The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [82]
It was very funny to Van that Tony Carew, the poster boy for jet-setters, had finally found the one woman in the whole round world who could lead him around by the nose. An Indian movie star, of all the wild things. It was so like him. Van had been plenty curious about the girl, so he had found one of the actress’s Hindi-language movies on an Indian-made DVD. Tony’s sex-bomb girlfriend turned out to be this sugary, Technicolor hoochie-coochie girl who didn’t even kiss her co-stars. The whole ridiculous thing gave Van a warm, bubbly, glowing feeling. Poor Tony, poor old Tony, that lucky slob.
Jeez, at an altitude like this, that Chardonnay had some kind of kick.
He patted her hand. “Precious,” he said, “we should just let old Tony just be Tony. You and me, we get to be you and me. We can be happy, if they give us a chance. That’s what counts.”
A flush rose to her cheeks. Dottie’s shoulders started to shake. Oh, for heaven’s sake, she was going to cry. Van’s heart smoldered guiltily within him. Well, why shouldn’t she cry? She had good reasons.
He put a hand on her shoulder. “Honey, it’ll be all right now. It’ll be good for a while.”
Dottie only sniffled all the more. Why could he never tell her the right thing? Sometimes he almost got it all straight in his head. But he had a cramp in him that would never let him give her the right words.
The baby was asleep again. They were stuck in this small cold room. Dottie was crying and his head still hurt from the thin mountain air. But at least they were alone, and no one was bothering them. Dottie’s little room didn’t seem so bad once Dottie was inside it. It was lots bigger than his tiny Vault office, and probably much less weird, too. Dottie was here with him, that was the point. He wasn’t freezing outside the Facility’s gates in the dark. He should be grateful for that. Plus, there weren’t any Space Force generals around here. Life wasn’t so bad, it was pretty good after all, wasn’t it? Yes, life had to be good. He pulled his shirt off.
Dottie’s eyes widened as she wiped away her tears. Van grinned at her. Yeah, in her absence, he’d really been hitting the gym! He’d shed a lot of flab! Thanks to those Nautilus machines, he’d never been in better shape . . .
“What happened to your shoulder?”
Van glanced at the fading blotch of purple and yellow. He had hammered his shoulder black-and-blue with the bouncing butt of a South African combat shotgun. The thing had a spinning drum magazine that spewed shells as if they were confetti.
Dottie touched the bruise in wonder. “Honey, you really got hurt!”
Of course the blazing shotgun had hurt him some, but it had been so exciting that he hadn’t even cared. “A little accident at work,” he lied. He stretched out on the taut, narrow bed.
In a moment she had slid in next to him under the heavy quilt. They never shared the same bed much as a couple. With lives in separate cities, they had never fallen into that habit, somehow. This bed was much too small. Dottie clung to him as if they were stuck on a life raft. He was too tired and winded to make love to her, but he was taking huge comfort in the heat of her skin, in the even sound of her breathing. His star girl. A gift to him from the universe. On some silent level of his soul he had felt a profound terror, a deadly conviction, that he would never hold Dottie again.
Dottie pillowed her head on his arm, locked a leg around him, and fell fast asleep. The room was very dim. He could barely make out the sweet line of her nose, her cheekbone.
How frail the world was.
He’d never known, until he stepped behind the curtain of power, that civilization was mostly a matter of keeping up appearances. Up at the very top of the power elite, in the little counsels and committees of the great and the good, even the people who happened to be scientists and engineers had to become witch doctors. Yes, he was a politician now, too.