Warp (7 page)

He craned his neck for a few moments, then looked away.

“Let's not stare at them, shall we?”

Fay walked over to the bar, still arranging her hair.

“Once I was at this party at the Snail Club,” Basil said. “And Kay pulled me into the bathroom with her. She just wanted to mess around a little, I guess, I don't know. Anna was there that night, and I wanted to get out without anybody seeing us together, but I couldn't figure out how, so I started to climb out the window, but I was too drunk and I ended up just falling out instead. It was only on the first floor. But guess who was in the driveway? Fay. She was on her hands and knees, throwing up, and I landed on her.”

He looked over again.

“Look at her jaw. They both have these Dudley Do-Right chins.”

“It's not like anybody forced you to sleep with her or anything,” said Rob.

“Actually, I didn't sleep with her, if you really want to know.”

“Really?” Peters leaned forward. “Is she a virgin?”

“A virgin?”

“Oh, God,” said Rob. “Don't talk about it.”

Basil shrugged. “She was never not so by my hand,” he said.

The women sat down at the bar; Fay sat with her back to it, leaning back on her elbows, and a tall, red-faced man came over and kissed them both on the cheek.

“You never went out with her, did you, Hollis?” said Rob.

“A gentleman never tells.” He took another sip of his gin and tonic.

Peters announced that he had to go to the bathroom, and Blake stood up to let him out. More drinks came. As the waiter unloaded them, mariachi music started blaring out of some lo-fi-looking speakers up near the ceiling. Hollis began to feel detached from what was going on around him. He leaned back against his corner of the booth and let his head rest against the wall, while the others kept talking.

Sea marks of dark seaweed, limp sea rags, laid out in parallel on a bank of yellow sand. Shreds of foam arise and subside upon a field of green-and-blue swells.

I am Chingachgook—the Last of the Mohicans.

“It's not like a horse is going to be much help in a dungeon,” Blake was saying. “It's just going to fall in a pit or something. Step on a caltrop. Then you basically have to shoot it.”

“What's a caltrop?” Basil asked.

“It's a trap. Ah—a little spiky thing.”

He looked around for something to illustrate with.

“It has four points, like a pyramid. They make it so however it lands, there's always a spike pointing straight up. And it's small: you just drop a whole bunch of them on the ground if someone's chasing you on horseback, and the horse steps on them.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Or in a car,” said Peters. “It works on tires. They still use them, actually.”

Blake sipped his martini and made a face.

“Is it bad?” Basil asked.

“Too strong.”

He took another sip and shivered.

“Yeesh.” He shivered again. “Too much vermouth.”

“And what are you going to do with it?” Hollis said. “Even outside a dungeon. The horse, I mean. Joust? There's no point in jousting in D&D. I doubt I ever even owned a lance. All your adventuring gets done in a space that's relatively tightly circumscribed—”

Rob snorted derisively. “All
your
adventuring, maybe—”

“But it doesn't have to be a horse anyway,” Blake said. “It can be anything you can ride. Like a hippogriff. Or—”

He thought hard for a second.

“Or a pseudo-dragon.”

“Oh, sure,” said Basil. “A pseudo-dragon. Good thinking.”

“Gentlemen,” Peters said, raising his glass. “Please. I give you caltrops.”

They all drank.

Hollis closed his eyes and opened them again. Time seemed to be accelerating.

“Fair knight,” said the Maiden, “if you would agree to tarry with me here, and leave aside your questing ways, I should be most grateful.”

“That shall I not,” said the Knight.

He made as if to fasten on his helm.

“Oh please, fair knight,” said she, her bosom heaving. “Leave aside the ways of battle!”

“That shall I not,” repeated the Knight. “For I do seek the Grail.”

“First of all,” he heard Blake saying, when he focused again, “there'd be no noise in space. No torpedo noises, no explosion noises. Right? If you don't have any air you can't have noises, right? There's no medium to … whatever. Propagate it with. The noise. No big roaring noise when the
Enterprise
goes by, or anything like that. None of those signature
Star Trek
subsonics.”

His pale skin was flushed pink under his goatee. The waiter brought more drinks. Blake kept talking while he unloaded them with both hands.

“In fact”—he held up his finger—“you don't really use engines in space that much at all, really, since”—he stabbed his finger down on the table—“a ship proceeds at a constant velocity in free fall. In a vacuum. Right? There's nothing to slow it down.”

He took a sip.

“Microparticles,” Rob said. “Maybe. Actually, they can carry sound, too—”

“It just keeps going by itself. You only use engines when you accelerate or decelerate. None of this fucking ‘She can't take much more o' this, Cap'n!' It's space, right? You just coast, all the way!”

“That's it, Blake,” said Peters. “Get angry.”

“Well, but think about it,” Hollis said. “What do we really know about warp anyway? They might be right.”

He sat back against the back of the booth. He hadn't said anything for a while, and suddenly everybody was looking at him.

“What if warp is more like water? Maybe you
need
to run the engine all the time, just like a ship needs its propeller going all the time, to fight against the resistance of the water. See what I'm saying? Maybe there's resistance, and you have to keep pushing all the time, or you just slow down and stop. What if warp isn't all just coasting along all the time?”

The calculating capacity of my artificial positronic brain is approximately seven trillion times that of your human brain.

“Maybe,” Blake said. “Maybe. Still, they talk the same way about impulse power, too.”

He thought for a moment.

“All that bridge protocol comes from nineteenth-century naval stuff, you know. It's all in Patrick O'Brian.”

Malo climbed into his skiff and paddled out into the middle of the bay. No one saw him.

“Transporters, though, that's another thing: Scotty was trapped in a transporter for eighty years, right? In the Dyson Sphere episode. He doesn't age, because he's trapped in a transporter beam. Or does he? What about Lieutenant Barclay—when
he's
stuck in the transporter, something bites him on the arm. The Transporter Psychosis episode. It's not like he's frozen in time, he's still conscious. So why doesn't Scotty age when he's trapped in the transporter beam?”

Blake finished his drink. Nobody said anything.

“Well, anyway,” he said. “Think about it.”

“Geordie says it's on a special diagnostic circuit.”

“Your mother's on a fucking diagnostic circuit,” said Peters.

A crowd of three or four people banged in through the door, talking loudly. Cold air washed through the room. More drinks arrived.

“Plus,” said Blake, “if he was trapped for eighty years inside a transporter he'd go insane, even if he didn't die of old age.”

“Maybe he was lying,” Peters said.

“Lie is a blow to the tyranny of fact,” Hollis said.

He studied the backs of his hands, wiggling his fingers.

“I think lies are good,” he said. “People should lie more. Lies are like these little peepholes into a better world.”

“Milord waxes eloquent,” Peters said. “God, you're a cheap date, Hollis.”

None could match his merry gibes.

“I heard about this perfect job the other day,” said Rob. “Some of my radio friends. There's this Japanese news program that needs an entertainment reporter to cover, like, the whole U.S. scene. It has some dorky Japanese name, like
Eyepopper News
or something—you have to be fluent in Japanese. But if you were, you'd be set.” He shook his head, looking a little glassy-eyed. “The money was unbelievable.”

Hollis unobtrusively took his wallet out of his pocket, under the table, and counted the money in it. His hands were shaking.

Even those who tried to draw closer to him, lured by his wealth or the secret of his success.

No one spoke, and Hollis's attention wandered to the rest of the bar. Warm, humid air had steamed up the windows. A woman with short dyed-blond hair sat by herself, occasionally drinking beer from a glass, with a vacant expression. She was pretty, in a schoolgirlish way. Hollis caught her eye. She looked, then looked away. Some waiters and waitresses were sitting together in a closed-off section, sipping water and talking sedately among themselves. A few had already changed into their street clothes.

“If there's a bright side to the galaxy,” Peters said, more or less aimlessly, “we're on the planet that's farthest from it.”

For the first time that night Hollis noticed some long strings of garlics and dried peppers that were hanging from the ceiling. He was definitely feeling the gin and tonics, and he closed his eyes and pressed on his eyelids with the tips of his fingers.

The spins started.

There once was a man named McGee

Who lived almost entirely on tea

When they said, “You'll get fat.”

He replied, “What of that?”

That insalubrious old man from

“There's a monster GSAS party tonight,” said Blake. “Free beer. It's over in Lehman Hall.”

“Can you get us in?” said Basil.

He shrugged.

“It'd be dicey. The Law School isn't a graduate school, strictly speaking, it's professional.”

“Wise man,” said Hollis. “Learn a profession.”

“Forget it,” said Peters. “It's too late. By God, we'll stand here, and we'll die here.”

“You think she's seen me?” Basil said, fingering a button on his pinstriped vest.

“Who?” Peters asked.

“Fay.”

He gestured at the bar with his chin. They looked, but she wasn't there anymore. They found her sitting at a table with her woman friend in another part of the restaurant. The man she'd been talking to was gone.

“Signs would point to no,” Hollis said.

A waiter came over to announce last call.

“My cousin's coming to stay with me tomorrow,” Rob said. “He went to MIT. He stayed around here for a little while after he graduated, but he couldn't get a job—it was weird. He just lived off some kind of trust fund, till it ran out.”

A glass fell and smashed behind the bar, and everybody in the room stopped talking for a second.

“After that,” Rob went on, “I remember he started buying these surplus bulk food consignments because they were cheaper: crates of yams and stuff like that. Star melons. The weirdest possible stuff—all these Southeast Asian vegetables nobody'd ever even heard of. He used to go down to the docks to find them. Our whole family was just totally baffled.

Malo stayed awake until his parents were asleep, then slipped out the window and down to the docks where the fishing boats were kept.

“After a while he moved out to some town in upstate New York, with some friends of his from school. I guess it was cheaper. Now he spends all his time playing role-playing games—last I heard he was running a play-by-mail simulation of the Napoleonic Wars. In real time.”

As for that,
mon vieux—je n'en ai rien
.

“Look,” said Blake. He was carefully folding up a dollar bill into sections. He held it up. “It says, ‘Tits of America'!”

Hollis picked up a salt shaker and poured out some salt onto the table. He started pushing it into a crack in the tabletop with a steak knife. Somewhere somebody was making a tone by running a finger around the rim of a wineglass.

He glanced down at his watch. Peters noticed and leaned over to him.

“Don't fall asleep,”
he whispered.

“That's when they get you!” he shouted. “When you sleep!”

Blake slid out of the booth, followed by Peters, who heaved himself out and staggered a few steps away. The café was mostly empty, except for a few people at the bar.

“Jesus!” Peters said, stretching. “I feel like I have polio.”

They worked out the money and started getting ready to go. Rob had his coat on already. He poured what was left of all their drinks into one single glass, which was already cloudy with the dregs of Basil's margarita.

He held it up, saying solemnly:

“I have created life.”

They threaded their way single file through the tables and out the door. Hollis's ears rang in the sudden quietness as he put on his scarf and gloves. A dark figure on a ten-speed bicycle flew by in the darkness, gears ticking, bundled up against the cold. A half-full moon shone in the clear black sky. They stood around for a minute, just taking in deep lungfuls of the clean night air.

“I've been turning into kind of a pedophile lately,” Peters said. “It's pretty disgusting. I have a real thing for that girl in
Jurassic Park.
Lex. She can't be more than fifteen.”

“Are you kidding?” said Blake. He belched. “Relax, I'm sure she's like thirty-five by now.”

“But not only that, there's this commercial for some local restaurant, on cable, where these two girls are talking to their mom, and—”