The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [93]
Van sat on the bed. His soul was flapping like a blown sail. “Oh, Dottie.”
“I have a right to you. I’m your wife. Why should we neglect each other? I want you to come live with me. We could have another baby. They didn’t draft you. You’re not in any uniform. Why don’t you just do it?”
“I have a title,” Van said. “I get paid. They trust me.”
“You hate that work. It’s changing you. You should see what you look like when you’re trying to talk about it. Your eyes get so hard and cold. Your face gets sour . . . You look like a big dog guarding the world’s last bone.”
Van did not take this as an insult. He recognized the truth in what Dottie was telling him. He had the kind of face that cops often had. Cops were people who were never just freely happy to see you. Even if they were nice guys, and many cops were, they always, always had to give you that guardian look first, to size you up to see if you were dangerous, or armed, or insane. He’d seen that guard-dog look on the faces of a hundred people in the Vault, and now, yes, he had it, too. He had it because he deserved it. He had earned that face. He had it because he was one of them.
“Honey,” he said, “there’s a lot to what you say. I know that. But I can’t just leave. There’s a real big deal coming up in Virginia . . . Jeb says . . . well, Jeb says a lot of things . . . but if that all goes well, then it will all be worth it.”
“What about us? I want you to live here.”
“It was just a staff job,” Van told her. He was really talking to himself. “I never told Jeb I’d make it my career. Even Jeb’s post isn’t full-time. We were just supposed to . . . paper over the cracks until we can establish solid policy guidance and add permanent structure at a federal level, hopefully cabinet level.”
“Derek, I never heard you talk like that before. Not when we were happy.”
“Well, that’s how they have to talk.” Van groaned. “Honey, I know that I’m overdoing it. I need you to tell me when I go off the rails. When you’re not there for me, yeah, the inside of my head gets pretty strange.”
The suite’s phone rang discreetly. Van’s limo had arrived.
Van dug hastily inside his survival backpack. “I’ll miss my plane in Denver if I don’t leave right now. But here. I need you to hold on to some things for me. Take this hunting knife. Oh, and take this ray gun.”
Dottie gripped the ray gun’s cord. “You really carried this thing around with you, Derek?”
“All over. I need it to solder,” Van told her. “It makes a great office paperweight, too. But they’re so dumb on planes now that they won’t even let me take a thing that looks like a gun. And that bad gig I just did with the Space Force . . . well, I can’t tell you about that. But I wasn’t happy with that. That really backfired, it was so bad . . . It took me weeks to work on that, and I pulled in help from everyone I knew, but, yeah, you’re right, Dottie. I can’t fight with you about that. It would have been a hell of a lot better for everybody, everybody in the whole world, if I had just stayed here with you. Maybe watching some sci-fi on TV. Eating that venison sausage. With that cantaloupe. That stuff was great.”
“They don’t have any TV here.”
“That would have been even better. Some Bollywood movies with the venison sausage, yeah, I want that. I do.”
She threw her slender arms around him. “We had a great time, didn’t we?”
“Aw, Dots, it was such a honeymoon. It was just so great. I just wanted more and more. Someday, someday real soon now.”
“I’ll come see you in Virginia.”
“You send me some e-mail.”
Van made the mistake of reading his e-mail in the Denver airport. He’d granted himself just three days out of the loop, one brief human chance to eat, and sleep, and maybe kiss his life’s companion. Three days, and the CCIAB’s office came right apart. It was like reaching out in a blackout to touch