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that Sverenssen was looking past her shoulder at the sculpture in its recess.
She could picture it in her mind's eye with a neon sign in six-inch letters
above shouting, "I HAVE BEEN MOVED." Somehow she resisted the compulsion to
turn her head.
"I wouldn't have thought that somebody from Houston would be bothered by the
sun," he remarked. "Especially somebody with a tan like yours." His voice was
superficially casual, but had an undertone that invited an explanation.
For a second or two she felt trapped. Then she said, "I just wanted to get
away for a while. Your friend...Larry, was starting to come on a bit strong. I
guess I need time to get used to this."
Sverenssen looked at her dubiously, as if she had just confirmed his fears
about something. "Well, I do hope you manage to loosen up a little before too
much longer," he said. "I
mean, the whole idea of being here is to enjoy oneself. It would be such a
shame if one person allowed her inhibitions to ruin the atmosphere for
everyone else, wouldn't it?"
Despite her confusion, Lyn couldn't keep a sharp edge out of her voice.
"Look...I didn't exactly come here expecting this," she told him. "You never
said anything about playing musical people."
A pained expression came over Sverenssen's face. "Oh dear, I do hope you're
not going to start preaching any middle-class morals. What did you expect? I
said I would be entertaining some friends, and I expect them to be entertained
and made to feel welcome in a manner appropriate to their tastes."
"Their tastes? That's very nice of you. They must love you for it. What about
my tastes?"
"Are you suggesting that my acquaintances fail to come up to your standards?
How amusing.
You've already made your tastes quite plain-you aspire to luxury and the
company that goes with it. Well, you have them. Surely you don't expect
anything in this life to come free."
"I didn't expect to be treated like a piece of candy to be dangled in front of
those overgrown kids out there."
"You're talking like an adolescent. Do I not have a right to expect you, as my
guest, to behave sociably in return for my hospitality? Or did you imagine
that I was some kind of a philanthropist who opens his home to the world for
reasons of pure charity? I can assure you that
I am nothing of the kind, and neither is anybody else who has the inteffigence
to understand the realities of life."
"Who said anything about charity? Doesn't respect for people come into it
anywhere?"
Sverenssen sneered. Evidently it didn't. "Another middle-class opiate. All I
can say to you is that whatever fantasies you have been harboring appear to
have been sadly unfounded." He sighed and shrugged, apparently having already
dismissed the matter as a lost cause. "The opportunity is yours to enjoy a
life quite free from worries financial or otherwise, but seizing it requires
that you throw off a lot of silly protective notions left over from childhood
and make a pragmatic assessment of your situation."
Lyn's eyes blazed, but she managed to keep her voice under control. "I think I
just made it." Her tone said the rest.
Sverenssen appeared indifferent. "In that case I suggest that you call
yourself a cab without further delay and return to your world of misplaced
romanticism and unfulfillable dreams,"
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he said. "It really makes no difference to me. I can get somebody else here
within the hour. The choice is entirely yours."
Lyn stood absolutely still until she had fought down the urge to hurl her
coffee in his face. Then she turned away and, mustering the effort to maintain
her calm, walked off in the direction of her room. Sverenssen followed her
coldly with his eyes for a few seconds, then shrugged contemptuously and
hurried out through a side door to rejoin the others at the pooL
Two hours later Lyn was sitting in a Washington-bound plane beside the CIA
agent who had accompanied her to New York. Around them sat families, couples,
people alone, and people together;
some were dressed in business suits, some in jackets, and others in casual
shirts, sweaters, and jeans. They were talking, laughing, reading, and
sleeping-just ordinary, sane, civilized people, minding their own business.
She wanted to hug every one of them.
Chapter twenty-five
In the illusory world of VISAR'S creations, Karen Heller was half a billion
miles tall and floating in space. A loosely coupled binary system of
Ping-Pong-ball-sized stars, one yellow and one white, was revolving slowly in
front of her while a myriad more glowed as pinpoints of light in the infinite
blackness stretching away on every side. The center of mass of the two stars
was located at one of the foci of a highly elongated effipse, superposed on
the view by vis~, tracing the orbit of the planet Surio.
Hanging in space beside Helter and looking like some cosmic god contemplating
the material universe as if it were a plaything, Danchekker extended an arm to
point at the planet sliding along its trajectory in vis~s.a's speeded-up
simulation. "The conditions that Surio encounters at opposite ends of the
ellipse are completely different," he said. "At one end it's in close
proximity to both its suns and therefore very hot; at the other it's remote
from them and therefore quite cool. Its year alternates between a long oceanic
phase during the cool period, and an equally long hot phase during which Surio
possesses practically no hydrosphere at all. Eesyan tells me it's unique among
the worlds that the Thuriens have discovered so far."
"It's fascinating," Heller said, enthralled. "And you're saying that life has
emerged there despite those conditions. It sounds impossible." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]