Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [111]
Well, whatever; at this moment that wasn’t really the point. He needed to know what to do. It was like being in high school. He had hated high school for this very reason.
Diane sighed. He glanced at her; she was smiling her little smile. “That was fun,” she said. “I never take time like this anymore.”
She was keeping a good distance between them.
“We’ll have to do it in D.C.,” Frank suggested. “Take a break.”
“That would be nice. We might even have outdoor ice skating this winter, if the forecasts come true.”
“Yes, that’s right. Out on the Potomac for that matter.”
Another block.
Frank said, “You do work long hours.”
“No more than anyone else.”
“I hear it’s a lot more.”
“Well, there’s a lot to do. Anyway, it won’t last much longer.”
She pointed down a crossing street this time, rather than nudging him along. “Down that way. The hotel’s at Fifty-first and Lex.”
“Ah yeah. What do you mean, not much longer?”
“Well, my term is almost up.”
“It’s a term?”
“Yes, didn’t you know?” She looked up at him, laughed at his expression. “Heading NSF is a presidential appointment, it lasts for six years. I have just over a year to go.”
They stopped in front of their hotel.
“I didn’t know that,” Frank said stupidly.
“They must have told you when you did the orientation.”
“Oh,” said Frank. “I missed some of that.”
“You blew it off.”
“Well, yes, a little bit, not all of it. . . .”
She watched him, seeming amused but guarded. He had thought she was going to be his boss indefinitely. Now he had suddenly learned she was not as powerful as he had thought. And power is attractive. On the other hand, this meant she was not going to be his boss indefinitely, which meant that particular strangeness would go away, leaving them unconstrained by work issues—by the past in any manifestation—free to examine whatever was between them. So, less powerful in the pure sense, but less constrained in her relation to him; and how did these factors affect his feelings?
She was watching his face to see!
He didn’t know himself, so there was no way his face could show anything. But then that too must have been visible. And the unconscious mind—
He shivered at his own confusion, tried to smile. “So there’s light at the end of your tunnel,” he said.
“But I like the job.”
“Ah. Yes. Well . . . that’s too bad, then.”
She shrugged. “I’ll do something else.”
“Dang.”
She shrugged again. She was still watching him; interested in him. He wondered how much longer they could stand outside the hotel talking before it began to look strange.
“I want to hear more about this down in D.C.,” he said. “What you’re thinking of doing, and all.”
“Okay.”
“Good. Well, 6:00 train—shall we meet in the lobby and walk over to the station?”
“Sure. Five A.M. sharp.”
They turned together into the hotel and walked to the elevator. Up it went, opened at the third floor:
“Good night.”
“Good night.”
“That was fun.”
“Yes it was.”
WHEN CHARLIE CLEANED HOUSE HE WORKED in a burst of maniacal effort powered by very loud music, making the event into a kind of indoor extreme sport, a domestic pentathlon performed in a last-minute attempt to stave off utter shabbiness. The ancient insane and incontinent cats, the ineradicable musk that the swimming tiger had left in the basement (perhaps contributing to the cats’ paranoia), Joe’s depredations and accidents, Nick’s absent-minded tendency to use the furniture as a napkin, for instance to clean his fork so as to keep his food pure; all these left marks. Even the divinely slovenly Anna left marks, dropping her clothing wherever she happened to take it off, depositing books and papers and mail wherever she finished with them—all behaviors in stark contrast to the extreme order of her abstract thinking—all these had an impact. And Charlie himself was disorganized in both the abstract and the concrete; so that