“Bart…” she murmured, touched her hand to his cheek. He jerked his head away.
“How can you stand to touch me?” he cried. “Look at me! Look at what I am, remember what I’ve done! I’ll put you off on Mars—I’ve still got connections there. You’ll be all right, no one will be after you. I owe you that much. You’ll be safe, and someday you’ll look back on all this like it was a bad dream. You won’t even be able to believe that it happened. I hardly can, even now. You’ll forget all about me. You won’t even remember how much you hate me now.”
“H-hate you?” she stammered. Some of the old fire crept back into her eyes. “Hate you?” she shouted. “You utter imbecile! You stupid, self-centered swine! Haven’t you ever been kicked in the ass before? You think life is one success after another? Sure, life is full of horror and wretchedness and miserable filth! Sure we all do things we can’t bear, things we want to puke every time we remember them! Sure we’re grubby little worms scrabbling in a garbage-dump! I knew all that before I was sixteen years old. Welcome to the club, Bart, welcome to where it’s at. Is that any reason to whine like a kicked puppy? Maybe it is… But are you going to give it, all the stupidity, horror and sheer banality of life, the goddamned satisfaction? That’s not the Bart Fraden I’ve been sleeping with! The Bart Fraden I know would have the balls to fight back. My Bart would roll it all into a tight wad and shove it down existence’s puerile throat!”
Blazing fury, her eyes rheumy and bloodshot, her face smeared with dried tears and dirt, her mouth a snarl—he had never seen anything so beautiful in his life.
“Soph…”
She flung herself at him, buried her face against his neck. “You’re not getting rid of me that easy,” she said, her voice a breaking, quavering parody of cynical toughness. “You made me love you, you bastard, and you’re stuck with me whether you like it or not. Whither thou goest… my Peerless Leader!”
“Soph…”
Arm in arm, they went into the lifeboat.
An hour later, they sat side by side in the control room of the starship as the lights of the computopilot console one by one went green, completing the automatic checkout cycle, and in the viewscreen, Sangre was a calm, benign globe of peaceful browns and greens and blues.
Bart Fraden stared at that image, and wondered at what he felt. For what he felt was nothing. Somehow, he had bounced. Perhaps, he was able to wanly tell himself, perhaps somewhere there is a something that laughs knowingly and takes care of its own.
He looked at Sophia, at the strange new softness in her eyes, and he knew that whatever he had lost, he had also gained something. Life was worth living after all. And even if it wasn’t, it was still the only game in town.
The last light went green, and deep within the ship, the automatics were about to begin the long journey back to Sol, back to uncertainty, back to…
Screw ’em all! Fraden thought. If I survived Sangre, I can survive anything! He smiled.
“What’re you smiling about?” Sophia said softly.
Fraden laughed. “I was just thinking about the mess we’re going back to…” he said. “I wonder how Great China and the Atlantic Union and the G.S.U. are holding the Confederation together, with the Uranium Bodies to squabble about. Now there’s an unstable triangle! Hmmm… you know, I never formally renounced my A.U. citizenship. Now if I popped up and claimed that I was still de jure ruler of the Belt, and offered to apply for admission directly to the Atlantic Union, that would give the A.U. a legal claim to sole possession of the Uranium Bodies… China and the G.S.U, would scream bloody murder, but with a prize like that, the A.U. might just decide to play ball with me… It has its possibilities… Who knows, I might even be able to get ahold of Ah Ming again…”
Sophia O’Hara laughed, the old, old laugh. She squeezed his hand, kissed him.
“Sackcloth and ashes never did become you,” she said with a wry, knowing smile as the ship lurched, began to break orbit. “Back to business as usual, eh, Peerless Leader? Fun and games! Fun and games!”
The Men in the Jungle Page 29
