“The party on top is in charge of navigation. Code of the sea.”
“My mind must have been elsewhere. Silly of me.” “Um. Where’s breakfast?”
Naked, he padded across the planking. The yielding, creaking feel of oiled and varnished wood was one of the charms of this old trisected house, and worth the cost of leasing. He went into the bathroom, lifted the ivory toilet seat and peed for a long moment; first pleasure of the day. Finished, he lowered the seat and its magenta cover but did not push the handle. At thirty-five cents a flush, he and Alexandria had decided to let things go until absolutely necessary. As an economy measure the savings weren’t necessary for them, but the waste of not doing so seemed inelegant.
He slipped on his sandals where he’d stepped out of them the night before and walked through the archway of thick oak beams, into the kitchen. The tiled room held the night chill long after the remainder of the house had surrendered to day. The slapping of his sandals echoed back at him; he flipped on the audio channels and dialed first music, then—finding nothing he liked, this early—the news spots.
He grated out some sharp cheddar cheese while a calm, undisturbed voice told him that another large strike was brewing, threatening to cut off shipping again. He rapped open six eggs, thought a moment and then added two more, and rummaged through the refrigerator for the creamy, small curd cottage cheese he’d bought the day before. The President, he heard, had made a “tough, hard-hitting” speech against secret corporate gestation-underglass programs; the newscaster made no mention of similar government projects. Two of the recent hermaphrodites had married, proclaiming the first human relationship free of stereotypes. Nigel sighed and dumped the lot into the blender. He added some watery brown sauce he’d made up in batches for just this purpose and sprinkled in marjoram, salt and pepper. The blender purred it all into a smooth soup. He fetched tomato sauce while the audio went on about a new industrial coalition which had linked up with an equally massive crowd of labor unions, to back a bill granting extraordinary protectionist import taxes on goods from Brazil, Australia and China. For variety and in the name of pure blind experiment he added coriander to the mix, poured it into a souffle dish and started it baking. The oven popped with industrious heat.
Alexandria was showering as he dressed. He put the bedroom in order; last night, tumbling toward the bed, they’d scattered oddments of underclothing like debris from some domestic collision. He rolled up his flared shirt cuffs in anticipation of the day’s warmth and Alexandria emerged from the vapor shower, her expressive bottom jiggling beneath a sheen of moisture.
She slipped the shower cap from around her knotted hair and said, “Read me my horoscope, will you? It’s on the end table, there.”
Nigel grimaced. “I prefer entrails, myself. Shall I nip out for a small goat, put him to the knife and give you a prognosis for the day?”
“Read.”
“Much more satisfying, I should think. Gutsy—” “Read.”
“Gemini, April twentieth to May twentieth.” He paused. “Let’s see, ‘You are quick, intelligent and well organized. Try to use these to advantage today. Unfortunately, people will probably tend to think you are overly aggressive. Try not to flaunt your power, and resist the impulse to hurt small animals—this is a bad character trait. Avoid orange juice pits and dwarfs today.’ Sound advice, I’d say.”
“Nigel…”
“Well, what good’s advice if it’s not specific? A lot of vapid generalities won’t tell you much about what stock to buy for those Brazilian fellows—if there were stocks any more, that is.”
“They want to buy us, that’s the point.”
“The whole airline?”
“Yep. Lock, stock and et cetera.”
“And your job—?”
“Oh, they just want to own us, not run the company.” “Ah. Well—” He glanced at his watch. “Nearly time for the Catnapper’s Souffle.”
He went into the kitchen, dealt out forks, plates and napkins and took them into the dining nook. The nook had been a spacious closet in the old house, in those days a single-family dwelling, and now featured a mitred window giving on the back yard. A jacaranda tree, showing signs of an interest in blossoming into a velvety blue-and-white, bracketed one side of the green swath of lawn.
Nigel checked his watch again, which mutely informed him that this was the thirty-first of April. Was that right, under the new calendar? He ran the old rhyme through—thirty days hath November, and, and—? He never could summon up those fiendish little aids to memory when they’d be handy. But he knew April well enough, certainly: next week would mark fifteen years since Icarus.
Fifteen. And for all the conferences and international symposia and doctoral theses, scant reward had come of the Icarus adventure. He and Len had managed to lash a fair quantity of interesting artifacts into various crannies of the Dragon module, and even more outside, in the superstructure. But in dealing with the totally strange, how could they possibly make the right judgments? What seemed a complex web of electronics turned out to be a series of idiot circuits; the greenish fog that permeated the vast caverns within Icarus was an organic chain molecule, probably a high-vacuum lubricant.
Interesting, yes; but not keys to a fundamental discovery. Some odd technical tricks came out of it all—an advanced substrate for microelectronics, resistant alloys, some sophisticated chemicals—but somehow the alienness of the thing had slipped through their fingers. None of their haul bore silent witness to Icarus’s origin. Everything in it could have been made from Earth materials, far in the past—and a fraction of the scientists who worked on the trove thought it had been. No one had come up with convincing evidence of an earlier civilization on Earth, but the sheer ordinariness of Icarus seemed to argue for it.
For Nigel and Len it had been a slowly dawning defeat, particularly following the storm of controversy that waited for them when the shuttle brought them down from Earth orbit. NASA had shielded them at first, but too many people were horrified at Nigel’s risk-taking. The Indians broke off relations, even after he and Len fired the Egg and pulverized Icarus into harmless gravel. Congressmen demanded prison sentences for the two of them. The New York Times ran three editorials within one month, each calling for progressively stronger measures against NASA, and Len, and especially Nigel.
He spoke a few times before largely hostile audiences, defendings his ideas and emotions, and gave up. Words weren’t actions, and never would be. Luckily, he was a civilian. His offense against the moral equilibrium fell awkwardly between statutes. A Federal prosecutor introduced a charge, based on deprivation of the civil rights of everyone in the United States, but it was thrown out; after all, it was the Indians who’d been threatened. And in the public scuffle NASA kept very quiet, stepping gingerly around the fact that Dave had been lying behind that media-measured Cheshire-cat grin of his. The whole story about Icarus skipping on the upper atmosphere, like a child’s accurately skimmed rock, was a hastily improvised song and dance.
And so it had passed.
After a year and a final receding volley from the Times (“Remembering the Abyss”), other worries furrowed the world’s brows. Once out of the limelight, NASA began gently easing Len and Nigel out. Oddly enough, in obscurity lay more threat. Exposure of Dave’s lie in full view would have cost NASA support on all sides. But if the facts wobbled into view before an obscure committee, years later, it would do little harm; timing was everything. The trump cards he and Len held slowly devalued, like an inflated currency. Thus the worst time came when he could finally walk into a supermarket without being harangued, insulted, treated to a garlic-breathed debate.
That, too, he had survived.
“Ready yet?” Alexandria said, bringing the jug of orange juice into the dining nook. It rattled with ice cubes.
“Right.” Nigel shook off his mood and fetched the souffle. As he served it up with a broad wooden spoon, the crust cracked and exhaled a cloud smelling of omelette. They ate quickly, both hungry. It was their policy to eat virtually no supper and a thorough breakfast; Alexandria felt the body would use the breakfast through the day, and simply turn a supper into fat.
“Shirley’s coming over after supper tonight,” Alexandria said.
“Good. You finish that novel she gave you?” Alexandria sniffed elegantly. “Nope. It was mostly the usual wallowing in postmodernist angst, with technicolor side shows.”
Nigel popped a Swebitter grape into his mouth; his lips puckered at its tartness.
Alexandria reached for a grape and winced. “Damn.” “Wrists still hurting?”
“I thought they were getting better.” She held her right wrist in the other hand and wriggled it experimentally. Her face pinched for an instant and she stopped. “Nope, it’s still there, whatever it is.”
“Perhaps you sprained it.”
“Both wrists simultaneously? Without noticing it?” “Seems unlikely.”
“Damn,” Alexandria said abruptly. “You know, I don’t believe I want those Brazilians to get our company after all.”
“Uh? I thought—”
“Yes, yes, I started it all. Made the first moves. But damn it, it’s ours. We could use the capital, sure …” She twisted her mouth sidewise in a familiar gesture of irritation. “… but I didn’t realize…!”
“That was part of the soft sell, though. They’d get something thoroughly American—American Airlines.”
