“And what’s that, exactly?”
She hesitated, smiled and said modestly, “We’re gods.”
It took Chandler’s breath away—not because it was untrue, but because it had never occurred to him that gods were aware of their deity.
“We’re gods, love, with the privilege of electing mortals to the club. Don’t judge us by anything that has gone before. Don’t judge us by anything. We are a New Thing. We don’t have to conform to precedent because we upset all precedents. From now on, to the end of time, the rules will grow from us.”
She patted her lips briskly with a napkin and said, “Would you like to see something? Let’s take a little walk.”
She took him by the hand and led him across the room, out to a sundeck on the other side of the restaurant. They were looking down on what had once been a garden. There were people in it; Chandler was conscious of sounds coming from them, and he was able to see that there were dozens of them, perhaps a hundred, and that they all seemed to be wearing suntans like his own.
“From Tripler?” he guessed.
“No, love. They pick out those clothes themselves. Stand there a minute.”
The girl in the coronet walked out to the rail of the sundeck, where pink and amber spotlights were playing on nothing. As she came into the colored lights there was a sigh from the people in the garden. A man walked forward with an armload of leis and deposited them on the ground below the rail.
They were adoring her.
Rosalie stood gravely for a moment, then nodded and returned to Chandler.
“They began doing that about a year ago,” she whispered to him, as a murmur of disappointment came up from the crowd. “Their own idea. We didn’t know what they wanted at first, but they weren’t doing any harm. You see, love,” she said softly, “we can make them do anything we like. But we don’t make them do that.”
Hours later, Chandler was not sure just how, they were in a light plane flying high over the Pacific, clear out of sight of land. The moon was gold above them, the ocean black beneath.
Chandler stared down as the girl circled the plane, slipping lower toward the water, silent and perplexed. But he was not afraid. He was almost content. Rosie was good company—gay, cheerful—and she had treasures to share. It had been an impulse of hers, a long drive in her sports car and a quick, comfortable flight over the ocean to cap the evening. It had been a pleasant impulse. He reflected gravely that he could understand now how generations of country maidens had been dazzled and despoiled. A touch of luxury was a great seducer.
The coronet on the girl’s body could catch his body at any moment. She had only to think herself into his mind, and her will, flashed to a relay station like the one he was building for Koitska, at loose in infinity, could sweep into him and make him a puppet. If she chose, he would open that door beside him and step out into a thousand feet of air and a meal for the sharks.
But he did not think she would do it. He did not think anyone would, really, though with his own eyes he had seen some anyones do things as bad as that and sickeningly worse. There was no corrupt whim of the most diseased mind in history that some torpid exec had not visited on a helpless man, woman or child in the past years. Even as they flew here, Chandler knew, the gross bodies that lay in luxury in the island’s villas were surging restlessly around the world; and death and horror remained where they had passed. It was a paradox too great to be reconciled, this girl and this vileness. He could not forget it, but he could not feel it in his glands. She was pretty. She was gay. He began to think thoughts that had left him alone for a long time.
The dark bulk of the island showed ahead and they were sinking toward a landing.
The girl landed skillfully on a runway that sprang into light as she approached—electronic wizardry, or the coronet and some tethered serf at a switch? It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered very greatly at that moment to Chandler.
“Thank you, love,” she said, laughing. “I liked that. It’s all very well to use someone else’s body for this sort of thing, but every now and then I want to keep my own in practice.”
She linked arms with him as they left the plane. “When I was first given the coronet here,” she reminisced, amusement in her voice, “I got the habit real bad. I spent six awful months—really, six months in bed! And by myself at that. Oh, I was all over the world, and skin-diving on the Barrier Reef and skiing in Norway and—well,” she said, squeezing his arm, “never mind what all. And then one day I got on the scales, just out of habit. Do you know what I weighed?” She closed her eyes in mock horror, but they were smiling when she opened them again. “I won’t do that again, love. Of course, a lot of us do let ourselves go. Even Koitska. Especially Koitska. And some of the women—But just between us, the ones who do really didn’t have much to keep in shape in the first place.”
She led the way into a villa that smelled of jasmine and gardenias, snapped her fingers and subdued lights came on. “Like it? Oh, we’ve nothing but the best. What would you like to drink?”
She fixed them both tall, cold glasses and vetoed Chandler’s choice of a sprawling wicker chair to sit on.
