“Well ...” Bron mused. “I don’t know____”
“Oh do let’s sit here! It was such a lovely walk, after such a lovely ride. I can’t picture a happier destination!”
Bron smiled, shrugged, and for the second time felt the perspiration of embarassment break on the small of his back. The Spike was overdoing it. They should have been shown some other place first and this one second. That would have been the proper way. Who did these people think they were? “This is fine,” Bron said, shortly. “Oh ... here.” He pressed the bill on the domo—it would look ridiculous to hunt out a smaller one.
“Thank you, sir.” The nod and the smile were brief. “Would you like another drink while I bring you the menu?”
“Yes,” Bron said. “Please.”
“You were drinking ... ?”
And Bron remembered the name of that drink: Chardoza. “Gold Flower Nectar.”
“It is delicious!” The Spike dropped into her chair, put her elbows on the high arms and locked both hands, inelegantly, beneath her chin, stretched both feet under the table and crossed her ankles.
The domo’s laugh was, momentarily, almost sincere.
The metal leaves on the table’s centerpiece fell open. The drinks rolled out on marbled, green-glass trays.
Bron frowned—but then, the domo would have known what they were drinking before Bron had even summoned him from his cabinet.
Bron sat in his own chair across from the Spike and thought: She is totally delightful and totally upsetting. Somehow, though, the realization had crystalized: Play the client as he might, there was no way he could fit her into the role of his younger self. Her gaucheries, enthusiasms, and eccentricities simply had nothing to do with his own early visits to the Craw’s Bellona brothers—for one thing, she simply did not despise him the way he had despised those who had escorted him there, so that, in the game of dazzling and impressing in which he was busily racking up points, she was just not playing. What am I doing here? he thought, suddenly. Twice now he had been reduced to the sweat of mortification—and probably would be so reduced again before the evening ended. But at least (he thought on) I know what to be mortified about. Both discomforts and pleasures assured him this was his territory. The sweat dried. He picked up the cold glass, sipped. And realized that, for the duration of his thoughts, the Spike had been silent. “Is something the matter?”
She lifted her eyebrows, then her chin from her meshed knuckles. “No ...”
Smiling, he said: “Are you sure? Are you positive? There’s nothing about my manner, my bearing, my clothing that you disapprove of?”
“Don’t be silly. You know your way around places like this—which makes it twice the fun. You’ve obviously taken a great deal of time with your clothes—which I thoroughly appreciate: That’s why I didn’t go with Windy and Charo. They insisted on going in their digging duds, right after work.”
“Well, the joy of a place like this is that you can come as formal or as informal as you like.”
“But if you’re going to indulge an anachronism, you might as well indulge it all the way. Really,” and she smiled, “if I were the type to get upset over anyone’s clothes, Windy would have cured me long ago.” Now she frowned. “I suppose the reason I didn’t go with them is that I know, deep down, part of his reason for coming is to be scandalous, or at least to dare anyone to be scandalized. Which can be fun, if you’re in the mood. But I have other things to do, right now—The two of you, in your youth, shared a profession.”
“Yes. I know,” Bron said, but could not, for the moment, remember how he knew. Had she alluded to it? Or had Windy?
“He has some very unpleasant memories associated with places like this.”
“Then why does he come back?”
She shrugged. “I suppose ... well, he wants to show off.”
“And be scandalous?”
Her lower lip inside her mouth, the Spike smiled. “Charo said she had a fine time. They said I should really try and come if I could.”
“Then I hope you have an equally, or even finer, time.”
She nodded. “Thank you.”
The domo, at his shoulder, announced: “Your menu ... ma’am?”
“Oh!” The Spike sat up, took the huge, velvet-backed and many-paged folder.
“... sir?”
Bron took his, trying to recall if, on Mars, they gave the menu first to the man, then the woman; or was it first to the younger, then the older; or was it the client, then the—
“Perhaps you’d like a little more air than that?” The domo reached up, snapped his fingers. The interleaved mirrors (after their ten-minute, uphill hike, only a dozen feet above them now) began to rise, turn, and fold back from the stars.
A breeze touched them.
The tablecloth’s edge brushed Bron’s thigh.
“I’ll just leave you for a minute to make your choices. When you reach your decision—” A smile, a nod—“I’ll be back.” And he was gone behind a rock.
The Spike shook her head, wonderingly. “What an amazing place!” She turned her chair (the seat swiv-eled) to look down the near slope. “I mean, I don’t think I’ve ever been in an enclosed space this large before!” It was at least six hundred yards to the top of the slope across from them. Some of the intervening space was filled with great rocks, small mountains, hillocks of grass, artificial ramps, platforms and terraced surfaces where, here and there, another table stood, tiny with distance, with or without diners bending to their meals. They could see a dozen furnace-fires where, from the equipment ranged around, the more brutal cooking was done.
Other customers, singly or in groups, accompanied by their own, black-clad domos, ambled along the paths, over the ramps. The far rise, slashed in three places by falling water, looked like some battlefield, at night, lit by a hundred scattered campfires on the dark, green, and craggy slopes. The multimirrored ceiling, as soon as their eyes drifted away thirty feet, was endlessly a-flicker with a million times the stars in any normal sky.
“Out where we come from—” the Spike’s voice brought him back—“I guess we just never have this much space to waste. Well—” She opened her menu—“what in the world” and glanced at him, up from under lowered brows, with a half-smile that brought him the political significance only seconds later, “shall we have to eat?”
And while he was trying to remember the name of that dish he’d had on his first visit to this kind of establishment in Bellona, the Spike began to read out various selections, their accompanying descriptions, the descriptions of traditional accompaniments, the small essays on the organization of meals customary for various cuisines. As Bron turned pages, “... Austrian sausage ...” caught his eye; he stared at it, trying to recall why it intrigued him. But then she said something that struck him so funny he laughed out loud. (He let the page fall over.) Then they were both laughing. He read out three selections—all of which were hysterical. Somehow, with much hilarity (and another round of Gold Flower Nectar) they constructed a meal that began with a clear suomono, followed by oysters Rockefeller, grilled quail, boeuf au saucisse en chemise—sometime amidst all this, a steam-boat of fresh vegetables arrived at one side of the table and an ice-boat of crudites at the other; the wines began with a Champa-gnoise for the oysters, then a Pommard with the quail, and a Macon with the roast.
Bron paused with his fork in a piece of the tissuey crust that had chemisee’6. the boeuf. “I love you,” he said. “Throw up the theater. Join your life to mine. Become one with me. Be mine. Let me possess you wholly.”
“Mad, marvelous man—” Carefully, with chopsticks, she lifted a broccoli spear from the top tier of bubbling broth: the coals through the steam-boat’s grill-work glowed in her gauntlet—“not on your life.”
“Why not? I love you.” He put down his fork. “Isn’t that enough?”
Gingerly, she ate her broccoli.
“Is it,” he asked, leaning forward, “that I’m just not your type? I mean physically? You’re only tu
rned on by dwarfish little creatures who can do backflips, is that it?”
“You’re very much my type,” she said. “That’s why I’m here. On the animal line—and I do think that’s to be appreciated—you’re really most spectacular. I think large, blond, Scandinavians are quite the most gorgeous things in the world.”
“But I’m still not a monkey who can swing through the trees by his tail, or who comes to places like this in his digging duds.” He’d realized he’d been offended by her remark only halfway through his own. “Or, for that matter, a long-haired young lady who sits around and tinkles folksongs.” He hoped the smile he put on now mitigated some of what, to his ears, sounded a bit harsh. “Alas, what can I do about these minor failings?”
Her smile was slightly reproving. “You have your own charm. And your numerous rough points ... But also charm.”
“Charm enough for you to come away with me forever?”
“Now it’s my turn to say, ‘Alas.’” She took the last of her broccoli between her teeth, drew the ivory sticks away. “No.”
He said: “You’ve never been in love, then. That’s it. Your heart is all stone. You’ve never had the heat of true passion melt it to life. Otherwise, you’d know I speak the truth and you’d surrender.”
“Damned if I do and damned if I don’t, huh?” She put down the chopsticks, picked up her fork, and cut at her beef. “Actually, I have been in love.”
“You mean with Windy and Charo?”
“No. With them I am merely happy—a state, by the way, I value very highly, ‘mere’ as it is.”
“Do you mean the lady you got refixated for, then?”
“No. Not even that. This was just a matter of the old, ordinary chemistry I was born with.” She ate another bite and, with foreknuckle, brushed away crumbs from her lower lip. “In fact, I think I’m going to tell you about it. I have, really, been in love. And what’s more, it was really and truly and dramatically unrequited. Yes, I am going to tell you. So just listen—I haven’t got it all rehearsed, now, so it’s going to come out very clumsily—who knows, even uglily. And I haven’t any idea if anything in it will mean anything to you. But I’m sure somewhere in it the right feeling, if not the right words, will be there. Like the Book of the Dead, or something: just read it once, and when you need it—when you can use it—you have to trust the necessary information will come back to you, if you just let it all flow through your ears even once. I used to teach—or rather, for the past few years because the company has been doing so well, we’ve been doing a sort of solstice seminar at Lux University. In theater. And I—”
The story was unclear. And clumsy. It had something to do with walking into her seminar room on the first evening, three years or five years ago, and seeing one student who was wearing only a fur vest and a knife—strapped to his foot; then there was something about a lot of drugs. He was either selling them or buying them ... Oh, yes, she had been struck practically inarticulate by him the moment she had walked into the room.
“Well, how did you teach the class then?’* Oh, she explained (in the middle of explaining something else), she was very good at that. (At what? but she was going on:) He and one of the other, older students, had asked her, after the class, to contribute a running credit draft to a beer fund. (They were making beer in someone’s back room.) Then, somehow, she was staying at his place. Then more drugs. And he was taking her, first with a group of friends who made candles, to hear a singer at an intimate club, then to visit a commune out in the ice—on his skimmer, which she sounded like she was more impressed with than she was with him, and then to see some friends of hers way away—the class had finished by now—and he was apparently the nephew of some famous naturalist and explorer Bron had actually heard of in connection with the Callisto ice-fields where there was an ice “forest” and the ice “beach” named after him; but this story had taken place on Iapetus, not Callisto—and “... when obviously it wasn’t going to work out, and I had spent two weeks—at least!—without being straight one minute, you’d think it was his religion]—really, it was like walking around with your skull all soft and your meninges stripped away and every impulse from every sensation in the Solar System detonating your entire brain—you understand, the sex had been absolutely great as far as / was concerned. But the physical thing just wasn’t him (he was one of your mystic types)—well, there was nothing for me to do but ... leave. Because I loved him absolutely more than anything else in the world. I slept the last night in the same room with him, on a blanket on the floor. Once I tried to rape him, I believe. He said fuck off. So I did, and later he said I could hold him if it would make me feel better, and I realized that I didn’t want that. So I said, thanks, no. Brunnhilde on her bed of flame could not have burned more than I! (He said I was too intense—!) I lay there, all night, on the floor beside him, completely alone with myself, waiting for a dawn I was perfectly sure would never come.
“And that morning, he hugged me; and then he took me to the shuttle. And he gave me a notebook—the cover was blue plastic with the most amazing designs running through. And I was so happy I almost died. And kept writing him letters till he wrote me back—you see, one of my friends had said: ‘You know, you’ve destroyed his life. He’s never met anyone like you before, who thought he was that important!’ And that was years ago. I just got a letter from him last week; he calls me one of the people he loves] You see ... ? If you really love someone, and it’s obvious that it’s impossible, you’ll do that. Even that. You see?” He had no idea what that was, either. While he listened, he found himself again remembering the occurrences back in the earthie cell. Whatever had that actually been about? Would the Spike have any suggestions? He longed to interrupt her monologue to ask. But Sam had said the subject was verboten ... a matter of life, death, and would bo so forever. Still, it made him feel rather romantic ... if he could just suppress the frustration. And somehow, she was back in what seemed like the middle of the story, explaining that, you see, he had been older than the other students, that she didn’t even like children as a rule, though one had to make an exception for Charo—who was nineteen—because Charo was, in many ways, exceptional. Then there was something about a lot of pictures taken on an ice-ledge, naked, in the skimmer with the Catherine of Cleves Book of Hours—who, he wondered, was Catherine of Cleves, and where did the ice-ledge get into the whole thing? Really, he was trying to follow. But during the last moments of her recounting, he’d noticed, just to her left, another group passing below, their majordomo leading them along on the paths and ramps toward their secluded table.
As he watched the four men and three women walking, Bron suddenly frowned, sat slightly forward. “Do you know,” he said “—excuse me—but do you know that out of all the customers I’ve seen here, there isn’t one wearing shoes!”
The Spike frowned too. “Oh ... Well, yes. That’s the one concession Windy made to fashion, when he came here with Charo. In fact, just before I left, he reminded me to take mine off, in case this was where we were going—but really ...” Suddenly she giggled, drawing her own feet back under her chair (In his boots, Bron’s own toes began to tingle)—“they are terribly informal here. Windy said bare feet are ... well, encouraged—to enjoy the grass—but they really don’t care what you wear!”
“Oh.” Bron settled back; the majordomo came to flamb6 the bananas Foster—one red-gowned waiter pushed up a burning brazier, another a cart on which were the fruit, the brandies, the iced crime brulei. The various courses had actually been served by these high-coiffed and scarlet-gowned women. (They had women as waiters, too! And in a place like this!) During his first months on Triton, Bron had gotten used to people in positions of authority frequently of an unexpected sex. But people in positions of service were something else.
Butter frothed in the copper skillet. The domo ran his paring knife around a ring of orange rind, of lemon peel: in with the praline, the sugar; then the deft stripping of the white bananas, peel already baked bl
ack; and, after a sprinkling of brandies and a tilting of the pan, a whoooshl of flame.
“You see,” the majordomo said, laughing, tilting the pan. “Madame ends up with fire, water, earth, and air nevertheless!”
The Spike beamed with wide eyes and clasped hands. “It’s quite a production.”
With his heels pressed tight together beneath his chair, Bron spooned among the tiny flames that now chased one another around his dessert plate and began to eat the most entrancing confection he had ever tasted, while the sweat rose again on his neck and back. What was so awful (the Spike was now blithely chatting to the black-clad domo and one of the scarlet-gowned waiters—of course ‘waitress’ was the word, but it seemed so out of place in a place like this—who were evidently amused by whatever it was she was saying), was that they knew exactly (for a second he searched the domo’s and the waiters’ faces for some sign, look, or gesture to confirm their knowledge; but no confirmation was needed: It was obvious from the entire situation’s play and interplay. Bron sank back into his chair), exactly what they were: That she was new to all this, which they found delightful; and that he was someone who, on another world, had probably been taken to some similar establishment a dozen-odd times under dubious circumstances but that he had not been near such a place for at least fifteen years. Miserably, he spooned up the tongue-staggering sweet.
There were cheeses to taper off. There was coffee. There were brandies. From somewhere he dredged up a reaction to the Spike’s resumption of her story about the affair with her student. What she had been telling him was important to her, he realized. Probably very important. But it had been unclear. And, what’s more, dull. There comes a point, Bron decided, where for your own safety you have to take that amount of dull for the same as dumb. Which, he found himself thinking, applied to most of the Universe.
“Do you see?” she asked. “Do you see?”
He said: “I think I do,” sincerely as he could manage.
She sighed, disbelieving.
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