Slant Page 16

  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 and play 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 Twist,” comes a voice from outside. “I hope you aren’t asleep.”

  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 or Twist.

  “My God,” she says, “you look worse than I feel. What’s happened?”

  RIVERS

  Some ideas are lust lubricants to let troubled people slide through life. Not lies exactly—but very slippery.

  In New Hope, Pennsylvania, a Baptist denomination anoints the reborn 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

  18

  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 corners of his eyebrows and his lips, an enigmatic expression combining elements 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. Transient 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, isn’t it?”

  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 expected 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 strong and that’s unusual in the group so far. Wisdom of our sort,” he flicks a finger between them, “finds a home in older frames. It’s a tough load for the young to
bear.”

  Jonathan has enough self-respect left that this melodramatic display gives him no option. He laughs and shakes his head. “My God, Marcus, you have me going here, don’t you?”

  Marcus smiles a little sadly, but his eyes are bright and focused. He is not drunk and he is not fooling. “This is an old restaurant and I know the paint on its walls. Nobody would dare bug this place, because people like me know whose lapels to grab and which ear to shout in. It’s safe here, comfortable here.”

  “You’re not having me on?”

  “Not a bit,” Marcus says. “You either say yes, you want to go to the next stage, you trust me this far, or you say no, and never speak of this to anyone, including Chloe. And you’ll never be offered the chance again.”

  The female waiter comes by and asks how they’re doing. Marcus tells her they’re doing fine, and asks for a second bowl of Lagavulin.

  “Stagnation, pitfalls; the rules are changing,” Marcus says after she leaves. “That’s what you have to look forward to. Yox makes the temps and the disAffected more ignorant and more aggressive, bottom-up management is on the sly spin again, pffft! The collective is in place, grunting piglets all, and those of us with managerial talent are soon out on our butts in the snow and no shovels. Goddamn machines will replace us, too.”

  “Come on, Marcus, cheer me up,” Jonathan says. He is not really prepared for this sort of nonsense, but as he looks at Marcus, and thinks of all he knows about this man, all the deals and sideshows he’s rumored to be involved in, all the threads he rides straight into the statehouse and the most powerful executive caucuses, even into the Rim Council and the Southcoast White House… It’s hard to speck Marcus as a deluded old fool.

  “It’s not a cheery subject,” Marcus continues doggedly. “The therapied society rides around on too many crutches. It’s crippled and corrupt. But the unknown is scary. The Stoics—they cling to class superiority and a sense that God will eventually clean out the gutters and the water will flow fresh and clear once more. It’s not going to happen. We’ve made some major mistakes in learning how to dance, and now the floor is crowded with clumsy fools…”

  Marcus’s phrasing strikes Jonathan as being too practiced, but undeniably persuasive. Still, Jonathan resists being drawn in too quickly. “I don’t think things are so dark,” Jonathan says.

  Marcus looks down at the table. The waiter brings another bowl of Scotch and asks Jonathan if he’d like more wine.

  “Coffee, please,” Jonathan says.

  “Modcaff, regular, or de?” the waiter asks.

  “Regular,” Jonathan says.

  “I’m not unlike you, Jonathan,” Marcus says. “At your age, I thought I was living in the best of all possible worlds, taking into account a few pitfalls here and there. Beate loved me and I loved her, and we were building things together. But that was twenty years ago. We were heading toward the Raphkind showdown, and the so-called last hurrah of the super-conservatives. Raphkind killed us. Went overboard. May the bastard rot in hell. So now we have namby-pamby New Federalists—a trendy name for a purely financial and expedient frame of mind. I’m one. I know you’re one as well. Are you proud of your creed?”

  “Within limits,” Jonathan says. He suspects Marcus plays faithfully and slyly the tune of whoever’s in power.

  “So what’s in the future for you? Do you know that managers between the ages of forty and fifty suffer thymic disorders twice as often as temp employees? Society wears us down. We wear ourselves out. But if we turn ourselves over to the therapists, they adjust our neurons and glial cells, they stick microscopic monitors into us that are supposed to balance our neurotransmitters and reconstruct our judgment centers. They say we’re as good as new. But you know what happens? We lose an edge… Therapied managers just don’t cut it. The happy man lets down his guard. After a while, being happy becomes a kind of drug, and he avoids challenges because failure will make him unhappy. It’s a fact. So more and more—we take our mental aches and pains and stay away from the therapists…

  “Oh, we want our employees therapied—we want them happy and creative enough and friendly. But managers as a class can’t afford that kind of happiness. We have a higher duty.” Marcus glances at Jonathan. “You’re not happy, are you?”

  Jonathan leans back against the cushion and holds out his hands, gives a little sigh. “I’m in between general contentment… and deep unrest,” he says.

  Marcus lifts his eyebrows. “Well put.”

  “But I’m not desperately unhappy, Marcus.”

  “Still, if an opportunity comes along, allowing great change and new opportunity, you’d go for it, wouldn’t you?”

  So they are back to that.

  “That would depend on the opportunity.”

  Marcus points his finger into the tabletop and thumps it several times. “The gold ring, Jonathan. Not the brass ring. Gold.”

  Jonathan finishes the last drops of wine in his glass. Outside, the storm shows no signs of abating. “Have you offered this opportunity to anyone before me?”

  “Yes,” Marcus says.

  “Many?”

  “Two. One accepted, one declined.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “In the last five years.”

  Jonathan feels a twist, an almost physical churn in his chest. If he could just be rid of his present stagnation—breathe freely in a new phase of life, undo past mistakes and play out his better potentials…

  “If I say yes, can I turn back at a certain point later?”

  “No,” Marcus says squarely. “It’s yes or no. Here and now.”

  “I have to put my trust in you.”

  “That’s the crux.”

  “What about my family? Would they be involved?”

  “They have to undergo the same inspection as you,” Marcus says. “If they pass, they go.”

  So Beate isn’t going, Jonathan intuits.

  “What about their chance to choose?”

  “In our group,” Marcus says, “the head of household bears the brunt.”

  The emergency chime on Marcus’s pad sounds and Marcus pulls it out, angling it away from Jonathan’s eyes. It is a text message; Marcus reads it swiftly, his face a practiced blank, and puts the pad away.

  “Something’s up,” he says. He gives Jonathan a look that can be interpreted either as disappointment or a kind of apologetic sorrow. “Jonathan, I’ve never placed you anywhere but in the sly spin, have I?”

  “Never,” Jonathan truthfully acknowledges. He cannot blame Marcus for his present situation.

  “What’s just happened—what I’ve just learned—puts us deeply in need of someone like you. The opportunity is even better for you. You can move right into a position of influence. I’ll vouch for the fact that you’re capable and you’re ready.”

  Jonathan does not feel comfortable leaping into the dark, and dragging Chloe after him…

  But he remembers her stiffness in his arms. Whenever he has touched her in the last month, she has seemed secretly annoyed. Her respect for him, her desire for him as a man, has faded, buffeted by the pressures of children and the stalling—he supposes—of his career.

  She is disappointed in her life. She is disappointed in him.

  A wild flare of anger and fear rises. Marcus is watching him. Marcus always seems to know the inner workings of his people; that’s why his career has never faltered. He always keeps his teams together—and he always chooses his people well.

  “Are you in charge?” Jonathan asks.

  “No. But I’m close to the top, and those above me are the best. I’ve never seen better.”

  Jonathan blinks and his left eye stings. It’s been a long night. He wipes the corner of his eye with the knuckle of his forefinger, then stares at Marcus.

  “Say yes, and you’ll have one last chance to back out—think it over for tonight and call me tomorrow evening. After that, after you’ve learned what we’re up to, you’re in. No backing out. Ever.�
��

  He has been looking for a change, any change, to regain Chloe’s respect, to win back her need for him. But everything he has considered seems ridiculous—moving to Europe, even China, starting over again. He can’t let go of what they’ve already gained in the world. He believes Chloe values their security very highly, and would think even less of him if he jeopardized that.

  “The gold ring, Jonathan.” Marcus fixes him with a patriarchal and steady gaze. “Never steered you wrong, Jonathan.”

  “Better contacts, references?”

  Marcus smiles. “Best you’ve ever seen. Solidarity. Real support in tough times, and the times are going to get much tougher, believe me.”

  “My family will get… better contacts, better opportunities?”

  “If they make the grade, Jonathan.” Marcus nods. “You know their quality better than I.”

  “Yes,” Jonathan says.

  “I’m sure they will,” Marcus murmurs, but looks away.

  “Yes.”

  Marcus looks back sharply. “Is that your answer?”

  Jonathan blinks. He did not mean it as an answer, he thinks, not precisely an answer, not yet at least. But Marcus is growing restless. Marcus does not like prevarication and delay. Either you know your mind or you don’t.

  “Yes,” Jonathan says.

  Marcus smiles. He is genuinely relieved. “Welcome aboard.”

  They shake hands. Jonathan for a moment does not know who he is or what he is doing; there is such a pressure of withheld anger that he fears he might go home and beat someone—or more likely, kill himself.

  He is so in love with Chloe, so desperately in need of her, and she has given him so little of what he believes he deserves, despite all. The pent-up shock of this realization makes him a little dizzy.

  “Go home and rest,” Marcus says. “This takes something out of all of us.”

  “What’s the next move?” Jonathan asks.