“Suppose it doesn’t?”
“We’re giving her everything we can now. Hospitalization would only—”
Nigel waved him silent with a hand. Abruptly he heard the distant swishing of traffic on Thalia outside, as though suddenly the volume control had been turned up somewhere.
He stared at Hufman. The man was a technician, doing his job, not responsible for the reddening and swelling attacking Alexandria. Nigel saw that, had never doubted that, but now in the compressed airless space of this office the facts smothered him and he sought a way out. There had to be a release from the arrowing of events.
Hufman was gazing steadily at him. In the man’s constricted face he read the truth: that Hufman had seen this reaction before, knew it as a stage in the process, something to be passed through as surely as the aches and spasms and clenching tremors. Knew that this, too, was one of the converging lines. Knew that there was no release.
SEVEN
Lubkin did not react well when Nigel requested an extended leave.
He appealed to Nigel’s duty to the project, loyalty to the President (forgetting his British origins), to JPL. Nigel shook his head wearily. He needed time to be with Alexandria, he said. She wanted to travel. And—casually, not quite looking into Lubkin’s eyes—he was behind in his flight simulations. To maintain his astronaut status he needed a solid week at NASA Ames, splicing it up so that he was never gone from Alexandria more than a few hours.
Lubkin agreed. Nigel promised to call in at least every two days. They were bringing in new men, Ichino and Williams, to supplement the survey program. If Nigel wanted to interview them now—
Nigel didn’t.
The three of them went to the beach again, partly to exorcise the experience, partly because it was October and the crowds were gone. They lounged, they waded. The women were doing their meditations regularly now. They would face each other, draw the annular circle in the sand between them, link hands and go off into their own mesmerized world. Nigel closed his eyes, back pressed to the sand, and dreamed. Of Alexandria, of the past. Of the years after Icarus.
What put off The New York Times attracted women. They would drift his way at a party, lips pursed, seemingly inspecting Cezanne prints, and abruptly come upon him, round doe eyes widening in polite surprise at his mumbled identity (yes, he was the one), hand unconsciously going to the throat to caress a necklace or scarf, an oddly sensual gesture to be read if he cared.
Often, he did. They were electric women, he thought, yet they sensed in the Icarus even something basic and feral, some mysterious male rite performed beyond the horn-rimmed gaze of pundits and, most importantly, away from women.
They were of many kinds, many types. (How mascu-
line, one of them said, patting blue hair into place, to think of women as types. Embarrassed—this was in New York, where differences were unfashionable that year— he laughed and threw some chablis at the back of his throat and left her soon thereafter, reasoning that, after all, he did not quite like her type.) He sampled them: the Junoesque; the wiry and intense; the darkly almond sensual; the Rubens maiden; the others. How not to call them types? The urge to classify washed over him, to analyze and inspect. At last he came to look upon himself as from a distance, pacing his responses, never moving wholly with the moment. There, he quit. The NASA flack who hovered ever-present at his elbow tried to keep him “alive” on the 3D, circling through the talk shows, to retain his “saturated image,” but Nigel dropped out. And after a while, found Alexandria.
He went for long runs on the beach between La Jolla and Del Mar, keeping in training, churning doggedly by forests of firm young thighs, sun shimmering through a thin haze of sweat that ran into his eyes from bushy eyebrows. Cantilevered breasts—or, more stylishly, bare ones, brown painted nipples pouting in the stinging sun— swung to follow his progress. He loped along the ocean’s foaming margin, feet slapping in water, arms and legs growing leaden, his throat awash in dry pinpricks. He diverted himself by studying the faces that wheeled by, moving stride by stride into his past. Small families, leathery men, dogs and children: he picked roles for them all, ran small plays in his head. He glimpsed them frozen in laughter, boredom, lazy sleep.
One of them had stared straight at him, seen in an instant what his mind’s eye was up to and given him a crooked insane grin, eyes crossed. He slowed, stopped. Tried to read the deliciously red lips. Came closer. And met Alexandria.
The past was really not a scroll or an ornament for the mind to do with as it liked; no. It was a fog, a white cloud made of pale dead brain cells that once stored memory, their loss a sloughing off of detail and everyday incident, until only a few moments, warm random yellow lights, shine through the fog. Whether he had met Shirley first, or Alexandria, was not clear to him any longer. He had been reeling away from the whole oppressive NASA thing, without realizing it, and when Alexandria appeared he washed up on the shore of her. He remembered talking to her, very earnestly, over clear glasses of Vouvray, chilled so that it almost numbed the lips to drink it. Remembered hikes on the southern slopes of Palomar Mountain, past the ruins of the great telescope, lizards scuttling in the sunlight. And dry nights, dim and strange after the setting sun, with that cool stagnancy that pervades the California coastal towns.
Early on, when things were still cementing, Shirley and Alexandria still saw each other separately, in elaborately arranged schedules, but soon they saw the comedy of it and became more natural. Their circle of friends constricted until he and Alexandria became a circle of two, complete together, though not obsessive, not clutching at each other. They each lived in the world, moving and doing, she at American Airlines and he at NASA, but each in an orbit that defined the locus of the center: the place where they both met. About this center Shirley orbited, a moon bound to their planetary influence. Always changing, always shifting, the spaces around the three had still a Pythagorean simplicity, a unity centered on the two—
“Nigel. Wake up, Nigel!”
Shirley loomed over him, blotting out the sun. “We’ve got to go. She’s feeling nauseous again.”
He sat up. Alexandria smiled wanly a few meters away, eyes hollowed and dark, a shadow of the woman he had conjured up a moment before. He wrenched his eyes away.
They took the express coach to the Orange County Fall Fair, coasting high on the Santa Ana freeway above the punctured, burnished ruins of La Mirada and Disneyland, now asprawl with groves of oranges again.
Alexandria potted earnestly at moving dummy targets, felling three with wadded paper bullets and winning a wooden doll that grinned with manic love. They rode the looper, relishing the seconds of delicious free fall. They inspected the implausibly fattened cattle, stared into the blank brown eyes of lambs, stroked the matted heads of baby goats.
A ring of singing New Sons accosted them. Nigel brushed them off and Alexandria lingered behind to speak to them, beyond his earshot.
They sat under cloth umbrellas and ate fair food: tacos, pasta salad, crisp sansejens. Nigel slurped at a tankard.
And Alexandria said with sudden finality, “We should have had children.”
“Alexandria, no, we thought it through. Our jobs—” “But then there would have been something…”
She blinked rapidly, swallowed and bit into her simbani and noodles.
Uncomfortably, Nigel glanced at the next table. A mother was urging her son to finish his taco so that the family could go see the cattle show. “Ummm, mmmm, mommy.” The boy artlessly fumbled the taco into his left hand and dropped it theatrically on the ground. The maneuver was well timed; his mother looked back to see the taco tumble, but not early enough to see his preparations. “Oh,” he said unconvincingly.
“All through,” Alexandria said.
Nigel turned and found she was smiling again.
“Right, I see that. What I can’t make out is why I must have a telltale installed.” Nigel leaned forward, shoulders hunched, elbows on Hufman’s desk. Alexandria sat silent, hands folded. Hufman grimaced and started over:
“Because I can’t rely on Alexandria carrying her pickup monitor everywhere. Her telltale is much more complex than yours—it taps directly into the nervous system—but its radio transmitter hasn’t got enough range. If she got beyond her pickup, she could have a brain stem hemorrhage, go into a coma, and you’d think she was just dozing. But with a pickup telltale inset behind your ear, you’d know something was wrong even if she’d left her monitor behind.”
“And fetch you.”
“An emergency team, not me.” Hufman sighed, looking frayed and tired. “If you two are going to travel or even go on long walks, the telltales are necessary.”
“It won’t screw up my inner ear or my balance, anything like that? NASA has to approve any—”
“I know, Mr. Walmsley. They’ll okay it; I checked.” “Nigel, yours is only an—” Alexandria glanced at Hufman.
“Acoustic transducer,” Hufman supplied.
“Yes. Mine is a complete diagnostic communicator. We’ll both be tagged with the same transmission code, but yours will be, well, just a warning light for mine. You—”
