Part 3 (1/2)
After dinner we strolled through the lobby of the Zones Wetherall wasn't in his usual hurry to be off to some other appointment. After I'd signed his contracts, our dinner conversation had s.h.i.+fted to pleasantries. Until Wetherall mentioned my parents.
”Was it hard growing up without parents?” he asked.
”You know about that?”
”Yes.”
I wasn't about to tell him any more than he needed to know. Especially since I didn't know what he'd spied out about me already. ”Lots of children survive without parents. You grew up without a father, didn't you?”
Everyone knew the story of the impoverished childhood that had preceeded his rise to wealth.
”Mother was resourceful. We didn't live too far from here-in Colorado.”
So we parried evasions for a while. Not that I cared about his childhood. I could see we were about as compatible as mustard and motor oil. We were standing near the doors when Dr. Blaine Thorp found us.
”Ah-hah!” he said, sticking out his hook accusingly.
”What's he doing here?” I said to Wetherall.
Thorp ignored me and turned to Wetherall. ”So Professor Cobble has superseded me in your plans,” he said. ”I didn't realize that your work required the imprimatur of drab officialdom-I thought you were a visionary!”
”Well, Blaine,” said Wetherall, ”even visionaries need something solid to stand on. Liz here is of the opinion that your science is rather shaky.”
”You liken yourself to the jewels, and everyone else to the pile below!” thundered Thorp. ”I wonder how Professor Cobble feels about that comparison.”
”Oh, please,” I said.
A reporter who'd been staking out Thorp as he staked out the lobby wheeled, his spex trained on us.
I turned to see Wetherall's reaction. There was none. He was gone.
”You lunatic,” I said to Thorp. ”Why do we have to be in the same field? Why do we have to be on the same planet?”
”You suffer from what Freud called the 'narcissism of minor differences,'my dear,” said Thorp. The reporter's spex reflected the overheads. I'd antic.i.p.ated being linked with Wetherall in tomorrow's papers. Now it was going to look like I'd put on this gown for a date with a chiropractor with delusions of grandeur. I could already hear the laughter of my colleagues.
”I don't know that one.” I glanced around the lobby, wondering if I'd really lost Wetherall. ”But I'm sure you'll explain.” Maybe he was lurking behind one of the marigold trees.
”Simply put, we most intensely dislike those with the greatest similarities to ourselves. They threaten us. Hindus hate Muslims, not Chinese, et cetera. Therefore, you despise me because I reflect your real choices: eccentric science, bizarre alliances.”
”Where's the narcissism?”
”Have you glanced in a mirror recently?”
”More recently than you'd imagine.”
”So, you feel undue love for those minor characteristics that define your difference from me-primarily your academic sinecure-while ignoring the central resemblance.” Noticing the photographer, he struck a triumphant pose with his hook. ”The irony is, your replacing me in Wetherall's regard was part of my plan.”
”How can we replace you when you won't go away?” a voice broke in.
It was Wetherall, back again, trailed by Murk Janglish. Something was going awry with Wetherall's smartwig, and the hair was climbing up around his hat like a many-tendrilled octopus. Meanwhile Janglish was tugging awkwardly on Wetherall's elbow-elbows seemed to be the lawyer's specialty. ”Ramsdel,” Janglish said, ”Please. This isn't necessary. Your presence will only focus attention on this situation.”
The reporter had that glazed look of deeply-gratified desire. The red light glinted in the corner of his spex.
”I'll go away when the secret of the jewels is revealed,” Thorp said to Wetherall. ”And you and Ms. Cobble are just the ones to do it for me. You'll work from the inside while I guide you from without. Together, the three of us-”
”Together, the three of us will do nothing,” Wetherall said.
”Mr. Wetherall,” I said. ”It's okay, I can handle him-”
”I've no doubt you can, Dr. Cobble,” Wetherall said. ”But you're working for me now, and I stand by my employees. Dr. Thorp,” he said, ”if you have any complaints about your treatment, take them up with Mr. Janglish here.” Wetherall held out his arm, I took it, and pus.h.i.+ng past the photographer, we went straight to the elevator and up to my suite.
Once inside, Wetherall seemed to get an attack of shyness. He wrestled the petulant wig from his head and eyed the door nervously.
”You can wait here while things cool off downstairs,” I said.
”That's not the way the paparazzi work. The longer I wait the more of them will gather.” He handed the wig to me. ”Would you take care of this?”
He slipped out of the room before I could ask him what to feed it.
So I plopped onto a chair the size of a subcompact car, kicked a Donya Durand shoe at the mirror and then stared into it, trying to find the simple, boring Professor Liz Cobble who had gotten out of bed that morning. At least my hair didn't crawl all over my scalp.
Sometimes I blamed my aunts for turning me into that boring Professor Liz Cobble. Aunt Lindsay was Professor of Vertebrate Semiology at the University of Wisconsin, and Aunt Kym ran the only sensory deprivation spa in Madison. Growing up in their purple and pink Victorian house had been much more of an adventure than I'd wanted after my parents died. Although I knew I could never be normal again, I could at least seem normal. Only the outside world was certain that I was living with a pair of lunatics.
The fact that Aunt Lindsay and Aunt Kym loved me only made things harder. For their part, they were open minded when I insisted on wearing clothes to school and dating outside of my gender, although I could tell they thought I was being oppressed by the patriarchy and commodified by the Bank of America. I became a little reclusive, and a little p.r.i.c.kly about challenges to my own way of doing things. I spent a lot of time as a child watching myself for signs that I would end up like them, and in reaction I became Ms. Dutiful Grind.
But I still remember the smell of the scented electrolyte that always clung to Aunt Kym like the oddest of perfumes, eau d'inconscience collective. And Aunt Lindsay teaching me to read as I sat on her lap and she took me through her charts of the seven stages of courts.h.i.+p in the lesser cetaceans.
I suppose exobiology wasn't a surprising career choice for somebody with a seeker of primal truths in place of one parent and a student of the sign language of animals in place of the other. But I'd intended to be entirely more sober about the way I lived than my aunts.
Except that here I was, rattling around in a new jar of mixed nuts. Fanatic Blaine Thorp and pathetic Ramsdel Wetherall, soft Nguyen O'Hara and hard Murk Janglish. And me.
I had only myself to blame.
One day after my dinner with Wetherall, Nguyen O'Hara and I started for Stateline aboard Laputa, which was being towed by the base truck on its electromagnetic tether. The guestrooms aboard the lifthouse were lavishly outfitted, if not exactly up to Zones standards. Wetherall had arranged to have my office chair and desk moved overnight so I would feel comfortable in my work environment. I chatted briefly with one of his jolly avatars, who said he'd gone ahead to coordinate the arrival of equipment and supplies.
We cleared the Wasatch Range by midday, and the wastes unfolded before us. The dwarfing effect of the expanse always catches me by surprise, no matter how many times I visit the desert. The absolute white and flat of the evaporated salt plains takes ordinary vastness to the level of the conceptual: Earth's tabula rasa. The human mind flinches from the blank page. All we can do is build scrawny highways through to the next inhabitable place, out from under the hammer of weather, off the edge of the table of the possible. Whatever their reasons, the s.h.i.+tdogs had chosen the loneliest place on earth.
Ordinarily the loneliest. For, by the time we arrived at the rendezvous point, we weren't alone. The combination of the Wetherall angle, the Laputa photo op, and the public confrontation with Thorp had rekindled interest in the Stateline site. Two kilometers west of the s.h.i.+mmering piles and dark entrenchments of s.h.i.+tdog territory, a sprawl of vans and campers and bubbles had sprung up; it was almost the size of the army of reporters that covered Holy Joe Jolson on his pilgrimage to Bayonne. Wetherall's people had marked off the boundary of his property, and the media had nested just outside it, on public land.
I had no doubt one of Wetherall's avatars was negotiating for its purchase even as we watched.
As we approached the encampment, the base truck shortened our tether, until we hovered only fifteen meters above the salt flat. I wondered what Nguyen was doing. I wasn't in suspense for long; the truck parked between the Time/Pepsi compound and the NewsMelt van. Laputa was to be the star attraction of the media circus. The truck began to reel us in for boarding.