When Moon arrived after an hour and a half, she was fairly horrified by this bout of midlife hysteria. She was sweet and considerate, then crisp, then a touch crabby, and while he was deciding that, first, he was having a perfectly routine human experience from which he'd far too long been shielded, and hence with which he had never learned to cope, and which therefore meant nothing beyond its own description, and that, second, even so, he was, to his tremendous surprise, powerfully in love with this woman, and only cowardice could contrive to send him back within the tatters of his cool shell. Moon, in turn, was trying to deal with this unexpected reversal. Drought to inundation; neither pleasant, when all is said and done.
The next days were ruinous. Sleep destroyed, no work, commitments ignored. The sexual side effects of this grief and jealousy, as cliché and evolutionary psychology inscribed, were overwhelming: initial anesthesia pricking to priapism, teary lovemaking, coming in thunderclaps and lightning again and again and again and again—but none of it offering much guidance about what you do when you get out of bed or, more precisely, whom you get back into bed with in another day or month.
He and his estranged wife Emily attended to each other's reports, giving the odd if tentative hug when it helped. The balance sheet: Emily feels she is doing quite nicely with her new lover, although she finds the Girls somewhat irritating; lots of dogged goddess worship and do-good attitudinizing. Still, she is pleased with herself, awash with forgotten sexual pleasure. Her nails are now very closely clipped.
Moon leaves for two weeks of conferences in New York, calling him long-distance at considerable expense with messages of, probably, she thinks, love, um. He lolls on his virtuous bed reading Richard Dawkins's The Blind Watchmaker.
His scalding gut still bears an inner bruise. He purchases a fresh bottle of Mylanta, a liquid antacid with a chalky taste. Before her departure for the United States, Moon, with rather a lot of grumbling, told Harry that she's decided, in deference to his strong feelings about the matter, to cool it. Harry, she reports, finds this a cause of some annoyance, suggesting that he and Moon might readily deal with the difficulty by the simple expedient of keeping him in the dark. It is, of course, pretty much what he would have urged upon a new lover whose partner lodged the equivalent complaint.
He muses on his ideological inconsistencies, wondering whether one's tendency to feel at forty-two things other than one felt twenty years earlier is not necessarily a proof of the brain's softening, of loss of moral fiber, but perhaps a hint of maturity. He recalls that while Bertrand Russell swore by hearty fornication early and often, everyone else involved in the proceedings tended to think him a shit for it.
And yet, and yet—one can hardly change one's views simply because of the return of the repressed.
So he is terribly pleased whenever Moon calls from New York. Somehow he never really expects her to do so.
In Melbourne, the late-autumn night is balmy, soft, and warm, and Bach is playing on the radio. Moon keeps jumping out of the world, catching him unawares. He's been zipping along through an enchanting account of echolocation in bats, and the expression chirp chirps at him. One of her words. Some reverberation of her voice in the pages of science. He experiences a rush. Isn't it odd? Isn't it nice? Isn't it sickening, he imagines Moon saying with a wince. No, she doesn't, she yearns to hear it, but yes, surely she does wince, no doubt she'd squirm a little at the pushiness...
What's happening to him, he senses, is a sort of unpeeling, exhilarating and hopeful, not just the usual trudge downhill, and if there's some risk, he thinks, even a lot of risk, and some nimble footwork, and defenses are up to be snuck through, well, okay, right now he is buzzing beautifully even if his gut still feels the bruise and the bite. And that's the thing, he tells himself, that's the difference between his cool more-or-less indifference at Moon's up-front general policy announcement (and his own) of the joys of existential zipless fucking and his present preposterous pains. He cares now, yes, the clichés inscribe and traverse him, for the first time in years he is vulnerable, and things hurt vilely that a mere week back barely registered.
Is this a by-product of his years of evasion with Emily? No doubt, at least in part. What is driving him to numbness, he decides, has nothing much in common with any dubious regressive urge to ward off the threat that the world might touch him, which he suspects is the secret of many marriages. His woundedness, it now seems to him, is quite the reverse of running away. Not being hurt before was running away. Hurting his wife Emily and ignoring it, often enough not even noticing the fact, was, he concludes, running away. He notes the banality of this conclusion and chooses not to give a shit.
What precisely is posed for the future by these reflections, these feelings, he cannot estimate. He is clear at least that he is neither demanding from Moon, nor offering her, fidelity in the 1950s' mold. His brain has not turned entirely sideways. What he desires above all is to continue barreling along this heart-crushingly luminous and sudden road. And yes, his love, his consciousness of Moon is central to this change. Can he tell her outright? Certainly it is news that might not please her, might seem an imposition merely, might reek of an implication that he wishes to limit her choices in the interests of pursuing his own moment (perfectly commonplace, after all) of—is it saying too much?—joyful happiness.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Jan
Space bubbled, ripped open. The Hanged Man fell through a hole in reality, reconfiguring the computational substrate. It wasn't supposed to be possible. Until several weeks ago, it hadn't been. A girl could get the impression, Jan told herself, that we approach the Contest's endgame. Everything is up for grabs.
A planet hung before them—not the beaten copper highlighted in sulfur yellow that her spaceship had watched without boredom during her absence, suspended between Sun and Mercury—but a world more eloquent, more nuanced, more straight-out ridiculous, really. Flying saucers! And now she had one, badly dented at best, useless for space at worst, tucked up against the belly of her craft. And below, or in front of them, was the vimana's place of origin.
Somebody had been throwing craps a billion times in a row and gotten sixes each time. How else could you explain the silly place?
This Venus, Maybelline's special and wildly improbable world, was gray ocean under streamers of gray cloud. Its twin moons hung like pale skulls in black space, each half the size of Luna. Jan's eyes went to a display where this cognate's Earth burned as a milk-bright pearl. It made her heart ache to see her world, even from such a distance, seething in its deep, putrid, poisoned envelope. In this universe, a Mars-sized protoplanet, orbit twisted by chaotic dynamics, smote this accreting twin world instead of primordial Earth, blasting off a Moon-sized lump of lithosphere that spun, elongated, tore in two, gravity flinging them into their double round as their own gravity sucked away the foul smog that in most cognates had cooked Venus to impossible hothouse temperatures. Jan winced. As Earth had cooked, in this subuniverse. No life, not even extremophile bacteria.
a beautiful planet, her starship told her, regarding Venus with a dozen diverse sensors. shall I drop you and the warrant officer off here with your sister, or should we return to the battle?
"Not much of a battle left back there, dude." All the Shinto craft attacking her had blazed in dark energy, then snuffed out like candles. "Let's drop Pjilfplox and the wreck off, then have some R & R." Something tickled at her mind from her implant. "No, actually, I have a better idea."
Positioned politely to one side of her control room, the warrant officer fluttered leaves in a gesture of acquiescence. They could speak human languages when they wished, but they preferred not to. A faint stench of manure had entered the cabin along with the rescued vegetable, and despite her gratitude, not to mention a tincture of guilt over the smashed flying saucer, Jan would not be sorry to see the back of it. To whatever extent it could be said to have a back or front. Presumably Maybelline could tell the difference, especially when one was in rut. Ja
n shuddered slightly, watched Venus turning from an etched plate to a globe to landscape beneath her, swept with blowing cloud.
They fell through moist air to a cleared place marked by immense growths—not trees, not bushes, not corals, nor mottled, soaring aggregations of multicolored fungi, but some alien blend of them all—disposed against the soil in an immense Pythagorean theorem. The Hanged Man floated to the edge of the large square on the hypotenuse. The tree things were hung with vimanas in various stages of construction or perhaps deposition, like gaudy holiday decorations. Light blurred from the gray tin of their hulls, dazzled from the crystal nodes in their bellies, gleamed from the eggshell white of the landing balls. Mazel tov! Jan shook her head, trying not to laugh.
As the starship deposited the wrecked vimana with typical delicacy, Maybelline came through a Schwelle from her Heimat fortress to meet them. It was apparent even from a distance that she was not pleased. Then again, May was rarely pleased by anything. Jan found herself grinning. That typical dyspepsia gave Maybelline her Warrior edge. It didn't make her any more likeable but it made her a formidable foe of the K-machines, a good woman to have at your side. Like that frustrating man, Ember, a Knight Warrior, if ever she'd seen one, and a damned fool with his monstrous research into superintelligence that had blighted an entire cognate Earth. Maybe the new kid, August, would make a fourth Knight. He was still unformed, that much was obvious, but he had the 'tude of a fighter—and Septima's crystal, after all, had selected him for the X-caliber implant.
Jan rode the extruded escalator to the surface, gave May a saucy wink.
"Hey there, toots. Pity about the flying gadget, but at least this time it wasn't deformers that blew the shit out of it. We're lucky that good old Hanger arrived in the nick of time and saved our bacon."
Her sister scowled. She was wearing some sort of ghastly mottled-green-and-puce sack, probably trying to blend in with the natives. "You never tire of breaking things, do you, Jan?"
"It was in a good cause," she said with mock contrition. "Saving the warrant officer's life. And mine, of course."
Maybelline pushed past her, offered one muscular hand to the Venusian. "Welcome home, my lord Pjilfplox. I apologize for letting you get mixed up with this nonsense. Personal vendettas have no place in the Contest." She glanced sideways, shaking her head as the vimana was dragged off by writhing tendrils into the heart of the Pythagorean theorem, where it would be disassembled in a series of processes that would leave it reduced to molecules, and those fed, in turn, into the nanocapillaries of the great Sun-hungry Builders.
Jan could not contain herself. "Give me a break. What, are you going to tell me that flying saucers don't grow on trees? Oh, wait—they do."
"Ignore the externalities as usual, Janine. Never mind the costs that have to be borne by—"
"Lighten up, kiddo." A faint, tingly stench moved in the air, not the rank odor of blood and bone or manure but something that made her heart jump, like a whiff of horny testosterone. For a moment she wondered who or what was in heat. Not me, she thought. And remembered, an instant later, that this was the tang of Venus. Goddess of love my foot, she thought. She put her arm through Maybelline's before her sister had a chance to pull away, placed the other arm around the vegetable warrior, drew them away from the hanging Hanged Man, made a jaunty little skip. "Come along, gang. Let's get a drink, or an infusion, or whatever. Then after that, you and me, my love," giving her sister a sharp jolt in the ribs with her elbow, "what we need to do, we need to climb back lickety-split into my hog and get back to work."
Maybelline pulled away, gave her a resentful look. "You're getting very high-handed, missy. I'm perfectly satisfied right here, doing—"
"And then," Jan said more loudly, speaking blithely over the top of her, "we can fetch our new little friend August on board, and take another run out to the Xon star."
Loud noises from inside the vimana Builder made them both grit their teeth and squeeze their eyes shut involuntarily. That was the trouble with vegetables—they could be so damned noisy.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
August
I got up from the table, thunderstruck, thinking about Tansy's ruined house, the place I had lived for years, about dead things dropped in her bathroom while she and her guard dog slept through it, more or less, the intruders equally unaware of the sleepers as they fetched dead things to the nexus point for collection. My deathwatch sister regarded me without moving anything more than her gaze, which she now held fixed upon me. I said, "Sorry, Septima, I have to go. This has been very illuminating." I reached across the table, took her hand, shook it sincerely. "I hope those poor children... well, you know."
"They're human, August. They'll survive. May I give you a word of advice?" Now she, too, rose, keeping her grip upon my hand, standing beside me in her plain cover-all and her military bearing.
"I'm all ears. It's more than any of my other siblings have bothered to give me."
"Don't sulk, lad. I've offered you the reason for their evasions. Think of all this as a combination of testing and training. Being tested in fire tends to burn, August, but you will come out of it—assuming you do come out of it—tempered and strengthened."
I did not find her comments remotely encouraging. Nobody asked me to sign up for this; I was a conscript, a poor dumb schmuck who had wandered into the wrong universe by mistake. No, that was ridiculous and self-pitying. I was a Seebeck by birth, as were they. If Great-aunt Tansy and my poor lost hound, Do Good, were illusions, dissected fragments of my family's skittish parents, still their sweet memory remained presences in my life, urgent, talismanic. They had represented stability, kindness, love, loyalty, courage, even sharp intelligence of a rather skewed variety. I owed their memory, dubious or even false as it was, at least this much: I was the last of their children and now I must stand beside my brothers and sisters in this conflict, this absurd Contest, until we prevailed.
The problem was, nobody would tell me the rules, nobody would show me the scorecard.
I shrugged. "Whatever," I said. To the operating system I added, "Give me my brother Marchmain."
A Schwelle opened. I stepped on to hot, crunchy, dazzling-white sand. Waves boomed and then hushed, boomed and crashed and hushed, tall, blue, curling water, frothing white foam. My nostrils twitched at the spiky odors of the ocean that stretched from brilliant shoreline to a horizon of paler blue. The sun was high overhead. Marchmain lay stretched on the sand, cheek resting on his crossed forearms, naked and sinewy, brown as old oak, a battered straw hat on the back of his curls. He turned his head a fraction, slitted open one eye.
"Ah, the wonderboy. I understand that I have you to thank for my continued existence, according to the damned cat. Don't stand on ceremony. Skin down, August, pull up some sand."
Water. Always water. If they weren't trying to drown me or wash me, they wanted to invite me in for a dip. Maybe it was because I had grown up as an Australian, in the sea-girt land of 'roid-free Olympic gold medalists. Cultural stereotyping. It was high-summer hot, I'd started to sweat already, and I was dizzy with what I realized, after a moment, was the cross-world equivalent of jet lag. I looked around carefully. Nobody, nothing living other than the line of trees and low bushes at my back, nothing ferociously half-alive, half-mechanical, for that matter.
Oh, what the hell. I took my plaster-dusty clothes off, placed them carefully on the sand, weighted them down with my footwear. The sand was hot under my bare soles, too hot for sitting naked and shooting the breeze, especially since there was no breeze. I ran down to the water's edge, waded quickly across a million tiny white-and-blue fragments of shattered shell to the cold, crisp sea, plunged in, sported for a few minutes as the tension in my muscles drained away, mindless as a dolphin.
I could not stay that way. For minutes I floated on my back, paddling lightly with my hands, formulating my questions as clearly as I could. After a while, I swam back to shore and joined my brother.
"I hope you kept a
n eye peeled for sharks," he said lazily.
I didn't know whether to believe him or not, but my muscles tightened again. "You bastard. Couldn't be bothered mentioning it before I went in?"
He rolled over on his back, propped himself on his elbows. Glistening sand clung to his torso, stuck in his sweat and body hair. A curious emblem in gold dangled on a chain, propped against one nipple. It was a question mark inside an open circle, with an arrow pointing to the right. I knew what it meant, because he'd uttered that expression when we'd first met as if it were a mantra: Ask the Next Question. Well, I'd just done so, although it wasn't the one that interested me.
"Calm down," he told me. Like a gymnast, he brought one foot up almost to his waist, tapped the metal gleaming there. "These little gadgets seem to put sharks off. Handy, really. So tell me, why are you here pestering me? Shouldn't you be out with the rest of them, killing things?"
I thumped away hot sand with my own heel, crouched, scooped some more from the top layer, carefully lowered my backside into the cooler depression. "I don't suppose you have any sunblock? Or a spare hat? I'm staying here until I get some answers, but I'm not eager to pay for them with sunstroke."
"For Pete's sake, must I do everything?" Marchmain reached out his right arm, muttered a deixis, and his hand disappeared into a narrow slot in the air. He rummaged about, drew out a spray can and threw it to me, poked around some more, leaning far to the right, dragged back something white and complicated, handed it to me with a smirk. I dropped it on the sand, stood up and sprayed myself from head to toe with sunscreen, enjoying the familiar coconut savor, sat down, and examined the thing. Linen and lightweight ropes of some sort. I couldn't help myself; I started to laugh.
"You've gotta be kidding. A burnoose? Been out riding lately with Lawrence of Arabia, have you?"
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