Harsh Oases (2 page)

I had to laugh at the sheer brazenness of the man, and I did. It felt good, to let the laughter, however black, tumble out, unenforced and wild. When I stopped, we leaned together on the burnished aluminum and drank. His hip touched mine with more than accidental force, but I could not find it in me to rebuff the mild come-on.

My laughter acted as a lure cast into the night. Like a voracious fish intent on consuming the hapless angler, Jasmine swarmed back along the dying sound and found me. I could tell by the expression on her too-perfect face that she was afraid I was having fun without her.

“Martin, dearest,” she said, sweeping in upon Mireault and me, “whatever are you doing, languishing here in the stem?”

She was really wired tonight, more so than I had seen her in weeks, since she had died in front of twenty million people. The actress in her was in total control, turning every gesture and speech into a flamboyant bid for center-stage. She wore some new perfume that I hadn’t seen her buy. It smelled like an Egyptian orgy.

“We are lubricating,” I said, “the passage of time with the oil of intoxication.”

Mireault smiled and bowed. Jasmine extended her hand and had it kissed. “And your charming friend?” she asked.

I introduced the dapper Ambassador. Jasmine’s smile grew hollow when she realized he had no connection with show-business, and she went all stiff and mean.

“Well, if you must get cocked, come join the rest of us and be sociable. That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it? Besides, we’ll be getting underway soon. There’s a prize for the first boat to reach the capsule, and Colin’s determined to win it”

She pivoted and walked brusquely off, knowing I would follow like her lapdog.

Because, of course, I was.

In the bow, people stood elbow to elbow, swilling Piper-Heidsieck like water and gossiping. Soft blue bi-O-lites mounted on poles cast a subtle glow, more shadow than light. Many of the women wore eco- necklaces, another product of Fermenta A.B., the Swedish biotech firm that had made a fortune with last years lifegems. The clear tubes contained a kind of brine that was home to some diatoms, algae, and a few other simple organisms. (I believe one or two krill per necklace were the highest lifeforms contained.)

The material was oneway-permeable to air and the owner’s metabolic residues, which input was enough to sustain the whole miniature ecosystem for a few years.

I thought the jewelry was rather cruel. Imagine flaunting trapped creatures like that.…

Among the rest of the giddy passengers, I looked back and upward, to see Colin Trollinger, the famous cinema director, who was our unbearably gracious host, standing at the controls of his craft. The long blonde hair he was affecting this month, implanted at no little expense in a fashionable Brazilian clinic, waved in the night-breeze.

“There she is!” someone on our boat shouted. Immediately Colin flicked on a searchlight, which probed to the south, where the capsule was expected. More shouts and beams followed from our sister ships, till the night was filled with noise and light.

At last one of the criss-crossing shafts caught the descending, chute-strung capsule full on, and we were off toward it, engines roaring.

It looked so small and fragile, I wondered that anyone could have trusted himself to a flight in it But that was what Hughes, McDonnell Douglas, General Dynamics, Textron, and their lesser competitors were known for: quick, no-frills, cheap orbital service, in competition with the NASA and ESA shuttles, where everything was triple-redundant, with prices to match.

As we raced across the water, spray drenching everyone’s fancy clothes, I couldn’t imagine how the original shouter had spotted it. I figured later that it was sighted against the stars it occluded in its passage.

Eventually, the capsule splashed down, its chute billowing in the water around it like a huge jellyfish. We reached it first. I knew Colin would be smugly satisfied. But what thrill could he possible derive, when he was always first?

Our searchlight pinned the capsule to the water like a steel butterfly on shirred velvet. People clustered at the starboard rail. Two of Colin’s crew—big, competent, and bored-looking hirelings—were casting magnetic grapples. They caught the capsule and began to haul, their muscles straining. When it bumped our side, it blew its hatch.

Like Venus being born, wearing a silver suit and contoured unpressurised headgear, Nikki Nike emerged.

At that instant, the sky began to bum.

I am going to tell you that the aurorae were the most beautiful things I have ever seen, and you will not believe me, because you weren’t there. But it does not matter, because they were.

The aurorae were the most beautiful things I have ever seen.

Convoluted draperies of radiance, they bedecked the sky. Primarily greenish-yellow, they were tinged along their upper edges with a seepage of neon red, as if their namesake, Aurora, had lent them her hot plasma/blood. They stretched for miles in the ionosphere, seeming by perspective’s tricks to converge far away from us, as if flowing from some central source.

And flow they did. I had always thought—if I thought of it at all—that the aurorae would be static. But they were not. They pulsed, they crawled, they slithered, like gigantic living things, too high and supernal and proud to recognize the small creatures who watched them.

I stood entranced for an indefinite time—perhaps half an hour. The sheets of cool fire held all my self, dispersed yet intensified.

You must believe me.

When the last one died, I dragged my eyes and soul back to earth. At our ship’s bow, her headgear doffed to reveal a black crewcut, stood Nikki Nike, a small sacred circle separating her from the unwontedly silent Hesperideans. Her face seemed to bear some gorgeous afterglow from the heavenly display.

And why not?

She had made it happen.

The Senator from Puerto Rico was trying to charm the skivvies off the Women’s Wimbledon winner. I couldn’t say as I blamed him, since her plyoskin outfit was little more than a glossy blue lacquer over her formidable physique. Next to them, the Archbishop of New York was arguing politics with the Prime Minister of Ireland. Both had had too much to drink, and they seemed about to come to blows. I hoped they wouldn’t. I hated to see women fight. In other corners, drinks hoisted high in a complex social semaphore, other couples and groups played their mindgames on each other. The three-piece band on the stage in the back of the room blasted forth their own quirky version of Stella Fusion’s hit, “The Climax Decade Blues.” Bodies thronged the sweaty dancefloor.

The single club on the main island of the Hesperides is always called La Pomme d’Or. It’s an unbreakable tradition. Its owners—usually stolid businessmen, but sometimes more interesting types—come and go, lasting as long as profits or their ulcers dictate. But the long, low building with its wicker-furnished veranda and glossy mahogany bar has a life and identity of its own. No one would dare rename it. Its last owner hadn’t, and he had been almost as much a fixture as the place itself. A man named Hollister, or something like that, who never left the building until certain events that culminated in two deaths forced him out and off the island.

The current owner was Larry Meadows. He stood by the bar now, surveying the organized chaos with a benign gaze. After all, furniture and glasses might get smashed, but he would still have had the honor of hosting the bash. And it wasn’t every day—or night—that one’s bar was elected to cater the official party following the premiere of a Nike original.

When the boozy fleet had anchored in the Bay, and everyone had been ferried ashore, I had managed to become separated from Jasmine. Now I was contriving earnestly to stay out of her clutches for a bit longer, no easy task in such close quarters. I knew I would pay for my rashness in the morning, but it didn’t signify now.

I had to talk to Nikki Nike alone.

Something about the woman had intrigued me deeply. Obviously, the awesome sky-fires she had ignited played a part in my fascination. But she exuded a personal force and charm that had snared me like a net of unbreakable spidersilk. The dignity and aplomb with which she had stepped from the capsule, as if out of Botticelli’s painting. The transfiguration lighting up her features after the celestial show. These bespoke a deep inner-directedness, a self-assured capability that transfixed me more strongly than anything sexual.

Ducking behind a dizzy debutante as a shield, I wove my way toward the largest knot of people, knowing I’d find Nikki there.

On the outskirts of the group, I spotted her, trapped in the middle. Still wearing her silver suit, sans headgear, she looked like a chromed product of Detroit or South Korea, save for her face, which was pixieish without the least trace of cloying feyness. Her teeth were very white and small, as she smiled valiantly at the fawning compliments, but her grey eyes looked nervous and weary.

I used my weight to shoulder people aside. “Excuse me. Excuse me, please. Message for Miz Nike.”

People parted at the sound of the twentieth-century magic incantation. Reaching Nikki, I said in a voice meant to carry, “Miz Nike, telephone call for you. I believe it’s New York.”

She sized me up instantly, and wasn’t fooled. Still, she said, “Oh, yes. I was expecting it Where can I take it?” Her eyes were a thankyou-card Hallmark never wrote.

I led her to the bar. Still no sign of Jasmine. We stopped near Meadows. He turned his placid face, behind which there was always something going on, toward us.

“Marty, Miz Nike,” he said. “Anything wrong?”

“Not a thing, Larry. Just wondered if the back room was empty.”

Larry’s left eyebrow twitched slightly. Otherwise, nothing registered. “Sure. Feel free.”

I took Nikki’s ungloved hand. My autonomous nervous system almost gave up breathing. I felt like a cloddish adolescent. What was the matter with me? Perhaps I’d swallow my tongue when we started talking.

The private rooms of La Pomme had been the living quarters of the last owner. Now, one served as Meadows’ office, the others as storerooms.

The party sounded like a distant war once the door was closed.

“You looked as if you could use a little peace and quiet,” I said. “I took it upon myself to help.”

She stood a few feet from me, her left knee locked tight, her right bent outward slightly, foot forward. Her crossed arms compressed her small breasts. She gauged me again, totalled my second score with my first, averaged the result, and passed me.

Her form slumped. “Well, yes, you were right. Being spam in a can is more tiring than you might think. And the show was so perfect, it drained me even more.”

“Sit down, then,” I said. “Let me get you a drink.”

She collapsed into a deep chair. I went to the small bar on the far wall.

“Larry’s private stock,” I explained, pouring two scotches. When I handed her one, she looked a bit irked, and I kicked myself for not having asked what she wanted. But I was so used to servicing Jasmine wordlessly, that I had acted on automatic.

She took it though, and sipped. “Do you bring all damsels in distress here?” she asked.

“Hardly,” I said. “Larry and I play cards here occasionally.”

“He called you Marty,’“ she said.

I winced. “Larry’s the only one who calls me that. It’s Martin. Martin Fallows.”

We shook hands.

“Let me say thanks, Martin. I was really dead on my feet, but I felt obliged to entertain.”

“It’s nothing,” I said. “Maybe you can help me some day.”

Congealed silence filled thirty seconds, as our conversation hung by its fingertips over the abyss of embarrassed unfamiliarity. Desperate, I said, “Uh, you have quite an unusual name. Your parents?”

She smiled. “No. My own choice. Artist’s prerogative. Nike, the goddess of victory. And Nikki, from an old Prince song.”

“Great singer,” I chimed in. “Too bad about his career ending so badly.”

I was referring, of course, to the famous case prosecuted under the Robertson-era Helms-Falwell Morals Act. Taking it all the way to the Rehnquist court and losing had pretty much bankrupted and demoralized the pop-star. But I had heard heartening rumors that, in the new atmosphere that began to bloom a couple of years ago, after Joe Kennedy’s election, he was contemplating a comeback.

“Yes,” Nikki agreed. “He still sounds great.”

“Oh?”

“I just heard him at a private party last month.”

Well. There wasn’t much I could add to that. I switched the focus to her assumed surname.

“You’re very concerned with success, I take it.”

“It’s the only thing that counts, Martin. Failure is instructive, up to a point, but ultimately unsatisfying. Consider this piece I did tonight.”

I nodded in what I hoped was an intelligent fashion.

“Sure, I could have stayed groundside, while we shot up the canisters. But what if something went wrong, and I wasn’t up there to do my damnedest to fix it? Besides, what kind of art is it where the artist never even approaches the canvas?”

“Putting it on the line,” I said. A little cynicism slipped out.

She shrugged. “Gotta walk it like you talk it.” Her lips caressed her glass, her throat worked beautifully.