“I don’t know.” She wanted to turn her visual off again, but once it was on, she couldn’t. It would be rude.
“I’ve got an idea. Why don’t you meet me tomorrow night at the Embassy Club. We’ll have dinner and talk more then.” Fitzpatrick’s voice was bright and professional, and repelled Gaia slightly. Had he been sincere earlier? Was Fitzpatrick that good of an actor?
“What time?” Gaia felt withdrawn and mechanical.
“Is eight fine for you?” Fitzpatrick’s tone softened as he read the discomfort in her expression.
“Are you paying?”
“Yes.”
“But you’ll be reimbursed,” she said. “Because taking me out to dinner is your job, right?”
“Does it really matter?”
“If you’re being reimbursed then there’s no way that this can be a date. You’re not asking me out to a romantic dinner when I’m irrational, right?”
“I’ll be reimbursed,” Fitzpatrick assured her.
“Good. Then it’s a date.”
Chapter Eighteen: Black Dress
Gaia twisted her arms behind her back, fumbling for the tiny metal tag of her zipper. She’d managed to drag the zipper from her tailbone to her bra strap before losing it completely. The top of her dress hung open and let in chilly drafts.
She wore a black dress, made of clingy, shiny fabric with a fitted torso, a low neckline and a very long zipper. She wore it once a year to the Merchant’s Gala. The rest of the time, she wore her Happy Snak smock, on the theory that if she didn’t promote her business, no one else would. The smock made getting dressed in the morning easy.
The black dress interested Wave. Wave had read that the dress was the traditional garb of the human female, but had seen few women wearing them. Wave was also fascinated by Gaia’s shoes, which were of the patent-leather low-heeled dress variety. Wave found human feet grotesque. They were freakishly small to the Kishocha, and the pointy toes of the dress shoes only accentuated this feature. For an hour or so, Gaia tried to be a good ambassador of women’s fashion, but she had finally tired of Wave’s questions. Wave sensed this and wandered away to help some customers, leaving Gaia to carry on her battle with her zipper alone, while thinking obliquely about the traditional costume of her gender.
It had a kind of significance even though Gaia didn’t know what that significance was. She knew she was a black-dress woman. She was neither a white dress nor a red dress female. She was neither vulnerable nor passionate, yet still decidedly a woman. So the black dress it was.
There was no way she could explain that concept to Wave. As Gaia finally found the zipper and yanked her garment mostly closed, she found herself pondering the yawning abyss that separated their species. There must be millions of ideas too integrally Kishocha to be explained, like singing when you’re sad or not-really-dead ghosts.
When she tried to imagine what more she could not know or ever understand, Gaia experienced a sudden vertigo. She couldn’t imagine. She couldn’t understand even a fraction of what it was like to be Kishocha. They were so utterly alien.
Until now, she’d never understood the profound meaning of that word. She ran her fingers across the scrape on her cheek, where the deceased scholar’s clam had grazed her flesh. She felt confused and cold. The enormity of the task she’d taken on came rolling at her like a tidal wave. She felt like she’d blacked out in some foreign bar and awakened to find herself married to a stranger.
She knew she shouldn’t have taken off the Happy Snak smock. The Gaia who wore that smock was a person she was comfortable being. The black-dress Gaia was as mysterious to her as her new identity, Shrine Guardian Gaia. The only way she could stop feeling lost and confused during the next few hours was to pretend to be wearing the smock—pretend to still be at Happy Snak pondering the benefits of Readi-seal deep-frying cartridges.
“Readi-seal, the seal that never leaks.” Gaia mumbled the slogan to herself. She grabbed her bag and headed out. She hoped to pass through Happy Snak with minimal commentary.
Cheryl was the only person in the back kitchen. She sat on a green stepladder, chewing some Nico-Nico gum and leaning against storage locker fourteen. Past Cheryl, Gaia could see Roy pumping orange cheese onto a paper boat full of blue corn nachitos. Gaia couldn’t see Wave, but she could hear it arguing with a customer about soft drinks. The woman had ordered her drink without ice, and when Wave dispensed her beverage, the cup had been only two-thirds full. She wanted a full cup. Wave explained that ice displaced one third of the drink, so a cola with no ice should fill only sixty-seven percent of the cup. Full Drink Woman reasserted her demand for a full cup. Wave responded more forcefully that would cause loss to the beloved Gaia Jones in the form of over-poured beverages.
Full Drink Woman demanded to see Gaia Jones. Wave replied it was not possible for her to have an audience, that Gaia Jones was far too important to speak about portioning soft drinks and that Full Drink Woman would have to learn the rules before she tried to buy anything at Happy Snak. Full Drink Woman began to curse Wave.
Gaia rubbed her eyes. She didn’t want to enter the fray, but it pained her to listen to Wave destroying any chance of a return visit from Full Drink Woman. Cheryl didn’t move either. She rolled her head tiredly toward Gaia.
“Wave’s got some flexibility issues,” she told Gaia, “and it doesn’t really understand the customer-is-always-right rule.”
Gaia nodded, listlessly. “Can you finish zipping me up?”
Cheryl hauled herself off the stepladder and closed Gaia’s zipper. “Nice dress,” she said, then returned to her seat and stared in a glazed way, at nothing. Gaia hoped Cheryl was on break.
Roy came to Wave’s rescue. Roy was a natural at customer relations. He got Full Drink Woman the full drink that she coveted, then listened to her complaints about Wave, Happy Snak and A-Ki Station in general. Roy sympathized without being condescending. Full Drink Woman left smiling.
Wave chewed its lips in confusion. Its cranial tendrils hung flat and forlorn, indicating a conflicted mental state about possible wrongdoing.
Roy told Wave not to worry about it, then asked if Wave knew what the word “bitch” meant. A beeper went off. Cheryl stood and removed twenty pounds of chicken from the Safe-T-Thaw, pausing for a moment to jam a thermal probe into the translucent flesh. The light flashed green. The meat was thirty-five degrees Fahrenheit, right on the edge of the bacterial danger zone.
Cheryl padded over to the prep table and started threading chicken onto skewers for chicken satay. “You going out with somebody?”
“Fitzpatrick.” Gaia put on a small handful of jewelry: a dress watch, two rings, a set of earrings. She disliked necklaces.
“Fancy.” Cheryl worked the chicken flesh onto its skewers in rhythmic knitting motions.
“It’s not a date.” Gaia tugged at her thigh-high stockings. She wondered if one of them was inside out. It kept falling down. She took her shoes off to check the seams. Both stockings were inside out. Gaia pulled them off.
“Too bad. He’s pretty good looking.”
“He called my store Crappy Shack.” Gaia pulled her left stocking back on.
“Was that the old location?”
“Yes.”
“Right.” Cheryl finished a skewer. “You have to admit that wasn’t the nicest-looking store on the concourse.”
Anger flared up in Gaia. Her cheeks got hot. She focused on successfully donning her right stocking. “It was the best I could afford.”
“Exactly. It didn’t fit in with the corporate clones on the station. It was original. Now you’ve got a really nice place that’s just as original without the second-hand stuff. I bet he doesn’t call it crappy anymore.”
Being chronically early, Gaia arrived at the club fifteen minutes before Fitzpatrick. She acquainted herself with the lobby. The club resided at the top of a twelve-story tower perched atop the thirty-six-level complex that formed the main compound of A-Ki Station. The club’s fl
oor rotated slowly, so that patrons could enjoy their drinks while gazing out at the splendor of human life in space. Diners were offered a circular panorama of the corporate tower complexes with massive radio arrays and flamboyant signs advertising their sponsors. On the perimeter of the towers, rank upon rank of black obelisks ringed the station like a surrounding army. Solar panels.
As Gaia surveyed the familiar ugliness of the human buildings, she found herself looking past them, at their foundations. Now that she knew the station was comprised of shell, she wondered how the buildings had been anchored to it. She was thinking of the clock-mounting incident, when she’d hammered a nail into the living flesh of her wall. The injury had healed over the next few days, but left a pock-marked scar.
The surface of the station was not dusty or rocky. It looked almost like coral. Wide shiny fingers reached up from the surface, and gripped the foundation of the Coke building like hundreds of massive hands. Why hadn’t she seen this before?
It struck her as strange that she’d never looked at the ground. She’d never thought about the fact that it wasn’t rock and concrete securing them to the station. They were being held in the grip of a massive sphere packed full of water and aliens.
Humans were either parasites or pets. Gaia couldn’t figure out which one. The last time she’d felt this disoriented she’d been signing her divorce papers. In a sudden regression into childish insecurity, Gaia felt like calling her mother again. She suppressed the urge.
She looked at her watch. Fitzpatrick was one minute late. The door of the club slid open and there he stood—without his briefcase. Fitzpatrick wore a suit, but no tie. Somehow, Fitzpatrick looked more casual and simultaneously snappier than he usually did. Gaia suddenly wished that she were a sufficiently assiduous student of fashion to determine the exact location of this subtle difference.
Fitzpatrick saw her, smiled and walked forward in a confident, manly way. What was it about him that seemed so masculine tonight? Maybe it was all the time that she was spending with the Kishocha. They were genderless, but she found herself boorishly assigning gender roles to them anyway. In fact, to her, they all seemed male. The most ambiguous of the aliens was Wave, to whom Gaia could not assign any kind of gender at all.
Gaia found herself, for the first time, admitting that she enjoyed the sight of Fitzpatrick. He moved with a certain grace that, while not weak or effeminate, had a note of refinement. His blond hair seemed rakishly adventurous. His jaw, square to the point of being silly, looked good to her.
Gaia breathed deeply. Maybe Fitzpatrick’s disheveled attentiveness the previous night had eroded her defenses. Or maybe, as Stinger had suggested, she needed to find someone to muzzle with. Gaia suppressed an internal shudder. She was only microseconds away from considering sex with Fitzpatrick, based on the criteria that he was human and also male. Could she be any less discriminating?
And yet Stinger’s comment tugged at her. She had been “prodding her own throat like an ugly” since she’d been on this station. Still the idea of Fitzpatrick as a sex partner made Gaia slightly ill, in an aroused kind of way.
“Ms. Jones, so good to see you.” Fitzpatrick shook her hand warmly. This was nothing new. He always shook her hand warmly. Why should she notice it especially tonight? She suddenly pictured him naked. For some reason, even clothed in nothing but fluorescent light, Fitzpatrick was holding a briefcase. Gaia suppressed a giggle. Was she cracking up from the pressure? Her moods seemed to be beamed into her head by a hostile alien intelligence. One moment she was morose and maudlin, the next aroused, the next completely giddy. One thing was for sure. It wasn’t the Kishocha implanting these ideas. If it were the Kishocha, she’d be thinking more of clams and decapitation.
“Hi.” It was all Gaia could manage.
“Enjoying the view, I see?”
“I was just looking at the foundations of buildings.”
“Does structural engineering interest you?”
“Not really,” Gaia replied. All urge to sleep with him dissipated. “Let’s go get a table.”
“I have one reserved.”
She followed Fitzpatrick to their table. After perusing the club’s menu, Gaia decided to go with two appetizers and no entree. She wasn’t into overpriced plates of lab-grown meat. She knew what it cost to buy all the ingredients at the club and found their markup breathtaking.
Fitzpatrick ordered the lab-grown veal, sautéed in marsala with tiny red hydroponically grown potatoes and sugar snap peas. The veal was garnished with real slices of lemon, which had to be shipped from the Sunkist complex on Mars. He also ordered wine and a salad. Gaia had a dark beer, which was brewed locally by a guy who used to be on the custodial crew of the Coke Tower.
“So,” Fitzpatrick began, once the server had withdrawn. “Are you doing all right?”
“It’s going pretty well.” Gaia broke a hunk of bread off the miniloaf in the center of the table. “I’ve decided to stay.”
Fitzpatrick reached into his inner suit pocket and retrieved a slim cigarette case. He popped it open, pulled out a stick of Gitanes cigarette gum, and began to chew it thoughtfully. Gaia warmed to him again, but wasn’t sure if it was just another hormonal surge.
“Why did you want the rebreather?”
“I want to be able to go in the water, so that I can find Kenjan if I need to. The water is too deep for me to feel comfortable without an oxygen supply.”
“Are you a good diver?”
Gaia nodded. “I’ve got a lot of hours underwater.”
“Yes, it says so in your file.”
“If you already know that, why did you ask me?” Gaia scowled.
“Just a little small talk.” Fitzpatrick straightened his cuffs. The waiter arrived with their food and silence settled between them. Gaia tore off another hunk of bread, while Fitzpatrick started on his salad.
Gaia poked at her appetizers and ordered more beer. Because she constantly saw people chewing, Gaia had developed the habit of rating people’s attractiveness on how they ate. Fitzpatrick looked good eating. She imagined this was the reason she was attracted to the refined guys, even though they were out of her league. Maintenance guys, who definitely were in her league, were universally atrocious chewers. They also tended to leave small piles of garbage wherever they went. Even coffee generated a tiny monolith of crushed cream packets, sugar envelopes and broken stir sticks. Fitzpatrick, in contrast, was an unfailingly neat eater. He even secreted the foil wrappers of his Gitanes cigarette gum in his pocket.
Gaia suddenly realized that she really didn’t want to talk about the Kishocha or any important matter. She wanted a break from them. Yet, she still had to negotiate the main course, dessert and cigarette gum. She decided to just ride it out in silence, then abruptly ruled out that course of action as inexcusably rude and bitchy. Besides, Fitzpatrick had done a lot for her and though she hated to admit it, Gaia wanted him to like her.
“So,” Gaia said. “Are you married?”
Fitzpatrick, at first startled by this question, recovered quickly. “No, neither am I gay. Yourself?”
“You know I’m not married.”
“A lesbian then?” Fitzpatrick finished his salad and set the fork down.
“No. I’m divorced.”
“That doesn’t preclude your being a lesbian.”
Gaia scowled. “Are you recruiting for them or something?”
“Not at all, I’m just making conversation. I’m also divorced.”
“Before you came into space, or after?”
“After. Space life didn’t agree with my wife’s career. She’s a ceramic artist. The shipping costs were astronomical—literally.”
“I bet. You should see the bill for a case of Earth-grown clams.”
Fitzpatrick nodded. “And your husband?”
“What about him?”
“Did you to decide to end it before you came here?”
“Yeah, we split up in Washington, before I started Happy Snak. He was
a public defender turned corporate mega lawyer. He was a bitter man.”
“How long were you together?”
“Only a year.” Gaia toyed with her empty vegetable skewer. “Then I couldn’t stand it anymore.”
“My wife and I were together for seven years.”
“Any kids?”
“None, we were waiting to be more established.”
“That was smart, I guess.” Gaia’s second plate of appetizers arrived, along with Fitzpatrick’s entree.
“You know the reason I like eating here is that they do such a good job with inferior ingredients,” Fitzpatrick said.
“What do you mean inferior? They use top-of-the-line stuff. Those parsley leaves have Boeing Arboretum written all over them.” Even across the table Gaia could make out the deep green letters.
“Yes, but it’s nothing compared to the flavor of food actually grown on Earth. Speaking of which, did you really order clams from Earth? I heard something about that from the woman at receiving.”
“I thought they’d be a neat experience for Wave. Wave had eaten one at an embassy banquet and couldn’t get over how weird they were,” Gaia said.
“In what way?”
“They looked different, and tasted different, and were salty in a different way… I guess you’d have to eat a lot of live, raw sea creatures to become a connoisseur.” Gaia nibbled on a frog leg.
“As opposed to dead, cooked amphibians?”
“Frog meat’s the best up here. It’s from real frogs. That’s why it’s so expensive.”
“Do you think I might be able to purchase a couple of your clams?” Fitzpatrick asked.
“For yourself?”
“I’ve been having a real craving for chowder, and canned just won’t do.”
“So is chowder your dish?”
“How do you mean?”
“All guys have a certain dish they make, and it tells a lot about their personality. For example, if a guy’s signature dish is a breakfast dish, like an omelet, you know he’s used to cooking for women in the morning,” Gaia said.
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