Collected Short Fiction, page 1137
When it was over they whispered to each other and stroked each other and gave each other little nibbling kisses, and he pretended it had been marvelous, but his real impulse was to pull away and light a cigarette and stare out the window at the snow, and he wasn’t even a smoker. It was simply the way he felt. It bad been only a mechanical thing, only a hotel-room screw, not remotely anything like snake and ocean: a joining of flesh of the sort that a pair of rabbits might have accomplished, or a pair of apes, without content, without fire, without joy. He and she knew an ever so much better way of doing it.
He took care to hide his disappointment.
“I’m so glad I came here, Chris,” she said, smiling, kissing him, taking care to hide her disappointment, too, he guessed. He knew that if he entered her mind he would find it bleak and ashen. But of course he could not do that. “I wish I could stay the night,” she said. “My plane’s at nine. We could have dinner downstairs, though.”
“Is it a terrible strain, keeping the power back?”
“It isn’t easy.”
“No. It isn’t.”
“I’m so glad we did this, Chris.”
“Are you?”
“Yes. Yes. Of course.”
They had an early dinner. The snow had stopped by the time he saw her to her cab. So: you fly up to Denver for a couple of hours of lust and steak, you fly back home, and that’s that. He had a brandy is the lounge and went to his room. For a long while he lay staring at the ceiling, sure that she would come to him with the ocean, and make amends for the unsatisfactory thing they had done that afternoon. She did not. He wondered if he ought to send her the snake as she dozed on her plane, and did not want to. He felt timid about any sort of contact with her now. It had all been a terrible mistake, he knew. Not because of that emanation from the dirty depths of the psyche that she had so feared, but only because it had been so anticlimactic, so meaningless. He waited for a sending from her, some bright little flash out of Arizona. She must surely be home now. Nothing came. He went on waiting, not daring to reach toward her, and finally he fell asleep.
l
Jan said nothing to him about the Denver trip. He was moody and strange, but she let him be. When the silence out of Phoenix continued into the next day and the next he grew even more grim, and skulked about wrapped in black isolation. Gradually it occurred to him that he was not going to hear from Laurel again, that they had broken something in that hotel room in Denver and that it was irreparable, and, oddly, the knowledge of that gave him some ease: if he did not expect to hear from her, he did not have to lament her silence. A week, two, three, and nothing. So it was over. That hollow little grunting hour had ruined it.
Somehow he picked up the rhythms of his life: work, home, wife, kids, friends, tennis, dinner. He did an extensive analysis of southwestern electric utilities that brought him a commendation from on high, and he felt only a mild twinge of anguish while doing his discussion of the prospects for Arizona Public Service as reflected in the municipal growth of the city of Phoenix. He missed the little tickle in his mind immensely, but he was encapsulating it, containing it, and after a fashion he was healing.
One day a month and a half later he found himself idly scanning the mindnoise band again, as he had not done for a long while, just to see who else was out there. He picked up the loony babble out of Fort Lauderdale and the epicene static from Manitoba, and then he encountered someone new, a bright dear signal as intense as Laurel’s, and for a dazzled instant a sudden fantasy of a new relationship blossomed in him, but then he heard the nonsense syllables, the slow, firm, strong-willed stream of gibberish. There were no replacements for Laurel.
In Chicago, where he had been sent to do a survey of natural-gas companies, he began talking to a youngish woman at the Art Institute, and by easy stages some chatter about Monet and Sisley turned into a dinner invitation and a night in his hotel room. That was all right. Certainly it was simpler and easier and less depressing than Denver. But it was a bore, it was empty and foolish, and he regretted it deeply by breakfast time, even while he was taking down her number and promising to call the next time he was in the Midwest. Maitland saw the post- Laurel pattern of his life closing about him now: the Christmas bonus, the trip to Hawaii with Jan, braces for the kids, the new house five years from now, the occasional quickie romance in far-off hotel rooms. That was all right. That was the original bargain he had made, long ago, entering adult life: not much ecstasy, not much grief.
On the long flight home that day he thought without rancor or distress about his year and a half with Laurel, and told himself that the important thing was not that it had ended but that it had happened at all. He felt peaceful and accepting, and was almost tempted to reach out toward Laurel and thank her for her love, and wish her well. But he was afraid—afraid that if he touched her mind in any way she would pull away, timid, fearful of contact in the wake of that inexplicably sundering day in Denver. She was close by now, he knew, for the captain had just told them that they were passing over the Grand Canyon. Maitland did not lean to the window, as everyone else was doing, to look down. He sat back, eyes closed, tired, calm.
And felt warmth, heard the lapping of surf, saw in the center of his mind the vast ocean in which Laurel had so many times engulfed him. Really? Was it happening? He let himself slide into it. A little flustered, he hid himself behind a facade of newspapers, the Tribune, the Wall Street Journal. His face grew flushed. His breathing became rougher. Ah. Ah. It was happening, yes, she had reached to him, she had made the gesture at last. Tears of gratitude and relief came to him, and he let her sweep him off to a sharp and pounding fulfillment five miles above Arizona.
—Hello, Chris.
—Laurel.
—Did you mind? I felt you near me, and I couldn’t hold back any more. I know you don’t want to hear from me, but—
—What gave you that idea?
—I thought—it seemed to me—
—No. I thought you were the one who wanted to break it up.
—I? I missed you so much, Chris. But I was sure you’d pull away.
—So was I, about you.
—Silly.
—Laurel. Laurel. I’m so glad you took the chance, then.
—So am I.
—Let me have the snake, Chris.
—Yes. Yes.
He stepped out into the tawny sun-baked hills with the heavy porcelain jar and tipped it, and let the snake glide toward her. It was all right after all. They had made mistakes, but they were the mistakes of too much love, and they had survived them. It was going to be all right: snake and ocean, ocean and snake, now and always.
Hail to the Chief
A month or so before the spring presidential election, the public-affairs terminal in Sid Miller’s bedroom turned itself on and told him he was going to be one of the candidates. That shook him dp some. He had never given much thought to becoming president. Sure, somebody had to be president, but the computers had three hundred eighty million citizens to choose from, Even with elections being held twice a year, as they had for the last ten or fifteen years, the odds against getting picked were so steep that no one in his right mind spent much time wondering about it.
But once the astonishment wore off. Miller found himself adapting nicely to the idea. President Miller?
Why not? He had to admit he was feeling some restlessness after twenty-six years as a certified public accountant in Grand Forks, North Dakota. Maybe it was time for a change. He was a fine accountant, respected by his clients; but there had to be more to life than that. In Washington he’d surely get a chance to meet some interesting people. They said the Washington restaurants were quite fine, especially the French ones. He loved French food. As president, he’d have plenty of opportunity for fancy dining—state banquets and such. As for the responsibilities of the office, that didn’t worry him at all. The computers had been doing ninety-nine percent of the work for decades now. Everybody knew that. The printouts he’d get each morning would cover the hard stuff—foreign-policy decisions, domestic legislative programs, appropriate economic positions. All he would really need to do was make speeches, meet with delegations of voters, dedicate a few dams and bridges, confer with other heads of state, and sign bills into law. Why not? “Sure,” Miller said cheerfully, “if nominated, I will run. If elected, I will serve.”
The next day he received a thick sheaf of computer-generated position papers and a three-week supply of resounding campaign speeches. They let him have only two hours to look things over before he went on camera, but he delivered his lines like an old pro.
“My fellow Americans,” he said, “it is time to.get this nation moving again! Destiny beckons! Today we are given an opportunity such as rarely has been ours before.” And so on and so forth. Miller carried it off beautifully. Within a week he was established as the clear favorite. Everyone loved him, especially the computers that were going to do the actual voting. Of course, it helped somewhat that the other five candidates were such a weird bunch: The random-selection process is apt to do that sometimes. The most plausible of them was an irascible old lady from Pasadena who owned sixty-eight cats, and the rest went sharply downhill from there.
So Miller made a clean sweep of the electoral college and became the one hundred thirteenth President of the United States. A week later he went to Washington for a meeting with his predecessor, who shrugged and said, “Shucks, you’ll love it! Ain’t nothin’ to it, y’know?”
At a grand reception held at the White House he shook hands with all the newly elected members of the Senate and House of Representatives and the incoming Supreme Court. Everybody’s inauguration was held the next afternoon, and the partying went far into the night.
Miller certainly did love being president. He signed whatever he was supposed to sign, delivered rousing speeches for the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving, and held a state dinner for platoons of visiting dignitaries every Friday. In June he went overseas for two terrific weeks in Europe: parades, museum tours, tea at Buckingham Palace, dinners prepared by the finest chefs of Paris. The six months of his term went by amazingly quickly.
Naturally Miller felt sad when it was all over. It had been the time of his life. But he had good things to look forward to, now that he was an elder statesman: a nice pension, a steady stream of journalists and historians coming to interview him, and many other little benefits of retirement.
So he went cheerfully back to Grand Forks and busied himself with his memoirs and in raising money for the Sid Miller Presidential Library.
One of those little benefits of retirement turned up last week. The Japanese have decided to adopt the modern American system of election by lottery and want him to serve as a consultant. The fee is very nice. So he leaves for Tokyo tomorrow. His only regret is that he doesn’t care much for Japanese food—all that raw fish, all that soy sauce. But he hopes the French will be the next people to go in for letting the computers run the government. Miller would be only too happy to provide them with advice. After all, he really loves French cuisine.
Tourist Trade
when they spent the night together, more than the earth moved
AFTER A MOMENT Eitel’s eyes adjusted to the darkness and the glare of the clashing crisscrossing spotlights. But he didn’t need his eyes to tell him what sort of bizarre zoo he had walked into. His sensitive nostrils picked up the whole astonishing olfactory blast at once: a weird hodgepodge of extraterrestrial body odors, offworld pheromones, transgalactic cosmetics, the ozone radiation of personal protection screens, minute quantities of unearthly atmospheres leaking out of breathing devices.
“Something wrong?” David asked.
“The odors. They overwhelm me.”
“The smoking, eh? You hate it that much?”
“Not the tobacco, fool. The aliens! The E-Ts!”
“Ah. The smell of money, you mean. I agree, it is very overwhelming in here.”
“For a shrewd man you can sometimes be very stupid,” Eitel muttered. “Unless you say such things deliberately, which you must, because I have never known a stupid Moroccan.”
“For a Moroccan, I am very stupid,” said David serenely. “And so it was very stupid of you to choose me as your partner, eh? Your grandfathers in Zurich would be shamed if they knew. Eh?” He gave Eitel a maddeningly seraphic smile.
Eitel scowled. He was never sure when he had genuinely offended the slippery little Moroccan and when David was merely teasing. But somehow David always came out of these interchanges a couple of points ahead.
He turned and looked the place over, checking it out.
Plenty of humans, of course. This was the biggest gathering-place for aliens in Morocco, the locus of the focus, and a lot of gawkers came to observe the action. Eitel ignored them. There was no sense doing business with humans any more. There were probably some Interpol types in here too, hoping to head off just the sort of deals Eitel was here to do. To hell with them. His hands were clean, more or less.
But the aliens! The aliens, the aliens, the aliens!
All over the room. Vast saucer eyes, spidery limbs, skins of grotesque textures and unnameable colors. Eitel felt the excitement rising in him, so un-Swiss of him, so thoroughly out of character.
“Look at them!” he whispered. “They’re beautiful!”
“Beautiful? You think so?”
“Fantastic!”
The Moroccan shrugged. “Fantastic, yes. Beautiful, no. Blue skin, green skin, no skin, two heads, five heads: this is beauty? What is beautiful to me is the money. And the way they like to throw it away.”
“You would never understand,” said Eitel.
In fact Eitel hardly understood it himself. He had discovered, not long after the first alien tourists had reached Earth, that they stirred unexpected areas of his soul: strange vistas opening, odd incoherent cosmic yearnings. To find at the age of forty that there was more to him than Panamanian trusts and numbered bank accounts—that was a little troublesome; but it was delicious, as well. He stood staring for a long ecstatic chaotic moment. Then he turned to David and said, “Where’s your Centauran?”
“I don’t see him.”
“Neither do I.”
“He swore he’d be here. Is a big place, Eitel. We go looking, and we find.”
The air was thick with color, sound, fumes. Eitel moved carefully around a tableful of leathery-faced pockmarked red Rigelians, burly, noisy, like a herd of American conventioneers out on the town. Behind them sat five sleek and sinuous Steropids, wearing cone-shaped breathers. Good. Steropids were easy marks. If something went wrong with this Centauran deal David had set up, he might want to have them as customers to fall back on.
Likewise that Arcturan trio, flat heads, grizzled green hair, triple eyes bright as blue-white suns. Arcturans were wild spenders, though they weren’t known to covet Eitel’s usual merchandise, which was works of fine art, or more or less fine art. Perhaps they could be encouraged to. Eitel, going past, offered them a preliminary smile: Earthman establishing friendly contact, leading perhaps to more elaborate relationship. But the Arcturans didn’t pick up on it. They looked through Eitel as though their eyes didn’t function in the part of the spectrum he happened to inhabit.
“There,” David said.
Yes. Far across the way, a turquoise creature, inordinately long and narrow, that appeared to be constructed of the finest grade of rubber, stretched over an awkwardly flung together armature of short rods.
“There’s a woman with him,” Eitel said. “I wasn’t expecting that. You didn’t tell me.”
David’s eyes gleamed. “Ah, nice, very nice!”
She was more than very nice. She was splendid. But that wasn’t the point. Her presence here could be a troublesome complication. A tour guide? An interpreter? Had the Centauran brought his own art expert along? Or was she some Interpol agent decked out to look like the highest-priced of hookers? Or maybe even a real hooker. God help me, he thought, if the Centauran’s gotten involved in some kind of kinky infatuation that would distract him from the deal. No: God help David.
“You should have told me there was a woman,” Eitel said.
“But I didn’t know! I swear, Jesus Mary Moses, I never see her yesterday! But it will be all right. Jesus Mary Moses, go ahead, walk over.” He smiled and winked and slipped off towards the bar. “I see you later, outside. You go for it, you hear? You hear me, Eitel? It will be all right.”
l
The Centauran, seeing the red carnation in Eitel’s lapel, lifted his arm in a gesture like the extending of a telescopic tube, and the woman smiled. It was an amazing smile, and it caught Eitel a little off guard, because for an instant it made him wish that the Centauran was back on Centaurus and this woman was sitting here alone. He shook the thought off. He was here to do a deal, not to get into entanglements.
“Hans Eitel, of Zurich,” he said.
“I am Anakhistos,” said the Centauran. His voice was like something out of a synthesizer, which perhaps it was, and his face was utterly opaque, a flat motionless mask. For vision he had a single bright strip of receptors an inch wide around his forehead, for air intake he had little vents on his cheeks, and for eating he had a three-sided oral slot like the swinging top of a trash basket. “We are very happied you have come,” he said. “This is Agila.”
Eitel allowed himself to look straight at her. It was dazzling but painful, a little like staring into the sun. Her hair was red and thick, her eyes were emerald and very far apart, her lips were full, her teeth were bright. She was wearing a vaguely futuristic metal-mesh sheath, green, supple, clinging. What she looked like was something that belonged on a 3-D billboard, one of those unreal idealized women who turn up in the ads for cognac, or skiing holidays in Gstaad. There was something a little freakish about such excessive beauty. A professional, he decided.
