Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [6]
He managed to get all three boxes out of the elevator without actually jamming the door, but he had to leave two behind while he carried the third to the door of his apartment. He set it down, ringing his own doorbell as he turned away to fetch the second. When he came back with the second box, however, he found that his ring had gone unanswered. The first box was still outside. Given the number of spy eyes set discreetly into the corridor walls there was no way anyone would take the risk of stealing any of its contents, but its continued presence was an annoyance nevertheless. When Damon had placed the second box beside the first he fished out his key and opened the door himself, poking his head inside with the intention of calling for assistance.
He closed his mouth abruptly when the blade of a carving knife slammed into the doorjamb, not ten centimeters away from his ducking head. The blade stuck there, quivering.
“You bastard!” Diana said, rushing forward to meet him from the direction of his edit suite.
It didn’t take much imagination to figure out what had offended her so deeply. The reason she hadn’t answered the doorbell was that she’d been too deeply engrossed in VE—in the VE that he’d been in the process of redesigning when concentration overload had started his head aching. Damon realized belatedly that he ought to have tidied the work away properly, concealing it behind some gnomic password.
“It’s not a final cut,” he told her, raising his arms with the palms flat in a placatory gesture. “It’s just a first draft. It won’t be you in the finished product—it won’t be anything like you.”
“That’s bullshit,” Diana retorted, her voice still taut with pent-up anger. “First draft, final cut—I don’t give a damn about that. It’s the principle of the thing. It’s sick, Damon.”
Damon knew that it might add further fuel to her wrath, but he deliberately turned his back on her and went back into the corridor. He hesitated over the possibility of picking up one of the boxes of groceries he’d already brought to the threshold, but he figured that he needed time to think. He walked all the way back to the elevator, taking his time.
This is it, he thought, as he picked up the third box. This is really it. If she hasn’t had enough, I have.
He couldn’t help but feel that in an ideal world—or even the so-called New Utopia which was currently filling the breach—there ought to be a more civilized way of breaking up, but his relationship with Diana Caisson had always been a combative affair. It had been his combativeness that first attracted her attention, in the days when he had wielded the knives—but he had only done so in the cause of sport, never at the behest of mere rage.
A great deal had changed since then. He had switched sides; instead of supplying the raw material to be cut, spliced, and subtly augmented into a salable VE product, he was now an engineer and an artist. She had changed too, but the shift in her expectations hadn’t matched the shift in his. With every month that passed she seemed to want more and more from him, whereas he had found himself wanting less and less from her. She had taken that as an insult, as perhaps it was.
Diana thought that the time he spent building and massaging VEs was a retreat from the world, and from her, which ought to be discouraged for the sake of his sanity. She couldn’t see how anyone could absorb themselves in the painstaking creation of telephone answering