Mysteries of Motion (37 page)

Perdue’s next-door neighbor, a famous hostess, always has too many cars in front of her house and his. But he won’t complain, because sometimes the parties are Elsa’s, though not tonight. Two cars are from the working press. The press milks a lot out of this street. He has his eye on one of the other houses for his elder daughter; the younger one may in time take over his. Mole won’t marry for years. He has his eye on those geishas, he said. Perdue smiles, though it doesn’t show.

Tonight he and Elsa have a date for a drink alone; she knows the pressures on him. Staying on to check Canaveral round the clock—four nights now, five?—he’s late for it. The last of the old black maids who wait at the corners for the Washington buses has gone home. Good, she won’t look daggers at him for living here. Or murmur, “Uppity.” Standing on the step, he looks forward to Elsa opening the door for him, wife-warmth flooding his heart. She knows a lot about the human heart, related as she is to the man who wrote the book on it. And yet believes so staunchly in the worth of his.

He shivers again, waiting. Early prizes can be saddening, later. Whom the gods love, et cetera. Gods are useful; multiple or single, they take the dirt off one’s hands. He really believes in them. Let the Gilpins be the atheists. And there’s no reason to be sorry about young Fred yet. It’s all on the knees of the gods.

The door opens. The entry hall is so small, so low-ceilinged, the heads of the newsmen gathered behind Elsa bob at him as if on pikestaffs.—Oh, Lee—Her home-name for him—Lee—the
Courier.
—Yes, Elsa?—The
Courier
’s, all right, Lee.—Yes I know. Just left the office—. The press can’t already be here for anything wrong there. Besides, he’s wearing an intercom.—Gentlemen?—He knows them all so well. Saw them at the launching. Will go on seeing them.—
Lee
—. What’s wrong with her? She never interrupts like this. Knows when to sink back, when to shine. Always at his side.

—Admiral?—the senior of them all says. Always ranks you, tenderly. For the blow that’s coming. But from where?—Admiral, we’re reliably informed that a passenger on the
Courier
under the name Fred Kim is really your son. Can you give us a line on it?—Her mouth is what’s wrong with Elsa. There ought to be a fan in front of it. For she truly knows his heart.

Nothing will show on his face.

And that’s the way it’ll be. Sketch him often enough and it comes out paint. I’m not as sure of her; she’ll never let on what she really thinks of him. But that’s him. Except for too much of the NASA bit. That’s Gilpin. Funny, how it crept in. But in every other way, that’s him all right. I’m always so shitty good at it. At putting myself in his place.

Mole looked down at himself. Wonder will I tell Gilpin?…Know I’m going to. Funny, how when I went up to Gilpin in that grisly corridor, how he seemed to recognize me. Though that’s only the man’s way; they all say. If I tell him I’m here, won’t I have to tell him why? He’ll worm it out of me…Know I want him to.

Freddie won’t talk—if the press get to him in Osaka. But he’s there. And I’m—wherever here will be. Somebody’ll leak it. Maybe the somebody will be me. And that’s the way it’ll be. For the honorable admiral.

The sharp ache in his chest isn’t a physical one. That’s unfair. Everything ought to be physical here.

He ought to be hearing from others in the cabin. Not a rustle above the flight’s steady wash. Soon the aides must come with food—or did muscle drill come before? He’s almost hungry enough to raid the emergency supply under the seat. Would an alarm ring out? He’s tempted to—just to hear something. No, can’t afford yet to get caught with his hand in the cookie jar, or in any unspecified act. Maybe no one here can. Maybe robot-hands, not in the manual, would unfold out and discipline them. Or maybe no one’s here, except him. Which would he prefer? He won’t answer. He prefers to be a child at his window, waiting to be called to meal. When all children are good. Soon the mother-voice will chime.

He dares a look at the window. A tremendous corps de ballet of stars leaps at him and over his head. Shift focus and those stars are stationary, Mole passing. Fixed points, maybe, of a far somebody’s toleration, they gaze toward him out of the uncountable woods. Creaturing toward him, who can fly. If he had his golden branch with him, his magical brass-bone, he’d play clarinet for them. He’s trilling, the long note unfurling from his mouth. Softly, p’roo. Who’d think that one could whistle, in non-gravity? In his dream or doze, his cabinmates answer him.

A man’s descending hand, naked out of its mitt, nicks past his shoulder but can’t rest there. To his sleep-myopic eyes it’s huge and sculpturally near, a marble hand from a Rodin, from a monument. The hand of God, broken from the largest statue in the universe, is at his shoulder. But on the underside of its wrist, on the soft inner part over the tendons, is a human mark.

“Haven’t played the clarinet in years,” Mole mumbled. He woke. “Who’s whistling?”

“You started it.” Gilpin, grasping a wall bracket, is dangling over him.

Mole’s ear can distinguish two or three ordinary chuffers, an off-key Wish-I-were-in-Dixie and one fancy birdman trill. Everybody in the cabin must be at it. Testing space with the tongue. Tasting Outer. God, above him, has a one-day beard.

The space suit hangs on Gilpin shabby-perfect, the way his clothes used to when he was lecturing, easy togas for that well-known head. Which is staring down intently at Mole’s breast pocket. The free hand, marble no longer, floats at his side. The unsupported feet tread air. Sweat starts from the stubbled cheeks—floating is hard work. The free hand lowers to touch Mole’s ungloved hand, turning it palm up. Freddie had done the purple wrist mark on it with a tattoo needle. He’s an able draftsman, but the marks on the two wrists held up for Mole’s inspection are not quite the same. A bead of sweat, loosed from the nodding head above him breaks into a cloud of minute globules, dispersing out.

“Sonny Perdue?” God says.

Lying on his rack, Mole gazes up, the joints of his limbs lifting and lowering as if he himself is the air’s articulation. Thought is breaking out on him, like sweat too, crusting his upper lip with what tomorrow may be beard. The whistling has died, silenced by the truer music of affairs.

“Saw your picture once, in your father’s office.”

Mole, staring up, acquires his first definition of God. God is whoever is ambulating, half-created by the horizontal’s awe for the vertical.

“Does your father know?”

Mole smiles down, studying his own body’s rise and fall. Suddenly, with a swift glance at the panel, which says nothing new, he thumbs the right spot on the couch arm, his straps fly up and he with them, grabbing the hand rail in the cabin wall just in time. He’s panting, but where everybody wants to be, from Peter Pan on. Walking on air. From his cabin mates below, a faint cheer. “Know what?”

“That you’re here.”

Swung by their hands, he and Gilpin ride chest to bumping chest. Must he answer him? Can’t have two idols; you must choose. Letting one destroy the other. According to all the comic books.

“I
know.” It feels to him as if he’s chosen himself. Perhaps it’s meant to. This is what Freddie couldn’t tell him. I’m the real liftoff. As Tom here is. As all the whistlers are, in all the goodly vessels. We’re the orbit in the greater dark, and we’ll be the docking, or the overshoot. All of us—the passengers of ourselves. Even to any dummies on the flight deck.

Is he now in possession of all the flight facts?

Quick, the panel’s glowing angrily.
RETURN TO COUCH.

“Tom—ask you something?”

But Tom’s head is bent. One wavering hand has slipped its rung. The other’s about to, loosing him to be dashed upward, or from side to side. How it would actually be—Mole can’t recall. But his muscles already move, as on any old playing field. One of his fists uncramps itself, snagging Gilpin by the belt. Straining Gilpin toward him, lifting him like a sack of nothing, a human bubble, he hooks him to the wall. Turning carefully, leaning into it, he does the same for himself. No time for the couch.

So they swing again, side by side.

“Thanks.” Gilpin’s greenish around the mouth. “You wanted—to ask me?”

Mole shakes his head—oops! The tendons he overworked there a moment ago stretch oddly light, but not without effort. There’s weight in space, but it’s not—weight. Let the question hang there. “Never mind.”

“Sorry.” Gilpin’s grimace is new. Three years ago when Mole first heard him speak he had a roundish crowd-blending countenance hard to remember. Now his hawk-lids droop, scarab-patched. One would know him anywhere.

So this is Tom Gilpin. Not old, nowhere near aged, but one can see how his aging is going to be, with no return possible. So this is Mole’s father as well. Those who have to tot up their century. Men of power have such killing smiles when they’re weakly like this—but would one die for them?

Gilpin caught sight of the panel. He sighs, looking downward. “Is that couch a hundred miles away? Or only ten?”

They’ve linked onto the highest grips on the wall. Mole half wants to let go, to try how it would be to bob in helpless ricochet. How niggly careful you have to be here. “You just go down hand over hand. Hand
under
hand. And leg. See those notches? They’re on the transverse. Makes it easier. Just be careful—not to rise.” He grins helpfully. Down below, the others in the cabin, all second crew, are now sitting upright like good pupils.

“You didn’t understand, Sonny. I’ll make it. Just that I’m scared.” Gilpin’s eyes bore into his. “Still want to ask me something? Or not?”

They swing.

It comes to Mole how precious such a question would be. One of the durable ones likely to go unanswered, even by headmaster Chape. Unasked, it could sustain him through the airlocks ahead. Only clasp it. Is space an opening out? Or a closing in?

“Sorry about this, Sonny. I’m of the gravity generation.”

“Name’s Mole.”

“Sorry, Mole.”

Pass
me
the torch, Mole said to himself. To all of them.

“SO, YOU FOUND YOUR NEW WIFE
over here,” Bill Wert said across their table. All the Garrick’s other patrons were still at the bar. Club London didn’t usually dine at six-thirty, nor Wert either.

Opposite him, the heavily mustached young Iranian, last seen eighteen years ago as a boy of ten, stared at him unnervingly.

“I m-mean of course, in N-new York.” Wert sat back, annoyed. To all steadfast career officers in the Department, any place outside the U.S., even one’s own club in London, remained “over there” even when one
was
there. Normally Wert concealed it better.

Young Bakhtiary kept silent. “New wife,” said to any modern upper-class Iranian, was tactless as well; monogamy was what was recent to them. To say it to Manoucher, whose father, in defiance of both fashion and palace ukase had taken a second wife at seventy and was now, at over ninety, taking a third (which must be why the son, for five years at the UN without a break, was passing through London on his way home), meant that Wert had jumped nuances and was speaking as family, to which his unique friendship with the elder Bakhtiary entitled him.

Under that luxuriant mustache, which these days must make him appear old-fashioned even among his own countrymen, the boy eating now looked stolid and alertly stupid, the way all young men of his kind used to. In the thirty minutes since he and Wert had met, he’d seldom spoken without deliberation, as if the two long balloons of black hair on his upper lip gave him that privilege. Their tapered ends, if slightly elongated and tied behind his narrow Aryan head, could serve him as a mask, should he ever need one. All the young men had looked like that, in the provincial Azerbaijan of the younger Bill’s first tour. While there, a tender sprig barely out of Georgia, he’d never met a Bakhtiary socially, or a Pahlevi—the patronymic of the former Shah—either. This young man’s mother, the august first wife, had been a Pahlevi. With a long palace arm.

“In New York?” Manouch, tall even at ten, must have got this from her side. He wore a Savile Row suit and Hardyman made-to-order shirt—which he wouldn’t have acquired in the present oil-money “Arab” sack of London, but by inherited habit. He put a manicured and wedding-ringed hand on the cloth. A squirt of mock orange, maybe Floris, came from him pleasantly. “No,” he said slowly. “I would not have find a wife there.”

Wert grimaced, not concealing it. He’d never again seen Bakhtiary the father, or any of the family since that time in Venice, eighteen years ago, when the old man’s whole female clan had been accidental witnesses to Wert’s tragedy—the death of his wife Jenny in the courtyard below the Bakhtiarys’ hotel suite’s window—and the old man had for a spell adopted him. But the letters from Teheran still came regularly, written in the elegant Harrovian script and grammar of maybe 1905—along with slang roguishly Americanized for his correspondent.
Bill, I’m getting hitched again,
last week’s letter had said.
Do you know the Egyptian symbol for life
—
the ankh?
Bakhtiary had drawn it.
That’s what a woman is. And the same shape.
Adding, as often recently,
You’re forty-six, Bill, fourteen years younger than me when I first married. Precocious, you were to us in Venice, married at only twenty-eight.
The old man remembered everything—even that the day was a Wednesday, when Jenny Wert’s motorcycle had toppled on the cobbles below the Hotel Danieli’s balcony—and often described it. Never until now saying, or implying as so many friends did, “Bill, why don’t you marry again? It’s time.”

“You mean you wouldn’t want to find a wife there?” Wert said irritably. Frankness had kept his rank low in the service, though the home crowd had learned that foreigners tended to trust him because of it.

“In New York?” the son repeated, then logjammed again, in the remembered provincial style. Had he been brought up in the provinces? Was he a smart Bakhtiary, exported to the UN, or only a rich one whose way in had been bought for him? Could this son ever grow up to the thunderously willful style of his father? Who’d fallen from governmental grace a hundred times, and always on his feet—a dapper man, clean-shaven even then, who talked fast English and moved slow, clearly accomplishing mountains of the intrigues they called work, and twinkling all the while over “our little corruptions”—teasing all Anglo-Saxons within range.