by F P Adriani
*
It turned out I didn’t need to tell Tan anything—Nell let it slip, about the break-in.
When we were all finally standing in the restaurant’s lobby, Nell asked me if I’d found out anything new about that night.
Tan’s face twisted furiously then. And Derek’s usually pretty placid face didn’t look too happy either.
“Dammit. When did this happen?” Tan demanded at me.
“Wednesday night,” I said.
“And neither of you were going to tell anyone?” Derek asked now, looking at Nell first, then at me, then back at Nell. He was openly frowning now.
“It’s really not your concern,” I said, and as I did, I noticed the restaurant’s host motioning for us to follow her into the dining room.
“But—” Derek began.
“Drop it,” said Nell, flashing him a look as we all started walking down the long lobby. Her head whipped over to me. “I’m sorry I screwed up, Pia. I should know better than to talk about business like that in front of these two.”
“What are ‘these two’?” asked Tan in a snide voice I didn’t care for.
“Men,” said Nell, abruptly stopping walking, and facing Tan and Derek. “This is what Pia and I do now. This is our business.”
“Well, you’ve got other business now,” said Derek; then he kind of stormed off into the restaurant.
My face felt hot now, and my mind felt terrible for Nell. I knew this night was supposed to be something special for all of us, and now that specialness had been blown.
Quickly I said, “I’m sorry about all this, Nell—”
“About what?” She laughed a little and slipped an arm beneath mine. “By the time we get to the table, Derek’ll have forgotten all about it. You’ll see.”
Nell turned out to be absolutely right. At the table, Derek was all blue-eyed smiles as he held out a chair first for Nell and then for me. Tan kind of skulked up to the table, his face looking as flushed as mine still felt. His head tentatively moved toward me, and when I smiled a little, he quick-kissed the tip of my nose.
Once we’d all sat down, we wound up having one of the best times we’d ever had together. We went from totally fucking awkward to totally fucking spectacular in the space of only a few moments. Sometimes, life was like that.
During the meal Nell’s face glowed just like the other day when she’d told me about her pregnancy. And it seemed her glowing now was also for another reason: she and Derek had decided to get married.
“Where, we don’t know yet,” Derek said when they had, with grinning faces, broken the news to Tan and I, and all four of us had just come out of a group hugging and backslapping session.
“I know where,” Tan replied then, sitting back down in his seat. “At my place—the patio.”
“Omigod,” I said, “that would be fantastic! The view there with the mountain—Nell?”
“You know, I’d really love that, but I can’t impose—”
“Sure you can,” said Tan.
“So when’s the day then?” I asked eagerly.
Nell shrugged and looked over at Derek as her palms left the tabletop and turned to the ceiling. “Three months from now? Well, really, I don’t know. We haven’t decided that.” A pause. Then she added, “I’ll be showing then, but I don’t give a shit.”
We all laughed.
“Damn,” I said, “sometimes I can’t believe how uptight life used to be.”
“Believe it!” said Nell, rolling her eyes ceiling-ward.
*
After dinner, we all went to Tan’s and had drinks on the patio—fruit-juice drinks in Nell’s honor.
The night was warm; the wind blew up off the valley, spreading the scent of flowers and palella nectar, and filling our nostrils with a sweet and spicy perfume. We stood there before Magenta Mountain, making tentative plans for how the wedding ceremony would be set up, where Nell and Derek would stand, how many people would attend….
“Oh my,” said Nell, rolling her eyes in the same way she had in the restaurant. “I think I’ll be embarrassed if it’s too big an affair.”
“Why?” I said. “You’ll only do this once!”
“I hope,” said Nell with those rolling brown eyes again.
“What do you mean you hope?” Derek demanded in a shocked voice, but his blue eyes held sharp humor. “Of course only once.”
“Yes. One time, for forever…” Nell said, her voice fading into softness as Derek pulled her close so they could kiss.
I had been leaning back against Tan’s warm body, and now his arm slipped around my waist and seemed to lock there.
*
After that kiss, that Nell and Derek wanted to be alone became obvious; they literally couldn’t stop looking at each other. They seemed to have forgotten Tan and I were with them, even while we both continued tossing around ideas for their wedding. It seemed there was such a thing as being so in love, even your wedding became a distraction from the two of you.
Derek and Nell soon left, but Tan and I remained on the patio.
I was lying on one of the loungers when he brought me another glass of fruit juice. At that moment, I really wanted to share some things with him about what had been going on…but I held my tongue. The night had been so wonderful….
“You want to talk?” he suddenly asked me, flashing me a serious face as he sat down on the lounger beside me.
“Actually, I really don’t want to ruin this perfect night.”
He shook his head at me. “You won’t, you won’t. Communicating shouldn’t ever make anything worse, unless it was bad to begin with.”
Why the fuck did he have to say that? A sharp caustic pain filled my throat. I lifted my head at him. “What’s going on with you?”
“I wanna know what’s going on with you?”
I sighed a long sigh, my head falling back again as I glanced up at the purple-black sky and said, “I think I may have to go to Hera soon.” I turned to him again, watching for his reaction.
He’d been sipping his own fruit juice, and now he stopped, his brow lowering at me. “What are you talking about?”
I laid my drink onto the little table beside me. “Ringer. Ringer mentioned an institute there. Castano was involved with it.”
“So? What does that mean? I have a membership card to The Acrylic Painter’s Institute.”
“Tan, you didn’t turn up….” I never finished my sentence—his possible death was the last thing I wanted to think about tonight—or ever! “Aye-yaye-yaye! What the hell am I saying?” I sprung off the lounger and walked nearer to the beautiful hot-pink mountain. We’d just had such wonderful moments right here with our friends. Where on Diamond had those moments gone….
“Have you heard from Hu again?” came Tan’s voice from behind me. When I spun around now, he was standing right there in front of me.
“Is that what all this was about tonight?”
“No…but it’s part of it.”
I just stared at him for a long moment. Then: “Yes, I heard from her.”
“And?”
“I don’t know. I just don’t. But when I do, I promise I’ll let you know…. Now I don’t want to talk about this anymore! Let’s go inside. The perfume out here’s done things to me tonight, things I’d like you to finish.” I grinned, quickly lifting my eyebrows at him a couple of times.
Then he grabbed my hand and spun me toward the house.
*
Afterward, when we were both lying naked on his bed, he said, “You ever been to Hera?”
I shook my head “no.”
“I have—one time. It’s suffocating. I don’t think you’d like it being indoors all the time.”
“I’m not moving there,” I said in a dry voice. “It’s just that I’ve been pointed there.”
“How?” he asked me, sitting up on his elbows a bit.
“Since I came back to Diamond, a bunch of things kept coming up about Hera.” I turned my head away from him.
“Hera’s even more corrupt than here.”
Now I looked at him again, my hard eyes indicating that his statement was exactly why I should check out any Heran leads.
He sighed, sounding frustrated, but he didn’t press the don’t-go-there issue. Instead, he flopped onto his back and said, totally changing the subject, “The Diamond Sphere’s visible now.”
The Diamond Sphere was Diamond and its two moons, Crayton and Photon, and Hera and its moon Joon. Two times during most Diamond years, when a ship emerged from the oldest main space flume to Diamond’s layer, visually Diamond sat at the center while the other four planetary bodies seemed at almost equal distances from Diamond. Everything was bathed in a spherical yellow-orange glow then, Diamond looking star-like, as if all four nearby bodies orbited Diamond. It was a trick of perspective in this part of the Universe, via space-bending in the space-flume’s vicinity, which trick bent the light spectrum too, inverting some colors and adding and subtracting others, depending on the angle of flight. The whole strange effect had been confusing to the first humans ever to exit that space flume, who thought they were about to crash into a star….
I hadn’t responded to Tan’s statement, so he continued now, “I’ve heard The Sphere’s really beautiful in person. I’ve always wanted to see it.”
“Then at some point you’ll need to leave Diamond and come back through the old flume,” I said.
Slowly, with a small frown on his face, he nodded at me. “You ever seen The Sphere?”
“Once, when I was a kid. I was so little. I remember color—the planets looked suspended in sunlight.”
“I want to see that someday. I think we should see it together.” His mouth lovingly tilted up at the corners, and that warm little smile of his somehow warmed my whole body.
“I agree,” I said finally, smiling back at his beautiful face and not for the first time thinking that, one of these days, my heart would literally, finally melt in his presence.
*
I started the next day with a lot on my mind. I was simultaneously remembering that whole moment the night before, that beautiful smile of Tan’s, that warmth filling my heart, the warm color of The Diamond Sphere…and, unfortunately, all the work I had to do.
Normally I didn’t work on Saturdays because they were my rest day. They were also my favorite day of the week: Sleep All-Day Day.
But I had too much going on in my life right now to sleep too much. So when I’d woken up, I decided to pop into the office and make a second call to a place I’d contacted about guarding Julianne that first night.
When I had finally let myself into my office and was about to pick up the main-desk’s phone, it rang. Roberto this time, to tell me that he was at Julianne’s and how very happy he was to do the Julianne job now: Lori Godwin had offered him advance payment, separate from what MSA would be paid.
Still, though that was good for him, I told him it would now be too much work. Then I added, “Possibly seven days a week for weeks, months—who knows. If you work every day, you’ll lose your effectiveness. You just can’t do that.”
“Thanks for telling me what I can’t do, Mom,” he said in a snide voice.
“Don’t you ever talk sexist to me like that again,” I snapped loudly. “Or you might need a new job permanently.” I slammed down my receiver.
Then I continued with the call I’d intended to make, and, an hour later, I had someone I’d used previously—Darla—set up for the weekends with Julianne, starting next week. This weekend Roberto would have to finish out by working both days.
He’d so annoyed me that I didn’t feel like telling him the temporary good-for-him news.
“Fuck him,” I said out loud. But I knew I was being stupid: Julianne was a client, and now I’d probably have to deal with various kinds of sticky situations because of her, both outside my office and inside my office. That was the way this shit usually went.
I sighed and began writing out some bills-due.
But then after about an hour of doing that and other office-keeping things, my strained eyes began feeling painfully dry.…
Fuck it. I’d go back to my hotel room and get some of my Saturday-rest. Really, I wouldn’t be any good to anybody if I fell apart physically.
*
For the rest of that day, I sleep-vegetated and awake-vegetated; then the next day, I decided to go to the Castano house.
Lori Godwin let me in at around one in the afternoon, and as soon as I walked inside, I saw Roberto step into the hall from where the kitchen was.
He walked up to me, saying, “Hey, Boss. Didn’t know you were showin’ up here.” His brown-shirted shoulder twitched in my direction, but he averted his eyes. Our last phone call could have been responsible for his newfound shyness. But he looked a little too…off today. I wondered if something was going on. So I asked him about that.
His blue eyes looked right at me. “Nothing, Boss—nothing’s happening. Been quiet like Tut’s tomb.” Now he sort of looked askance at Lori Godwin.
“I repeat,” I said, “what’s up?”
Lori interjected smoothly now, “I think Roberto’s just a little worried because we were eating lunch when you arrived.”
Roberto’s face flushed, quite badly. I couldn’t recall ever having seen that. It looked so strange on him, so youthful.
“Yeah, Boss—yeah,” he said now, fast-latching onto Lori’s words. “Just don’t want you to think I was sitting down on the job.”
“I know you’ve got to eat sometimes,” I said. “Where’s the girl?”
“Listening to music in her room,” Lori replied.
“I’d like to see her.”
Lori’s graying head jerked at me once—quick. Then she motioned for me to come with her. As we walked away from Roberto, I realized that, oddly, he and she had the exact same gray-blond hair color.
*
When we reached Julianne’s doorway, music blasted out at us from a radio farther inside. We stepped into the long brown-and-purple-decorated space, which contained a big tent-like fabric structure, which apparently encased Julianne’s bed. When Lori shouted her name, Julianne quickly emerged from that tent-spot and lowered the radio.
“Pia wants to talk to you,” Lori said. Then she left the room, pulling the door closed behind her.
“Hello, Pia,” Julianne said, a forefinger pushing up the bridge of her eyeglasses.
“Hi,” I said, smiling a little. “I’ve always wondered if eyeglasses are uncomfortable when you’ve gotta wear them all the time.”
“Sometimes they are. I hate them. But eye-lenses irritate my eyes, and I don’t want an operation to correct my vision.”
“One thing about me: I’ve always had perfect vision.”
“You’re lucky,” Julianne said in too dry a voice for a fifteen year old.
I walked up to her radio and turned the volume knob till the music got louder again. I motioned for her to stand with me in the room’s center, away from the windows and connecting walls.
Standing less than a foot from her, I said as I faced her, “I need to know more about the map. How many pieces were there?”
Her head shook fast. “I don’t know.”
“Come on—”
“I don’t. My mom never told me.”
“Well, how many do you think there are?”
Her dark-brown eyes turned to me, a little shrewdly. “It looked like three probably.”
Exactly what I had thought. I nodded. “So where are the other two pieces you didn’t have?”
“I don’t know,” she said again. “But I guess my mom had them somewhere. Wouldn’t she keep them?”
“I have no idea. I never knew her. She’s your mom.”
“She was my mom,” she said, her voice cracking a bit and making me feel like shit for my tongue-slip.
But before I could say anything further, she jumped across the floor toward her bed-tent, and then into it.
I moved closer, stood at the fa
bric’s opening. It was darker inside, the light passing through casting a bluish hue over her prone form. She was on her back, with an arm pressed over her eyes.
“I’m in trouble, aren’t I?” she said, her voice shaking, her arm still hiding her face.
I didn’t respond to her question. Instead, I said, “At some point, you’ll have to trust someone to really help you.”
“You mean like that John?” she said fast, nearly spitting the words. “Where’d he go?”
Again I didn’t respond to her question—well, I couldn’t really. I sighed. “So what do you know about where your mom worked?”
The arm came off her face and she sat up a bit. “You mean The Citadel? I like it there. It’s interesting.”
“It is, but that’s not what I meant. She only consulted there some days. What did she do the other days?”
Julianne shrugged. “She worked a lot, several times a year she traveled. Lori stayed with me then.”
“Do you know where she traveled?”
“Well, I guess she must have mapped the map at some time.”
“That’s a good point,” I said, nodding.
And that was also a troubling point because if Amy Castano had left a traceable traveling itinerary, someone could possibly look that up and, even without having the map, that someone could possibly locate where that DANGER spot was. Someone like me could do that, which wasn’t troubling. But if a not-me someone thought of the same idea….
“Can you give me anything else—can you think of anything?” I asked Julianne. “Even if it doesn’t seem important, tell me.”
Her face scrunched up a bit, and she did that quick finger-push at the eyeglass-bridge on her nose. “Hmm…there was one time—last year I think. My mom said she was going to Hera, and I always wanted to go there—see The Purple City, you know? Purple’s my favorite color. I kept saying that to her. But she wouldn’t let me come. I cried but she said, ‘No matter your tantrum, you’re not coming there’. I never got to see it. But my mom’s gone…. So I guess maybe now I could get to Hera someday.”
