“Alcohol has a remarkable number of—”
“Right. Apart from stuff like cement, which I presume you aren’t taking in by the handfuls, strong drink—love that phrase—is the worst thing possible for cramming on the kilos. But wine—the dryer, the better—isn’t. Scarcely more in a glass than a few grams of macadamia nuts. If you could get macadamias any more, I mean.”
He stopped, aware that he was probably talking too much. Mr. Ichino nodded solemnly at Nigel’s advice and asked the barman for beer. Nigel watched owlishly as the icing of suds rose. “Back to the sociometrician?” he said, and the two of them returned to the rec room.
A small knot of people had formed around Fresnel. Most of them had fashionably midnight-black hair, trimmed exactly to the shoulders. They were discussing Humanistic-Secular. The prime point in question seemed to be the use of electronically enhanced gloves by the Pope, and whether this meant he would throw in with the New Sons. Media said the two were jockeying over the issue; a computer-human linkup had predicted absorption of the Catholics within three years, based on assignable sociometric parameters.
Nigel beckoned to Alexandria and they drifted away. Shirley appeared, arriving late. She kissed Alexandria and asked Nigel to fetch her a drink. When he returned, Alexandria was talking to some Soviets, and Shirley drew him aside.
“Are you going with us?”
“Where?”
“The Immanence. We do so want you to go with us to see him, Nigel.”
He studied her eyes, set deep above the high cheekbones, to read how serious she was. “Alexandria has mentioned it.”
“I know. She said she’s making no progress. You just clam up about it.”
“Don’t see much point in talking nonsense.”
“You apparently don’t like talking to us at all,” she said with sudden fire.
“What’s that mean?” he asked, bristling.
“Ohh.” She slammed her fist against the wall in dramatic emphasis. She rolled her eyes and Nigel couldn’t stop himself smiling at the gesture. She should have been an actress, he thought.
“Nigel, damn it, you are not flexing with this.” “Don’t follow the slang, sorry.”
“Ohh.” Again the rolling eyes. “You and your language fetishes. Okay, in one syllable. Alexandria and I don’t know where you are any more.”
“Hell, I’m home with her most of the day.”
“Yes, but—Lord!—emotionally, I mean. You keep working on this thing, whatever it is, at JPL. Reading your damned astronomy books. Alexandria needs more of you now—”
“She’s getting plenty,” Nigel said a bit stiffly. “You’re closed off in there, Nigel. I mean, some gets through, but …” Shirley knitted her eyebrows together in concentration. “It never struck me before, but I think that might be why you fit into a triad. Most men can’t, but you…”
“I’d imagine a triad requires more communication, not less.”
“Of a kind, I suppose, yes. But Alexandria is the center. We orbit around her. We don’t have a true threeway.”
She leaned against the padded hallway wall, shoulders slumped forward, studying the carpet. Her left breast, exposed, teardropped in the soft shadows, its tip a brown splotch. Nigel suddenly saw her as more open, more vulnerable than she had seemed in months. Her pastel dress bunched at hips and breasts and somehow made her appear nude, as though the material protected without concealing. The oval on her left breast hung as an eye into a deeper layer of her.
He sighed. He was aware of the breath leaving him as a thick alcoholic vapor, a liter of stuff so substantial he half expected to see the cloud hang in the hallway, un-mixed with the customary air. “I suppose you are right,” he said. “I will go and see this fellow if you wish. It must be before we leave though—a week from now.”
Shirley nodded silently. He kissed her with an odd gravity.
Three people, chattering, came out of a nearby room and the mood between them was broken.
Mr. Ichino left early. Damned early, Nigel thought muzzily, for he had liked the man on sight. It was a good party, too, quite good. Lubkin’s affairs in the past had been straightaway the most boring of a sad lot of parties that sprouted up around the moribund jollity of the Xmas season. Keep the X in Xmas, he thought, making another round to the bar. The Bordeaux was finished off but a passable California claret went down nicely. Lubkin wasn’t being mean-minded about his wine, much to his credit. No poisonous California rotgut reds, no mysterious mixtures. Nigel realized dimly that he was pretty well into a substantial piss-up. Better yet, all done at Lubkin’s expense. He had half a mind to search out Lubkin and thank him profusely, meantime sloshing down a gratifyingly large quantity directly in his presence.
He set out on this mission and found himself negotiating a surprisingly difficult corner getting out of the rumpus room. (Did Lubkin allow an occasional rumpus in the rumpus room? Just a sweet beheading or two, in full color, Chinese cleavers and all? No, no; the disorderly nature of the cleaning-up would offend the man.) The angle of the corner was obtuse, opaque. He had noticed the floor plan was pentagonal, with occasional jutting intrusions, but how was he to get his bearings?
He sat down to clear his head. People drifted by as if under glass.
He pondered the opaque angle. Oddities of the language: angle, with two letters interchanged, spelled angel. Easy, so easy. One transposition rendered the comfortably Euclidean into—pop—the orthodoxly religious. Two letters alone could leap that vast, abiding chasm. Absurdly easy.
Up again, and off. In the living room he sighted land, in the persons of Shirley and Alexandria. They were foci for the usual knot of JPL engineers, men with close-cropped hair and cheap ballpoint pens still clipped in their shirt pockets. They smiled wanly as he approached, looking as though they had just been shaken awake.
Nigel skimmed past these constellations on a flyby, then ricocheted from conversation to conversation in the hollow living room:
—So Cal lost its appeal to the regional EIB?
—Sure. I expected it.
—So our water quote’s cut again?
—Sure. Factors into an eighteen-thousand-person popdrop, mandatory. We’ll make it up from fractional decline. Slowed immigration laws will come through. And the Federal Regional Support Allotments will be shaved. We—
Onward:
—Suppose we’ve got the terrorists stopped on plutonium 240? So what? Since the New Delhi incident we know the damned Asians can’t be trusted to—
Onward:
—and I loved that scene with the semen all over the stage, just frozen CO2 really but what an effect, jizzing into the audience—
Here and there Nigel began talking, feeling the sentences form whole inside before he’d begun them. He unzipped the floppy covers from words, made them pop out quick and shiny. People peered at him as though down a pit, from a height. Words merged together.
