Looking around in frustration, Praxis caught sight of an almost-familiar figure across the room. She was facing away from him, but the upward sweep of ash-blonde hair and the square shoulders on a trim body—or what he could see of it—brought back memories. For a moment he thought he could smell her perfume, but in his weakened state, his mind sometimes played tricks.
Praxis turned away from the reception desk and started across the lobby, slowly at first but gaining speed the closer he came. “Tippi!” he called under his breath. Then louder, “Antigone?”
The woman turned. She had the same beautiful face with the strong jaw and high cheekbones, the same gray eyes that went wide in surprise, and wider in recognition. “John!” she called. Then something in the set of his face, in the slight stagger as he walked, must have alarmed her. Her smile of recognition changed to a frown of concern.
They met in the middle of the lobby with people moving all around them. The quick hug of old friends, the touching of cheek to cheek.
“What happened to you, John?” she asked, holding him at arm’s length.
“What else? I got old.” He drank her in. “You haven’t changed at all.”
She tipped her head. “Same old outsides, but going rotten inside.”
“Oh, no! What’s wrong?” He could not believe she was sick.
“Kidney disease. Incurable. I’m here for a new pair. You?”
“Endocrine trouble. Adrenal glands. Need a pair, too.”
“I lost track of you,” she said quietly. “I went to Oklahoma, the war started, and …” She shrugged. “Two different worlds ever since.”
“I know. I guess you picked the right side.”
“Luck picked for me.” She paused again. “I heard your business failed.”
“Can’t do civil engineering with the economy crashing around your ears.”
“And your wife died. I was so sorry to hear about that.”
“There was nothing we could do. At least she went quietly.”
“Dad?” Callie asked, coming through the crowd with Rafaella.
“Oh! Yes! You remember Antigone Wells.”
“Of course. You got me out of a terrible jam.”
“Easy trick,” Antigone said. “And who’s this?”
“My daughter. Rafaella di Rienzi. Say hello, dear.”
“Buona sera, signora,” the little girl said shyly.
Antigone looked straight at Callie. “I’ll bet there’s a story here.”
“You have no idea,” his daughter said. “Are you checked in, Dad?”
“I was just negotiating the process. I need your help.” He turned to Antigone. “Can we see you at dinner, or something? Chance to catch up?”
“Sure, I’m just doing tests and samples this afternoon. Say, six o’clock?”
“Gosh, you people eat early!” Callie remarked.
“This is the Midwest,” Antigone said. “We go to sleep with the sun, too.”
* * *
As she recovered from kidney surgery, Antigone Wells renewed the acquaintance—no, to be honest, the flirtation, or the budding romance—with John Praxis that had begun on a rooftop in San Francisco almost a dozen years ago. This time the affair was carried out in the Mayo Clinic’s cafeterias, libraries, and physical therapy rooms amid the serious work they both needed to get healthy again.
John seemed to be gaining strength and vitality day by day. When she asked how the surgery to replace his adrenal glands had gone, he told her he never went under the knife. Apparently, the doctors had a new technique that turned mature cells into totipotent stem cells right inside the body. Then they could manipulate the genes in those baby cells to grow up into fresh, healthy tissues. It was all done with needles.
She gathered from things John said in passing that he was no longer a rich man. She wasn’t really surprised, since he had lived in a country with a stated policy of redistributing private wealth, and that country had just endured nine years of war—and lost. True, the conflict had been more on the level of economic and psychological attrition than territorial invasion and aerial bombing. But both sides had conducted targeted raids intended to reduce public infrastructure—things like transit, water, sewage, and power systems—and so disrupt public comfort and safety. The Federated Republic had made much of news stories about the suffering on both East and West Coasts.
John’s daughter apparently had financial resources, either left over from the cash which Wells had helped her take out of the engineering business or from some new venture. Callista Praxis made no secret of her connection with minor Italian aristocracy—a connection now rumored to be deceased—but Wells understood that Italy had just as much of a redistributive bent as California, and Callie’s title by marriage, “la Contessa,” was purely decorative.
As the end of her rehabilitation period neared, Antigone Wells found herself suddenly becoming hesitant. The future was a question mark, and she hesitated to ask John outright, “What are your plans now?” That would force her to confront her own situation, her feelings for him, and their future together—or, once again, apart. But finally, on the day before her discharge, with John still having some days to go because of his previously weakened condition, she could put it off no longer.
“Oh, I’ll go back to California,” he said.
“It’s not a question of citizenship, is it?” she asked. After the armistice, the exact nature of the national borders and limits of the U.S. government’s authority were still in transition. But she was sure she could get Praxis and his family permanent residence in the Federated Republic and eventually citizenship—unless amnesty and repatriation resolved the issue first.
“No, that will take care of itself, I think.” He paused. “I was thinking of the opportunities.”
“There’s lots more opportunity here in the Republic,” she said. With me, she added mentally.
“Really? I would have thought it was the other way around.”
“What? Oh—you just haven’t seen this country, not really. We have a vibrant economy, good manufacturing base, academic centers featuring advanced technology and biomedicine, plenty of energy resources, rivers that drain a continent, farms that run to the horizon, mines and forests under able management, free markets, solid currency, and stable finances. What do you have in the former United States to compare with that?”
He grinned wickedly. “Collapse. Ruin. Decay and deferred maintenance. Not to mention paths of destruction five miles wide. The place is just a mess.”
“And that’s an opportunity because—?”
“Somebody’s got to rebuild it. This time better than before.”
“But you don’t have a company anymore.”
“I have a Rolodex. I know top-notch engineers hungry for work.”
“But where will you get the money to pay them?”
“Money?” he asked. “Money’s like air. When you need it, it’s just there.”
“I don’t—I mean—you’re seventy-five years old. Isn’t it too late to start over?”
“And miss out on the biggest engineering boom in a century? Not on your life!”
“I admire your spirit, John,” Wells said at last.
“And I do have an ulterior motive,” Praxis said. “I have some unfinished business.” He told her about the deal he had made to acquire future title to nearly a million acres of prime timber and recreational land held in the old National Forest System. If he could survive another thirty years or so, and still manage to pay upkeep on the preserve, he would become one of the biggest landholders in California.
“I never heard of that program,” she admitted.
“They kept it pretty quiet. Still, the deal is entirely legal.”
“But … it’s a contract with a government that may no longer exist.”
“I understand. There is risk,” he said. “Everything depends on whether the Federated Republic will recognize obligations of the old United States. That would be a gesture of good will, I think. History has too many e
xamples of bad things happening to victors who extracted punitive measures. Reconstruction after the first Civil War and rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the Old South, for one. Versailles at the end of the First World War and the rise of Nazi Germany, for another.”
“You’re going to need a lawyer to pull all this off.”
“Probably. Do you know a good one?”
“I’d better come with you.”
* * *
With the armistice apparently holding and turning into a peace process, Richard Praxis had reason to preen at his next one-on-one meeting with Philip Sawyer. The chief executive was among the few people at Tallyman Systems who knew the true success of Project RealPolitik, which for everyone else in the company was still in early-stage development. And Sawyer was the only one in a position to congratulate Richard, however privately.
“Yes, our clients are very pleased,” Richard said. “They’re even talking about some kind of covert honor, to be awarded anonymously and kept at Cyber Warfare headquarters—until everything is declassified in a hundred years or so.”
“Well, you and your team will certainly be getting a bonus.”
“Ah, as to that. I’ll take the money, of course, as part of the regular executive package. But the team doesn’t know the project is actually over. Special recognition rewards at this point would be out of place.”
“You could still sell the software as a game, couldn’t you?”
“That would be considered insecure. Somebody might twig.”
“Well, then, what’s the next move for you? Destabilizing Japan?”
“Oh, yeah!” Richard laughed. “Like they’d need any kind of push.”
“Seriously, Richard. What has your group in Government Affairs got lined up for next quarter?”
“Oh, um … Well, there are still the projects I came in on: infrastructure leveling and alignment for water and power, transit, demographics. They’re going to need a lot of intelligent rebuilding out on the coasts.”
“Are the algorithms for stochastic evolution ready to roll on real-life projects?”
“Well, no. Maybe in a year or two. First, we need to get some small-scale demonstrations going. We’re still at the dream-time stage.”
“Why is that?” Sawyer asked.
“My group was pretty busy with that other thing.”
“You have to multitask around here, Richard. Everyone else does.”
“Of course, sir.” Richard thought fast. “We could put together some proposal packages, aimed at whole city rebuilds: optimal population density, work-life balance, logistics and traffic control, water and sewage scaling, substation gridding. The sort of municipal master planning my old firm did for the Saudis back in the seventies, or the Chinese in the oughts—but done using Tallyman techniques.”
Sawyer frowned. “That sounds like Twenty-Nine Points stuff. Didn’t we go to war about the government imposing that kind of control?”
“Well, yes. But it’s still applicable to places like Atlanta and Sacramento, where the fighting was hardest. And, of course, being both evolutionary and stochastic, the algorithms will ape—um, approximate—results from market forces.”
Sawyer nodded. “Put together a package and we’ll take a look at it.”
* * *
The four of them took a flight together from Minneapolis-Saint Paul into San Francisco. They made the trip with half the restrictions and a third the documentation required during the war—or at least during its active phase. Upon landing, John Praxis went off to arrange ground transportation while Callie and Antigone collected their luggage and kept Rafaella amused. He managed to book an Electrocab big enough for all of them and loaded their bags at the curb.
He punched the address on Balboa Street into the GPS screen, then paused. “Can we drop you at a hotel?” he asked Antigone.
She looked at her wrist. “It’s after nine, and I don’t have a reservation.”
“Well, then …”
“Let me go home with you, and I can call around from there. Okay?”
“Sure thing.”
When they got to the house, he unloaded the family’s bags but left Antigone’s in the bin. He glanced over his shoulder. “You want to pay for the cab to wait?”
“I can always get another, can’t I?”
“We’re pretty far out in the Avenues.”
“I’ll chance it. I’m feeling lucky.”
He took his and Callie’s bags, with Callie carrying Rafaella’s, up to the front door, and then on up the second, interior flight to their bedrooms. Antigone stood by her suitcase just inside the front door. When he returned, she was using her phone and frowning, shaking her head.
“Must be a convention in town,” she said. “All the places I know are full.”
“Ah, well …” Praxis didn’t know what else to suggest.
“Put me up for the night?” Antigone asked.
“Well, um …” He caught his daughter looking at him with slitted eyes.
“There are only two bedrooms,” Callie said with a shrug. “Small house.”
“The couch down here—” Praxis began.
“—is hard and lumpy,” Callie said. “And we don’t have sheets for it.”
“Oh … dear.” Antigone finished with a sigh.
“Why don’t the two of you work it out?” Callie suggested with what Praxis took to be an evil grin. She corralled her daughter and took her up the stairs to bed.
“I guess …” He hesitated, then picked up her suitcase. “This way, please.” He took her up to the landing and down the hall to his bedroom. Fortunately, he’d left it neat, with the bed freshly made up, and all of his clothes either hung up or in the hamper. “You can sleep here and I’ll take the couch downstairs. Just let me get a few things.”
“That’s a queen-size bed,” Antigone said, running her hand over the polished walnut footboard. She was unbuttoning her jacket and slipping off her shoes. “Plenty big for two people.”
“Well, if you don’t mind. I mean, if you really want to—”
“Please don’t make me beg, John.”
* * *
John Praxis was shy, which Antigone Wells had suspected all along. She had to take matters into her own hands, unbuckling his belt and unbuttoning his shirt. To do so, she stood close to him with her face upturned, looking directly into his eyes. When she got to the fourth button, he bent and kissed her full on the lips.
She put her arms around his neck and held on. They were gentle kisses, almost chaste, with no presumption. His day’s growth of beard tickled, and she smiled.
“I’m afraid I’m out of practice,” he said.
“We both are. Unbutton me, please.”
His fingers shook as he worked the little pearl buttons of her silk blouse, keeping straight down the middle. He was plucking at the material, clearly trying not to brush up against her breasts with his fingertips or knuckles.
“It doesn’t mean anything unless you touch me,” she whispered.
He stopped, looked at her in surprise, and gently cupped her breast with his palm. He slowly rubbed the silk against the lace and glazed satin of her bra.
She felt her flesh tighten in response. She closed her eyes. After a moment, she finished the unbuttoning herself, slipped out of her blouse, pulling the silk out of his hands. She turned slightly away, self-conscious about the reddened scars low on her back over her new kidneys. “Unhook me, please.”
Neither of them had any words after that. He finished undressing her, kissing her in new and exciting places. She ran her hands over his upper arms and then his shoulders as he worked his way down her body. When he moved away to undress himself, she turned down the bed and climbed onto the crisp, white sheets. She arranged the pillows behind her shoulders and the small of her back and then arranged herself among them.
He climbed onto the bed and knelt between her legs. His member was stiff and questing. He started to sink down into her, then froze.
“What?” she ask
ed, alarmed.
“I don’t have a condom!”
She laughed aloud.
“I mean, seriously,” he insisted.
“What could it possibly matter?”
He nodded, but he still hung over her. She chafed his back and sides, as if to warm him up, and then pulled him down. He moved slowly into her. She adjusted her hips and moved with him.
“I’m not hurting you, am I?” he asked.
“I’m a lot tougher than I look,” she said.
After a time without counting, he climaxed. She followed immediately.
He lay with her for a moment, cheek against cheek, then withdrew and rolled onto his back. She sighed and put an arm across him, dropping the back of her hand onto his chest. After a pause, she slowly rubbed her knuckles in the wiry hairs there.
“Thank you,” he whispered.
She flopped her hand over and ran her fingers and palm down his stomach, across his damp groin, to the top of his thigh. There she rubbed gently. “Don’t make me beg.”
After midnight, when they were finished and both of them were almost unconscious, Antigone Wells raised herself on one elbow and looked around the darkened room.
“This house needs growing things,” she said. “Orchids, I think.”
* * *
The rebirth of Praxis Engineering & Construction Company took place, not in a glass-and-steel tower overlooking San Francisco Bay, but on the third floor of a four-story building on Sansome Street in North Beach. The elevator up from the lobby was a brass-bound cage run by hydraulics with electro-mechanical switching, technology that had been developed in the age before electronics, and spent more time in breakdown mode than in operation. At least the stairs were cast-iron and nonmechanical. Everyone involved with the startup was healthy enough to climb them two or three times a day—more if they happened to go out for lunch. The lease was just for six months, by which time John Praxis figured they were either in business and could move uptown, or out of business and would no longer need the space.
According to the articles of incorporation, which Antigone Wells had drawn up as the new chief counsel, Praxis was chairman and chief executive, Callie was president and chief operating officer, and Rafaella was their biggest shareholder, because her college fund had supplied the first infusion of working capital.
Coming of Age: Volume 1: Eternal Life Page 25
