“When I get back,” Mary Ann says, “every so often, David and Mary Ann are going to have a drink or some coffee.”
“You got it,” David says. “We’ll talk about men and why they’re impossible to have good relationships with. Now go find yourself a nice one to break your little heart.”
Walking down the corridor, one of the things she enjoys most is that half the staff is doing double takes—only recognizing her on a second glance even though they know she’s in the building—and the other half is walking right by without seeing her.
There’s a pile of newsbriefs in her room, and it’s wonderful to throw them away unread. She calls for a bellhop.
When he comes, it’s the same bellhop who brought her breakfast the morning when she made her decision—if you can call halfway-to-a-break-down a decision. Come to think of it, he’s been turning up a lot; maybe it’s because she tips well or maybe it’s personal loyalty. Either way, she’ll take anything that seems like human association right now.
“Uh,” he says, “I guess it’ll be a while before you do this again.” He’s still kind of awkward in making conversation, but since she’s made it clear that she likes to talk to him—and to waiters and desk clerks and everyone else—she’s been getting used to this kind of awkwardness.
“Yep. Wanna know where I’m secretly going?” she asks.
“It won’t be much of a secret if you tell people.” He drags the baggage cart onto the elevator for her, and the door closes behind them. Two floors, then out to the limo, limo to the airport, then onto a jumplane.
“The tabloid channels will be revealing it tomorrow,” she explains. “Fortunately, most people can’t recognize an XV performer who isn’t on XV, and I’m going where XV is still pretty rare anyway. So I really can tell you, and you can tell anyone you want to.”
He grins. “Well, then, sure, tell me. I’ve impressed a lot of people at Yukon Mike’s Saloon with our conversations.”
“Well, make sure you spill this one tonight, because everyone will know it tomorrow. I’m going to Tapachula. It’s a city in southern Mexico, close to the Guatemala border.”
“What’s there? What’s it known for?”
“Regular people with regular jobs, and absolutely nothing,” she says. “Except maybe peace and quiet. Kind of town everyone leaves, where they learn to get excitement somewhere else.”
They’re at the limo now, and very deliberately she steps close to him, hands him his tip, and says, “If you can be as gentle as Rock is, you’d be welcome to find out what it’s like to kiss me.”
“Nobody’s going to believe this,” he mutters, blushing, and when he does kiss her, it’s like a sensitive fourteen-year-old touching lips with the girl he worships. If that’s what Rock is coming across like in XV, no wonder he’s got such a following.
When the kiss breaks, he looks a little dazzled. “So how am I in real life?” she asks.
“Sweet,” he says. “And tender. Not like XV at all, but it’s really, really nice. Thank you.”
“Thank you,” she says. “If you pass through Tapachula, look for a dumpy American who never does anything but sit around and read nice, big, thick trashy novels.” They shake hands—it’s almost solemn—and for good measure she adds a line she had on stage once, back when she was still Mary Ann, Laura’s last line at the end of
Tea and Sympathy
—“‘When you speak of this later—and you will—be kind’”
He nods, they both say goodbye, and she gets into the limo and tells it “Airport.” It closes its doors, drives out of the lot onto its track, and she’s on her way.
Maybe after this vacation, if she still feels the same way about XV, she’ll put the money into a permanent annuity for herself, start auditioning again in New York, do some real acting … and start dating bellhops. It’s not that good a joke, but she laughs all the way to the airport about it.
One of the reasons nobody notices when John Klieg and Glinda Gray go out to lunch together, and don’t come back, is that after all these years anyone would assume that they are working on something and have chosen to do it outside the building. The major reason, however, is that everyone stopped to catch the XV of Synthi Venture’s pre-vacation departure, and they are all plugged into goggles, muffs, and scalpnet at the moment that Klieg and Gray walk down the hall together.
Glinda is not quite believing that this is happening. She went into the office and said, “The one thing the AI says is that there’s a ninety-six-percent possibility of more and stronger wind, all over the hemisphere, than there has ever been before. Every really fragile structure is going to take damage. They can replace and reinforce antennas for communications, they can bury power lines, they can shore up smokestacks or replace them with jets … but what they can’t do is quickly modify the space-launch facilities. For those you’ve got to have the spacecraft moving pretty fast before it ever hits the wind. The wind is going to completely shut down satellite launching for months, first in the Northern Hemisphere, then in the Southern. And satellite launching is close to a trillion-dollar-a-year business.”
“Nobody has an all-weather launch facility?”
“They can air-launch from airplanes or jumplanes, operating out of the few all-weather airports. But even all-weather airports shut down for hurricanes, boss, and air launch has been fading since single stage to orbit came in. Everything is right there … if we can get an all-weather launch system together in the next three months, we can probably get a global monopoly on space launch for a year or so.”
From the way he looked up at her and grinned, she knew she had done well, and when he grabbed the phone and gave the orders to get a real study rolling and give her authority over it—god, she’d be in charge of a thousand-member team by the end of the month—she knew it was more than good. She’d really grabbed the whole works this time.
What she didn’t expect was what he said next. “Okay, most of that won’t start rolling till Monday, and after that you’ll be so busy you’ll never take time off. And neither will I if this lives up to its promise. Why don’t you and I go pick up Derry and go do something fun together for the rest of the day?”
In the first place, it never occurred to her that John Klieg had even listened to her when she’d talked about her personal life; moreover, she had no idea what he did with his time on weekends—in fact, her impression was that all he ever did was work, going home mostly to eat and sleep. But on top of that … unmistakably, and here she was without makeup, in sweater, jeans, and sneakers because it was Saturday—her boss, a nice guy and
great-looking, has asked her out. And included her daughter in the invitation, which sounds like a man who is serious.
So as they go down the hall together, she’s more tongue-tied than she’s been in years, and he seems to be pretty quiet too. In the parking garage, they decide to go in his car, and set hers for an automatic “find home” so that it will go back to her garage and park itself sometime in the next couple of hours, whenever the continuous traffic data it receives indicate that it will be cheapest.
He sets his car for her address, and it rolls down the ramp and onto the track. “This is totally contrary to all my principles,” he says, with a fraction of a laugh, like a cough. “I’ve been in business of one kind or another for twenty-five years, and this is the first time I’ve ever asked an employee out.”
Glinda looks down at her lap and smiles. “Well, I’ve been at GateTech for sixteen years myself, boss, and this is the first time I’ve dated inside the company.”
“You could start by calling me ‘John’ instead of ‘boss’”
“I could try, John. But it might take a while before it comes naturally.”
“Good start, anyway. Well, let me see. I remember from what you’ve told me that Derry is horse-crazy, likes to do ‘grown-up’ things like have lunch and go to the theatre, and gets cranky when you break promises to her. Is having me along at lunch going to count as a broken or slightly damaged promise?”
“Hah,” Glinda says, and as she leans back, she finds herself thinking,
Remember, even if he does own the place, he’s only one level up from you. Think of it as a Clerk I dating a Clerk II
. “Derry
wants
me to date more. And when she sees it’s a good-looking older guy with money, she’ll be overjoyed. She’s got all kinds of goofy ideas from XV, even though I only let her use the family channels. Even on those, the whole romance thing gets a little oversold.”
“No kidding,” the boss—
John, dammit—
says. The big Chevy Mag Cruiser swings nimbly onto the freeway, and then across it to the Premium Skyway. The view over the Cape and out toward the Atlantic is its usual bland self—trees and sand down to water. She remembers when she first came here, with her ex, it seemed so exotic to them after their years in Wisconsin.
“Romance is very definitely oversold,” John adds, probably hoping to continue the conversation. Glinda realizes she’s been letting herself drift. “On the other hand, I like to think it does exist.”
“Yep, it does,” Glinda says emphatically. “And I still believe in it.”
Yep
. Damned Wisconsin coming out in her; at least she didn’t say “you bet.” “But I’d like to keep it from being Derry’s focus of life for a couple more years yet. She’ll have sixty or seventy years for it once she starts. And besides,
I just don’t think it’s healthy for a little girl to be interested in a grown woman’s, uh, dating life.”
John nods approvingly. “So, just out of curiosity and because I’m desperately insecure, how much has she had to be interested in lately?”
“Well, nothing at all for the last two years …” They both start to laugh at that. “Okay, maybe there’s some reason for concern, but the concern shouldn’t be coming from an eleven-year-old. How long’s it been for you?”
Klieg shrugs. “Oh, seven or eight years, I guess, depending on what you count. For a while I subscribed to a romance service, if you know about those … but for the last few years I haven’t even done that.”
“Romance service” is not quite the kind of euphemism that “escort service” used to be, but it’s not far from it, either. What the romance service guarantees is that a fixed number of attractive women—the customer defines “attractive,” but it need have nothing to do with the sort of women who would really be attracted to the customer—will approach the customer romantically, somewhere out in public, act friendly and interested, and accept at least five dates with him.
As long as he doesn’t ask, he’ll theoretically never know whether he’s being lucky or the service is functioning. In practice, a paunchy middle-aged businessman can usually figure out that the girls in their late teens and early twenties who keep picking him up in bars or at the park are coming from the service, unless he’s seriously self-deluded as well. “So,” she says cautiously, “what did you order from the romance service?”
“Everything,” he says. “They had kind of a sampler deal, where they’d just throw your name in at random. The trouble is, I’m not any good at telling someone who likes me from someone who acts like she likes me. I kept getting disappointed when they didn’t want to go beyond the fifth date.”
“But they must have—” Glinda was about to say “asked you for money,” but then she realized that they might not have, if he didn’t ask for sex.
“Oh, sure, some of them were just hookers, but it didn’t take that long to figure out which ones—they were the ones who started talking about sex before I got the car door closed. But that wasn’t most of them. The thing is, a lot of young women go to work for those services. Don’t forget that the colleges turn out a lot more educated people than the economic system can really absorb. Heck, middle-class parents have more kids than the system can absorb into the middle class. So a lot of very nice, well-spoken, pretty young women, who didn’t happen to study anything they have a prayer of getting a job with, sign up with a romance service because not only do they make a living, they also meet men with money. And if they meet one they like, there’s no reason why they can’t keep dating him if they like. I went
out with one of them for a year or so, but”—he sighs—“she decided she liked another guy—sort of a starving poet close to her own age—better. Can’t say I blame her, really.”
Glinda chooses her words carefully. “It seems a pity that that’s all a young woman can find to do with herself.”
“Oh, they could wait tables or answer the phone somewhere,” Klieg says. “The trouble is that an awful lot of people expect they can get paid for being attractive.”
“Well, they can.”
“True,” he admits, “but most of them don’t like realizing what the cost of making a living that way is. Anyway, I got kind of tired of it, and then really tired of it, and dropped the subscription. What you could meet that way—aside from hookers—was young women who were very good at looking good and spending money. Good for decoration or long conversations about their feelings, but that was it. Most of them didn’t seem to have read much in college, or at least not to remember it.” Klieg sighs. “So, anyway … getting back to the present case, I figured, well, if you don’t like me, I can always bribe you into staying with the company, because I do need you as an employee. And if you do … well, I just like you, for some reason or other, and I suddenly realized I had been taking all my risks over on the business side of the ledger. I thought it might be interesting to see if I could take a chance on the personal side.”