He walked quickly down to the sward, and paced off the long row of Bareiss columns, their disarray like bowling pins caught flying. On the other side of the canal he sat at a round white table at the edge of a sidewalk cafe, and nursed a Greek coffee for an hour.
Suddenly Maya was standing before him.
“What do you mean by this?” she said. She gestured at the table, at his own annoyed scowl. “What is wrong now?”
He stared at his coffee cup, looked up at her, then back down at the cup. It was impossible. A sentence was pronouncing itself in his mind, each word equally weighted: I illed John.
“Nothing’s wrong,” he said. “What do you mean?”
The corners of her mouth tightened, making her glare look contemptuous and her face old. Nearly eighty now. They were too old for this. After a long silence she sat down across from him.
“Look,” she said slowly. “I don’t care what happened in the past.” She stopped speaking, and he risked a glance at her; she was staring down, looking inward. “What happened in the
His heart beat inside him like a child trying to escape. His lungs were cold. She was still talking, but he hadn’t caught it. Did she know? Did she know what he had done in Nicosia? It was impossible, or she would not have been here (would she?); but she ought to have known.
“Do you understand?” she asked.
He hadn’t heard what she was referring to. He continued to stare at his coffee cup, and suddenly she slapped it away with the back of her hand. It clattered under a nearby table and broke. The white ceramic semicircle of the handle spun on the ground.
“I said
Paralyzed, he continued to stare at the empty tabletop. Overlapping rings of brown coffee stains. Maya leaned forward and put her face in her hands. She was hunched tight over her stomach, not breathing.
Finally she breathed, pulled her head up. “No,” she said, so quietly that at first he assumed she was addressing herself. “Don’t speak of it. You think I care, and so you do all this. As if I would care more about then than now.” She looked up at him and caught his gaze. “It was thirty years ago,” she said. “Over thirty-five since we met, and thirty since all that happened. I am not that Maya Katarina Toitovna. I don’t know her, I don’t know what she thought or felt, or why. That was a different world, another life. It doesn’t matter to me now. I have no feeling for it. Now I am here, and this is me.” She poked herself between the breasts with a thumb. “And look; I love you.”
She let the silence stretch, her last words drifting out like ripples on a pond. He couldn’t stop looking at her; then he pulled his gaze away, he glared up at the faint twilight stars overhead, let their position seep into his memory. When she said I love you, Orion stood tall in the southern sky. The metal chair under you was hard. Your feet were cold.
“I don’t want to think about anything but that,” she said.
She didn’t know; and he did. But everyone has to assume their past somehow. They were nearly eighty years old, and healthy. There were people who were now 110 years old, healthy, vigorous, strong. Who knew how long it would last? They were going to have a lot of past to assume. And as it went on, and those years of their youth receded into the distant past, all those searing passions that had cut so deep. . could they really be only scars? Weren’t they crippling wounds, a thousand amputations?
But it wasn’t a physical thing. Amputations, castrations, hollowing out; they were all in the imagination. An imaginary relationship to a real situation. .
“The brain is a funny animal,” he muttered.
She cocked her head, looked curiously at him. Suddenly he was afraid; they
And yet there she was, sitting there miserably, looking as if he could shatter her like a coffee cup, shatter her with a single flick of his finger. If he didn’t at least pretend to believe her, what then? What then? How could he shatter her like that? She would hate him for it— for forcing her to remember the past, to care about it. And so. . one had to go on, to act.
He lifted his hand, so frightened that the movement felt like teleoperation. He was a dwarf in a waldo, a waldo that was stiff, touchy, unfamiliar: lift, quick modulate! To the left, hold; return, hold; steady. Down gently. Gently gently onto the back of her hand. Clasp, very gently. Her hand was really very cold; and so was his.
She looked wanly at him.
“Let’s—” He had to clear his throat. “Let’s go back to our rooms.”
For weeks after that he remained physically clumsy, as if he had withdrawn into some other space, and had to operate his body from a distance. Teleoperation. It made him aware of how many muscles he had. Sometimes he knew them so well he could snake through the air, but most of the time he jerked across the landscape like Frankenstein’s monster.
Burroughs was flooded with bad news; life in the city seemed fairly normal, but the video screens piped in scenes of a world Frank could scarcely believe. Riots in Hellas; the domed crater New Houston declaring itself an independent republic; and that same week, Slusinski sent tape of an American orientation in which all five dorms had voted to leave for Hellas without the proper travel permits. Chalmers contacted the new UNOMA factor, and got a detachment of U.N. security police to go there; and ten men arrested 500, by the simple expedient of overriding the tent’s physical plant computer and ordering the helpless occupants to board a series of train cars before the tent’s air was released. They had then been trained off to Korolyov, which was now in effect a prison city. Its transformation into a prison had become general knowledge sometime recently, it was hard to recall exactly when, as it had an air of already-always about it, perhaps because the parts of a prison system had existed for several years, scattered planetwide.
Chalmers interviewed some of the prisoners over their room videos, two or three at a time. “You see how easy it was to detain you,” he told them. “That’s the way it will be all over. The life-support systems are so fragile that they’re impossible to defend. Even on Earth advanced military technology makes a police state much more possible to implement than ever before, but here it’s absurdly easy.”
“Well, you got us when it was easiest,” replied a man in his sixties. “Which was smart. Once we get free I’d like to see you catch us. At that point your life-support system is as vulnerable to us as ours is to you, and yours is more visible.”
“You should know better than that! All life support here is hooked back ultimately to Earth. But they have a number of vast military powers at their disposal, and we don’t. You and all your friends are trying to live out a fantasy rebellion, some kind of sci-fi 1776, frontiersmen throwing off the yoke of tyranny, but it isn’t like that here! The analogies are all wrong, and deceptively wrong because they mask the reality, the true nature of our dependence and their might. They keep you from seeing that it’s a fantasy!”
“I’m sure there was many a good Tory neighbor arguing the same case in the colonies,” the man said with a grin. “Actually the analogy is in many ways a good one. We’re not just cogs in the machine here, we’re individual people, most of us ordinary, but there’s some real characters too— we’re going to see our Washingtons and Jeffersons and Paines, I guarantee you. Also the Andrew Jacksons and Forrest Mosebys, the brutal men who are good at getting what they want.”
“This is ridiculous!” Frank cried. “It’s a false analogy!”
“Well, it’s more metaphor than analogy anyway. There are differences, but we intend to respond to those creatively. We won’t be hefting muskets over rock walls to take potshots at you.”
“Hefting mining lasers over crater walls? You think that’s different?”
The man flicked at him, as if the camera in his room were a mosquito. “I suppose the real question is, will we have a Lincoln?”
“Lincoln is dead,” Frank snapped. “And historical analogy is the last refuge of people who can’t grasp the
