In the Ocean of Night (16 page)

“They are, you see, sir, the social cement,” Fresnel said. He held his glass between two massive hands as though he would crush it, and gazed at Nigel intently. “They are
ne
cessary.”

“To glue together the foundations,” Nigel said blandly. “Correct, correct. They have only this week unified with numerous Protestant faiths.”

“Those weren’t faiths. They were administrative structures with no parishioners left to keep them afloat.”

“Socially, unification is paramount. A new binding. A restructuring of group relationships.”

“Nigel,” Alexandria said, “he thinks they are a hopeful sign.”

“Of what?”

“The death of our Late Sensate culture,” Fresnel said earnestly.

“Passing into—what?—fanaticism?”

“No no.” He waved the idea away. “Our declining Sensate art is al
ready
being swept aside. No more emptiness and excesses. We shall turn to Harmonious-Ascendant-Ascetic.”

“No more Nazis gutting blonds for a thrill on the Three-D?”

Alexandria frowned and glanced at Lubkin’s pearly 3D, now blank.

“Certainly not. We shall have mythic themes, intuitive art, work of sublime underlying intent. I do not need to stress that these are the feelings we all sorely lack, both in Europe and here and in Asia.”

Alexandria said, “Why does that come next, after Sensate?”

“Well, these are modified views, taken from the strictly schematic outline of Sorokin. We could pass into a Heroic-Promethean, of course”—he paused, beaming around at them—“but does any of us expect that? No one feels Promethean these days, even in your country.”

“We are building the second cylinder city,” Mr. Ichino said. “Surely construction of another world—”

“A fluctuation,” Fresnel said jovially. He touched a fingertip to his vest. “
I
am always in favor of such adventures. But how many can go to the—the cylcits?”

“If we build them fast enough with raw materials from the moon—” Alexandria began.

“Not enough, not enough,” Fresnel said. “There will always be such things, and they are good, but the main drift is clear. The last few decades, the horrors of it— what have we learned? There will always be dissenters, schismatics, deviants, holdovers, dropouts, undergrounds, heretics even, and of course the reluctant or nominal conformers.”

“They are the majority,” Mr. Ichino said.

“Yes! The majority! So, to do
any
thing useful with them, to channel and funnel that stu
pen
dous energy, we, we must place—how is it said?—all these under one roof.” Fresnel made a steeple of his hands, his stone rings like gargoyles.

“The New Sons,” Nigel said.

“A true cultural innovation,” Fresnel said. “Very American. Like your Mormons, they add whatever elements are missing from traditional religions.”

“Stir, season to taste and serve,” Nigel said.

“You’re not truly giving it a chance, Nigel,” Alexandria said with sudden earnestness.

“Bloody right. Anyone for drinks?” He took Alexandria’s glass and made off toward the bar.

The carpet seemed made of spongy stuff that lifted him slightly into the air after each step. He navigated through knots of JPL people, flashing an occasional automatic smile and brushing away from contact with others. At the bar he scooped up a basket of pumpkin seeds, roasted and salty and crisp. The Chilean red was gone; he switched to an anonymous Bordeaux. Mr. Ichino materialized at his elbow. “You remain an active astronaut, Mr. Walmsley, I understand?”

“So far.” He downed the Bordeaux and held out his glass to the bartender for a refill.

“Should you be watching your weight?”

“A good eye you have. Quite good.” Nigel prodded a finger into his stomach. “Gaining a bit.”

“Alcohol has a remarkable number of—”

“Right. Apart from stuff like cement, which I presume you aren’t taking in by the handfuls, strong drink—love that phrase—is the worst thing possible for cramming on the kilos. But wine—the dryer, the better—isn’t. Scarcely more in a glass than a few grams of macadamia nuts. If you could
get
macadamias any more, I mean.”

He stopped, aware that he was probably talking too much. Mr. Ichino nodded solemnly at Nigel’s advice and asked the barman for beer. Nigel watched owlishly as the icing of suds rose. “Back to the sociometrician?” he said, and the two of them returned to the rec room.

A small knot of people had formed around Fresnel. Most of them had fashionably midnight-black hair, trimmed exactly to the shoulders. They were discussing Humanistic-Secular. The prime point in question seemed to be the use of electronically enhanced gloves by the Pope, and whether this meant he would throw in with the New Sons. Media said the two were jockeying over the issue; a computer-human linkup had predicted absorption of the Catholics within three years, based on assignable sociometric parameters.

Nigel beckoned to Alexandria and they drifted away. Shirley appeared, arriving late. She kissed Alexandria and asked Nigel to fetch her a drink. When he returned, Alexandria was talking to some Soviets, and Shirley drew him aside.

“Are you going with us?”

“Where?”

“The Immanence. We do so want you to go with us to see him, Nigel.”

He studied her eyes, set deep above the high cheekbones, to read how serious she was. “Alexandria has mentioned it.”

“I know. She said she’s making no progress. You just clam up about it.”

“Don’t see much point in talking nonsense.”

“You apparently don’t like talking to us at
all,
” she said with sudden fire.

“What’s that mean?” he asked, bristling.

“Ohh.” She slammed her fist against the wall in dramatic emphasis. She rolled her eyes and Nigel couldn’t stop himself smiling at the gesture.
She should have been an actress,
he thought.

“Nigel, damn it, you are not
flexing
with this.” “Don’t follow the slang, sorry.”

“Ohh.” Again the rolling eyes. “You and your language fetishes. Okay, in one syllable. Alexandria and I don’t know where you
are
any more.”

“Hell, I’m home with her most of the day.”

“Yes, but—Lord!—emotionally, I mean. You keep working on this thing, whatever it is, at JPL. Reading your damned astronomy books. Alexandria needs more of you now—”

“She’s getting plenty,” Nigel said a bit stiffly. “You’re closed off in there, Nigel. I mean,
some
gets through, but …” Shirley knitted her eyebrows together in concentration. “It never struck me before, but I think that might be why you fit into a triad. Most men can’t, but you…”

“I’d imagine a triad requires
more
communication, not less.”

“Of a kind, I suppose, yes. But Alexandria is the center. We orbit around her. We don’t have a true threeway.”

She leaned against the padded hallway wall, shoulders slumped forward, studying the carpet. Her left breast, exposed, teardropped in the soft shadows, its tip a brown splotch. Nigel suddenly saw her as more open, more vulnerable than she had seemed in months. Her pastel dress bunched at hips and breasts and somehow made her appear nude, as though the material protected without concealing. The oval on her left breast hung as an eye into a deeper layer of her.

He sighed. He was aware of the breath leaving him as a thick alcoholic vapor, a liter of stuff so substantial he half expected to see the cloud hang in the hallway, un-mixed with the customary air. “I suppose you are right,” he said. “I will go and see this fellow if you wish. It must be before we leave though—a week from now.”

Shirley nodded silently. He kissed her with an odd gravity.

Three people, chattering, came out of a nearby room and the mood between them was broken.

Mr. Ichino left early. Damned early, Nigel thought muzzily, for he had liked the man on sight. It was a good party, too, quite good. Lubkin’s affairs in the past had been straightaway the most boring of a sad lot of parties that sprouted up around the moribund jollity of the Xmas season.
Keep the X in Xmas,
he thought, making another round to the bar. The Bordeaux was finished off but a passable California claret went down nicely. Lubkin wasn’t being mean-minded about his wine, much to his credit. No poisonous California rotgut reds, no mysterious mixtures. Nigel realized dimly that he was pretty well into a substantial piss-up. Better yet, all done at Lubkin’s expense. He had half a mind to search out Lubkin and thank him profusely, meantime sloshing down a gratifyingly large quantity directly in his presence.

He set out on this mission and found himself negotiating a surprisingly difficult corner getting out of the rumpus room. (Did Lubkin allow an occasional rumpus in the rumpus room? Just a sweet beheading or two, in full color, Chinese cleavers and all? No, no; the disorderly nature of the cleaning-up would offend the man.) The angle of the corner was obtuse, opaque. He had noticed the floor plan was pentagonal, with occasional jutting intrusions, but how was he to get his bearings?

He sat down to clear his head. People drifted by as if under glass.

He pondered the opaque angle. Oddities of the language:
angle,
with two letters interchanged, spelled
angel.
Easy, so easy. One transposition rendered the comfortably Euclidean into—pop—the orthodoxly religious. Two letters alone could leap that vast, abiding chasm. Absurdly easy.

Up again, and off. In the living room he sighted land, in the persons of Shirley and Alexandria. They were foci for the usual knot of JPL engineers, men with close-cropped hair and cheap ballpoint pens still clipped in their shirt pockets. They smiled wanly as he approached, looking as though they had just been shaken awake.

Nigel skimmed past these constellations on a flyby, then ricocheted from conversation to conversation in the hollow living room:

—So Cal lost its appeal to the regional EIB?

—Sure. I expected it.

—So our water quote’s cut again?

—Sure. Factors into an eighteen-thousand-person popdrop, mandatory. We’ll make it up from fractional decline. Slowed immigration laws will come through. And the Federal Regional Support Allotments will be shaved. We—

Onward:

—Suppose we’ve got the terrorists stopped on plutonium 240? So what? Since the New Delhi incident we know the damned Asians can’t be trusted to—

Onward:

—and I loved that scene with the semen all
over
the stage, just frozen CO
₂
really but what an
effect,
jizzing into the
au
dience—

Here and there Nigel began talking, feeling the sentences form whole inside before he’d begun them. He unzipped the floppy covers from words, made them pop out quick and shiny. People peered at him as though down a pit, from a height. Words merged together.

Nigel: You pronounce “clothes” as though it were “close.”

Woman: Well, aren’t they the same?

Nigel: How about “morning” and “mourning”?

And then away, to the bar, where some decent hock burbled out into his uplifted glimmering glass. He sipped. A riesling? Too sweet. Gewürztraminer? Possibly.

The room was unsuitably warm. He moved through the heavy, cloying air. Crescents of sweat had blossomed under his armpits. He made for the rec room.

Vacant. The 3D. He thumbed it on. The screen flickered wetly at him and melted into an overview of the two annular circles. Bodies laced together. A voice boomed out over the crowd. Bread and wine. Come to fullness.

No communion rail and wafer, not here. No baptismal dunking, no empty Jewish phrases muttering about a Pharaoh in a tongue they can’t understand. No ritual. The
real
religion straight from the wellsprings. Only once and all together. Joyful singing love forever. Sic transit, Gloria.

Nigel reeled away to the opposite wall, yellowed by a spotlight. He punched at a button, stabbed another. Family Music Center, it said.

Good, right. Try for a bit of Eine Kleine Krockedmusik.

He dialed. Wellsby’s choral improvisations swelled out of the speaker. He stabbed again. Jazz: King Oliver. Brassy trumpet, drums. But where was the Bach? The sixties, one of his favorite Beatles? Or did he have to settle for some modern cacophonist?

He turned back to the 3D. Stabbed once more.

The writhing New Sons, again. Make a joyful noise unto the horde.

He punched at the buttons.

The black swastika vibrated against the orange uniform. The gleaming tip of the sword bit into the girl’s stomach. She begged, crying. The man shoved upward and the sword sank deep. Blood spattered from her. She lunged against the cords binding her hands but this only made the sword slice crosswise. She screamed. The crimson laced down her legs.

Nigel wrenched it off. He was sweating; it ran into his eyes. He wiped his brow and wheeled away.

He paused in the hallway to steady himself. Malt does more than Milton can, to justify God’s ways to man. Welcome to the 21st century. Sic transit, Gloria. Or was it Alexandria?

He made his way to the patio. Cool air washed over him. The fog below had layered above the jacaranda trees, haloing the lights of Pasadena. Nigel stood, breathing deeply, watching the gathering mist.