by Ellen Datlow
“Oh. Certainly.”
“And it would be best if we could look at them together.”
“Oh Yes, I guess it would.”
“But we don’t have to do that before dinner.”
“After dinner?” He looked a little pale.
“Tomorrow will be soon enough. I did just get here, after all.”
Now he really came to life. “Oh, of course, this is really thoughtless of me, keeping you here when you’d probably like to get some rest and you must be hungry, too—”
He babbled both of us out of the room. I broke away and made a stop at my quarters before heading down to the dining room, which in any other place would have been known as a banquet hall.
Now, NN, I know, I just know you’re picking up on my hostility toward the empath. The poor innocent empath. What on earth have I got against empaths? And how can I be so unprofessional as to show it?
Hang me, shoot me—emotional criminal!
I told you, I didn’t work with empaths. It feels indecent, doing something like that without a machine.
Hang me, shoot me—emotional prude! You just can’t win in this business. I always knew that.
But I’ll tell you what else I don’t like about empaths. I know all about empathy; you know that, you taught me everything I know, right? You do still claim that, don’t you? Sure you do, I know you. Yah, I know all about empathy; empaths are something else.
There’s something about empaths touching you—not even touching you, being around you. You just know they’re soaking it all up, whatever it is. They’re always just—soaking it all up. Drinking you in. You’re supposed to feel such kinship with them. You’re not alone any more, someone knows exactly how you feel, someone’s walked a mile in your moccasins. But what’s that for, anyway? Yah, I know, so you feel you’re not alone any more, right, we said that, didn’t we. Didn’t I, excuse me, I’m doing all of the semitalking. But what’s it really for? What possible survival value can that have? For you, I mean—you the regular person. What’s the survival value of feeling such kinship with someone, of not feeling alone any more emotionally. Pretend you’re a regular person instead of a dried-up old bastard just for the sake of example, okay, NN? The survival value of, yes, empaths in terms of you, the regular person. Well, there is none. Not for you.
It’s all for the empath. When you know exactly how anyone—everyone—feels, that’s a pretty powerful survival tool. In fact, you’d probably end up doing a lot more than just surviving with it. Survive and thrive, yah; and soaking it all up all the time, you’d get terribly—accustomed to it, more than accustomed, addicted. Except that’s not quite the word. I mean, are you addicted to air?
Yah, so what’s in it for you, the regular person? (You pretend like you’re a regular person, okay, NN, or have I already asked you to do that?) What’s in it for you? I mean, shouldn’t you get something out of this? Well, sure you should, and you do.
You get to like having someone crawling around in your emotions, feeling them with you, and letting you feel other emotions from other people.
Except maybe like is the wrong word.
Do you like air?
Caverty had thirty pairs of moccasins, by the way, and Mad-a-LAYNE had had her sensitive little soles in every one of them.
It was a banquet hall, but the type of place where you sat down in one spot only if you really wanted to, if you were tired or something. Most of the Entourage were gypsy diners, the type of people who seem to be reluctant to light anywhere even semipermanently, in case they should see a better place to sit. So they were all cruising around, plates or cups or whatever in hand, cocktail-party style, working at enjoying themselves.
I’d stopped off at my room for a change of clothes and a dose of solitude so I could refortify myself. There wasn’t time for even the quickest mental exercise with the system, unless I wanted to miss a good portion of the dinnertime dynamics and something told me I didn’t want to miss very much in this house.
I managed to arrive in the dining room before both Caverty and Madeleine, which meant dinner was not quite underway. You could tell that by the general demeanor of the room. The entire Entourage was in a waiting mode.
Quite a mixed bag, this Entourage. There had to be at least thirty of them, acting out their inner lives. A few were dressed after certain animals; bears or lions seemed to be the fashion, though I spotted a couple of chicken people. At least, they looked like chicken people to me. A peacock might have been appropriate in some cases but no one cared to be quite that obvious. There was an umbrella woman who took up a lot of space; at various times, her umbrella skirt would open or shut for some private reason of her own, following no pattern I could see. I saw Priscilla with her little group; she’d changed some of the swatches on her outfit and polished her metallics so that she twinkled under the chandeliers. The members of her group were now each wearing an outfit made from one of her swatches. You might have briefly mistaken them for the focal point of the Entourage. On second glance, they’d have reminded you of nothing so much as some kind of in-house organization. Like security guards. It would figure, I thought, helping myself to a bowl of something fragrant. If definite job assignments weren’t made, individuals within the Entourage would automatically fall into certain roles, depending on their personalities. Priscilla was a natural for the cops.
I was looking around for a place to sit when someone finally chose to notice me. I’d noticed him wading along behind me as I’d made my way to the buffet. It would have been hard not to notice him. He was at least six-three and bulky and where he wasn’t bulky, he was hairy; the kind of person who makes you feel crowded just by being nearby. I’d figured I’d mix in among everyone as though there were nothing unusual about my being there but he planted himself in front of me, cutting off most of my view of the room and said, “You’re new here.”
His tone was politely matter-of-fact, not accusatory at all; wherever he fit in here, he wasn’t the cops. “Yes, I am,” I said, shifting position so a woman in a harlequinesque outfit could pass behind me.
“Did you come to join?” he asked, reaching around me for a bowl of the same stuff I had. His arms were so long he barely had to move.
“No, I’m—”
“Didn’t think so.” He smiled cheerily. “I always know when someone’s coming in to join. Hasn’t happened in an awfully long time. Came alone, didn’t you?”
I nodded. “I was just upstairs talking to Caverty and Mad-a-Layne.”
His eyebrows went up very slightly. “It’s a good group here. Good balance of all different kinds.” Priscilla cruised by closely enough to hear what we were saying. My bulky friend looked at her for a few moments with mild hostility on his dark furry face. “Mostly a good balance. When you’ve got all kinds, you’ve got all kinds. But as long as they serve their purpose and don’t just take up space and eat up all the food, you can tolerate just about anyone.” He looked down at me again. “Of course, we’re all on the same side here,” he added quickly. “There may be a slob here and there, but they’re our slobs. If you get what I mean.”
“Couldn’t be clearer.”
“I’m Arlen. Some people call me The Bear, but not to my face.” He chuckled into his beard. “Of course, they don’t know I started them calling me The Bear. Planted the name myself. I figured if they were going to be calling me something, I might as well have some say over what it was.”
“Is that name insulting to you?” I asked.
“Hell, no. But they think it is.” He laughed again. “Some people, if they think they’re insulting you, it’s all they need to know. And that’s how you survive in an Entourage.” He herded me a few feet away from the buffet table. “What’s your name and what are you planning to do here besides survive?”
“Allie. Deadpan Allie, actually, and I’m a pathosfinder.”
I’d finally managed to rumple his smooth. “Pathosfinder?” He actually stepped back from me. “For who? Not Caverty?”
“Who called you?” the Nordic-looking woman asked, worry large on her luminous face. “Is it my fault?”
Arlen The Bear patted her shoulder gently with a huge pawlike hand. “That’s not quite the right question, Lina. Poor Lina thinks any time something goes wrong around here, she’s somehow to blame for not spotting the problem early enough.”
“For some people, sensitivity has to be cultivated, worked on every moment, waking and sleeping,” the woman explained to me anxiously. “Otherwise, they get hardened to everything without ever realizing it because being insensitive is their natural state of mind. And it can be contagious, too, insensitivity can. It can spread from just one person to infect a whole group and pretty soon you can have a whole population incapable of feeling for their fellow human being.”
“Yes,” I said, “but—”
“So that’s why I asked if our needing a pathosfinder was my fault.” She looked up at Arlen with begging eyes. Icy-blue eyes, I noticed. “Is it me, Arlen? You’d tell me, wouldn’t you?”
Arlen’s laugh was kindly as he gave her a gentle hug. “Sure I would, but by the time I did, you’d already have been told several times by everyone else. Stop worrying. She isn’t here because of anything you’ve done wrong. But she hasn’t yet said why she is here.” His expression was a little less kindly now; I’d upset one of their own. God knew how they were going to receive the fact that I was going to be messing with the entourage’s raison d’être. But we can’t lie to anyone directly involved with a client, whether it’s a friend, enemy, parent, Entourage or something even more baroque. Not unless it’s to save someone’s life. Suppose it’s your own life? I’d once asked NN. Don’t be silly, he’d said. Who’d want to kill you?
I thought about that as I said, “I’m here for Caverty.”
Nobody said anything. A third of my audience backed off.
“Caverty called you?” Arlen asked finally. “He must have. I can’t believe it. All these years with Madeleine and now—” He shook his head a little. “What are you going to—I mean, are you—”
“I’m not replacing Mad-a-LAYNE permanently.”! could hear the sighs of relief above the general chatter in the room. “I really hadn’t meant to create a disturbance,” I said, glancing to my right, where the umbrella woman was getting the news that there was a pathosfinder at large from a waifish type in black secondskins. “I’m going to do some work with Caverty and when it’s done, I’ll be leaving and life will go on.”
“Maybe you won’t want to leave,” said a chubby man in a pouch suit, ordinary except for the fact that it seemed to be padded to make him even chubbier.
“Yah. You might really get to like it here,” said the Nordic woman. “That happens.”
“I have some things to go back to that are very important to me,” I said politely.
“What?” asked The Bear with what seemed to be genuine curiosity.
“Ah …” Something told me they weren’t going to perceive my career as suitably important. I seized the first thing that came into my head. “There’s Nelson Nelson.”
“An important someone?” asked the Nordic woman.
“Ask him to come here. He might like it,” the Bear suggested.
“I, uh, no, I couldn’t.”
“It’s up to you,” said the man in the pouch suit. “But don’t count it out completely, staying here. You just might. You never know.”
The general babble in the room changed its tone and I knew without even looking that Caverty had come in.
Immediately, their attention went directly to him, allowing me to slide out of the spotlight and into the general crowd. Slipping between derelicts and duchess types, I made my way over to a small raised area containing a few small tables where I could sit and regroup. A few chiffon fanciers lingered by the steps up to the area; I managed to pass them unnoticed, in spite of the fact that I’d dipped the corner of somebody’s scarf in my dish. If he didn’t care, I didn’t.
Relieved to be out of the general crowd, I didn’t see that there was someone else sitting at the table I’d chosen until I was about to sample the night’s entree.
“You’re new here,” he said.
I paused with my spoon nearly at my lips.
“Only the new people choose to sit up here. The very new and the very old.” He smiled with the left half of his mouth; his diamond eyes twinkled. Diamond biogems are seldom a good choice but his olive skin kept him from looking too much like a willing victim of blindness. He was older than someone you’d expect to find in an Entourage, and not as done over as the average citizen. The nose had been broken at least once, but the effect wasn’t homely. He’d have reminded you of your father, if that was your orientation. It wasn’t mine. To me, he looked only like a graying, older man in comfortably baggy shirt and pants, too sensible to be here but staying anyway for some reason of his own.
“It’s Madeleine they’re all so worried about,” he continued, watching as the room rearranged itself around Caverty’s presence.
“Not Caverty?”
“Oh, of course, Caverty. Both of them, really. We don’t have one without the other here, as you must know. But they’re worried about Caverty in terms of Madeleine and what you mean for her. I know. I’ve been here with the Entourage since before it was formally an Entourage. I may have founded the Entourage. Or helped found it. I came to him, others came. Then we were a caravan.” He paused to watch a woman wearing a jewel-encrusted cage over her face and neck make her way through the room. One of the chicken people stopped her and they embraced warmly.
“I know all their dynamics, small and large. I direct the domestic drama here. At one time or another, I’ve gotten all of them to play at least some small part. Caverty finds it amusing, I think, to watch other people besides himself have problems, even if they’re just staged. And once he based a holo on one of my scenarios—Dinners Between Dinners, after my scenario, Food Fight.”
“You don’t say.”
“That was the only instance, though. Usually I cribbed from him now and then. As a kind of tribute to his work. And as a kind of tribute to being fresh out of ideas at the time, too.” He fell silent, watching Caverty moving among his Entourage.
The Entourage both moved aside for him and crowded around him all at once. It was as though a new element had been dropped into simmering waters. Caverty slipped among them much more easily than I’d been able to, maneuvering effortlessly, balancing socializing and finger food. He ate a little, held court, ate a little more, held a little more court—a reception, I realized. Every night, the Entourage gave him a reception of the type he’d probably gotten on the debut of a new holo. Not so unusual, really. Performers become addicted to applause quite easily. But Caverty had found a way to get a fix of applause every day—more often than that, if he wanted—without having to go through the tiresome business of working for it.
“Get it direct, from producer to consumer,” I muttered.
“Pardon?”
I shrugged. “Just a stray thought.”
The man got up with a smile and tossed a cloth napkin onto the table. “Well, I should go say ‘good evening’ to the great man.”
“Do you always do this?”
“Every night, dinner’s an occasion here. Didn’t they tell you?”
“I mean, you personally going over to pay your respects.”
Mildly troubled frown. “I stay here by his good graces. I eat his food, take up space, ply my trade, all by virtue of his hospitality. Once a day, I can let the man know how I feel.” He paused, studying me for a moment. “You have to mean something here, you know. Whether you stay or not.” Then he looked toward Caverty, prepared a friendly smile, and moved away, straightening his clothes.
It took him over a minute to make his way through the cluster around Caverty, not because it was so crowded, really, but because some of the couture was voluminous, like the umbrella lady, and because they were all deferring to each other as well as socializing among themselves, while Caverty favored each person who reached him with more than just token conversation. Didn’t the novelty ever wear off, for any of them?
Off to one side, I saw that Harmony had appeared amid the near-fringe of the ragged circle around “the great man” and was subtly directing traffic, moving people along so they could greet Caverty in turn and moving those who’d already spoken to him away without seeming to. Caverty was facing in her general direction, reinforcing the idea of them getting in line for him. It might have been engineered, but it had the look and feel of incidental choreography—they’d fallen into doing things this way and as long as it worked they’d keep doing it.
I tried to catch the expression on each face as the Entourage members paid their respects and turned away but I wasn’t close enough to see them all. The ones I could see looked content, or satisfied, or, I don’t know—appeased, somehow, the way children look when they all go home from the party with a gift. Which was probably the case.
Caverty looked the same way, a little drawn and besieged, perhaps, but generally content. Appeased. Happy, even.
He shouldn’t have been. He should have felt tired and put upon and too in demand. But then, I thought, if he’s not giving any of himself to his work, he has plenty left to give to his Entourage. Right, Allie?
No, wrong—he supposedly wasn’t doing any work because he didn’t have any inside him, so he shouldn’t have had anything to offer this live-in applause machine. So what exactly was he giving them and where was it coming from?
I scanned the room again and found her at last. She was at the opposite end of an invisible straight line that ran from Harmony through Caverty. That look. She could have been in religious trance; she could have been gazing at her firstborn child; she could have been dreaming of a lover or fantasizing a murder behind that look. Her Emotional Index shifted, melted, segued through a thousand different states in less time than it took to think about it.
