He opened his eyes again and studied her. She wore the simplest of black dresses. Long panels of gossamer cloth hung down from a deep neckline. They were artfully arranged to hint at the tanned flesh beneath. She had a well-scrubbed sheen on her nose but her face was clouded by an odd, compressed tension.
“Shirley, old girl, you know I’m no revolutionary.” “Do you feel the same way about what those Brazilians want to do?” she said sharply. “They’ve got great little ideas about how to make the airline cost-effective again.”
“How?” Nigel said guardedly.
“During peak periods, when the computers don’t have enough solid-state electronics banks left to do the job, they’re planning to use human neural inventories.”
Nigel blinked, surprised. “Alexandria didn’t tell me.” “She probably doesn’t want to bother you while you’re busy planning your trip.”
“Probably… But look, why not use animals to tap into, for computer memory?”
“They don’t have—what’s it called?—anyway, they lose detail too easily.”
“Holographic data-storing capability, you mean.” He paused. “I’d heard about the experiments, but…With the cost of manufacturing computers these days, and the power drain, I suppose it’s smart economics…”
“Is that what you say? Economics? To hook poor people into machines, rent out their frontal lobes?”
“Granted, it’s unappealing. A zombie life, I suppose.” “It’s beneath human dignity.”
“How dignified is it to starve to death?”
Shirley leaned forward and said fiercely, “Do you really believe such a simple-minded—? You do, don’t you? Nigel, you’re greedy. You don’t know a thing about social problems and you want your life undisturbed.”
“Greedy?”
“Of course! Look at this room. It’s packed with every rich man’s amusements—”
“I didn’t notice you hanging back at the threshold.” “Okay, I enjoy a holiday too. But—”
“Why aren’t you down in Brazil? That’s what those types are going to do, isn’t it?—use grunt labor from Brazil to beef up—you’ll excuse the phrase?—American computers? Why not go down there and work with the poor people on the spot, in some little dimple of a burg?”
“This is my home,” Shirley said stiffly. “The people I love are here.”
“So they are. And you have wondrous thighs, Shirley, but they can’t encompass all the world’s teeming troubles.”
“Sarcasm won’t—”
“Listen.” Nigel cocked his head. “Alexandria’s coming in from her walk. I don’t want a chuffup over this, Shirley. I want no bother before we go off. Right?”
She nodded, her mouth twisted slightly as though under pressure.
Nigel saw that the mood in the room would be detectable when Alexandria came in, so he leaned back, yawned elaborately and began in a heavy Welsh accent,
“Aw-ee lasst mah-ee hawrt een ahn Angleesh gawrdaan,
Whaar thah rawzaz ahv Anglahand graw…”
ELEVEN
He and Alexandria lifted three days later. They had booked well in advance to get a flight over the poles; they reentered the atmosphere as a flaring pink line scratched across the sky of the north Atlantic.
Matters were a bit better in England than during their last visit several years before. There were only a few shambling beggars at the baggage checkout, and they seemed to have valid licenses. Most of the terminal was lighted, though not heated. Their helicopter to the southlands lifted free with a clatter into the chilling winds. Coal smoke blotted out the London sprawl.
They reached their destination easily: a well-preserved English inn about three hundred and fifty years old, well run and securely guarded. They spent Christmas there, snug in the battering winds. The next day they hired a guard and a limousine and visited Stonehenge.
Nigel found the experience oddly moving. In spirit he was scarcely an Englishman anymore after the welfare state had turned into the farewell state. These massive thrusting columns, though, spoke to him of a different England. The heel stone was so marvelously aligned, the celestial computer so accurate, he felt a kinship with the men who had made it. They had thrust these gray measuring fingers at a clockwork sky, to understand it. The New Sons had long since played up the pantheistic side of the Druids, popularly thought to be the builders of this stone heap, never mentioning the rest—that these were not men who followed others’ ideas senselessly.
Nigel looked out at the road where a gang of altered chimps was repairing wash damage. They cradled their special shovels and flicked mud thirty meters in one toss. Alexandria stood beside him, biting absently at a fingernail: evolutionary remnant of animal claws. He shivered and took her back to the inn.
Paris was depressing. The second day of freezing in a darkened hotel ended with a shutdown of water pressure throughout the city for the rest of the week.
The pleasure domes of the Saudis were thronged. Cloud sculptors flitted over the desert, carving erotic white giants that coiled ponderously into vast orgasms.
Over South Africa the display was more modest. At evening the swollen elders appeared, wrinkled financial barons, and enjoyed an orchestrated weatherscape as they dined. Nigel and Alexandria watched a vibrating rainbow that framed purple thunderheads, clouds moving with the stately grace of Victorian royalty.
In Brazil, in a restaurant, Alexandria pointed: “Look. That’s one of the men we’re negotiating with for the airline.”
“Which one?”
“The stocky man. Tiltlens glasses. A sway shirt. The briefcut jacket with highlighted trim. Khaki—”
“Right, I see.”
She looked back at Nigel. “Why are you smiling?” “I’ve missed that eye for clothes you have. I never see those things, really.” He reached out to take her hand. “I’ve got you back again.”
A lot of the planet they couldn’t see. In the large areas without resources or industry a white man was an automatic enemy, a child-starver, a thief; the politics of the past thirty years had seen to that. In Sri Lanka they went a block from the hotel to eat. Partway through their curry the muttering in the restaurant and a gathering tension drove them into the sinking street. A passing cab took them back, and then to the airport, and then to Australia.
They were baking on Polynesian sands when his pager buzzed. It was Lubkin. Ichino had relayed the radar search idea to him. They had a blip. It was bigger than two klicks, and spinning. It would rendezvous with Venus inside eleven days if it didn’t accelerate. Lubkin asked if Nigel would return early to run the Main Bay team. Nigel told him he would think about it.
