Slant

by Eikeltje

  in the summer (but now that grooming might be neglected). All of this

  is in the background as he asks for the check. He will pay. She does not object.

  "I've been talking your ear off," she says as they walk to the door. Outside,

  on the street, they are side by side and the moment has come to shove off or

  play the old game to the end. Giffey hopes his technique has not gotten feeble;

  it's been over a year and a half since he last played.

  "Thank you for your company," he says. Then a pause. "I like the sound of

  your voice," he says. "It's the prettiest I've heard in a good while."

  "Well, thank you, Jack."

  They face each other. It is really damned cold out here and the streetlights

  cast long shadows where they stand. He can barely see her face and his own

  face is starting to hurt. "You do a lot of things to me, Yvonne."

  / SLANT 107

  "Yes, well you listen nice and you're no grandpa."

  Giffey reaches out and strokes her arm. The fur collar is rising with her hair

  and making that dark halo again, and within, the center of a target, the oval

  of her face. Her very pretty face. Hell, it was all a pretense. All his doubts

  were faking him. He wants this woman and he even needs her because he is

  afraid of going up against Omphalos in the next few days. There probably

  isn't much time left. He can say farewell to the good food, the drinks, the

  landscapes and the skies; he can say farewell to the eyes and noses and breasts

  and hips, too.

  He doesn't give a damn about Bill who does not take care of this woman

  the way she wishes and who is far away diddling himself with his Yox buddies

  and some karaoke curies in Thailand or India.

  "You raise a powerful need," he says softly. "I'd like to make you think a

  little better of at least one man."

  "Oh," she says. She's nervous now. The last man she played this game with

  was probably poor self-diddling Bill. "I don't dislike men, not at all. Don't

  mistake me. But you're special. You listen. I--"

  She's starting with the words again. Giffey takes her arm and pulls her

  toward him, gauging by her automatic resistance to that pull the measure of

  how much more persuasion she will need before she admits she is committed.

  Not much. He zeroes into the pale oval within the halo and kisses her.

  The kiss starts offgentle, and then she finally offers open lips and her tongue.

  He doesn't much like tongue kissing, but he plays that move through, and

  then up to the regions he is much more fond of, her eyes and her nose. She

  clings to him tightly, accepting this hungrily. No more resistance, at least as

  long as they do only this, with their clothes on, in a public place.

  "Let's go," Giffey says.

  "All right," Yvonne says.

  "Over to my apartment," Giffey says. "It's too cold to get naked here on

  the street."

  "Yeah," Yvonne says. She chuckles--not a giggle, but a genuine, almost

  masculine chuckle, and that's fine.

  She's added it all up and her answer is one.

  TRIBUTARY FEED

  LitVid Search Fulfillment (Backdata: FREE by bequest of the author): Text column

  of Alexis de Tocqueville II (pseudonym-?-) March 25 2049

  The growing disaffected in America merit our concern. How do we describe

  them succinctly? Discouraged, cut loose from the cultures for which their intellect

  and character destine them, those cultures of spiritual conservatism and

  Bucktail bigotry which have been shown again and again to be politically incapa-

  108

  GREG BEAR

  economy. Their refusal to take advantage of educational opportunities, which

  they regard as corrupting, leaves them little to do but join the ominous numbers

  on the New Dole. Here, they sit with their families locked into specially tailored

  and highly "moral" Yox feeds, funneling their few resources into an obsequious

  entertainment industry that has ever believed "a hundred million people cannot

  be wrong." Here they relive the glory days of elitism and bigotry, or golden

  dreams of blue-collar solidarity and dominance. They hand their hearts and

  minds over to demagogues like spoiled children. They are a dead people, but

  still dangerous.

  Alice orders the limo to let her out three blocks bet?bre her home. She is

  suffocating in the artificial lavishness of the limo cabin. Her eyes fill with tears.

  She feels insulted and abused and, for the first time in many long years, soiled.

  Flashes of hatred mingle with jagged, unhappy memories and a long-quiet

  sense of shame.

  She walks along the deserted street, following the glowing lines in the

  walkway and the curb. A warmer wind is cutting between the buildings and

  the few houses, and brilliant, scary flashes of lightning play silently above the

  clouds.

  She does not want to be protected. She feels the power of the wind and the

  eclouds,

  thrills a little at the

  and blue effulgences, begins to reassemble

  orange

  her pride and her armor.

  But at the front door, there are tears in her eyes again. She shivers at the

  thought of the faceless man trying to pry her loose from her protections, like

  a cruel beachcomber working at a limpet. "Why does he want to know anything

  about me?" she mutters. "What a creep, What a monster."

  She spends thirty minutes in the shower, alternating between sonic micro-spray

  and steady stream. She feels as if she should scrub off all her skin and

  grow it new and clean. She feels between her legs briefly, wishing she could

  shed all her insides, everything the faceless monster's flesh and semen touched.

  She has never felt this way about a man before, and in a far recess of her self,

  she worries about the frightening strength of her revulsion.

  It's only sex and it u,as only once and he got nothing special,' he didn't even ask for

  anything special. He didn't care. He wanted to ask questions.

  Alice feels the sparks of anger ide, damped by exhaustion. All she wants

  now is to crawl into bed and sleep, straight sleep, without the pre-dream child

  vid she often uses, just simple sleep.

  /

  SLANT 109

  And then she sees that dreadful facelessness again. Her breath quickens and

  she moans. She gets out of bed and walks in her thin silk robe into the living

  room, the spare and unadorned place where she seldom spends much time.

  Right now she wishes she had artwork all over the walls, a pet or a friend to

  talk to; all of her friends, until now, it seems, need her more than she needs

  them.

  She has a few articles on a shelf that give her some comfort: a ceramic poodle,

  pink and ridiculous, that belonged to her grandmother; an antique folding

  razor her father gave to her when he first learned she was going on call-ins as

  a teenager ("to protect yourself," he said, "because the only thing that hurts

  worse than knowing what you're doing is the thought of losing you altogether'')

  that she had never carried on her person; a miniature plastic spray of

  flowers; a picture of her parents and brother. She has not thought of her brother

  in months. She picks up the picture and stares at it.

  Carl is eleven years old
in the picture and she is nine. Carl did not know

  what to think of his sister. He was straight-arrow, knightly. He signed up

  with the Marines to go to the Moon as part of a settlement effort and died in

  a pressure drop five years ago.

  She replaces the picture.

  Five men have wanted to marry her. She wants to tell Carl that; she did not

  fail in the marriage department, not for lack of interest. She never felt it was

  necessary to get married, never felt strongly enough for the men who asked,

  with the exception of one...

  Alice refuses to think of that one now. Putting him together with the

  facelessness she has just endured is more than she wants to deal with. It would

  be so nice to have someone like him here; but if he were here, she would never

  have gone off on a call-in.

  Finally, Alice gives in and sits before the theater in the small family room.

  She orders the unit on and waits for it to find her eyes with its projectors. The

  swirling sound centers her in an opening space filled with selections. She

  chooses a mindless linear vid, a domestic drama. "What time is it?"

  11:31 p.m. flashes in red before her eyes, over the faces of the participants.

  They are all part of a family in a comb coming to grips with a new son-in-law

  who is untherapied and works fixing internal combustion engines for illegal

  atavist car races. He is cute and muscular and chunky-rough and he

  says funny, eccentric, but wise things that make the therapied vanilla-smooth

  comb family look inept and foolish. Side notes on the image tell Alice

  she can convert this to karaoke for an extra ten dollars. "Live andplay the

  whole livelong story/ Be Amanda; let your S.O. portray Baxter/ All the story and

  twice the fun: available in straight flow, mixed doubles, wide field with random meets

  from around the world, or total gone-gone-gonzo/ Explore Amanda's world by strolling

  or in freezeframe/"

  The house monitor chimes. Alice pauses the feed and asks who is it. "It's

  110

  GREG BEAR

  Alice cuts the feed, pays a partial rather than scheduling a replay, and goes

  to the door.

  Twist stands shifting from one leg to the other in the entry, knuckle between

  her teeth. Her knees are actually pointed toward each other, total gamin,

  vulnerable as hell. She comes in, straight silky black hair windblown, face all

  crinkled like a little girl. She looks stretched and terrible.

  Suddenly, Alice feels an outpouring of relief and affection for Twist.

  "My God," she says, "you look worse than I feel. What's happened?"

  RIVERS

  Some ideas are just lubricants to let troubled people slide through life.

  Not lies exactly--but very slippery.

  In New Hope, Pennsylvania, a Baptist denomination anoints the re-born in

  a fountain of living light, guided by encoded data from the River. They will tell

  you, as you are so baptized, that by consuming the flesh and blood of Christ you

  absorb his data into your pattern.

  That makes Christ a virus.

  The community memes evolve and live on.

  --USA BLISTER-FAST SPIN

  Thirteen Coins is a hoary and very demod restaurant that used to serve the

  fourth estate. It sits in a re-done Commons district now, an island of tradition

  and antiquity in a rolling park filled with visibly moving, growing, and self-pruning

  topiary: lions, elephants, dinosaurs, as well as spaceships and ringed

  planets.

  The storm has turned the park into a forbidding dreamscape, the park's

  lighted pathlines contending with blue-green and orange flashes.

  In a high-packed, enclosed, mock-medieval booth near a broad window

  overlooking the gardens, Marcus sips a Lagavulin single-malt while Jonathan

  drinks a glass of Chilean Sangiovese.

  "I love the Stoics," Marcus says. "Don't misunderstand me, Jonathan. A

  finer and more dedicated group of philanthropists and civic-minded folk you'll

  never find. I've made more fruitful contacts there than anywhere else in my

  life--with the possible exception of my wife's relations." He draws up the

  /

  SLANT 111

  ments of chagrin and resignation. Then he sips very delicately at the small

  ceramic bowl of Scotch. '"Sherry barrels for aging. Sixteen years old and purring

  like a tiger. Wonderful stuff."

  "You wanted to shake them up," Jonathan offers, to get Marcus to come to

  some point.

  "You catch me out exactly," Marcus says. "Get somebody like Torino in

  there and see what he knocks loose. But . . . Nothing. A few moths and some

  dust and crumbs. He's right, you know. This neural hypothesis stuff is dead-on.

  It's a practical and useful description of how society works. Screw nature.

  After all how many of us survive in the jungle any more? And anybody who

  follows the lines of the argument can . . ." He sips again. "Rise above. Survive

  the challenges."

  "I need to study it some more, I think."

  Marcus stares at him steadily, a little gravely. "Yes. But you're not here

  talking to me--I haven't invited you here to talk with me, and watch me

  drink good Scotch while you down a doubtful glass of unnatural vintage--Christ!

  A Chilean Chianti--because you might profit from Torino."

  "You've always steered me in the right direction, Marcus. So why am I

  here?"

  "Life's a little stagnant, isn't it, Jonathan?"

  Jonathan inclines his head.

  "You're an elegant fellow, sharp and well-bred. You have good pedigree--mentally

  and genetically. You could fit right in with the top comb managers

  now, if fate offered you a different situation."

  Jonathan smiles thinly. "I enjoy living below the comb, Marcus."

  "Believe it or not, I agree--all those social expectations, all that ritual. It's

  tough staying on the high comb path, racing against America's self-perceived

  elites. They are so smug. Still, I wonder why so many of them are caught

  becoming Chronovores, hmm? I mean," Marcus continues, "they'd simply be

  playing the same life over and over again, the same round of ritual and challenge

  and expectation, until the future caught up with them... Not the best

  of situations. Hm?"

  Jonathan does not know where all this is leading, but he nods. His class

  thinks of the high comb as superficial, despite the undeniable political and

  financial power they wield. Marcus is part of the X-class, as rich as most in

  the comb, but intellectually independent--or so he's led Jonathan to believe.

  "By the way," Marcus says, glancing at his old twentieth Rolex, too demod

  for words, "does Chloe know where you are? That you're with me?"

  "I've told her I'm going to be late," Jonathan says.

  "Good. Always be good to the women." He sips again. Jonathan has a glance

  at the charge on Marcus's pad: Sixteen-year Lagavulin, two hundred and fifty

  dollars a glass. Transie,t glories, he thinks. "Beate probably doesn't care where

  I am, as long as I'm not in her hair. Christ, romance is an old gray mare,

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  GREG BEAR

  Jonathan smiles but reveals nothing.

  "I'll get down to it now, Jonathan," Marcus says. "I've recommended you

  to a group that isn't new, a little off the expecte
d spin, but very promising.

  Your CV came up on a criteria search and I pulled you out in particular because

  we know each other."

  "What do they do?"

  "They ask for discretion, that's what they do," Marcus says. His tone is

  blunt and his face looks older. "It's tough to accomplish something new and

  tougher to keep it secret, especially if it gives you a great advantage. A very

  great advantage."

  Jonathan tries to keep his chuckle sophisticated. "A secret society?"

  "Yes," Marcus says, dead serious. "You get into it by degrees, and at the

  end, you do not pull out."

  Jonathan decides a suitably sober look is best now. Underneath, he stifles a

  disappointed laugh. Marcus is either joking with him or is getting drunk on

  his little bowl of Scotch.

  "As I said," Marcus says quietly, "the advantages are enormous. So is the

  COSt."

  Jonathan can think of nothing to say, so he continues to regard Marcus with

  a patiently straight face.

  "But you fit," Marcus says, staring down at the bowl. "You're young and