner, and that there is a barrier around that woman, whether it’s private sex or security, I don’t know—he lifts his hands palms upward and sighs.
“Both,” he says. “And then we come back to SciCom. After I talk with you I remember this woman’s name. She is well known. This woman is like a man, she walk like a man, she wear clothes like a man. She is Director of EnergyWest—but that is like saying SciCom, they are together like a hand which slide into fitted glove. Perhaps they are using her, I think, using the strangeness of this woman to see that you don’t talk with Collette. This is a circle we are making, now I see. I tell you I have seen things with SciCom which frighten me—things like this. I will give example how it works. We have plutonium plant in Brazil with terrible discharge for a week—one week, I tell you. The river entirely dead, the people downstream sick, for a hundred kilometers, some die. Why is this? SciCom data overrides discharge controls, everyone knows this is so. But investigation goes on for six years now. I give you another example. In Argentina, two thousand cattle die from a wrong inoculation; it is SciCom instructions again. That investigation is lasting eight years, this is joke to me, but it is not joke to SciCom. For yourself, they cannot question your competence, since you have flown your ship back. But if they have made a mistake, they will never take responsibility. They never admit mistake. You know what my agriculture man says in Argentina? ‘Until they have other explanation, they have only investigation.’”
“My navigator thinks they’re trying to set us up. I don’t know,” I say, rubbing my chin. “I would really like to talk to the woman.”
“Non pensarci piu,” Massimo says, waving a fly from its loop around the salad. “Forget this one—you will see, there are others. And in this place? The man who wrote your ship’s report, dead—ahhh. For your sake, I do not think it best you see this woman they take from you. Perhaps you will have luck with appeal—then, maybe. Almost always these people in SciCom are harmless, castrati—no, like men who play with themselves, masturbati. But if you catch them—ahhh. They do have… power,” Massimo says quietly, his hands flat on the table. “They protect themselves, like Mafiosi. They do what they want.”
A white Formula E whistles past as I lean toward Massimo; a shiver runs down my spine. For an instant I see Cooper’s face in Massimo’s, they share the same broad nose, the same thick hair. “You’re afraid of them, too?” I ask, thinking of my run-in with security last night. “Do you think Werhner’s right? He thinks that Cooper’s death…”
“All right.” Massimo nods, smiling to himself. “I exaggerate. A man dead—this frightens me. But yes, I exaggerate. This is only my advice, to leave them alone—what can you do, a pilot? Ah, Rawley, let us not think on these things for now, let us forget them for a time.”
“I’ve been…” I start to say, then notice Massimo is looking at the cars.
“You think you can handle Lancia?’
My pulse quickens, I tell Massimo I’d like to try.
“Well, come, I am going to run Ferrari. We shall see if perhaps you can drive, too.”
The pleasant coolness of its leather upholstery aside, my immediate impression of the Lancia is that its steering is too tight and its suspension very stiff; I can feel every bump in the track, the car seems jittery. But as I learn the course, its straights, banks, and S’s, I pick up speed and with a rising howl I enter a tunnel of motion and the machine itself seems to smooth the ride. The cockpit becomes comfortable in the moving air, and the car begins to feel the way hand-cut clothing feels—close, comfortable, another skin—seems more like flying than the days in theTube. The sunny track is a good, long ride—over ten kilometers—on a banked, twisting surface like an idealized freeway through the city. I roar past separate grandstands in different sectors, through a tunnel of high-rises, down a straight through a greenbelt with a murderous, decreasing radius hairpin at its end, accelerate up into a set of elevated S’s whose edges raise the hair on the back of my neck the first time through. In the curves the Lancia resists braking, it wants the line, it propels itself through a corner with its own fine calculus of speed, weight, and cohesion into a beautiful slide.