One more tryl
His coffee-cup was empty. He thought about pressing the buzzer by his bed, which would bring back Estelle _ to see what he wanted. That was among the reasons why an apartment in the Lakonia towers was so expensive; no other dwellings had been erected in the United States for over twenty years that incorporated a room for a servant and facilities for summoning her. Besides, there was almost literally nowhere else where anyone willing to be a servant would voluntarily seek employment. No native American would do so; Canadians were scarce; Mexicans were allowed in only on sufferance, by way of consolation for having their country policed by U.S. soldiers, and so many Cuban saboteurs had sneaked in by posing as Puerto Rican valets and chambermaids that a total ban had been imposed.
(It was like being the focal point of a beam of light split up between the facets of a jewel, then reflected back towards a center by a ring of distorting mirrors. He was aware, simultaneously, of the things he had been told in his briefings Back There, and of the things he had seen
that matched his briefings, and also of the things that didn't-and these last were terrifying.)
Get your head straight (And, superimposed, awareness of the fact that the phrase was older than he was.) Take It from the top!
So where is the top? Government level? Good enough. Here 1 am: the cherry on the sundae of the Frozen War.
Was anyone still trying to break that twenty-year-old international log-jam? Since they recalled and jailed the American negotiators in Canberra for collaborating with the enemy, surely someone must have had another go? Tonga? Was that where the conference last-?
Oh, never mind. For all practical purposes, you had to compute with the status-quo. In other words, these people knew that their country had been the first to put men on the moon, and capped that achievement by doing it a second time, and then discovered that there were two billion other people who didn't give a damn about the moon. Too late. Just in time to pull the troops back and assign them to the streets of American cities. If they'd waited a year longer, there wouldn't have been troops to pull back. Whole army corps had been decimated by desertion, exactly as happened to the Tsarist armies in 1917.
Then there was a slump, which rendered American corporations unable to meet overseas commitments. Then, because of the slump, there was a witch-hunt, and the possession of an American passport became the (high-priced) excuse to apply for political asylum elsewhere. The end result was, simply, that no one wanted to know the Americans any more, and the Americans stuck their noses in the air and said, “Stuff you, Jack, we're self-sufficient.”
Like the Byzantine Empire after the loss of the rich Western provinces to the barbarians.
But only like that. Not the same True, they talked in similar terms, forever complaining about the foreigners who bit the hand that fed them, and they treated their fellow-creatures as objects-thus to lie with a woman was a mere discharge of tension, not the gage of a genuine liking. But there hadn't been an empire. The tentacles of what might have become one had been chopped off just in time-by the Vietnamese, the Cambodians, the Burmese, the Filipinos, all of them with help from Peking.
Nonetheless the kalpa was cycling. He could feel it. He had studied Marx; he had studied Toynbee and Sorokin; he had studied the Rig-Veda. It was his firm conviction that the resources of human beings were limited, and that implied that-even if there were no precise repetition-a man now, in a predicament analogous to that of a man ten thousand years ago, would react in an analogous manner. The Hindu notion that the universe repeated itself was a poetic truth, like the Toynbeean parable of the progress of civilization. He, like everyone else, was carried on a wave in the middle of an ocean too vast to discern the shores of, and …
it was making him sea-sick. He got off the bed with a grunt of anger and went to see whether a cold shower would “straighten his head.”
(r) X,
Where . . . ? Oh, Oh, yes. 1 think 1 remember. Or do 1?
And, the moment after recollecting why she was in this strange, shabby room that shook and trembled, Lora wished she hadn't woken up enough to do so. Her mouth tasted filthy, her stomach was sour, and there was a dull gnawing pain between her eyes.
She was stretched out naked on a hard couch covered with a sheet: old, but intact and fairly clean. It had been far too hot last night to bear any covering. It had also been too hot to go on lying next to Danty after they finished screwing. A mere touch made. sweat erupt from the skin like a strike of water in a desert. So he was on the other couch; at right angles to hers.
So 1 finally had a black. Funny. It didn't feel any different. It was dark, of course . . .
She reached out and brushed Danty's toes with her own. His response was to bury his face deeper in his pillow.
We meant to go night-riding, didn't we? And then …. Did he talk me out of it? 1 guess so, because we came here.
Not important. Not as important as the fact that her bladder was bursting. She sat up, and nearly cracked her head on a wall-hung bookcase. There were a lot of books here, she realized. On the floor, too. When she swung her legs off the couch, she trod on one and picked it up and read the title. It said: The Calculus of Mysticism.
Not only the books were peculiar. She saw a curious trefoil-shaped piece of plastic with furniture castors underneath, hung on string from a nail, and a plastic battery driven ornery, one of the big ones that cost a thousand bucks, and a Bonham's top, and a tape-recorder with a Buddha on the lid. The Buddha looked as though it might be Japanese.
Hmm! So this was Danty's home! Last night she hadn't really noticed; her attention had been elsewhere. Half eager to relieve herself, half anxious to find out more about him while he was asleep, she wandered the long way around the room towards the curtain at the end which, because it was next to an obvious shower-cabinet, she assumed to conceal the toilet. The only other door, apart from the entrance, was ajar and revealed a tiny kitchen.
A violin, for goodness' sake Or is it a viola? 1 wonder if he plays it-reaching to twang one string of it faintly or if it's simply decoration.
Curtain. She pulled it back. And discovered that it did not give on to a toilet, but an alcove just wide enough for a single bed, on which a dark-haired woman was asleep.
She stared for a long frozen moment. Then she let the curtain fall and spun on her heel. Spotting her dress tossed over a chair, she ducked into it-a slow job, because her arms kept coming out through the wrong openings. But she managed it in the end.
Shoes? Oh, yes: left them in the car. But where the hell had she left the car with them in?
She rushed to the window: grimy, reinforced with wire, veiled with cheap semi-translucent curtains. Below, on the opposite side of the street, a car that looked like hers the right make and model, anyway. Thank goodness.
Toilet?
The reeky turd! I'll use his shower!
She turned it on, reluctantly, when she'd finished, and got splashed. The noise of running water aroused Danty, and he gave her a sleepy grin and said, “Hello, Loral” “Good-bye!” she snapped, and stormed out. The exit door gave a satisfactory slam.
That was what woke Magda. When she pushed aside the curtain, she found Danty at the window, watching Lora on the way to her car. She said, “Hi, Danty. Was it the Turbinate?”