The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [84]
Guest meals were served up in the main ranch house, in a sunny conservatory with a stunning mountain view. Van had started his day with Russian eggs Benedict with spinach and caviar, plus pineapple juice and an inch-thick buffalo breakfast steak. His altitude sickness was banished. The protein, vitamins, and half a gallon of Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee had definitely gotten his motor running.
Dottie, who was off the pill, had surprised him with a condom, which they promptly broke. Van was shocked to see her shrug off this mishap, and even laugh about it. She was in a mood he had never seen.
The cottage’s hot tub was like a little amphitheater, surrounded by black solar-water heaters. The tub gave off a volcanic Jacuzzi sizzling in the crisp winter air. Van had never made love in a hot tub before. As the pulsing currents beat and sizzled against his naked flesh, he got it about the appeal there. It was like having more sex without even needing to move.
Dottie sampled her glass of white wine, and tucked her cold hand back in the hot water. “Honey, that was too long apart, okay? I don’t wanna be a computer-security widow.”
“We can meet again at that big to-do in Virginia. And after that, Tony has invited me to a Joint Techs conference up here.”
Unhappiness crossed her face. He’d given her the wrong answer. She didn’t want him to just make some dates.
He couldn’t tell her the simple thing that she needed to hear. Even though he knew what that was, more or less. It was something like: “Honey, I missed you just as much as you missed me.” But that wasn’t quite true, and he knew it.
Those months apart had brought him an ugly self-wisdom, Van thought as his floating feet bobbed in the sizzling water. There was something wrong with him as a man, a husband, a father, and a human being. He was the only child of a troubled marriage. He came from a line of people who were way too bright. He had an ability to concentrate and work creatively, and he also had a thorny, geeky isolation.
And those were not two different things. They were the very same thing. Beneath his shell, his personal armor, he had a vast, galactic gulf of need. It was huge and ruthless, like an autism. It would never be filled. And that wasn’t her fault at all, for a thousand loving Dotties couldn’t fill it. His heart of hearts lived there in a gulf of darkness, and his love for her was like one single glowing star.
If he’d been a poet he could have told her that in some nice way, but Van had never in his life packed a thought like that into words. He might have made a start at saying it—but there was worse. In her absence from his life, in the icy vacuum where her warmth had once consoled him, there was a new and powerful emotion growing inside him. As Van floated there at ease under the big winter sky, looked after, fed, watered, loved, now he could see that feeling, now he could finally put a name to what was going on inside of him. It was rage. He could see that rage within himself as if watching it through a telescope. It was black and hard and dense, like a neutron star.
He was someone who read manuals, wore glasses, and typed on a keyboard. About the most violent thing he ever did in his cyberwarrior life was to look for a buffer overflow. But rage was growing in him, because rage was a native part of his soul. Rage grew there in the entirely natural way that grief would grow in a widower.
Van had nothing to say to her about this. He couldn’t any more wrap his tongue around that than he could lick broken glass.
Dottie looked over his shoulder. Then she found her glasses, put them on, and stared.
Van found his specs as well. Two men were approaching their cottage on horseback. The first was a young