“Yes, I was amazingly content. But for one problem. It was spelt k-a-t-e, as if you hadn’t guessed.”
STALKED
The university was closed for summer vacation, but instead of taking off for a remote corner of the world or even, like some students, going on a package tour to the Moon, Kate stayed in KC. Next after the welcomefest he met her at a coley club patronized by the more frameworked execs of G2S.
“Sandy, come and dance!” Seizing his arm, almost dragging him away. “You haven’t seen my party trick!”
“Which is—?”
But she was doing it, and he was genuinely startled. The ceiling projectors were invisible; it took fantastic kinaesthetic sensibility to dance one chorus of a simple tune without straying off key, and more still to come back and repeat it. That though was exactly what she did, and the clamorous discord generated by the other dancers was overriden by her strongly-gestured theme, mostly in the bass as though some celestial organ had lost all its treble and alto couplers but none of its volume: the Ode to Joy in a stately majestic tempo. From the corner of his eye he noticed that four European visitors sitting at a nearby table were uneasy, wondering whether to stand in honor of their continental anthem.
“How in the—?”
“Don’t talk! Harmonize!”
Well, if the last note was from that projector and the one adjacent is now delivering that note … He had never taken much interest in coley, but Kate’s enthusiasm was infectious; her face was bright, her eyes sparkled. She looked as though some other age might have judged her beautiful.
He tried this movement, that one, another different … and suddenly there was a chord, a true fifth. Which slipped a little, and had to be corrected, and—got it! A whole phrase of the melody in two meticulously harmonizing parts.
“I’ll be damned,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone. “I never met anyone before over about twenty-five and capable of proper coley. We should get together more often!”
And then someone on the far side of the floor who looked no more than fifteen wiped the music of Beethoven and substituted something new, angular, acid—probably Japanese.
After the madrigal concert where he also met her, and the lakeside fish fry where he also met her, and the target-archery meet where he also met her, and the swimming gala where he also met her, and the lecture on advances in the application of topology to business administration where he also met her, he could hold back his challenge no longer.
“Are you following me or something?”
Tonight she was wearing something sexy and diaphanous, and she had had her hair machine-coiffed. But she was still plain, still bony, still disturbing.
“No,” was her answer. “Pre-guessing you. I don’t have you completely pegged yet—I went to the wrong place last night—but I’m closing in fast. You, Sandy Locke, are trying far too hard to adhere to a statistical norm. And I hate to see a good man go to waste.”
With which she spun on her heel and strode—one might almost have said marched—to rejoin her escort, a plump young man who scowled at him as though virulently jealous.
He simply stood there, feeling his stomach draw drumhead-tight and sweat break out on his palms.
To be sought by federal officials: that was one thing. He was accustomed to it after six years, and his precautions had become second nature. But to have his persona as Sandy Locke penetrated with such rapidity by a girl he barely knew …!
Got to switch her off my circuit! She makes me feel the way I felt when I first quit Tarnover—as though I was certain to be recognized by everyone I passed on the street, as though a web were closing that would trap me for the rest of my life. And I thought that poor kid Gaila had problems … STOP STOP STOP! I’m being Sandy Locke, and no child ever came sobbing out of the night to beg his help!
SEE ISAIAH 8:1-2
Make speed to the spoil, for the prey hasteneth.
YEARSHIFT
“I thought you’d never show,” Kate said caustically, and stood back from the door of her apartment. He had caught her wearing nothing but shorts, baggy with huge pockets, and a film of dust turning here and there to slime with perspiration. “Still, you picked a good time. I’m just getting rid of last year’s things. You can give me a hand.”
He entered with circumspection, vaguely apprehensive of what he might find inside this home of hers: the upper floor of what at the turn of the century must have been a desirable one-family house. Now it was subdivided, and the area was on the verge of ghettohood. The streets were deep in litter and tribe-signs were plentiful. Bad tribes at that—the Kickapoos and the Bent Minds.
Four rooms here had been interconnected by enlarging doorways into archways; only the bathroom remained isolated. As he glanced around, his attention was immediately caught by a splendidly stuffed mountain lion on a low shelf at the end of the hallway, warmed by a shaft of bright sunlight—
Stuffed?
It came back in memory as clear as though Ina were here to speak the words: “She blames it all on that cat her father gave her. …”
Regarding him almost as steadily as her unlikely pet, Kate said, “I wondered how you would react to Bagheera. Congratulations; you get full marks. Most people turn and run. You’ve just gone a trifle pale around the gills. To answer all your questions in advance—yes, he is entirely tame except when I tell him to be otherwise, and he was a present from my father, who saved him from being used up in a circus. You know who my father was, I presume.”
His mouth very dry, he nodded. “Henry Lilleberg,” he said in a croaking voice. “Neurophysiologist. Contracted degenerative myelitis in the course of a research program and died about four years ago.”
“That’s right.” She was moving toward the animal, hand outstretched. “I’ll introduce you, and after that you needn’t worry.”
Somehow he found himself scratching the beast behind his right ear, and the menace he had originally read in those opal eyes faded away. When he withdrew his hand Bagheera heaved an immense sigh, laid his chin on his paws and went to sleep.
“Good,” Kate said. “I expected him to like you. Not that that makes you anything special. … Had you heard about him from Ina, by the way? Is that why you weren’t surprised?”
“You think I wasn’t? She said you had a cat, so I assumed—Never mind. It all comes clear now.”
“Such as what?”
“Why you stay on at UMKC instead of sampling Other universities. You must be very attached to him.”
“Not especially. Sometimes he’s a drag. But when I was sixteen I said I’d accept responsibility for him, and I’ve kept my word. He’s growing old now—won’t last more than eighteen months—so … But you’re right. Dad had a license to transport protected species interstate, but I wouldn’t stand a hope in hell of getting one, let alone a permit to keep him on residential premises anywhere else. I’m not exactly tied hand and foot, though. I can take vacations for a week or two, and the girls downstairs feed and walk him for me, but that’s about his limit, and eventually he gets fretful and they have to call me back. Annoys my boyfriends … Come on, this way.”
She led him into the living room. Meter-high freehand Egyptian hieroglyphs marched around three of its walls; over the fourth, white paint had been slapped.
“I’m losing this,” Kate said. “It’s from the Book of the Dead. Chapter Forty, which I thought was kind of apt.”
“I’m afraid I never read the …” His voice trailed away.
“Wallis Budge titles it ‘The Chapter of Repulsing the Eater of the Ass.’ I bleat you not. But I quit repulsing that fiercely.” She gave a mocking grin. “Any how, now you see what you can lend a hand with.”
No wonder she was wearing a layer of dust. The whole apartment was being bayquaked. In the middle of the floor here three piles of objects were growing, separated by chalked lines. One contained charitable items, like clothing not yet past hope; one contained what was scrapworthy, like a last-year’s stereo player and a used typewriter and such; one contained stuff that was only garbage, though it was subdivided into disposable and recyclable.