Newton's Wake

human race is out there, it’s doing fine, and we’re coming to see you soon!’

She was quite proud of it. No Neil Armstrong, but come to think of it, he’d had only one line and he’d fluffed that.

Over the past week, since her arrival, Carlyle had talked to a lot of people: journalists, scientists, venture planners, military company directors. Every night she had returned exhausted to her room high in a hotel near the city centre, and slept until dawn. In the mornings she went out and explored the streets around the hotel, before returning for breakfast with her handler of the day. She had learned a lot about Eurydice’s peculiar history and purported prehistory, and in return had passed on as much as she knew and was politic to reveal about her family’s, and that of the rest of the human race. That she was, by her very presence, turning upside down the assumptions that had ruled the colony since its founding troubled her not at all. She’d seen the firm do bigger jobs, and her sole concern was to do this one right. All the time she was aware that Shlaim, in one form or another, was probably undergoing—or would soon undergo—a like debriefing, and that it was best not to say anything he could plausibly refute. Still, she had a head start on him in the business of a charm offensive, and she tried to make the most of it. Time enough to bring them fully up to speed when the Carlyle ships fittled in.

The makeup artist patted her face with a tissue. A spray hissed briefly at her carotids.

‘That’s it,’ he said, stepping back.

She smiled politely at him in the mirror. The result of his work she could admire, in an abstract way, as though it was on somebody else. She felt masked.

‘It’s lovely,’ she said, and stood up. A cape slithered to her feet. ‘Sorry about the bruise.’

His lips thinned, then stretched to a reluctant smile. ‘It’s nothing. My fault.’

‘If you’re sure.’

‘Of course.’ The tip of his tongue visited his lips. He was a little afraid of her, she thought. They all were. He stepped aside for a moment and returned with a green dress on a hanger dangled from his forefinger. Stiff, sculptured, off-shoulder, big at the hips and bust, its skirt supported by concentric, nested, truncated cones of stiff fine mesh, it looked as if it could stand up and waltz off by itself. She got into it as into a space suit, from the back. The fit was perfect.

‘I look like the wife of some geezer picking up a Nobel Prize,’ Carlyle said. ‘For chemistry.’

‘It’s very this evening.’

She met his mirrored gaze with a warmer smile than before. ‘How do you keep up?’

‘ “Keeping up,” ’ he said, with some froideur, ‘is not what I do.’

She stepped into shoes that lifted her heels ten centimetres off the floor. The cosmetician handed her a clutch purse and a wrap.

‘That’s you all set to party,’ he said.

She looked speculatively at him. Paul Hoffman was tall, muscular, with cropped blond hair, cheekbones to die for. Right now he had an elbow cupped in one hand and his chiselled chin in the other, head tilted slightly, smiling at her like she was some work of art on a wall.

‘Not quite,’ she said. ‘I’d like to go … accompanied.’

‘Oh, of course, I can arrange—’

‘Would you like to accompany me?’

He blinked. ‘Really? I’d be delighted. Thank you so much.’ He ran his hand over his hair, looking flustered. ‘Excuse me a moment while I go reconfigure my sexuality.’

‘There’s no need—’ she began, but he was gone. A few minutes later he was back. He stopped in the doorway and looked her up and down.

‘Wow,’ he said.

‘Don’t get your hopes up.’ She took his arm and turned him to the exit. ‘I liked you better the other way.’

‘That’s what they all say,’ he sighed. ‘It’s a tragedy.’

It was like seeing yourself as you would be seen a thousand years in the future, when you had become mythology. The room had about fifteen hundred people in it, swirling and circulating. The arrangements weren’t formal; the dress was, in a way she hadn’t seen here before. Hoffman had been right, her gown was very this evening. Tuxedos and taffeta, black-and-white vying with colour for vividness. Firefly cameras bobbed and darted among the guests, projecting a seamless and soundless survey of the party on thirty-metre-high walls, and to the world outside. Everybody from the upper reaches of Eurydicean society—people so busy that most of them had had no chance to meet her yet—was there and wanted to talk to her, or at least be seen next to her. Carlyle was grateful for Hoffman’s presence. Everybody here seemed to know everybody else, and presumed they knew her. The makeup artist knew them all, and knew just how to cultivate or wither that presumption. She had to trust in his target selection and avoidance:

‘Shipping planner. Big money, big name, bo-ring. Smile and shake hands.’

‘She’s from Harvard’s. Thank her for the frock.’

‘Defence. Mind your mouth.’

‘News analyst. Keep him sweet.’

‘Oh dear. The things I see when I’m pointed the wrong way.’

This last was for a pale young man with a sharp black beard and a sort of outline of a formal suit, in leather, without a shirt. He was carrying what looked like a test tube that wafted fragrant and mildly narcotic steam.

‘Adrian Kowalsky, actor,’ Hoffman added more audibly, by way of introduction. ‘Hi, Adrian.’

‘Delighted to meet you, sir,’ said Carlyle.

‘Enchante,’ Kowalsky bowed. ‘You have rewritten all our scripts.’

She shrugged her bare, naked-feeling shoulders and sipped her drink. The glass was an inverted cone on a straight stem. The idea was, you didn’t put it down. There were racks for them somewhere.

‘Cannae be helped, I’m afraid.’

‘Oh, that wasn’t a criticism. Good grief. It’s only now I’m beginning to appreciate how desperately sad everything seemed, only last week.’ He inhaled steam from his tube, eyes lidding for a moment, opening shining. ‘The isolation, the futility, the sense of enclosure.’

Carlyle shook her head. ‘I don’t quite follow.’

‘Do you read the classics?’ Kowalsky waved a hand. ‘Assuming you have the same. We were a Diaspar. Dancers at the end of time. You know? Eloi with ennui?’

‘All dressed up and nowhere to go?’ she suggested.

‘Yes!’ said Kowalsky. It seemed he’d never heard the stale phrase before. He touched her elbow. ‘You have no idea… . By the way, there is something I would like to ask you.’

‘Yes?’ She awaited one of the many frequently asked questions.

‘What’s he really like? General Jacques?’

She blinked and looked around. ‘Isn’t he here?’

Hoffman shook his head. ‘He’s not the flavour of the day.’

Carlyle raised her eyebrows. ‘Oh well. I’ve only met him two or three times since I arrived. If you’ve watched the television, you’ll have seen what he’s like. Very straight, direct, laconic. Off camera he’s no different. A bit less formal, maybe.’

‘And his personal life?’ asked Hoffman, smiling.

‘I didn’t ask! He lives with a woman somewhere, that’s all I know.’

Hoffman looked, a little, as if a daydream had been dashed. Kowalsky, on the other hand, brightened.

‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘What you see is what you get, that’s what you’re saying.’

‘As far as I know,’ said Carlyle. ‘Why?’

Kowalsky leaned in, confidentially. ‘I’m hoping to play him.’

‘Jacques Armand? The man I, uh, met?’

‘The very same.’

‘What’s this?’ Hoffman asked. ‘Instant drama?’

‘No, no,’ said Kowalsky. ‘Something historical.’ He stretched out an arm. ‘And histrionic!’

‘Good heavens,’ said Hoffman. ‘Not one of Ben-Ami’s spectacles, I hope.’