Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [138]
High above the house a young wing glider was wheeling in search of a thermal. His angelic wings were painted like a flamingo’s, each pink-tinted pinion feather brightly outlined. Madoc had never seen a real flamingo, but he knew that they were smaller by far than the bird boy. Natural selection had never produced a bird as large as the human glider, but modern technology had taken over where mutation had left off, in every sphere of human existence.
Madoc smiled as he watched the glider swoop low and then soar, having found his thermal. He willed the flier to attempt a loop or some equally daring stunt, but the conditions weren’t right and the boy hadn’t yet obtained the full measure of his skill. In time, no doubt, he would dare anything—flirtation with danger was at least half the fascination that attracted men to flight.
Damon was lucky to have inherited a house like this, Madoc thought—all the more so if, as Damon continued to insist, Silas Arnett’s death had been no more real than Surinder Nahal’s. It was a pity that Damon didn’t seem to appreciate what he had—but that had always been Damon’s problem.
“Who was on the phone?”
Madoc hadn’t heard Diana Caisson come up behind him; her bare feet made no sound on the thick carpet.
“Damon,” he said, without turning to look at her. He knew that she would be wearing nothing but a bath towel.
“When’s he coming?”
Still Madoc wouldn’t turn to face her. “He’s not,” he said.
“What?”
“He’s not coming.”
“But I thought. . . .” Diana trailed off without finishing the sentence, but she wasn’t finished. Madoc watched her cheeks go red, and he saw her fist clench harder than any streetfighter’s fist. He’d seen her draw blood before, and he didn’t expect to see anything less this time.
Madoc knew what Diana had thought. She’d thought that Damon had offered them temporary use of the house he’d inherited from Silas Arnett as a roundabout way of fixing up a meeting. She was still waiting for Damon to “see the light”: to realize that he couldn’t bear to be without her and that he had to mend his ways in order to win her back. When Damon had returned the full set of master tapes which he’d plundered for his various VE productions, she’d recklessly assumed that it was the first step on the way to a reconciliation: a gesture of humility.
Madoc knew different. Damon had never been one for seeing the lights that other people suspended for him. He liked to chase his own fox fires.
“What did he say?” Diana asked.
Madoc thought for a moment that she might be trying—unsuccessfully—to suppress her annoyance, but then he realized that it was just a slow buildup. He didn’t suppose he had any real chance of heading her off, but he felt obliged to try. “He said that we should relax and enjoy ourselves. He said that we could stay as long as we want, because he doesn’t anticipate using the house at all. It’s on the market, of course, but it could take weeks to sell, or even months.”
“Will he be coming later in the week?”
“No, Di. When he says that he doesn’t intend using the place at all, that’s exactly what he means. He’s busy.”
“Busy!” Her voice had risen to a screech. “He’s just inherited two small fortunes, to add to the one he already had but somehow never got around to mentioning. He doesn’t have to make any more telephone tapes, or any more game tapes, or any more fight tapes, or any more pornotapes . . . not that he ever did, it seems. He can do anything he damn well likes!” Diana had not yet begun to accept that she was fighting a losing battle, because she hadn’t yet begun to understand why she had never had a chance of winning it.
“That’s right,” Madoc told her as gently as he could. “He can do anything he likes—and what he likes, as it happens, is setting himself up in business.”
“He could have done that in Los Angeles!”
“He thinks Los Angeles is way too crowded. There’s no real privacy here. If he were going to stay here, he said, he might as well take the job