Four for Tomorrow Part 7

"Perhaps Bastille Day," she whispered. "There's the Liberte, figalite, Fratemite Fete Nue . . ."

"Where?"

"In the New Versailles Dome, at nine. If you'd like an invitation, I'll see that you receive one. ..."

"Yes, I do want one."

("She made you ask," jeered Primitive Moore.) "Very well, you'll receive one in May."

"Won't you spare me a day or so now?"

She shook her head, her blue-blonde coif burning his face.

61."Time is too dear," she whispered in mock-Camille 43 pathos, "and the days of the Parties are without end.

You ask me to cut years off my life and hand them to you."

"That's right."

"You ask too much," she smiled.

He wanted to curse her right then and walk away, but he wanted even more so to stay with her. He was twenty-seven, an age of which he did not approve in the first place, and he had spent all of the year 1999 wanting her. He had decided two years ago that he was going to fall in love and marry-because he could finally afford to do so without altering his standards of living. Lacking a woman who combined the better qualities of Aphrodite and a digital computer, he had spent an entire year on safari, trekking after the spoor of his starcrossed.

The invitation to the Bledsoes' Orbiting New Year- which had hounded the old year around the world, chas- ing it over the International Dateline and off the Earth entirely, to wherever old years go-had set him back a month's pay, but had given him his first live glimpse of Leota Mathilde Mason, belle of the Sleepers. Forgetting about digital computers, he decided then and there to fall in love with her. He was old-fas.h.i.+oned in many re- spects.

He had spoken with her for precisely ninety-seven seconds, the first twenty of which had been Arctic. But he realized that she existed to be admired, so he insisted on admiring her. Finally, she consented to be seen dancing with him at the Millenium Party in Stockholm.

He had spent the following year antic.i.p.ating her seduction back to a reasonable and human mode of ex- istence. Now, in the most beautiful city in the world, she had just informed him that she was bored and was about to retire until Bastille Day. It was then that Primitive Moore realized what Civilized Moore must really have 62.known all along: the next time that he saw her she would be approximately two days older and he would be going on twenty-nine. Time stands still for the Set, but the price of mortal existence is age. Money could buy her the most desirable of all narcissist indulgences: the cold- bunk.

And he had not even had the chance of a Stockholm snowflake in the Congo to speak with her, to speak more than a few disjointed sentences, let alone to try talking her out of the ice-box club.Even now, Setman laureate Wayne Unger was moving to cut in on him, with the expression of a golf pro about to give a lesson.) "h.e.l.lo, Leota. Sorry, Mister Uh."

Primitive Moore snarled and bashed him with his club; 44 Civilized Moore released one of the most inaccessible women in the world to a G.o.d of the Set.

She was smiling. He was smiling. They were gone.

All the way around the world to San Francisco, sitting in the bar of the stratocruiser in the year of Our Lord Two Thousand-that is to say: two, zero, zero, zero- Moore felt that Time was out of joint.

It was two days before he made up his mind what he was going to do about it.

He asked himselffrom the blister balcony of his suite in the Hundred Towers of the Hilton-Frisco Complex): Is this the girl I want to marry?

He answered himselflocking alternately at the traf- fic capillaries below his shoetops and the Bay): Yes.

Why? he wanted to know.

Because she is beautiful, he answered, and the future will be lovely. I want her for my beautiful wife in the lovely future.

'So he decided to join the Set.

He realized it was no mean feat he was mapping out.

First, he required money, lots of money-green acres of 63.Presidents, to be strewn properly in the proper places.

The next requisite was distinction, recognition. Unfortu- nately, the world was full of electrical engineers, hum- ming through their twenty-hour weeks, dallying with pet projects-competent, capable, even inspired-who did not have these things. So he knew it would be difficult.

He submerged himself into research with a unique will: forty, sixty, eighty hours a week he spent-reading, designing, studying taped courses in subjects he had never needed. He gave up on recreation.

By May, when he received his invitation, he stared at the engravednot fac-copy) parchmentnot jot-sheet) with bleary eyes. He had already had nine patents en- tered and three more were pending. He had sold one and was negotiating with Akwa Mining over a water purification process which he had, he felt, fallen into.

Money he would have, he decided, if he could keep up the .pace.

Possibly even some recognition. That part now de- pended mainly on his puro-process and what he did with the money. Leotanee Lorelei) lurked beneath his pages of formulas, was cubed Braque-like in the lines on his sketcher; she burnt as he slept, slept as he burned.

In June he decided he needed a rest.

45 "a.s.sistant Division Chief Moore," he told the face in the groomerhis laudatory att.i.tude toward work had already earned him a promotion at the Seal-Lock Di- vision of Pressure Units, Corporate), "you need more French and better dancing."

The groomer hands patted away at his sandy stubble and slashed smooth the s.h.a.gginess above his ears. The weary eyes before him agreed bluely; they were tired of studying abstractions.

The intensity of his recreation, however, was as fa- 64.tiguing in its own way as his work had been. His muscle tone did improve as he sprang weightlessly through the Young Men's Christian a.s.sociation Satellite-3 Trampoline Room; his dance steps seemed more graceful after he had spun with a hundred robots and ten dozen women; he took the accelerated Berlitz drug-course in French (eschewing the faster electrocerebral-stimulation series, because of a rumored transference that might slow his reflexes later that summer); and he felt that he was be- ginning to sound better-he had hired a gabcoach, and he bake-ovened Restoration plays into his pillowand hopefully, into his head) whenever he sleptgenerally every third day now)-so that, as the day of the Fete drew near, he began feeling like a Renaissance courtier (a tired one).

As he stared at Civilized Moore inside his groomer, Primitive Moore wondered how long that feeling would last.

Two days before Versailles he cultivated a uniform tan and decided what he was going to say to Leota this time: -I love you?h.e.l.l, no!) -Will you quit the cold circuit?Uh-uh).

-If I join the Set, will you join me?That seemed the best way to put it.) Their third meeting, then, was to be on different terms.

No more stake-outs in the wastes of the prosaic. The hunter was going to enter the brush. "Onwardi" grinned the Moore in the groomer, "and Excelsior!"

She was dressed in a pale blue, mutie orchid corsage.

The revolving dome of the palace spun singing zodiacs and the floors fiuoresced witch-fires. He had the un- comfortable feeling that the d.a.m.ned flowers were grow- ing there, right above her left breast, like an exotic para- 65.46 site; and he resented their intrusion with a parochial possiveness that he knew was not of the Renaissance.

Nevertheless . . .

"Good evening. How do your flowers grow?"

"Barely and quite contrary," she decided, sipping something green through a long straw, "but they cling to life."

"With an understandable pa.s.sion," he noted, talcing her hand which she did not withdraw. "Tell me. Eve of the Microprosopos-where are you headed?"

Interest flickered across her face and came to rest in her eyes.

"Your French has improved, Adam-Kadmon . . . ?"

she noted. "I'm headed ahead. Where are you headed?"

"The same way."

"I doubt it-unfortunately."

"Doubt all you want, but we're parallel flows already."

"Is that a conceit drawn from some engineering lau- reate?"

"Watch me engineer a cold-bunk," he stated.

Her eyes shot X-rays through him, warming his bones.

"I knew you had something on your mind. If you were serious . . ."

"Us fallen spirits have to stick together here in Mal- kuth-I'm serious." He coughed and talked eyetalk.

"Shall we stand together as though we're dancing. I see Unger; he sees us, and I want you."

"All right."

She placed her gla.s.s on a drifting tray and followed him out onto the floor and beneath the turning zodiac, leaving Setman Unger to face a labyrinth of flesh. Moore laughed at his predicament.

"It's harder to tell ident.i.ties at an anti-costume party."

She smiled.

"You know, you dance differently today than last night."

66."I know. Listen, how do I get a private iceberg and a key to Schlerafenland? I've decided it might be amus- ing. I know that it's not a matter of genealogy, or even money, for that matter, although both seem to help. I've read all the literature, but I could use some practical advice."

47 Her hand quivered ever so slightly in his own.

"You know the Doyenne./?" she said/asked.

"Mainly rumors," he replied, "to the effect that she's an old gargoyle they've frozen to frighten away the Beast come Armageddon."

Leota did not smile. Instead, she became an arrow again.

"More or less," she replied coldly. "She does keep beastly people out of the Set."

Civilized Moore bit his tongue.

"Although many do not like her," she continued, be- coming slightly more animated as she reflected, "I've always found her a rare little piece of chinoiserie. I'd like to take her home, if I had a home, and set her on my mantel, if I had a mantel."

"I've heard that she'd fit right into the Victorian Room at the NAM Galleries," Mooie ventured.

"She was born during Vicky's reign-and she was in her eighties when the cold-bunk was developed-but I can safely say that the matter goes no further."

"And she decided to go gallivanting through Time at that age?"

"Precisely," answered Leota, "inasmuch as she wishes to be the immortal arbiter of trans-society."

They turned with the music. Leota had relaxed once more.

"At one hundred and ten she's already on her way to becoming an archetype," Moore noted. "Is that one of the reasons interviews are so hard to come by?"

"One oi the reasons. . . ." she told him. "If, for ex- 67.ample, you were to pet.i.tion Party Set now, you would still have to wait until next summer for the interview- provided you reached that stage."

"How many are there on the roster of eligibles?"

She shut her eyes.

"I don't know. Thousands, I should say. She'll only see a few dozen, of course. The others will have been weeded out, pruned off, investigated away, and variously dis- qualified by the directors. Then, naturally, she will have the final say as to who is in."

Suddenly green and limpid-as the music, the lights, the ultrasonics, and the delicate narcotic fragrances of the air altered subtly-the room became a dark, cool 48 place at the bottom of the sea, heady and nostalgic as the mind of a mermaid staring upon the ruins of Atlantis.

The elegiac genius of the hall drew them closer together by a kind of subtle gravitation, and she was cool and adhesive as he continued: "What is her power, really? I've read the tapes; I know she's a big stockholder, but so what? Why can't the di- rectors vote around her. If I paid out-"

"They wouldn't," she said. "Her money means nothing.

She is an inst.i.tution.

"Hers is the quality of exclusiveness which keeps the Set the Set," she went on. "Imitators will always fail because they lack her discrimination. They'll take in any boorish body who'll pay. That is the reason that People Who Count,"she p.r.o.nounced the capitals), "will neither attend nor sponsor any but Set functions. All exclusive- ness would vanish from the Earth if the Set lowered its standards."

"Money is money," said Moore. "If others paid the same for their parties . . ."

". . . Then the People who take their money would 68.cease to Count. The Set would boycott them. They would lose their elan, be looked upon as hucksters."

"It sounds like a rather vicious moebius."

"It is a caste system with checks and balances. n.o.body really wants it to break down."

"Even those who wash out?"

"Silly! They'd be the last. There's nothing to stop them from buying their own bunkers, if they can afford it, and waiting another five years to try again. They'd be wealthier anyhow for the wait, if they invest properly.

Some have waited decades, and are still waiting. Some have made it after years of persisting. It makes the game more interesting, the achievement more satisfying. In a world of physical ease, brutal social equality, and rea- sonable economic equality, exclusiveness in frivolity be- comes the most sought-after of all distinctions."

" 'Commodities,'" he corrected.

"No," she stated, "it is not for sale. Try buying it if money is all you have to offer."

That brought his mind back to more immediate con- siderations.

"What is the cost, if all the other qualifications are met?"

"The rule on that is sufficiently malleable to permit an otherwise qualified person to meet his dues. He guaran- 49 tees his tenure, bunk-wise or Party-wise, until such a time as his income offsets his debt. So if he only pos- sesses a modest fortune, he may still be quite eligible.

This is necessary if we are to preserve our democratic ideals."

She looked away, looked back.