Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [87]
People laughed, and the gleam of triumph in Phyllis’s eye had nothing to do with Jupiter. But there was a tightening at the corner of her mouth; something at the end of her tale had darkened the triumph, somehow.
“And you were the leader, right?” someone asked.
Phyllis held up a hand, to say she could not deny it though she wanted to. “It was a cooperative effort,” she said. “But sometimes someone has to decide when there’s an impasse, or simply a need for speed. And I had been head of Clarke before the catastrophe.”
She flashed her big smile, confident that they had enjoyed the account. Sax smiled with the rest, and nodded when she looked his way. She was an attractive woman, but not, he thought, very bright. Or maybe it was just that he did not like her very much. For certainly she was very intelligent in some ways, a good biologist when she had done biology, and certain to score high on an IQ test. But there were different types of intelligence, and not all of them were subject to analytic testing. Sax had noticed this fact in his student years: that there were people who would score high on any intelligence test, and were very good at their work, but who at the same time could walk into a room of people and within an hour have many of the occupants of that room laughing at them, or even despising them. Which was not very smart. Indeed the most giddy of high school cheerleaders, say, managing to be friendly with everyone and therefore universally popular, seemed to Sax to be exercising an intelligence at least as powerful as any awkward brilliant mathematician’s— the calculus of human interaction being so much more subtle and variable than any physics, somewhat like the emerging field of math called cascading recombinant chaos, only less simple. So that there were at least two kinds of intelligence, and probably many more: spatial, aesthetic, moral or ethical, interactional, analytic, synthetic, and so forth. And it was those people who were intelligent in a number of different ways who were truly exceptional, who stood out as something special.
Phyllis, however, basking in the attention of her listeners, most of them much younger than her and, at least on the surface, in awe of her historicity— Phyllis was not one of those polymaths. On the contrary, she seemed rather dim when it came to judging what people thought of her. Sax, who knew he shared the deficiency, watched her with the best Lindholm smile he could muster. But it seemed to him a fairly obviously vain performance on her part, even a bit arrogant. And arrogance was always stupid. Or else a mask for some kind of insecurity. Hard to guess what that insecurity might be, in such a successful and attractive person. And she certainly was attractive.
After supper they went back up to the observation room on the top floor, and there under a glittering bowl of stars the crowd from Biotique turned on some music. It was the kind called nuevo calypso, the current rage in Burroughs, and several members of the group brought out instruments and played along, while others moved to the middle of the room and began to dance. The music was paced at about a hundred beats a minute, Sax calculated, perfect physiological timing for stimulating the heart just a bit; the secret to most dance music, he supposed.
And then Phyllis was there by his side, grabbing for his hand and pulling him out among the dancers. Sax only just restrained himself from jerking his hand away from her, and he was sure that his response to her smiling invitation was sickly at best. He had never danced in his life; as far as he could recall. But that