Mysteries of Motion (56 page)

“Thank you,” he says low. “Your car’s a rented one, isn’t it? Why don’t we go in mine? It is mine.” He blushes again. “Give me the registration. Fateh will take care of delivering it.”

“She drives?”

“Like the wind.” He goes off to take care of it.

“He’ll have some money of his own,” the girl says. “He doesn’t know it yet. Bakhtiary saw to it. Your cousin will take him in?”

“For good? You’d want that?”

“Best for him.” From behind the glasses, and the hat.

“Possibly she’ll be glad to. They’re about the same age. And tastes.”

Crazy. How can he know what Ferey’s tastes are, or even his own cousin’s, during those intervals when all creatures are a lone unit of being? He’s merely tired of clocking the differences between people; he wants likenesses. It’s then we can make decisions for others. “And, that house of hers.” With all its assembled family garniture. “He can organize it. Like a palace.” Relieving me of that yoke. Wert finds he can smile. “Look—it won’t take long to get to my hotel. They’ll find rooms, for you and him. The manager’s—a gentleman. Tomorrow you’ll see a doctor.” He’s prepared to insist. No answer. “At my cousin’s—we’ll decide what next. That okay with you?” She has a right to know what to expect. So does he.

She’s listening, but not to him. To a sound he can’t identify, either what it is or where it’s coming from, except that it’s not coming from the dining room. Pillahil-ilah-allah-ilal. The voice of the wedding presents, wailing from the box-room downstairs? Or all the random birdcalls of his life come to plague him, as men are plagued when they find pleasures too strange for them? Peeah-ee-ahooo-eu-uu-pewi. Balooch.

No, it’s the call to evening, from the mosque. Do they have an
imam,
here?

Together, they follow it.

In the small room off the hallway a slim figure, white-shirted, is touching its forehead to the floor over and over. It’s a young man, a young man’s voice, rasping and uncertain, new to heavenward allegation, testing it. Or greeting what presently exists. It’s the Ordoobadi boy.

Finished, he passes their niche without seeing them. Wert has a view of his face. That face knows it is immigrant.

He checks an impulse to go after it. No more cronies for tea. This girl is bringing him dowry enough. The reasons for violence—he must always have wanted them.

Wert raises his head, sniffing. He knows that smell, long-grained in the nostril, Caspian, on the edge of char. They’ll eat it anyway, as they always do. This meal is not on camera. Each child shall have a piece of its burnt lace. “The rice is burning.”

That driver’s cap she’s wearing must be Fateh’s. The long visor projects from her forehead like an antenna, over goggles that watch. He lifts the cap off, the glasses also, half wanting the guises never to end. She’s to lead him to the wilderness.

Underneath, her eyelids are wrinkled shut in prune misery. Her mouth is moving, in his language. He bends his ear to it. “Make me be here. I am not here yet. Please—make me be here.”

Ferey, passing them on his way out to the car, lowers his glance respectfully. They seem to be in a passage of love.

The small room Wert can see over her shoulder has nothing religious in it except an east window. It’s reddening. Old Sol’s going cosmic, once again. In the mean street down below, buildings hulk on their paws before him. South of Vancouver, on the last coast West, mountains slope to the sea, kitten in the starlight. Praise all the path between there and here—his country.

The game is always to enumerate, to praise, swallowing all ethical or aesthetic disappointment. To traipse across the steppes, the kraals, the wadis of whatever, the golf courses and the health stations of the new, new world, or the old, with heart-warming dinners everywhere. He can’t. No more palaces, except for Fereydoun.

How give someone your country except by first in faith receiving it, taking it like communion on the tongue? In all its shames and glories.

He pressed a hard palm against her back, remembering exactly everything. “You’ll dream here,” he said.

We’re the western approaches, limpid in the starlight. They haven’t really seen us yet.

“O
H, MY HONIES—”
Mulenberg writes to his daughters. The word processor has already corrected him—“honeys.” After spending three of his daily Free Room hours in mute session with it, he isn’t about to argue. Those are his first written words.

Behind him, Gilpin hunches in one of the silvery Easy Chairs, so labeled by its distant manufacturer. An easy chair shouldn’t be luminous, he said the first day. He always has a book. Sometimes he annotates rapidly in what he says is a form of speed-writing but each day he politely refuses use of the processor. “Bravo,” he says now. “Don’t stop for me.”

“I’m not. If you’re sure you don’t want it.”

“Hath too lean and hungry a look for me. We won’t have them at
The Sheet.”
At mention of his newspaper his face gives its usual gaunt twitch.

“Shakespeare—” the man now known to them as Cohen-Lievering says, making it out the airlock in one eel-hipped slide. His large head, bobbing on its rubber neck, recedes last.

“Some exit line,” Mulenberg says.

“He once had to recite whole plays, for his stuttering.” Gilpin nods toward the shelves of personal-history folders which line the forward wall. “Moves like an angel, though.”

“Or like a bat. Extra-sensory vibrations in his nose. Where’d he go?” Mulenberg has no further reason to be envious of Lievering on Veronica’s account, unless one is stupid enough to be envious of history. The man to be jealous of, for commanding love he hasn’t sought, is sitting across from him.

“Second crew’s cabin, next to the cockpit. He and Mole.” Gilpin’s face lights up. “That’s where they’ve berthed the boy. The whistlers’ cabin, Mole calls it.”

“Kid’s kind of their mascot, eh?”

“You might say—everybody’s.” Gilpin hunches further into the offending chair. He and Mulenberg are both in their more comfortable fatigue suits. He looks up from his usual brooding, the space pencil on its wrist-clip dangling idly. There’s gravity here, but no loose objects are allowed. “According to Mole, Ship’s Commander Captain Dove thinks Lievering looks like Jesus. A Jewish Jesus, the captain said.” Gilpin grins until the joke takes.

“Mole—” Mulenberg says. “That the boy’s name? Or his situation.” He’s not been too dazed by his own affairs to see that there is one.

“He was born to it.” Gilpin shuts his lip.

The man can’t lie; he even dislikes chairs for pretending to be Easy. But he can be sloppy about the facts. “Dove isn’t the ship’s commander,” Mulenberg says gently. “Commander’s an air-force cross-over none of us in Ordnance has met yet. Don’t know if even Wert has. Keeping him under wraps.”

Gilpin smiles at himself—the kind of man who would see his own drawbacks in perspective. “Should’ve known they’d never stand for a commander named Dove.”

So even Gilpin isn’t idealist enough to assume there are no military aspects to this mission? “The
Civilian Courier,”
Mulenberg says with a smile. Their brand of hype. So simple it works. For the great mass of the simple. For whom he has no contempt but no special feel, either. Except for his travels, he might have been one of them.

“Wert says that word acts on me like a glass of wine. Civilian.”

“Wert doesn’t get to go forward much, does he. For a man who’s going to be administrative officer.” Some show of equality was usually made by the military, when they wanted a man’s services. There had been—for Mulenberg.

“Wert has—a lot of background. Old government man.”

“Pretty dated, eh?”

The answer is just a headshake, but with more cussedness than maybe shows. Anyway, a man not to be lifted up by his own lapels. Yet accessible. Gilpin may make it his business to know about you, but this is why you can talk to him. Mulenberg sighs. “Wert had daughters, he’d know how dated he really is. Especially if they’ve got the idea you travel light.” Veronica crosses his mind, like a wraith which can’t get away this time. Where is she? Not far. “Promised to write them a full account. So as not to be just a—you know. Passenger freight. Maidie’s the emotional one, though to see her you’d never know. Married to that town she lives in. Keeps their home on firehouse discipline.” Though that broker husband of hers will never find the brass pole to slide down on for getaway. “I did something to shock her years ago, at her mother’s funeral. Well, you might as well know. I tore the dress—from the body. She hadn’t spoken to me since. Until the corridor.”

Mulenberg stretched, staring up. Ceiling and walls here are some stuff the lay trade hasn’t got the patents to yet. “So this trip must be of some use.” Mulenberg’s chuckle doesn’t quite make it. He presses a wall slot, closes on the dropped lozenge and pops it in his mouth.

“Tessa’s the
kind
one. The Californian. Lives in a Mendocino ravine, runs a commune.” He grins. “No one person’s supposed to run a commune. But Tessa does. With a lovely boy, now and then. Big girl, like her sister. Like me. Both of them with minds like their mother, sort I can talk business to. Miss that. Matter of fact, their college yearbook called them the two Kwan-Yins.” Though Tessa isn’t that neat a dresser, she’s the one you can give presents of value which would horrify Maidie with price-guilt. But now, after years of drouth, he must find a present for Maidie, too. What can it be, from here?

“As for that lad—I like his spirit. Though that age, I never know what to say to them.” He chuckles. The lozenge has helped. Everything here works as it’s meant to. “Know what he said to Ver—Miss Oliphant? ‘I feel at home with you because you’re like me. By now you’re just a little bit black.’”

“Smart boy.”

“Where is she?” After that scene in the corridor he knows his offhandedness fools no one.

“She has to wander. Reporter habit.” Gilpin smiles—since who can wander here? “My guess is she’s in with Seat Six.” In the Hygiene Unit, one side of which has become the two women’s hangout. He smiles too for that female bonding.

“So does the Jew wander, eh? Habit.” He’s glad when Gilpin laughs. “Watch myself, eh. Lived too long in Islam.”

“Ah. You meet Wert there?”

“I recommended him. But d’ya know, I can’t remember. Whether I actually did meet him.”

“He blends. It worries him.”

Mulenberg shuffles his notes, gathered for him in Washington. “Well, better get on with it.” He turned back to the machine. “You know—” he said dreamily, “I’ve been going on the idea, tell the emotional stuff to Maidie, the practical stuff to Tess. Divided like they always were, or trying to be. But maybe that’s what's holding me up.”

“Lucky—” comes from Gilpin behind him, “That you can tell the difference.”

There speaks a man who’s settled all that, Mulenberg thinks. Is it because I haven’t yet, that I divide the girls? Gilpin would never humiliate a corpse. Or confuse love and the body. Or be in thrall to any of it? He’s so safely in thrall to the multitude.

“I’ve read you,” Mulenberg said.

Behind him, Gilpin writes: “How vulnerable they often are, the men with daughters only. Sometimes they have extra stature because of it, sensitivities they themselves don’t identify. Their loves are often marked by being so much with women—surely this man’s are. But the world can make them feel they’re men without sons, so sometimes they hunt the male life? Bonding with the expense-account bars, the academic or commercial offices. And when they meet the ‘lads’—other men’s sons—are shy with them—”

“But, too easy for me to see what children are to people, since I have none. Like Wert here, up to now.”

Otherwise, Wert’s life is so outrun by the past decade that to men like Mulenberg it must read like history. Nothing so outmoded one political framework as the emergence of another. Wert, the foreign service officer, is getting to be the last of a certain kind of national, a man whose responses, geared to Earth politics, are of a kind which, along with the twentieth century, begins to disappear. Decades go faster toward the end of a century. The old politics is now as primitive-sounding as old land-grants. The new century is in the air,

So far according to what he’s reading, Wert has no children. But unlike Gilpin, he’s thought of it.

Quickly, Gilpin buries his head. Not before he sees Mulenberg’s newest opener, transcribed on the lighted screen where the processor’s user and any audience may follow his thoughts, reblinked:
Dear Kwan-Yins:

Mulenberg’s going to cheat. His file of space data, executed by research staff at his various offices, is merely a dictionary of heterogeneous fact designed to help him self-orient. He’ll use it whether he understands it or not—as really the more honest reportage on his present condition. And in spite of that salutation, he’ll alternate the two girls as it comes to him to do. As it comes to him! He trembles with communication, holding that abused word in his mouth like a lozenge. He’s naked in this new limbo, with his two communicants. None of the three of them yet a corpse.

Girls:

—I’m in a kind of common room and library which we’ve taken to calling the Free Room, because we’re on our own here—not otherwise programmed—and it has gravity. Pseudo of course, made by revolving the room, which is a cylinder, just as will be done in portions of the habitat. Or so I get it. You understand I hope that we’re not en route to another planet. Excuse if I insult your intelligence. I find that notion still prevalent down below. We’re of course en route to a man-made station, only one larger and farther than ever before.

And for longer inhabitance. No one’s believed, you see, that we’d do it so soon. And perhaps we won’t. When I look over the ordnance, one thing I do know down to the ground—ha, pun, Tessa—I have doubts. And no one’s really said—permanent. But make it or not, the world’ll be changed—already is. Doesn’t take a philosopher to see that (though I’ve got one sitting next to me). For instance, not two weeks out, and we’re already calling you Down Below. Not accurate. But we’re calling you it.

Let me give you a rundown on our daily routine. So that—