Jem

SEVEN

ANA DIMITROVA sat in a window table of a Greek tea shop in Glasgow, writing industriously on her daily letter to Ahmed. She did not send them all. That would be ruinously extravagant! But every week, at the end of Sunday, she spread them out on a table and copied out the best parts, enough to fill four dots in a microfiche. It was never enough. She leaned forward into the northern sunshine, left elbow on the table next to the cooling cup of strong, sweet tea, head resting on the hand, oblivious to the noise of the lorries and the double-decker yellow-and-green buses on the Gallowgate road outside, and wrote:

— it seems so long since last I kissed your lovely eyelids and wished you good-bye. I miss you, dear Ahmed. This place is terrible! Terrible and strange. It smells of petroleum and internal-combustion engines, the smell of wicked waste. Well. They have only another five or ten years and then their North Sea oil will be gone, and then we will see. The headaches have been very bad, I think because these languages are so uncouth. It is actual pain to speak in them. It will be all right, though, dear Ahmed. The headaches pass. The ache in my heart lasts much longer -

“More tea, miss?”

The harsh English words crashed into Nan’s ear. She winced and raised her head. “Thank you, no.”

“We’ll be serving lunch in just a bit, miss. The souvlaki’s very tasty today, cook says.”

“No, no. Thank you. I must be getting back to my hotel.” She had dawdled longer over the letter than was right, she thought remorsefully, and now she had to hurry, and the headache was back. It was not just that the woman was speaking English. It was the way she spoke it, the rough Scottish consonants that buzzed and rattled in the ear. Although in truth it did not much matter what language, or at least what non-Slavic language, she was hearing. The headaches were more frequent and more severe. It was probably because she had become a diplomatic translator. The international vocabulary of science was easy enough to translate, since so many of the words had the same roots in all languages. In diplomacy the risks were greater, the nuances subtler and more threatening. The choice of an adjective meant nothing in translating a report on X-ray polarimetry, but in a speech about locating a drilling claim on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge it might mean the difference between peace and war.

Nan paid her check and dodged cautiously across Gallow-gate among the towering buses that so mischievously raced along the wrong side of the street. The diesel stink made her cough, and coughing made her headache worse.

And she was late. She was to be picked up for the airport at one, and it was past noon already. She walked virtuously past the shops (so bright and gay!) without looking in a single window. There were styles here that Sofia would not see for another year. But why bother? It would have been nice to buy new clothes to wear for Ahmed. With him so many billions of kilometers away, Nan wore what was easiest to put on and least likely to attract attention. Evenings she spent alone when she could, listening to music and studying grammar. Her best treat was to reread the sparse letters he had returned for her prodigious outflow — although they were not stimulating. From what he said, Son of Kung sounded a grim and awful place.

She cut through a corner of the Green to walk along the riverside toward her hotel, hoping to avoid the noise and the invisible, but not unsmellable, exhaust from all the vehicles. No use. Lorries rumbled along the embankment, and the sludgy surface of the Clyde itself was pocked with oil tankers and barges and creased with the wakes of hydrofoils. How did one live in a place like this? And it all could have been avoided. A little forethought. A little planning. Why did they have to put oil refineries in the middle of a city? Why stain their river with waste and filth when it could have been a cool oasis? Why be in such a rush to pump the oil from the bottom of the sea when it could have provided energy, even food, for another hundred generations? Why use oil at all, for that matter — especially in these packs and swarms of cars and lorries — when the city could have been built around public transportation, electrically powered, or powered with the hydrogen that Iceland, not so very far away, was so eager to sell.

But on Son of Kung…

On Son of Kung it could be all different. She wished she could be there. With Ahmed. Not just to be with Ahmed, she told herself stoutly, but to be part of a new world where things could be done properly. Where the mistakes of Earth could be avoided. Where one’s children would have a future to look forward to.

Hers and Ahmed’s children, of course. Nan smiled to herself. She was an honest person, and she admitted that Kung-son seemed all the finer because Ahmed was there. If only she were not here! There were worrisome things between the lines of what he wrote. So many of his expedition had been sick. So many had died, just in the first days — and his only letters had been in those first days. Why, he himself could have — No. She would not countenance that thought. There was enough else to fret about. For example, the picture he had sent of himself. He had looked worrisomely thin, but what she had noticed most about the picture was the hand on his shoulder. The person who owned the hand was not visible, but Nan was almost sure it was a woman’s hand. And that was even more worrisome.

“Miss Dimitrova! Hoy, there. Nan!”

All at once she perceived that her feet had carried her into the lobby of the hotel, and she was being greeted by a man she almost recognized. Dark, short, plump, a little past middle age, he had a diplomat’s smile and wore clothes that, even across the immense old lobby, she was sure were real wool — if not cashmere.

He filled in the blank for her. “I’m Tam Gulsmit. Remember? We met at the FAO reception last month.” He snapped his fingers for a forkboy. “Your bags are all ready — unless you care to freshen up? Have time for a drink?”

Now she recalled him well. He had been persistent in his attentions, even to the point of lying in wait for her as she came out of the powder room and drawing her into an offensively close conversation in the hall. She had explained to him that it was no use. It was not merely a question of being in love with someone else. That was not his concern; she did not have to tell him her reasons. It was a matter of socialist morality. V. I. Lenin had said it. Free love was all very well, but who would want to drink from a glass that every passerby had fouled with his lips? (And yet in Moscow, she remembered, the public drinking fountains had just such glasses chained to them, and each one surely smeared with a thousand lips.) Let the Fuel powers do what they liked — partner swapping, group orgies, whatever. She was not there to pass judgment, but a socialist girl from Sofia did not even smoke in the street, because she had been taught certain principles of behavior that did not leave her when she grew up.

“Sir Tam,” she began — she remembered that he had one of those quaint British handles to his name — “it is a pleasure to see you again, but I must fly now to New York for the United Nations debate. I have no time—”

“All the time in the world, sweets, that’s what I’m here for. Boy!”

Tardily the bellboy rolled up with his forklift, and that was scandalous, too: her one little zipper bag did not need a fuel-guzzling machine to carry it; she had toted it a kilometer at a time herself.

Sir Tam chuckled indulgently. “Aren’t we quaint? This great, rambling old ruin — that’s the Britishness of it, isn’t it? We’re great at backing a losing horse long past the point where anyone else would have chucked it in. Lucky for us we can afford it! Now, is there anything else you need to bring?”

“But truly, Sir Tam, a car is being sent to take me to the airport. It will be here any minute.”

“Here already, sweetie. I’m it. Our Government have provided me with a Concorde Three, and I’d just rattle around in it by myself. When I heard that a friend of God Menninger’s needed a lift I took the liberty of coming for you myself. You’ll like it. There’s plenty of room, and we’ll make New York in ninety minutes.”

Scandalous, scandalous! Of course the British could afford anything, ocean of oil under the North Sea, their octopus tendrils already grabbing at the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. But morally it was so wrong.

She had no chance to refuse. Sir Tam overcame all objections, and before she knew what was happening she was lifted gently by cherry picker into — dear God! — a supersonic hydro-jet.

As soon as they belted up, in deep, foam armchairs with a suction-bottomed decanter and glasses already on a little table between them, the aircraft hurled itself into the air. The acceleration was frightening. The way the ground dropped away beneath them was not to be believed. Strangely, there was less noise than she had expected, far less than the warm-up roar of a clamjet.

“How quiet,” she said, leaning away from Sir Tam’s casually chummy arm.

He chuckled. “That’s five thousand kilometers an hour for you. We leave the sound far behind. Do you like it?”

“Oh, yes,” said Nan, trying to prevent him from pouring her a drink. She failed.

“Your voice sounds more like ‘oh, no.’ ”

“Well, yes, perhaps that is so. It is terribly wasteful of oil, Sir Tam.”

“We don’t burn oil, sweetie! Pure hydrogen and oxygen — have to carry them both, this far up. Not an ounce of pollution.”

“But of course one burns oil, or some other fuel, to make the hydrogen.” She wondered if she could keep the conversation on propellant chemistry all the way across the Atlantic, decided not, and took a new tack. “It is frightening. One can see nothing from these tiny windows.”

“What is there to see? You get turned on by clouds, love?”

“I have flown the oceans many times, Sir Tam. There is always something. Sometimes icebergs. The sea itself. In a clamjet there is the excitement of the landfall as one approaches Newfoundland or Rio or the Irish Coast. But at twenty-five thousand meters there is nothing.”

“I couldn’t agree with you more,” said Sir Tam, unstrapping and moving closer. “If I had my way there’d be no windows in the thing at all.”

Nan moistened her lips with the whiskey and said brightly, “But it is all so exciting. Could you perhaps show me around this aircraft?”

“Show you around?”

“Yes, please. It is so new to me.”

“What’s to see, love?” Then he shrugged. “Matter of fact, yes, there are a few features I’d like to call to your attention.”

She stood up gratefully, glad to get his hand off her knee. The headaches had lessened, perhaps because now they were breathing quite pure air instead of the Glaswegian smog, but she was annoyed. He had made it clear that they were the only passengers; that was not deceitful. But she had expected at least the chaperonage of the stewardesses, and they, all three of them, had retreated to their little cubbyholes in the aft of the aircraft. The little paneled lounge was far more intimate than she liked.

But worse was in store. What she had thought was a service cubicle turned out to be a tiny, complete bedroom suite. With — could one believe it? — a waterbed. Easily a metric ton of profligately wasted mass! For nothing, surely, but profligately immoral purposes!

“Now there,” said Sir Tam over her shoulder, “is a feature worth studying. Go ahead, Nan. Let your impulses carry you. Try it out.”

“Certainly not!” She moved away from his touching hand and added formally, “Sir Tam, I must tell you that I am an engaged person. It is not correct for me to allow myself to be in a situation of this kind.”

“How quaint.”

“Sir Tam!” She was almost shrieking now, and furiously angry, not only with him but with herself. If she had used a tiny bit of intelligence she would have known this was coming and could have avoided it. A delicate hint that this was the wrong time. A suggestion of — what? Of a social disease, if necessary. Anything. But she was trapped, the waterbed before her, this gland case behind, already with his lips against her ear, whispering buzzingly so that her headache exploded again. Desperately she caught at a straw.

“We — we were speaking of Godfrey Menninger?”

“What?”

“Godfrey Menninger. The father of my good friend, Captain Marge Menninger. You spoke of him in the hotel.”

He was silent for a moment, neither releasing her nor trying to pull her closer. “Do you know God Menninger well?”

“Only through his daughter. I was able to keep her from going to jail once.”

His arm was definitely less tight. After a moment he patted her gently and stepped away. “Let’s have a drink,” he said, ringing for the stewardesses. The satyr’s smile had been replaced by the diplomat’s.

The conversation was back on its tracks again, for which Ana was intensely grateful. She even managed to return to the little cubicle with the armchairs and to persuade the stewardess to bring her a nice cup of strong chai instead of the whiskey Gulsmit suggested. He seemed greatly interested in the story of Margie Menninger’s little episode, in every detail. Had they been fingerprinted? Was the people’s magistrate a court of record, whatever that was? Had Ana spoken to anyone in the militia about the incident later on, and if so what had they said?

Such trivial things seemed to interest him, but Nan was content to go on dredging up memories for him all the way across the Atlantic, as long as it meant his keeping his hands to himself. When she was wrung dry he leaned back, nursing the new drink the stewardess had poured for him and squinting out at the blue-black and cloudless sky.

“Very interesting,” he said at last. “That poor little girl. Of course, I’ve known her since she was tiny.” It had not occurred to Ana that Margie Menninger had ever been tiny. She let it pass, and Sir Tam added, “And dear old God. Have you known him long?”

“Not in a personal sense,” she said, careful not to add lying to the fault of being untruthful. “Of course he is of great importance in cultural matters. I too am deeply concerned about culture.”

“Culture,” repeated Sir Tam meditatively. He seemed about to produce a real smile but managed to retain the diplomatic one instead. “You are a dear, Nan,” he said, and shook his wristwatch to make the red numerals blink on. “Ah, almost there,” he said regretfully. “But of course you must allow me to escort you to your hotel.”

The morning session of the UN was exhausting. There was no time for a real lunch because she had to post-edit the computer translations of what she had already translated once that morning before they could be printed. And the afternoon session was one long catfight.

The debate was on fishing rights for Antarctic krill. Because it was food, tempers ran high. And because sea lore is almost as old an area of human interest as eating, the translation was demanding. There were no places where she could coast, no technical words that were new-coined and common to almost all languages. Every language had developed its own words for ships, seamanship, and above all, eating, at the dawn of language itself. Only three of Nan’s languages were in use — Bulgarian, English, and Russian. The Pakistanis were not involved in the debate, and there were plenty of others proficient in the Romance languages. So there were long periods when she could listen without having to speak. But there was no rest even in those periods; she needed to remember every word she could. The UN delegates had the awful habit of quoting each other at length — sometimes with approval, sometimes with a sneer, always with the risk of some tiny hairsplit that she had to get just right. Her headaches were immense.

That was, of course, the price you paid for having the two hemispheres of your brain surgically sliced apart. Not to mention the stitching back of parts of them that kept you from stumbling into things or falling down, or the DNA injections that left your neck swollen and your eyes bulging for weeks at a time and sometimes caused seizures indistinguishable from epilepsy. That had been a surprise. They hadn’t told her about those things when she signed up to become a split-brain translator — not really. You never did know what pain was going to be until you had it.

What made the whole day an order of magnitude worse was that she was starved for sleep. Sir Tam had followed her to her very door and then planted a foot inside it. His hands had been all over her in the limousine all the way in from the airport. The only way she could think to get rid of him was to pretend such exhaustion that she could not stay awake another second, even though it was just after lunch, New York time. And then she found she had talked herself into it.

So she did go to sleep. And woke up before midnight with the chance for any more sleep gone. And what was there to do with the eleven hours before the morning session would begin?

A letter to Ahmed, of course. A few hours with English irregular verbs. Another hour or so listening to the tapes she had just made to check her accent. But then she was tired and fretful. What she needed most was a walk from her apartment past the university into the fresh morning air of the park, but that was ten thousand kilometers away in Sofia. In New York you did not go walking in the fresh morning air. And so she had turned up for duty in the translator’s booth feeling as though a hard day’s work was already behind her, and her head throbbing and pounding in two different rhythms, one in each temple…

Her mind had wandered. She forced it back. It was Sir Tam asking for the floor now, and she had to put his words into Bulgarian.

His face was purple-red, and he was shouting. With one half of her brain Nan wondered at that while the other half was automatically processing his words. So much passion about such little fish! Not even fish. They were some sort of crustacean, weren’t they? To Nan, “krill” was something that old-fashioned peasant grannies stirred into their stews to give them body. It came as a grayish-white powdery substance that you bought in jars labeled “fish protein concentrate.” You knew that it was good for you, but you didn’t like to think about what organs and oddities were ground up to make it. In food-rich Bulgaria, nobody grew excited about the stuff.

But Sir Tam was excited. The Fuel Bloc needed it desperately, he shouted. Had to have it! Was entitled to it, by all the laws of civilized humanity! The Fuel Bloc already possessed the fleets of long-range factory ships that could seine the cold Antarctic Ocean. He quoted Pacem in Maris and the British-Portuguese Treaty of A.D. 1242. The tiny bodies of the creatures that made up the krill, he declaimed, were absolutely essential to British agriculture, being the very best kind of fertilizer for their crops.

At which the Uruguayan delegate interrupted, snarling, “Agriculture! You are using this essential protein to feed to animals.”

“Of course,” Sir Tam replied stoutly. “We are not blessed with the advantages given your country, Seсor Corrubias. We do not have immense plains on which our cattle can graze. In order to feed them properly, we must have imports—”

Someone in the American delegation laughed out loud, not a pleasant laugh, and the Uruguayan drummed on his desk derisively. “So it is cattle you feed, Sir Gulsmit? But we have it on the evidence of your own Ministry of Health that you give the krill to your cats and budgies! Do you then make minced kitten patties, perhaps? Or fresh chops of parrakeet?”

Sir Tam looked long-sufferingly at the president pro tern. “Sir, I must ask the courtesy of the floor.”

The president was a spare Ghanaian who had not once glanced toward any speaker. He did not do so now. His eyes stayed on the letters he was signing one by one as his secretary put them before him. He said, “I would request of the delegate from Uruguay that he reserve his remarks until the delegate from the United Kingdom has concluded.”

Sir Tam beamed graciously. “Thank you. In any case, I am almost finished. Of course, some part of our imports of krill does find its way into pet food, some part into protein additives for the justly famous British beef, some part into fertilizer to help us grow the vital foods that nature has otherwise denied us. Is that a matter for this body? I think not. What is of concern is the behavior of member states in their conduct of world affairs. We infringe no international treaty in continuing the long British tradition of the sea, in harvesting what is freely available to all in international waters, and of course in making suitable use of those pelagic areas which, by existing treaties freely arrived at by the member states, have long been reserved to us. But even this is not relevant to the motion before us today! That motion, I remind you, relates only to the proposal for a United Nations peacekeeping team to supervise the Antarctic fisheries. ‘Peacekeeping,’ my dear fellow delegates. A team to keep the peace. And therefore our position is clear. No such team is needed. The peace has been kept. There have been no incidents. There certainly will be none of our making. The United Nations has better things to do than to seek solutions for problems that do not exist.”

And he sat down, managing to do so with a bow to the president pro tem, a sardonic grin for the Uruguayan, and yes, even a wink for Ana, up in the translator’s booth! She shook her head in distress at this frivolous-minded person. But perhaps he was serious after all, for he was already writing something on a scrap of paper and beckoning a page, even as the Ghanaian finished signing his letters, slapped his portfolio shut, glanced at the clock, and managed not to catch the Uruguayan delegate’s eye as he said, “I am informed that the address of the next delegate may occupy a substantial period of time. Since it is now four, I suggest we recess this debate until ten o’clock tomorrow morning.”

A buzz rose up from the floor. Nan leaned back for a long moment, massaging her temples before she stood up and allowed herself to contemplate the next half hour: a quick meal, a bath, and then a lovely long sleep -

No. It was not to be. As she opened the door to the booth the page dashed up, out of breath, and handed her the note from Sir Tam. It said:

Absolutely essential you attend the party in the DVL, and that I have the pleasure of escorting you.

So there was no rest, no rest. She might have refused the invitation. But Sir Tam had taken the precaution of telling the head of the Bulgarian mission to the United Nations about it, and she was no sooner in her room than he was on the phone insisting she go.

She bathed quickly and dressed in what she guessed might be appropriate, then trotted back across the street from her hotel to the great quaint oblong building, so unlike its newer and fortresslike neighbors. Her head was pounding all the way. Diffidently she whispered her name to the guard at the Distinguished Visitors Lounge. He consulted a list, smiled frostily, and let her in.

What a tumult! How much smoke, and what odors of food and drinks! And there was Sir Tam, to be sure, tiny bouquet of flowers in one hand, the other hand on the shoulder of a plump, dark, grinning man whom Nan did not at once recognize but who was the very Uruguayan with whom Sir Tam had been exchanging insults an hour before.

“Nan! Ho, Nan! Over here!” He was beckoning her to him. She could not think of a reason for refusing, and knew before it happened that Gulsmit would be touching her again. And it happened just that way. The flowers turned out to be a bouquet of Parma violets, outrageously out of season and, of course, for her. Gulsmit insisted on pinning the corsage on her demure bodice himself, taking much more time over it than was necessary while the others in his little conversational group jovially pretended not to notice.

It angered Nan that the Scot should put himself on such terms of evident intimacy, especially in this hyperactive atmosphere, where people who had been trading threats with each other all day were now laughing and mingling and drinking together. Not only that. Every person in this little group was from a rival bloc. What would the head of her delegation say?

Sir Tam and the Saudi were Fuel. The Uruguayans were People. So were the two jolly Chinese women in their spike-heeled shoes and neo-Mao jackets of silk brocade and metal thread.

“You’ll never guess, Nan,” grinned Sir Tam after introducing her, “what our friends have up their sleeves for tomorrow. Tell her, Liao-tsen.”

The older of the Chinese women laid her hand on Ana’s arm, smiling. Clearly she had been drinking a great deal. Her consonants were fuzzy, but she said, comprehensibly enough, “The People’s Republic of Bengal will put forward an emergency resolution. It is a very pretty resolution, Miss Dimitrova. All about ‘the alleged multinational expedition of the Food-Exporting Powers’ and their ‘acts of violence against the natives of Son of Kung.’ ”

“Violence? What is this about violence?” demanded Nan, startled and suddenly fearful. If there was fighting on Kung-son … if Ahmed found himself in the middle of a war…

“That’s the funny part, dear girl,” chuckled Sir Tam. “It seems your friend God’s little junket has begun shooting down harmless balloonists. But not to worry. I don’t think it’s going to pass. It’s not a party matter, is it, Seсor Corrubias?”

The Uruguayan shrugged. “There has been no official consultation among the People’s Republics, that is true.”

“And unofficial?” Gulsmit probed.

Corrubias glanced at the elder Chinese woman, who nodded permission, and said, “I can tell you my personal opinion, and that is that the acts of violence we have heard described are not of much importance. Can one really get upset about rubber jack-o’-lanterns floating around in the sky?”

“There is also the matter of the underground race,” said the Chinese woman. She took another sip of her drink, looking merrily mysterious over the top of it at Sir Tam, before going on comfortably, “But that too… well, a few burrows broken into, that’s all. After all, how can we be sure that the creatures who inhabit them are indeed intelligent? We would not object to a Nebraska farmer, for example, opening a mole run as he plowed his corn paddies.”

“One might also,” said Ana boldly, surprising herself at the harshness of her voice, “speak of the crustacean race that has suffered some casualties.” But Sir Tam stopped her by a gentle pressure on the shoulder. She did not protest. She had suddenly begun to fear that it was Ahmed’s group that had caused those casualties, about which she knew so worryingly little.

“I would really enjoy watching you two fight it out,” said Sir Tam, laughing to take the menace out of his words. But Nan wondered if he didn’t really mean it. She also wondered why he was so carefully and publicly possessive of her, arm around her shoulder, hovering over her drink and refilling it from every passing tray. Surely all these foreign people would suppose they had been in bed together! She blushed at the thought. It would have been bad enough to be guilty of an immoral dalliance, like any common tart, and to have it known. But she was not even guilty! The name without the game — how awful! Why would Sir Tam go out of his way to create such an impression? Could it be that the lax morality of the Fuel people was such that he valued the appearance of sexual adventure as much as the relationship itself? Was he trying to show that he was still sexually potent? And what sort of people was she living among here?

“Please excuse me for a moment,” she said, glancing about as though looking for a woman’s w.c. But as soon as she was well away from Sir Tam, she circled around the white-paneled room to the buffet tables. At least she would bring up her blood sugar. Perhaps that would relieve the headaches and the exhaustion, and then she would think of a way to relieve the pressure from Sir Tam.

The table would have been lavish even in Sofia! But was it not the Tibetans who were giving this party? And why did they feel obliged to spread so wasteful a display of food? Caviar that certainly did not come from the Himalayas; delicate fruit ices that surely were unknown in their sparse, high valleys; pвtйs in the original wooden boxes from France. And look what they had done! The centerpieces were carved replicas of the races of Kungson! A balloonist, half a meter thick, in butter! A crustacean carved from what looked like strawberry sherbet! A long, almost ratlike creature — was it a burrower? — made from foie gras! And there, standing next to her, was a distinguished-looking gray-haired man who was directing a pale-haired younger man to fill a plate from the display. A spoonful of the burrower, a few slices of some sort of meat, a croissant, a scoop from the balloonist to butter the roll. He caught her eye and smiled pleasantly without speaking.

It was all incredibly ostentatious. It quite took Ana’s appetite away. She looked away from the food and saw Sir Tam across the room, eyes on her. Strangely, he nodded encouragement and pointed — to whom? To the graying, tall man next to her?

She looked more carefully. Had they ever met? No. But he had a face she seemed to know, from a photograph, she thought — but a photograph that had meant something to her.

She turned to speak to him, and the pale-haired man was suddenly between them, polite but at a state of readiness. For what? Did they think she was an assassin?

Then she remembered where she had seen the face. “You’re Mr. Godfrey Menninger,” she said.

His expression was inquiring. “Yes?”

“We’ve never met, but I’ve seen your picture in a newspaper. With your daughter. I’m Ana Dimitrova, and I met your daughter a few months ago in Sofia.”

“Of course you did! The angel of rescue. It’s all right, Teddy,” he said to the younger man, who stepped back and began collecting silverware for Menninger’s plate. “How nice to meet you at last, Ana. Margie’s here somewhere. Not near the food, poor thing. She has her mother’s metabolism. She can’t even look at a layout like this without putting on a kilo. Let’s go find her so you can say hello.”

Captain Menninger was sipping her Perrier water and allowing a fifty-year-old Japanese attachй to think he was making headway against her defenses when she heard her father’s voice behind her.

“Margie, dear, a surprise for you. You remember Ana Dimitrova?”

“No.” Marge studied the woman carefully, not competitively but in the manner of someone trying to learn a terrain from a map. Then the card file in her head clicked over. “Yes,” she corrected herself. “The Bulgarian woman. How nice to see you again.”

It was not anything of the kind, and she intended the Bulgarian bint to understand that. On the other hand, Margie had no particular wish to make an enemy of her, either. There might be a time when her connection with that Pak she was screwing — Dulla? Yes. Ahmed Dulla, member of the first Peeps’ expedition to Klong — could be a useful line to pursue. So she turned to the Japanese and said:

“Tetsu, I’d like you to meet Nan Dimitrova. She was such a help to me in Bulgaria. You know how foolish I am about making jokes — I just can’t help this mouth of mine. It says things that get me into the most terrible trouble. And so, of course, I said something ridiculously awful. Political, you know. It could have had really sticky consequences. And along came Nan, total stranger, just a good person, and got me out of it. How is that nice young man you were with, Nan?”

“Ahmed is on Kungson,” said Nan. She was unwilling to give offense, but she was not obliged to like this plump blond’s nasty little put-down games.

“Is he! Why, that’s a coincidence. You remember Dr. Dalehouse, of course? He’s there too. Perhaps they’ll meet.” She saw that her father’s aide had just signaled something to him and added, “Poppa, you’re looking worried. Am I saying something awful again?”

Godfrey Menninger smiled. “What I’m worried about is that if I’m going to give you a lift to Boston, it’s time we were on our way. You do remember you have a date at MIT tonight?”

“Oh, dear. I’d forgotten.” Wholly untrue. Margie had not forgotten the time of her date, which was the following morning, and she had no doubt that her father had not either.

“Also,” he went on, “you’ll be sneezing and scratching if we stay here much longer. Or had you also forgotten that you are allergic to flowers?”

Margie had never in her life been allergic to anything, but she said, “You do take such good care of me, poppa. Nan, I’m sorry this was so short, but it’s really nice seeing you again. And Tetsu, don’t be a stranger next time you’re in Houston. Stop by and say hello.” The Japanese hissed and bowed. Of course, Margie reflected, she could be out of town if he ever did happen to show up in Houston. Not that it mattered. She had already accomplished her objective. Past a certain age, even going to bed with a man did not give you quite as firm a grip on his emotions as communicating the impression that you certainly would like to if you ever got the chance.

In her father’s car, with the bodyguard-aide sitting in front, she said, “Now what was that all about, poppa?”

“Maybe your little Bulgarian friend isn’t quite as much of a country girl as she seems. Teddy swept her as a matter of routine. There was a microphone in her corsage.”

“Her? Bugged? That’s a crock!”

“That’s a fact,” he corrected. “Maybe her delegation put it on her, who knows? That place was full of sharks. It could have been any one of them. And speaking of sharks—”

“You want to know what I picked up,” she said, nodding, and told him what the Japanese had said about the Bengali resolution.

He leaned back in the seat. “Just the usual UN Mischief Night, I’d say. You turn over my garbage can, I throw a dead cat on your roof. Are they going to press it?”

“He didn’t say, poppa. He didn’t seem to take it very seriously.”

Her father rubbed the spot below his navel thoughtfully. “Of course, with the Peeps you never know. Heir-of-Mao has an investment in Klong. The Bengalis wouldn’t be starting anything they didn’t clear with the Forbidden City.”

Margie’s hair prickled erect at the back of her neck. “Are you saying I should worry? I don’t want my mission withdrawn!”

“Oh, no. No chance of that, honey. Relax, will you? You’re too much like your old lady. She never did learn to swing with the action. When the PLO kidnapped you I thought she’d have a nervous breakdown.”

“She was scared shitless, poppa. And you never turned a hair.” Not even, she thought, when your own four-year-old daughter was bawling into the jetliner’s radio.

“But I knew you were going to be all right, honey. I really did.”

“Well, I’m not bringing that up again, ol’ buddy.” Margie folded her hands in her lap and stared out the window. Between the UN complex and the airport there was no building, no street, that Margie had not seen a dozen times before. She was not really seeing them now. But they helped spur and clarify her thoughts, the long tandem buses hobbling down the slow lanes, the apartment dwellers walking their dogs, the school kids, stores, police on their tricycles, sidewalk vendors with their handmade jewelry and pocket computers. Thomas Jefferson, as he returned to Monticello, might have looked out of his stagecoach in just the same detached but proprietary way at the slaves weeding his crops.

She said slowly, “Listen, poppa. I want to get our mission reinforced. Now.”

“What’s the hurry?”

“I don’t know, but there’s a hurry. I want it done before the Peeps and the Greasies cut us off at the roots or get enough of their own people up there to own Kungson. I want us there first and biggest, because I want it all.”

“Shit, honey. Didn’t they teach you about priorities at the Point? There’s the krill business and the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and the Greasies threatening to raise their prices again — do you have any idea how tough all this is? I’ve only got one stack, and there’s only room for one thing at the top of it.”

“No, poppa, I don’t want to be told how hard it is. Don’t you understand this is a whole planet?”

“Of course I do, but—”

“No. No buts. I guess you don’t really understand what it means to have a whole planet to play with. For us, poppa, all for us. To start from scratch with, to develop in a systematic manner. Find all the fossil fuels, develop them in a rational way. Locate the cities where they don’t destroy arable land. Plant crops where they won’t damage the soil. Develop industry where it’s most convenient. Plan the population. Let it grow as it is needed, but not to where you have a surplus: good, strong, self-reliant people. American people, poppa. Maybe the place stinks now, but give it a hundred years and you’d rather be there than here, I promise. And I want it.”

Godfrey Menninger sighed, looking in love and some awe at the oldest and most troublesome of his children. “You’re worse than your mother ever was,” he said ruefully. “Well, I hear what you say. The Poles owe us one. I’ll see what I can do.”

TechTowTwo sprawled over the bank of the Charles River, more than twice the cubage of all the old brick buildings put together. There were no classrooms in Technology Tower Two. There was no administration, either. It was all for research, from the computer storage in the subbasements to the solar-radiation experiments that decorated the roof with saucers and bow ties.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology had a long tradition of involvement with space exploration, going back even before there was any — or any that did not take place on a printed page. As early as the 1950s there had been a design class whose entire curriculum revolved around the creation of products for export to the inhabitants of the third planet of the star Arcturus. The fact that there was no known planet of Arcturus, let alone inhabitants of it, did not disturb either teacher or students. Techpersons were used to unhinging their imaginations on demand. In the Cambridge community that centered around MIT, Harvard, the Garden Street observatories, and all the wonderlands of Route 128 there had been designers of interstellar spacecraft before the first Sputnik went into orbit, anatomists of extraterrestrials when there was no proof of life anywhere off the surface of Earth, and specialists in interplanetary communications before anyone was on the other end of the line. Margie Menninger had taken six months of graduate studies there, dashing from Tech to Harvard. She had been careful to keep her contacts bright.

The woman Margie wanted to see was a former president of the MISFITS and thus would have been a power in the Tech world even if she had not also held the title of assistant dean of the college. She had arranged a breakfast meeting at Margie’s request and had turned out five department heads on order.

The dean introduced them around the table and said, “Make it good now, Margie. Department heads aren’t crazy about getting up so early in the morning.”

Margie sampled her scrambled eggs. “For this kind of food, I don’t blame them,” she said, putting down her fork. “Let me get right to it. I have about ten minutes’ worth of holos of the autochthons of Son of Kung, alias Klong. No sound. Just visible.” She leaned back to the sideboard and snapped a switch, and the first of the holographic pictures condensed out of a pinkish glow. “You’ve probably seen most of this stuff anyway,” she said. “That’s a Krinpit. They are one of the three intelligent, or anyway possibly intelligent, races on Klong, and the only one of the lot that is urban. In a moment you’ll see some of their buildings. They’re open at the top. Evidently the Krinpit don’t worry much about weather. Why they have buildings at all is anyone’s guess, but they do. They would seem much the easiest of the three races to conduct trade with, but unfortunately the Peeps have a head start with them. No doubt we’ll catch up.”

The head of the design staff was a lean young black woman who had limited her breakfast to orange juice and black coffee and was already through with it. “Catch up at what, Captain Menninger?” she asked.

Margie took her measure and refused combat. “For openers, Dr. Ravenel, I’d like to see your people create some trade goods. For all three races. They’re all going to be our customers one of these days.”

The economist took his eyes off the holo of a Krinpit coracle to challenge Margie. “ ‘Customers’ implies two-way trade. What do you think these, ah, Klongans are going to have to sell us that’s worth the trouble of shipping it all those light-years?”

Margie grinned. “I thought you’d never ask.” She pulled an attachй case off the floor and opened it on the table in front of her, pushing the plate of eggs out of the way. “So far,” she said, “we don’t exactly have any manufactured objects. But take a look at this.” She passed around several ten-centimeter squares of a filmy, resilient substance. “That’s the stuff the balloonists’ hydrogen sacs are made out of. It’s really pretty special stuff — I mean, it holds gaseous H₂ with less than one percent leakage in a twenty-four-hour period. We could supply quite a lot of that if there was a specialty market for it.”

“Don’t you have to kill a balloonist to get it?”

“Good question.” Margie nodded to the economist with a lying smile. “Actually, no. That is, there are other, nonsentient races with the same body structure, although this one is, I believe, from one of the sentients. How about a market? If I remember correctly, the Germans had to use the second stomach of the ox when they were building the Hindenburg. ”

“I see,” said the economist gravely. “All we need to do is contact a few Zeppelin manufacturers.” There was a general titter.

“I’m sure,” said Margie steadily, “that you will have some better idea than that. Oh, and I ought to mention one thing. I brought my checkbook. There’s a National Science Foundation grant for research and development that’s waiting for someone to apply for it.” And for that gift too, I thank you, poppa, she thought.

The economist had not become the head of a major department of the faculty without learning when to retreat. “I didn’t mean to brush you off, Captain Menninger. This is actually a pretty exciting challenge. What else have you got for us?”

“Well, we have a number of samples that haven’t been studied very carefully. Frankly, they aren’t really supposed to be here. Camp Detrick doesn’t know they’re gone yet.”

The group stirred. The dean said quickly, “Margie, I think we all get the same picture when you mention Camp Detrick. Is there anything connected with biological warfare in this?”

“Certainly not! No, believe me, that doesn’t come into it at all. I sometimes go out of channels, I admit, but what do you guess they’d do to me if I broke security on something like that?”

“Then why Camp Detrick?”

“Because these are alien organisms,” Margie explained. “Except for the sample of balloonist tissue, you’ll notice that every item I’ve got here is in a double-wrapped, heat-sealed container. The outside has been acid-washed and UV-sterilized. No, wait—” she added, grinning. Everybody at the table had begun looking at their fingertips, and there was a perceptible movement away from the samples of tissue on the table. “Those balloonist samples are okay. The rest, maybe not so okay. They’ve been pretty carefully gone over. There don’t seem to be any pathogens or allergens. But naturally you’ll want to use care in handling them.”

“Thanks a lot, captain,” said the designer stiffly. “How can you be so sure about the tissue?”

“I ate some three days ago,” she said. She had their full attention now and swept on. “I should point out that the grant naturally includes whatever you need to insure safe handling. Now, this group contains plant samples. They’re photosynthetic, and their principal response is in the infrared range. Interesting for you agronomists? Right. And these over here are supposed to be art objects. They come from the Krinpit, the ones that look like squashed cockroaches. The things are supposed to ‘sing.’ That is, if you’re a Krinpit and you rub them on your shell, they make some interesting sounds. If you don’t have a chitinous shell, you can use a credit card.”

The woman from design picked up one of them gingerly, peering at it through the transparent plastic. “You said you wanted us to develop some kind of trading goods?”

“I sure do.” The last thing Margie pulled out of her dispatch case was a red-covered mimeographed document. The words MOST SECRET were dazzle-printed on the jacket. “As you can see, this is classified, but that’s just military hang-ups. It will be turned over to the UN in about ten days anyway, or most of it will. It’s the most comprehensive report we’ve been able to prepare on the three principal races of Klong.”

All six of the faculty members at the table reached for it at once, but the design woman was fastest. “Um,” she said, flipping through it. “I’ve got a graduate student who would eat this up. Can I show it to him?”

“Better than that. Let’s leave this copy and the samples with our friends, and let’s you and I go talk to him.”

Fifteen minutes later Margie had succeeded in getting rid of the department head, and she and a slim, excitable young man named Walter Pinson were head to head. “Think you can handle it?” asked Margie.

“Yes! I mean, well, it’s a big job—”

Margie put her hand on his arm. “I’m sure you can. I’d really appreciate it if you’d tell me how you plan to go about it, though.”

Pinson thought for a moment. “Well, the first thing is to figure out what their needs are,” he offered.

“That’s fascinating! It must be pretty difficult. I would hardly know where to start. Offhand, I’d say their biggest need, all of them, is just staying alive. As you’ll see, everything on the planet spends a lot of its time trying to eat everything else, including the other intelligent races.”

“Cannibalism?”

“Well, I don’t think you can call it that. They’re different species. And there are a lot of other species that are trying to eat the intelligent ones.”

“Predators,” said Pinson, nodding. “Well, there’s a starting point right there. Let’s see. For the predators like the balloonists, for instance, anything that would set them on fire would help protect the sentients. Of course,” he added, frowning, “we’d have to make sure that these were used only to defend the sentients against lower forms of life.”

“Of course!” said Margie, shocked. “We wouldn’t want to give them weapons to start a war with!” She glanced at her watch. “I’ve got an idea, Walter. I didn’t have much of a breakfast, and it’s getting on toward lunch. Why don’t you and I get something to eat? There’s a place I used to know when I was a graduate student. In a pretty frowsty old motel, but the food was good — if you have the time, I mean?”

“Oh, I have the time,” said Pinson, looking at her appreciatively.

“It’s up past Harvard Square, but we ought to be able to get a cab. And please let me — I have an expense account, and it’s all your tax money anyway.” As they walked toward the elevator, a mob of undergraduates flocked toward a lecture hall. Looking toward them, Margie asked, “Do you by any chance know a student named Lloyd Wensley? I think he’s a freshman.”

“No, I don’t think so. Friend of yours?”

“Not really — or anyway, not since he was a little kid. I used to know his family. Now, about these, ah, implements for self-protection—”

Several quite pleasant hours later, Margie got into a cab outside the old motel. If the food had not been really as good as she remembered it, the rooms still came up to standard. As they approached Harvard Square she had an impulse. “Go down Mass Ave,” she ordered the driver. “I want to make a little detour.” After a few blocks she directed him into a side street, and looked about.

She recognized the neighborhood. There was the supermarket. There was Giordan’s Spa, and there, over the barbershop, only now it was over a hardware store, was the three-room corner apartment where she had lived with Lloyd and Lloyd Junior through the ten months that measured both her graduate year and her marriage. It was the closest Marge had ever come to motherhood, fill-in to a six-year-old for the real mother who had died when he was three. It was the closest she had ever come to wifehood, too, and closer than she would ever come again. Old Lloyd! Thirty years old when she was nineteen, and so fucking courtly in the Officers’ Club that you’d never guess what he was like in bed. Not even if you’d tried him out a time or two, as Margie had been careful to do. Just looking up at the window of their bedroom made Marge’s neck ache with the memory of being head-jammed into a corner of the bed, half choked with pillows, so Lloyd could pump himself dry as quickly as convenient. As often as convenient. When he thought convenient. You didn’t ask a cuspidor for permission to spit in it, or a wife for sex. The cuspidor couldn’t struggle, not if you had it jammed into position just right, and it wouldn’t cry out. Neither would the wife, especially with the six-year-old stepson only marginally asleep just outside the door.

She ordered the driver on.

It would have been nice to see Lloyd Junior, all grown up.

But better not. Better the way it was. She hadn’t seen either of the Lloyds since the annulment, and no use pressing your luck. It had been a pretty frightening, dehumanizing experience for a young girl; how lucky she was, thought Margie, that it hadn’t scarred her forever!

When she got back to her hotel there was a taped message from her father: “To hear is to obey. Catch a news broadcast.”

She turned on the bedside TV while she packed, hunting for an all-news station. She was rewarded with five minutes about the latest Boston political corruption scandals, and then an in-depth interview with the Red Sox’s new designated hitter. But at last there was a recap of the top international story of the day.

“In a surprise move at the United Nations this morning, the top Polish delegate, Wladislas Prczensky, announced that his government has accepted the challenge presented by the Bengali resolution. The Food powers have agreed to send out an investigatory commission with broad powers to investigate the alleged cases of brutal treatment of native races on the planet whimsically called ‘Klong’ or ‘Son of Kung.’ There will be no representatives of major powers such as the United States or the Soviet Union on the commission, which will be made up of UN peacekeeping officers from Poland itself, Brazil, Canada, Argentina, and Bulgaria.”