Harsh Oases (4 page)

“Martin,” I offered, extending my hand. She imparted some of her electric vitality with her touch. “Sit a minute?”

“All right,” she said. “But it’s only fair to warn you that I’m here to solicit money.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. We have a solid prediction derived from the Hubble telescope of intense solar activity in about a month, and we plan to do another aurora show.”

“‘We?’” I asked, picturing some lucky lover.

She cocked her head to catch my nuance. “Just my corporation and me. Well, can you contribute?”

“Larry,” I called, “show this lady my tab.”

Larry sidled up behind the bar with his micro in hand. “Miz Nike, just be glad he’s not asking you for a handout. Look at this.” He showed my running total on his screen. “Good thing this boy’s got friends. Of course, his bill’s not growing so fast lately.”

“I’ve been working,” I said hesitantly, as if I should have been ashamed.

“Oh, really,” Nikki said. I could see she was itching to leave. “At what?”

Larry had gone, so I said it aloud. “A novel.”

She settled her trim rear more firmly on the stool, and I could see a real interest dawning. I felt suddenly guilty, despite having told the truth, as if I were passing myself off as something I wasn’t.

“It’s about the Hesperides,” I said. Then, more confidently, “I’ve been gathering material, you see.”

Now I had established that I was like her, only an interloper, a spy from the nation of artists, masquerading among these dilettantes and wastrels.

“Why, that’s wonderful, Martin,” she said. “I had a feeling when we first met that there was something more that interested you than this existence.” She waved her hand to indicate the teeming noisy room, where coils of smoke writhed like uneasy spirits.

“Perhaps you’d like to read it someday,” I said shamelessly.

“Why not now?” she countered.

“What about your fund-raising?”

Her smile was wicked beneath her pert nose with its exquisitely flared nostrils. “I hope you don’t think I’m nothing but work, Martin.”

And then she showed me what she meant

We had a single glorious week before she had to leave. Nikki spent a portion of that time hitting up donors. But mostly we lazed on the beach, cycled around and across the big island, among the eucalyptus and spruce, and made love on Jasmine’s bed, which looked like a mutant Lunar Excursion Module dappled with color.

Our affair was touched by the tenor of the times. The Wilderness Years (‘86-’96)—with their suspicion, narrow-mindedness, crusades and jihads—were almost over. Kennedy was in office, AIDS had been cured, the economy was booming, people were opening up. Oh, sure, there were troubles and global hotspots. When haven’t there been? Still, in this land, at this hour, tolerance and experimentation flourished, along with a healthy libidinous attitude. Everyone felt young, as if one would never die.…

I don’t suppose we were circumspect. Nikki had no idea of my exact relationship with Jasmine, although the brawl in the club should have given her some notion. I didn’t enlighten her, in fact let her think Jasmine and I had some sort of open-ended understanding. So we let anyone who wanted draw whatever conclusions they might about the nature of our affair.

That puts the blame for what happened squarely in my lap, and I don’t repudiate it.

We spent a lot of time telling each other about ourselves. Nikki detailed her career before the aurorae, all the conceptual projects she had been a part of. I guess her big break was helping Christo wrap the World Trade Towers. Now she was a force in the artworld to be reckoned with in her own right These aurorae were only making her name even more of a household word.

My past wasn’t so interesting, but I had one funny story to tell.

“Did you know,” I said as we lay on our stomachs on grassy Sheepshead Bluff, “that you are looking at the last liberal arts graduate of Harvard University?”

“No I’m not I’m looking at the sea. Much more fascinating.”

“Look this way then, because I am.”

She rolled onto her side, propped her head up with one hand. “What do you mean?”

“You remember that big curriculum shakeup they had in ’Eighty-nine, after they saw their enrollment fall so bad? Well, they eliminated degree programs for all the liberal arts. And I graduated In ’Eighty-eight.”

“Okay, I buy that much. But the very last?”

“I missed the official ceremony. Had a car accident on the way, being severely stoned. So I had to collect my diploma the next day. Dean said I was the last.”

“Boy, that’s a distinction,” she said, flopping back on her stomach.

I sat up and slapped my chest. “A national treasure.”

We were quiet a minute.

“It was a hard world for the last ten years,” I said. “I drifted for five of them before I found something I think I can do.”

“Never surrender,” she said, quoting a pop-prophet of yore.

“Why?”

She sat up too. “Death takes no prisoners “

In between the time Nikki left and Jasmine returned, I studied the physics and lore of aurorae, intent on appreciating this upcoming show even more than the first. (I liked the archaic name for them: merry-dancers.)

One description of the phenomenon caused a strange flipflop in my perceptions.

It read: “The magnetosphere might be compared to a gigantic television tube. The polar upper atmosphere would correspond to the screen of a television tube that has a diameter of about 4000 kilometers … The aurora would then correspond to an image on the screen in a television tube.”

I thought of Jasmine’s face, once endlessly replicated around the globe, and of Nikki’s streamers of cold fire, almost equally widespread.

It seemed the choice I had to make was not what I had thought, less between shadow and substance, than between the images which two women cast on the screens of the world.

“You heartless bastard,” Jasmine said in a flat, uninflected tone. She had passed the screaming, violent stage, entered tears and tantrums, and exited to resignation.

“C’mon, Jazz,” I said hopelessly. “Don’t pretend what we had was anything grander than what it was. You know it was strictly a thing of convenience, on both sides.”

“I still need you,” she said. “I’m still down, or maybe just crawling back up, and you’re gonna leave me. I was good enough for you when you had nothing, but now that you think you’re getting somewhere with this writing shit, you feel you can ditch me.”

I couldn’t refute the truth, so I uttered a cheap shot.

“You’ve been screwing the socks off Trollinger.”

“That doesn’t count, and you know it. That was for my career.”

“This is for my career,” I said, and turned.

“Well, let me tell you, Marty: no one walks out on Alyx and gets away with it.” She passed her hand across her forehead, and whispered, “Jasmine. I meant to say Jasmine.”

I walked out on her then.

I was staying in a suite registered to Nikki, at the small Hesperides Hotel owned by Jaime Ybarrondo. I had moved all my few possessions there before Jasmine came home. Or so I thought, until I noticed a sheaf of manuscript missing.

I dithered for an hour, and then went back for it.

Jasmine was on the phone when I let myself in. “Just get it done. I don’t care what it costs.” I saw Trollinger’s head—now festooned with red curls—in the holotank. Then she cut the connection.

“What do you want?” she coldly said.

“Some papers.”

She indicated the table where they sat. “I was going to put them in the trash, but they stank too bad.”

I let her cheap shot arrow into my gut, to balance mine lodged in hers.

Venus was falling. That bright wanderer among the stars seemed ready to dip into the chilly Pacific. There was no moon that night to compete with the aurorae, and I felt the show would be even more striking than the first.

Once again the assorted yachts and hydrofoils rode the ebony sea, like some colony of the dispossessed, permanently adrift from the fixed realities of the land.

I was not, of course, aboard Trollinger’s craft. Nikki had found me a spot with one of her backers. The man’s name was Song Ping, and he hailed from Hong Kong. He had left just before the Communists took over. I liked his sing-song, clang-bang name, and had been gratified to find the man himself a pleasant sort. Just prior to his departure from the former British colony, so the rumor went, he had managed to divert three million pounds from the Communist government’s accounts to his own, without leaving a single prosecutable software trace. Naturally, his life was worth nothing back home, but he was relatively safe here.

His boat was named the
EFT
.

Salty droplets whipped by a brisk wind rained in my face like an angels tears. The sea was less calm than for the previous performance, and I worried that Nikki would have a rough ride upon splashdown.

My nerves were twisted tight from the split with Jasmine and the anticipation of where Nikki and I would go with what we had. Next to me, two men I didn’t know were arguing in mild tones, and I listened to divert my attention from the sky.

“You should have bought Empatrax stock when I told you.”

“I know, I know, I’d be rich now. But I still say it’s due to plummet. It’s just a fad. Who wants to put up with wicked headaches just to feel the half-baked emotions of some bimbo or stud?”

“It’s not going to always be this crude. You watch. They say a new release of the recording software is coming soon, and the actors are improving all the time. You can’t expect perfection from the start. Just watch.”

“Hmmm …”

I let my concentration drift from their banter. All I could think about was Nikki, the aurorae—and Jasmine.

Suddenly someone hit the switch for the sky.

The aurorae were back, resplendent as before, cosmic curtains and arcs of gassy luminescence, quivering like skywolves eager to be unleashed. I felt afloat in the galaxy’s wild heart. Nikki had dumped her elvish dust into the pre-excited ionosphere. Now she would be coming down.

I didn’t let myself become fully enraptured this time by the display. Instead, I moved quickly to the control platform where Song Ping stood.

The slight, jovial man had a glass in his hand. He smiled when I came up the ladder.

“We’ve got to watch for her,” I said. “Can’t get distracted by the show.”

He nodded, his silence hinting at a profundity that was really broken English he was ashamed of. We scanned the twisting skies.

Shouts, and a searchlight snapped on, then another, two more, half a dozen. One caught Nikki’s capsule.

It had no chute deployed. It was falling like a stone.

“Damn it!” I yelled. “Get going toward where it’s gonna hit!”

Song Ping seemed to move through an infinity of slow-motion frames, although it must have been only seconds. We raced toward the splashdown point.

My eyes never left the plummeting capsule. I don’t remember what I thought. I recall with what agonizing slowness the backup chute opened. It didn’t slow the bullet of metal and glass and flesh by much.

Nikki hit in a geyser.

We weren’t even the first to reach her.

By the time we pulled along, they were lifting her out. Mortal now, no goddess, she looked like something wrapped in crumpled tinfoil. I couldn’t see if she was still breathing.

Laughter split the silence. Jasmine stood on the bow of Trollinger’s ship, hands on hips, like some grimly gleeful Valkyrie come to collect the dead.

“Your little bird’s had her wings clipped,” she shouted across the water. “What a shame. But accidents will happen, won’t they?”

A sudden crazed squeal of ionosphere-born static like the shout of Cronos being slain burst from all the ships’ radios. Above our heads, the aurorae seemed to mock us, like enormous serpents engirdling the globe.

I went to visit Nikki in the hospital. They had her in an inflatable full-body cast in the intensive-care ward, a battery of monitors hooked to her. I knew she was pumped full of miracle drugs and wired with replacement parts. She was bald, even her normal stubble having been shaved for the operation. She looked like a mummy with nightmares, or the victim of some underworld vendetta dredged up from the river-bottom.

But she was alive.

“How’s it going?” I said, putting on her bedtable a self-playing, voice- activated cassette of some music she had once said she liked. Prince, of course.

She looked at me strangely for a second or two. I guessed at first she was pretty doped up. But it wasn’t that.

“Okay, I suppose. They tell me that with some spinal regeneration, I’ll be good as new. How’s the book coming?”

“All right. I’m showing it to some people. Got some nice comments, a few nibbles.”

Speech ceased between us for a minute, while I chewed my cheek and remembered that awkward silence in the back room at La Pomme. But this silence, unlike the other, seemed empty of potential, a dead end.