She laughed and leaned back against the rail. “You’ve lost weight.”
“I’d better get back to my desk,” he said, rising. “One more year of office is still a lot of work.”
She stepped toward him, stood up on her toes, and kissed him. He almost started to hold her. In a moment she would reduce him to a schoolboy, startled by his good luck.
“My cane—I don’t know where I left it,” he said, trying to blot out the sudden vision of Evelyn in the automated car as it stopped without warning, throwing her forward to break her neck. The route input had sent a garbled signal, killing a dozen people that week….
“Take care,” Sam shouted. “We’ll see you.”
Janet got his cane from behind the chair. He turned away from her and confronted the terrace door. It slid open to release him, but she hurried ahead into the night and kissed him again when he stopped at the top of the steps leading down to the front of the house.
As he packed his bag, Richard felt anger rising. He stopped suddenly, sat down on the edge of the bed, and punched Margot’s number. She appeared on the small screen.
“Hello,” he said. “I should be at the old family house in Princeton by morning. Can you meet me?”
“What is it?”
“I just can’t take it here any more. I’ve been away too long to be blind. The party is almost over; I’ll slip out when they watch the news.”
He looked at her, admiring the slight tilt of her almond eyes as she smiled up at him from the screen.
“You like to make me…nervous,” she said.
“Is that what you call it when you’re excited?”
“I miss you,” she said shyly.
“I miss you, too. How’s school?”
“They were glad to have me back,” she said, “but I miss the people at Plato.”
“I’d better get going,” he said. She broke the connection.
He picked up his bag, went out into the hall, and walked toward the door that opened under the terrace. It seemed to take an eternity to reach it, but finally it slid open and he slipped out into the shadows.
He stopped and waited as a car pulled away, then walked quickly across the driveway toward his own vehicle.
The door opened and he climbed inside. He looked back through the clear bubble, expecting to see dark shapes watching him from the terrace; but there was no one and he felt relieved.
He touched the keys for Santa Fe, attached his seat belt, and sat back. The car moved down the long driveway toward the semiautomated road. In the rear-view mirror, the house slipped behind dark trees, its light a fire in the night.
When the car stopped, he snapped the wheel out from the panel and drove the mile to the freeway. Jack didn’t even say good-bye, he thought, and he said only two words to me all evening. Everyone had behaved differently in his father’s presence. The son of a bitch doesn’t care about anyone.
Central injected the car into the high-speed flow, and he released the wheel as the surge shot him across the starry desert toward the airport.
Samuel Bulero leaned back into the sofa’s cushions. He felt uneasy, disappointed. There was no point in thinking about Jack, he told himself. His brother’s attitudes got him through the only kind of life he knew; the time for choices was long past. There was no way that he could tell Jack about his disappointment. Jack’s neglect of bulerite was also his neglect of himself. Sam hated him for what he had done to Richard and Janet; he hated him for continuing the coldness that stood between them. This evening had been mild compared to others of the last twenty years.
He tried to think of hopeful things. His position at Princeton was secure. Although he was without wife, daughter, or son, he was not without family, love, or achievement. Janet cheered him, but he wondered about the slowness of their relationship. Was he afraid of taking his brother’s ex-wife?
He tried to think of things outside himself. AfroAsia and South America, especially Brazil, were rising influences, their economies fueled by pollution-free hydrogen, made from sea water, stored in bulerite tanks, and piped as natural gas had been in the last century. The older powers were using more advanced energy systems, but the world’s regions were moving toward economic equality, if not one of cultural-scientific influence and military power; even the smallest nation could now obtain enough energy for a better life.
He thought of all the arcologies—giant human organisms attached to the earth. The countryside and atmosphere were still in traction; the sunsets were blood red from all the dirt. People felt freer, no longer living as if catastrophe was inevitable. An indefinite peace prevailed in the garden. His personal discontents were minor; it was good to be alive, he told himself, wondering if he was a happy idiot.
Janet came into the room, sat down, and put her head on his shoulder. He put his arm around her and hugged her, afraid that she might fade from reality at any moment. She kissed him lightly on the lips.
He reached around, took her small hands, and compared them to his rougher, hairy ones. “How about Jack?” he asked. “How did he seem to you?”
“Nothing. It was dead a long time ago. I think he was bored with all of us. I don’t want to talk about it, Sam. I’m really fine—let’s forget it.” She tried to kiss him passionately, but he held back and she broke away. “Don’t treat me like a small girl, Sam.”
“What’s the matter?”
She sighed, “Old—don’t you feel it?” She poked him in the ribs.
He stretched his arms out on the back of the sofa. “My doctor’s team says I’m good for a hundred or more, and he’s not joking—but I’m an old man with my students. I’ll be forgotten when I go.”
“I’m counting on it.”
“On what?”
“On a whole lot of time left for us.” She turned away from him. “I want enough time to forget everything. It would be another lifetime, Sam—like the ones from one to twenty-five and to forty—the longest and best….”
He reached for her. “Janet, dear Janet, come here.” She turned around, tucked her legs under her, and buried her face in his shoulder. “A long time,” he whispered, holding her.
The lights in the room dimmed.
“It’s the one AM news,” she said. “Someone preset it.”
The holo appeared in the air above them, revealing a three-dimensional long shot of the earth-moon in space, then pulling back to show the sun. Sam remembered the old CBS colophon, earthrise on Mars, which had been retired at the turn of the century. The current logo was closer to the full-earth-above-the-moonscape scene of the 1960s. The Martian settlers had been right to look upon earthrise over Mars as a symbol of earth’s supremacy; every Martian schoolchild knew that earth was the green star in their sky—sometimes it was blue-green, but never the size shown on the media link.
“Let’s watch,” Janet said. “I feel like news.”
The standing figure of a newscaster whirled in like a propeller blade from a background of stars, growing larger until the figure stopped upright and lifesize. The brown-haired man was dressed in the artificial one-piece tweed, gray with tunic collar, popular in the great cities.
“Good morning. This is Frank Eiseley.” Suddenly he was floating against the red globe of Mars. “The cargo hauler Poseidon has blown up during its approach to the Deimos docks around Mars.” The figure of the reporter whirled toward the potato-shaped Martian moon. “Mars City officials report that very little debris has been observed by the rescue tugs. All one hundred and three crew members are believed dead.” A model of the slug like vessel appeared against the stars, with the reporter projected to appear as if he were standing on the hull. “Poseidon was the second-largest interplanetary hauler, next to Scorpio, which is nearly a kilometer in length. Both vessels were built almost twelve years ago, completing the bulerite fleet of fifteen ships.” The reporter seemed to be walking on the polished hull. “The UN Sun-space Commerce Commission and the government of the North Americas Region will conduct an investigation.”
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The three-dimensional view pulled back, suddenly dwarfing the reporter to convey a sense of the ship’s size. “Informed sources are speculating that the vessel may have had hidden defects in its nuclear propulsion units. As a precaution, the third-largest hauler, Atlas, has been ordered to moor at the nearest port for inspection.”
An image of the sun flashed on and off, and was replaced by the reporter’s head hanging in space. “A bulletin: Atlas has also been destroyed, while delivering supplies to the Solar Science City on Mercury.”
“My God,” Janet said.
The view switched to a sun-blasted plain covered with debris and small crushed hulls. “Apparently,” the voice said, “a few tugs which had attached themselves to the ship as it came in to moor at the orbital station were also brought down.” The tugs lay like dead gnats under the stars, but there was no sign of the big ship.
A vertical view appeared, showing a huge black hole in the plain below. The shadows were sharply painted by the low angle of light from the big sun off screen. The shadow darkness inside the blast crater was a black mirror turned to the stars.
2. The Funeral
Blue daylight filled the hoveryacht’s decktop suite; sunlight flooded in through the skylight, its brilliance made bearable by the tinted dome. Jack turned his head on the bed and looked out over the sea-green Gulf. Sea birds cried as they dived for their lunch; green islands floated on the water near the horizon.
Erica had gone to her cabin to prepare for his day, leaving him to dodge his thoughts. He reached back, grasped the large bed’s bulerite posts, and stretched. Straining, he tried to touch the toes of the Promethean figures at the top of each post, but it was too far; he let his arms fall and relaxed.
He could almost hear what went on in Sam’s mind. No real dedication to science…all surface, nothing like his father. Carlos was a scientist, technologist, administrator, and teacher. Jack is not even one of those things…flashy intelligence, more concerned with being somebody. He’ll endow a Bulero Prize….
He was surprised at how many remarks he remembered. They stuck in his brain, irritating and painful because they had been made by someone close to him.
He thought of Orton Blackfriar. A lame-duck politician and bleeding-heart lawyer, seeking to be near the mighty; he had been doing that all his life, under the guise of noble ideals. Janet must have invited him to the party.
He hated them all. They were all pushing their fingers into the Bulero brain, greedy for the wealth and power which was not theirs.
Jack closed his eyes and tried to enjoy the sunlight on his face and unclad body….
He sat up suddenly, wakened by a flash of light in the sunny field of his closed eyelids. A strange dream, he told himself, remembering when years before he had heard a girl screaming faintly in the center of his head….
He stood by the bed and stretched, thinking of the warm waters around him. The yacht would be here until noon, before heading back to his island in the Bahamas. He would have enough time to swim and forget everything.
He sat down on the bed, thinking of the great bulerite rod sunk deep in the earth’s hot core, an indestructible tap drawing enough heat to light a continent. He had made it possible, just as he had sought out the market for all bulerite’s applications. No one could take that away from him. Others were welcome to play with Carlos’s theories later.
He stood up and wandered over to the open window, remembering the blue bikini that Janet had worn at Cocoa Beach when they had first met. He had been grateful for the encouragement of her hello. The sky, sand, and sea had been so much more impressive than the callow boy on vacation from college.
He had been full of admiration for his father, filling her with talk of a career in physics. History had been coiled up inside him; but even then he had known that he would somehow disappoint her. She was still punishing him for not being like Carlos.
Jack took a deep breath of the salty air. The warm breeze touching his face made him feel secure. Then he was shaking suddenly, shivering throughout his whole body. It was the exposure to the sea air, he told himself, releasing the tension he had built up at the party.
He should not have gone to the house in New Mexico; that part of his life had been over a long time ago. His family was a strangely backward group of strangers, unable to see him in any way other than the personal. Janet was clever enough to be useful to the company; Sam was supported by institutional fools who understood only credentials; Richard, like all young people, had too many legal rights—he ignored his mother, but listened to Sam. Was Sam a father figure, or was Richard really interested in Sam’s philosophical work?
I don’t need any of them. By evening he would be well over the irritation of the party.
For a moment he remembered Janet’s youthful, shy embrace, her softness, the delicacy of her arms and shoulders, her black hair in his face. He wondered what she would be like now under her expensive clothes. However beautiful Erica was, he realized, she could never be Janet. Erica was timid, not as intelligent, easily made happy, or so it seemed; he had no doubt that she loved him. He was careful never to show her that he did not love her; it would be unbearable to be without her. Janet was free now, and he would never ask for her again, even if Sam were not part of it. Why is it, he wondered, that so much happiness is lost when we break with those who started in life with us? What kind of special imprinting leads us to live as if they were watching? Why are we so dependent, forever compelled to desire their approval, their envy, even their hatred? It was all nonsense, he told himself, feeling his calm returning.
He looked out over the sunny water and his eye caught the white underwing of a bird as it wheeled crying across the sky. The explosion tore through him from behind, throwing him out onto the sun deck, where he lay breathing heavily and holding his arms around his torso in a futile act of containment. His right eye stared into the blazing sun; his left eye was blind. His pained consciousness flickered through his body, appalled at the ruin. “Janet,” he whispered as the next explosion hurled him—
It was a bright day, unreal in its transparent clarity. Richard watched the five other funeral hovercraft floating slowly ahead of the one he shared with Janet and Sam. Sunlight yellowed the grassy aisle between the trees; wind fluttered the oak leaves. The day seemed to reveal itself to him, hiding nothing.
Six fliers, resembling old-style black limousines with curtained windows and leather seats, carried friends and relatives to the family plot in the park just south of Princeton. His father’s coffin rode in the first hovercraft, alone except for the chauffeur. The casket was a bulerite capsule which Jack had ordered for himself twelve years before.
The fliers were spaced one hundred feet apart as they continued their stately drift. At his right, Janet sat with her hands folded in her lap; Sam was staring down at his feet. The only sound was the soft whisper of the lift fan from below the floor. The wind was rushing through the trees in the afternoon outside, but Richard could not hear it; the sun moved slowly behind the crowns, slanting its shafts to strike the lens of the window at his left.
“I remember how happy he was when he built the yacht,” Janet said.
Richard turned his head and looked at her, as if at a stranger. She was dressed in a plain black skirt which came to below her knees, a white long-sleeved blouse with ruffles, and a black vest. She seemed calm, but her hand was cold when he touched it. All this has not really happened, her eyes seemed to say.
“I wish I’d talked to him more that night,” she said.
“Don’t think like that,” Sam said.
Sixty feet of water. Seven bodies brought up by the divers. Margot and he had just come in from the pool when the fax screen flashed the news. She had not wanted to attend the funeral, so he had left her alone at the Princeton house.
The police were still checking on Erica’s friends, hoping to find a motive for murder; but the explosion had been too big for any kind of bomb.
“I’m all right,”
Janet said, biting her lip to stifle the signs of crying.
Jack would have liked the funeral, Richard thought. Elaborate, it would seem worthy to the public that had known him as a Nobel Peace Prize recipient.
Richard saw the lead hovercraft rise and wobble, as if the wind were going to flip it over. A strange light shone from the rear windows. The rest of the fliers slowed and sat down on the grass. The lead vehicle continued forward erratically.
Five hundred yards ahead, the hovercraft burst into white brilliance and settled, withering the grass.
Richard opened his door and jumped out. The distant hovercraft was now a yellow mass inside the white, pulsating radiance. Warm air pushed against his face. The chauffeurs and some of the mourners were getting out to watch. The pulsations quickened and the mass brightened into a painful glare.
The explosion threw him on his back.
A strong wind passed over him; the trees strained at their roots and the leaves rustled like insects. Even with his eyes closed, the afterimage was vivid.
In a moment the air was still. He got up and looked around. The others were getting up; no one seemed hurt.
Richard climbed back inside the cab and closed the door. Janet’s face was a pale mask, her eyes full of fear. He took a deep breath and sat back, grateful for the quiet inside the cab.
“That was not a bomb,” Sam said.
The flier lifted from the grass and turned around; the others were also lifting and turning to leave the park. The grassy aisle started to rush by as the hovercraft accelerated. Richard thought of blackbirds scattering from a shotgun blast.
“Were they trying to get me, too?” Janet asked.
Sam looked at her as they sat in his apartment on the twentieth floor of Princeton’s faculty housing complex. The picture window provided a southerly view over the central park of the campus. The greenery was bright in the late afternoon sun. He did not want to tell her his suspicions, not when it was obvious that she was struggling to get past what had happened. There was a normal life for her, for both of them, up ahead somewhere, where Jack’s death would be a remote thing; yet he knew that she had once loved Jack and that something of that love still lived, buried deep within her, bound up horribly with guilt and pain.
Macrolife Page 5
