moved onto the horrors of London, Paris, Tokyo, Beijing, and New York. Then he spoke briefly about the closed zones that still surrounded the lost cities, of irradiated wildlife undergoing rapid evolutionary change in bizarre and clamorous Edens where the capitals of great empires had stood, only three hundred years ago…
The interest indicator glowed like a Darksider’s eye. Professor Yang strode up and down, his voice deepening, his gray beard swishing in the wind, his long fingers clawing at the air.
“Precisely how did it happen-this great calamity?” he demanded. “How much we know, and how little!
Will it remain for the scholars of your generation to solve these riddles finally? I confess that mine has shed only a little light around the edges of the forbidding darkness that we call-the Time of Troubles!”
As usual, his lecture lasted exactly the time allotted, a one-hundred-minute hour. As usual, it ended with a key phrase, reminding the drowsy student of what he had been hearing at the rim of his clouded consciousness.
The power light in the mashina winked off, and Professor Yang shouted: “Tea!”
A door flew open and a scurrying domestic wheeled in the tea caddy, the cup, themolko, the tins of oolong and Earl Grey.
“Sometimes,” muttered Yang, “I think I’ll die of boredom if I ever have to talk about the Troubles again.”
“One lump or two?” asked the domestic, and Yang, who drank tea after the ancient English fashion, turned anxious attention to the small, ridiculously expensive lumps of natural brown sugar.
“Two, I think,” he said.
If residuals from the lecture didn’t buy him a girl, at least they would, he hoped, keep him supplied with sugar for sometime to come.
The clocks of the Worldcity were nearing 21 when Yamashita, dining comfortably at home with his wife Hariko, heard his security-coded mashina chime and hastened into his den to receive a secret report from Earth Security. Somebody had cracked under interrogation. Yama listened to the report with growing dismay.
“Shit, piss, and corruption,” he growled. “Secretary!”
“Sir?” murmured the box in a soft atonal voice.
“Contact Steffens Aleksandr. If he’s not at home-and of course he won’t be-start calling the houses in the Clouds and Rain District. Make it absolutely clear that this is a security matter and that we expect cooperation in finding him.”
“Yes, sir. His home is not answering.”
“Try Brother and Sister House. Try Delights of Spring House. Try Radiant Love House. Then try all the others.”
“And when I find Steffens Aleksandr?”
“Tell him to wipe his cock and get to my office soonest.”
“Is that message to be conveyed literally?”
“Yes!”
Back at the table, he had barely had time to fold his legs under him when Hariko told him to stop using bad language in the house where the children might hear him.
“Yes, little wife,” said the man of power meekly.
“I suppose you have to go to the office again.”
“Yes, little wife. An emergency-”
“Always your emergencies,” said Hariko. “Why do I waste hours making you good food to eat if you’re never here to eat it? And why do you employ that awful Steffens person? He’s a disgrace, a man his age who lives like a tomcat. Not everyone can be as happy as we are, but everybody can have a decent, conventional life.”
Yama ate quietly, occasionally agreeing with her until she ran out of words. Then he went upstairs, removed his comfortable kimono, and put on again the sour uniform he’d worn all day.
On the way down, pinching his thick neck as he tried to close the collar, he stopped in the children’s bedrooms to make sure they were all asleep. The boys in their bunk beds slept the extravagant sleep of childhood. Looking at them, gently patting their cheeks, Yama reflected that adults and animals always slept as if they half expected to be awakened-children never.
Then to the girls’ room, where his daughter Kazi slumbered in the embrace of a stuffed haknim. Yama smiled at her but lingered longest at the bedside of his smallest daughter. Rika was like a doll dreaming, with a tiny bubble forming on her half-parted pinklips. He was thinking: if someone changes the past, she may vanish, never have a chance to live at all. To prevent that, he resolved to destroy without mercy every member of the time-travel conspiracy.
At the front door Hariko tied a scarf around his neck and gave him a hug; she was too modest to kiss her husband in the open doorway, even though they were twenty meters above the street. He patted her and stepped into the official hovercar that had nosed up to his porch.
“Lion House, Gate 43,” he told the blackbox, and sank back against the cushions.
At Radiant Love House, Professor Yang relaxed from his scholarly labors on one side of a double divan in the midprice parlor and viewed 3-D images of young women to the ancient strains of Tchaikovsky’sNutcracker.
“Do you see anything that pleases you?” asked the box that was projecting the images.
“Truly, it is a Waltz of the Flowers,” replied Yang sentimentally. The smell of kif wafted through the room, presumably from a hidden censer.
“The darkbeauty of Miss Luvblum contrasts so markedly with the rare-indeed, unique-blondness of Miss Sekzkitti,” murmured the box, going through its recorded spiel. “The almond eyes of Miss Ming remind us of the splendor of the dynasty from which she takes hernom d’amour. Every young lady is mediscanned on a daily basis to insure her absolute purity and freedom from disease. Miss Gandhi is skilled in all the acts of the famousKama Sutra. For a small additional fee, an electronic room may be rented in which the most modern appliances are available to heighten the timeless joys of love.”
Professor Yang had already halfway made his selection-the most expensive of the “stable.” Miss Selassie was a tall, slender woman of Ethiopian descent who had been genetically altered into an albino.
The box referred to her as “the White Tiger of the Nile,” and bald, bearded, long-nailed Yang, at ninety-nine reaching the extreme limits of middle age, found his thoughts turning more and more to her astounding beauty. Her body is like a living Aphrodite of ancient Greece, he thought, while her face is like a living spirit mask of ancient Africa.
“Miss Selassie, how much is she?”
“One hundred khans an hour.”
“Oh, dear. And how much for an electronic room?”
Professor Yang rightly believed that all the appliances known to modern science would be needed if he was to spend his expensive hour doing anything more than enjoying Miss Selassie’s company.
“Fifty khans an hour. However,” said the box seductively, “for such a man as yourself, Honored Professor, the house gladly makes a special price: Miss Selassieand an electronic room for an hour for the sum total of-”
A brief pause, during which Yang felt himself growing anxious.
“One hundred and thirty-five khans, a ten-percent reduction.”
“Agreed,” breathed Yang, giving himself no time to think. There was a brief flutter in the box as his bankchecked his voiceprint and transferred another K135 from his already deflated account to one of the bulging accounts of Radiant Love House.
“You should’ve asked for twenty percent off,” said a voice, making Yang jump.
A long, stringy, bony man holding a kif pipe rose from the other side of the double divan and stretched and yawned.
“I hope you haven’t been eavesdropping,” snapped Yang.
“No more than I had to,” said Stef in a bored voice. “I’ve made my selection, but the selectee is popular and she’s busy. I’m just telling you, if you’ve got the balls to bargain you can get them down twenty percent, sometimes more if it’s a slow night. The ten percent reduction they offer you is just merchandizing.”
Resentment at the stranger’s intrusion struggled with economic interest in Professor Yang’s breast. The latter won.
“Really?” he said.
“Sure. I do it all the time. You could’ve gotten the whole works for one-twenty.”
“Indeed. And the electronic room-is it really worth it?”
“It is if you have to have it.”
