Ark (34 page)

It seemed strange to me to be having a conversation like this in the dark. We couldn’t see each other’s faces, so how could we know what was really happening between us? Henry must have had similar thoughts, because he switched on a lamp. This enabled him to see the tears in my eyes.

He said, “I’m serious.”

“I know. You don’t think we’re rushing into this?”

“Hardly. We’ve had a long engagement.”

The next morning, accompanied by Ng Fred and Daeng, we flew to Ulan Bator. Arrangements had been made. A large black car met us at the airport and took us to a government building. I wore the nicest dress I had brought with me. Our witnesses, besides Ng Fred, were the pilot, a Chinese woman called Li-li, and Daeng. An official who spoke English listened while we exchanged vows as prescribed in the
Sigalovada Sutta,
the Buddhist text that pertains to the happiness visible in the present life. We had memorized the words on the plane.

Looking into my eyes, Henry said, “I promise to love and respect my wife, to be kind and considerate, to be faithful, to confide responsibility to her in domestic matters, and to provide gifts to please her.”

Looking into his eyes, I said, “To my husband, I promise to perform my household duties, to be hospitable to my in-laws and friends of my husband, to be faithful, to protect and save our earnings, and to fulfill my responsibilities lovingly and conscientiously.”

Ng Fred produced rings—plain gold bands Henry must have bought in New York, or who knows where. Henry and I exchanged them. Chastely, Henry kissed his bride.

The official spoke a few words in Khalkha Mongolian. Ng Fred interpreted and told us what to say in response. The official filled out our marriage certificate, writing everything in Cyrillic letters except our names, which he copied in Roman letters from our passports. It was evident that Henry’s name meant nothing to him. We were just a couple of wandering Americans who thought we were Buddhists, getting married in the wrong country. He signed and stamped the certificate and handed it over. Ng Fred paid the fee. The thing was done.

This was my thought: Nobody had ever spoken lovelier vows. They left Henry and me feeling that for once between the two of us, nothing had been left unsaid. I could see this in his eyes, and I tried hard to make the same thought visible to him.

~ * ~

ELEVEN

~ * ~

1

IN
THE
TIME THAT FOLLOWED,
I learned a lot about Henry that I hadn’t known before—chiefly, that he liked to talk in the dark. Our deepest conversations occurred when he woke from a dream. In many of his dreams, Henry found himself in a metropolis that resembled a city he knew, yet was not quite itself. The light was dim, as if bathed in moonlight alone. Either electricity has not yet been discovered in this place, or knowledge of it has been lost. He stands just outside a crowd of strangers who shun him. He speaks to them. They hear him but do not reply. He’s not inaudible or invisible to them—they just don’t want to have anything to do with him. They are like people waiting for a bus that’s late. Where is it, they think in unison. Is it coming or not? Suddenly the crowd parts and a kind of Quasimodo, squat and ugly and unwashed and dressed in rags, leaps out and wraps his arms around Henry. He is tremendously strong. Henry tells him to let go, but like the original Quasimodo, the creature is deaf. Henry struggles, but struggle is hopeless. Quasimodo’s arms are a vise that keeps on tightening. There seems to be no limit to his strength. Henry realizes that there can be no escape. The creature is never going to let him go. What is this thing? Death? Fate? Madness? Henry’s intelligence? The dream faded to black before Henry found out.

We made love and went back to sleep.

After the wedding, Henry moved into “my” apartment. Apart from a couple of brief, long-ago experiments while I was still learning the dos and don’ts of intergender relationships, I had never before lived with a man. Having a husband around the house was far nicer than I had supposed. It turned out that Henry had lived here by himself for a couple of months, so he had no adjustments to make to his surroundings apart from having me around. Except for my closet, the place was as he had left it. I wondered if the original bed, his bed, had been replaced, and if not, what had gone on in it before he started keeping himself only unto me. Judging by his vigor, the answer was, Quite a lot. I had no wish to know who the lucky girls had been, and Henry asked me no questions about my past. Adam was never mentioned by either of us. Henry and I were hardly ever apart. We didn’t hang out together when we were at home, but I caught glimpses of him and heard fragments of his voice as he talked on the telephone. Months after the novelty had worn off, we made love many times a day, whenever the idea came to one or both of us.

Everyone came to dinner—Amerigo and Garbo, Clementine, the three engineers, Ng Fred and his wife, who bore a striking resemblance to a great beauty I had seen in several Chinese movies. It turned out that she and the gorgeous actress were one and the same woman. Like Ng Fred, she spoke American English. Her American name was Gwen. She had been raised in Santa Barbara. How she and her children had gotten out of China was not explained.

Henry’s Rule Number 1,”Make no fuss,” was strictly observed throughout the evening. The food and wine were no better than usual, but how could they have been? No announcement of our union was made. None was necessary. Ng Fred already knew the facts. Everyone else saw the rings. No one remarked on them.

A couple of times a week, Henry and I actually went to restaurants where he was a familiar but nameless figure, a very generous tipper who always paid cash. Sometimes we even went to the theater. We walked a lot in the evening, and gradually I learned the faces of the chaps who accompanied us. It was easy. Four of them always sat, two by two, at nearby tables in restaurants or in the seats behind us and beside us in theater, while two remained outside, one on the front door, one on the back. We ran in the park every morning. The chaps ran with us. In the wee hours, we swam in the pool in the basement of our building while the chaps patrolled the perimeter.

There were reasons why Henry’s anonymity endured. Some people didn’t believe he existed, but was a phantasm invented by the dark side for its own hidden purposes. Because of the constant feed of images from orbit, he was much discussed on talk shows and in social conversation. He and I overheard people talking about him in restaurants and theater lobbies. Most seemed to like the idea that they might walk right by Henry, look right at him, and never know who he was. Even if they suspected that Henry was who he was, restaurateurs and waiters who graciously accepted his crisp tax-free banknotes had no motivation to tip off the paparazzi. Hanging out in public with me was chancy, but the possibility that someone might recognize me as the scarlet woman of the tabloids and realize that Henry must be Henry didn’t seem to worry him. Or if it did, he never said so or behaved as if it was anything to worry about. The real reason that he was spared the burden of celebrity may have been a simple one: Despite his wealth, Henry was perceived to be a nice guy who had done what he had done on his own, by using his head. He had every right to put on airs, even to make a spectacle of himself, but he had never done so. His inventions were regarded by most people as good deeds. Room-temperature superconductors and a virus-free Internet and fusion power and the Spaceplane and the greatest show in orbit had made everyone’s life more interesting, and if he made a lot of money out of them, what was so un-American about a guy taking his cut? Henry’s latest thing, the construction of whatever he was building in Earth’s orbit, clearly had benevolent purposes even if he hadn’t yet revealed them. Who knew what he had in mind this time? Maybe a ship would go forth and in due course return from the other planets, or even the stars, laden with treasure like a Spanish galleon. If so, he was far more likely than any imaginable government to share the loot.

The media might not have shared the good impression of the masses, but the spectacle of the space maidens going about their mysterious work in their bright outfits was a better story. Henry had the power to shut off the cameras and stop the flow of information and the Niagara of money that the images from orbit generated for the television industry. The media did not want that to happen. In the end, the uproar over the enhanced embryos was a two-day story. Henry was not hiding out in the White House or the Pentagon or some imperialist corporate office. He just wanted his privacy, and the fact that he was just about the last man on Earth who had any privacy didn’t seem to bother the common man at all.

~ * ~

2

IT TURNED OUT THAT THIS idyll of wedded bliss was an entr’acte.
After months of silence from China, Beijing carried out the threat that General Yao had delivered when he and his soldiers in disguise visited Ng Fred’s factory in Mongolia. A no-holds-barred story in
People’s Daily
awakened the sleeping scandal of the enhanced embryos. The paper alleged that the hidden purpose of Henry Peel’s work in progress on the fringe of outer space was to build a spaceship whose mission was to rescue a group of multinational capitalists, who were secretly financing it, from a catastrophic worldwide earthquake that was expected to cripple civilization, cause billions of deaths, and make the planet Earth inhospitable to life. The secret plan of the capitalists was to return to Earth as soon as it was safe to do so and impregnate such women as had survived the catastrophe with the genetically engineered embryos recently discovered in Italy. The goal was to establish a new political and economic order imposed by the Ubermenschen that would be the product of these technological rapes. The helpless survivors of the apocalypse would be enslaved, and in the dark age to follow, would be bred selectively, like livestock, to ensure an adequate supply of slave labor.

People’s Daily
quoted from the report of a commission of one hundred distinguished scientists that had been convened by the ruling body of the country, the Politburo Standing Committee of the Communist Party of China. The scientific commission was called, inevitably, the Commission of One Hundred. It included not only Chinese scientists, but also scientists and academics from several other countries, including Asian, African, Latin American, and European nations and the United States. All affixed their signatures to the report, and on the day after it was made public by
People’s Daily,
many of them fanned out to appear on television and websites in their own countries to explain its details in the local language. The scientists described in detail the catastrophic effects of the hyperquake and the role of the core of the earth in generating it. Their vision of the Event was remarkably similar to Henry’s—as of course it would be, since they were at long last considering the same data. Some were certain that the hyperquake would occur soon. Others believed that it was unlikely to take place in the lifetime of anyone now alive. Most agreed that it was inevitable. The consensus of the media, which polled the scientists, was that the odds were fifty-fifty and that X-Day, as journalists immediately named it, would occur sooner rather than later.

This scenario was the paranoia industry’s dream come true. Not only was the world going to come to an end and the accursed United States of America along with it, but the planet that the human race had abused so shamelessly was going to strike back and destroy its tormentors. At bottom, an international capitalist conspiracy was the villain of the piece, and Henry, the capitalist whom the masses had loved, was exposed at last as the villain of villains.

The
People’s Daily
story pulled no punches. The thesaurus remained the bible of the Reds. Ng Fred was described as the notorious lackey of U.S. imperialism, Amerigo as the infamous international drug peddler, Clementine as the ruthless spymaster and tool of the CIA, Melissa as a Wall Street pettifogger, myself as the notorious courtesan and pornographer. Even the poor Prof was described as an agent provocateur and infiltrator of academia. The engineers were also named, along with others.

The problem was that the underlying facts, if not the frosting about the multinational capitalist conspiracy, were accurate enough. Henry and the rest of us had been doing exactly what the story said we were doing, i.e., building a ship in which a sample of humanity of our own choosing might escape extinction. We had been doing so without revealing our intentions.