Worlds

34. Try Calling on the World for Peace of Mind

Nothing in Madrid prepared us for Nerja. Madrid was cold and just had normal city bustle; not many tourists this time of year. Nerja was sunwarmed and paved with tourists. (And the tour took us here because it was far less crowded than Málaga or Torremolinos.)

Not too many Spaniards, it seemed. Most of the chatter sounded Scandinavian when it wasn’t English. Our language machine made interesting noises when we tried to eavesdrop.

I was impatient to get into the ocean, since it had been too cold for swimming at Nice. But first I had to rent a “bathing suit,” contradiction in terms. A couple of bright scraps of cloth that barely hide nipples and genitals. I never felt so naked bathing at home. But it is erotic, in an adolescent, peekaboo way.

The water was rather cold but it was all right once you got numb. Jeff gamely stayed out with me for a few minutes, but when his teeth started audibly clattering I sent him back to the beach.

Salt water tastes interesting and its density makes you feel buoyant. But it’s hard to swim well when you’re trussed up like something out of a Devonite fantasy. I tired pretty rapidly and joined Jeff on the beach. He toweled me dry and we lay down on the sand, wedged between two parties of Germans. You could have walked from one horizon to the other without stepping off human flesh.

“You look good in that,” he said. “Especially wet.”

I’d noticed the difference. “Feel like an ad for a Broadway parlor. I’ll be scraping off eyetracks all night.”

“Wish I could help.” The hostel we were staying at was divided into male and female dormitories.

The wind shifted and we got a whiff of the Mediterranean, beyond the pollution boundary. That was some electromagnetic barrier a kilometer or so out. Our translator renders the Spanish term as “wall of shit,” which is sort of an awesome image. I buried my nose in the towel.

We fell asleep and got toasted pretty well. Jeff woke me and we took a quick splash. The damned bathing suit had sand in it; there was no way I could get it all out without taking it off, which I was tempted to do in spite of all the signs saying you would be arrested.

It was a longish walk back to where we’d rented the suits. By the time we got there, between the sun, salt, and sand, I was burned everywhere my skin had been exposed and rubbed raw everywhere else. People pay good money for this.

Madrid AmEx had been closed Sunday, the mail part, but the tour director had had our mail forwarded today. I had letters from John and Benny.

John’s letter was disturbing. Guarded language. He is not sure the Lobbies are acting in their own best interests. He is not sure of what the true sentiments of the American people are. (If they have any opinion one way or another. The Worlds can buy cube time to explain their problems, but the Lobbies can schedule dozens of sex and thrill shows in competition.) The situation is reasonably stable. He thinks. Our only useful threat is shutting down the power, and we’ve made the threat, and they’ve weighed it, and haven’t yet closed the Cape. Negotiations, if you can give that word to it, continue. But it’s hard to separate the information from the noise.

Benny sent another poem:Deuce On It

Crafting second letter after dawn(Recall the last, I hope; it means a lot),And hope you’ll keep this letter when I’m gone:I’d rather not be buried in a plot.

Beware the ides of any month of Spring(Try calling on the World for peace of mind),Lay low. There’s no use in bartering:All men who hold the goods are too unkind.

Please be careful what you think and say(Stay within the bounds of common sense),Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May:Of May, the darling buds have accidents.

I be afraid. Don’t think that I’m untrue(Since no more letters fly from me to you),—Benny

It was posted in Denver. So he’d started running.

This poem was more straightforward, if a little scary. But the words didn’t sound like Benny in either of them. Which could have been the form, of course. Every poem of his I’d found was traditionally minimalist; his using sonnets made me think there must be a code.

I hadn’t found it in the first one. I’d finally given up, deciding he’d used too subtle a code. I’m no poet, after all; I haven’t even studied that much poetry.

“Letter from Benny?” Jeff had come up behind me.

I jumped, and held the sheet against my chest. “He wouldn’t want anyone else to see it Personal.”

He shook his head. “All I saw was that it’s a poem. Wish I could do that.” He sat down across from me. “Dinner?”

“If it’s late enough. I want to lie down for a while.” We agreed to meet here in the common room at eight.

I found the code in a few minutes this time. The repeated line, “Crafting second letter after dawn,” was the key. Reading the second letter of each word didn’t work, beyond “reef.” But reading down, taking the second letter of each line, gave RENDER ALL TO FBI. I went upstairs and got the first poem, which translated to THEY DID KILL HER.

So we had been right. But what did he mean by “render all”? Had he gone to the FBI, or was he asking me to do it?

And what about the content of the poems? The first one didn’t make much sense, beyond the coded message, but the second had some real information. “I’m gone: I’d rather not be buried in a plot” was clear, but the rest wasn’t, other than a general sense of danger, foreboding. I suppose “I be afraid” meant “FBI raid.” God knows what else was hidden in metaphor and rebus, though I should probably be careful on the ides of May. The fifteenth?

I took my pill early, and tried to get some sleep. Dreams kept waking me up, and the sunburn made it hard to find a comfortable position. I finally went down to the common room with a book.

Jeff was on time. We worked our way toward the beach in approved Spanish barhopping style. They have tapa bars, where small snacks are served with beer and wine. You have a drink and a snack and then move on to another bar. Some of the snacks were seafood; I tried not to think of what they’d been swimming in.

Most of the bars were crowded and noisy, standing-room-only places. It wasn’t until we got to a relatively quiet one that he noticed I hadn’t been very talkative.

“Is something bothering you?”

“Can’t figure out which parts of this thing are edible.” I’d gotten something that might have been a pickled fig.

“Is it Benny?”

I guess that was when I made the decision. I nodded.

“You know he doesn’t have anything to worry about,” Jeff said. “I’m quite—”

“That’s not what I mean. Benny’s the same kind of friend as you are.” I bit through the rind. It was fibrous and sour. How to say it? “Benny’s in serious trouble. His life’s in danger.”

He set the wineglass down without drinking. “Is he sick?”

“No… or if he is, it’s the least of his worries.” I drank the rest of my wine all at once and signaled the bartender. He looked at his feet; men order here. “Why don’t you drink that up and get us another?”

He did. “Who’s he in trouble with?”

“We don’t know a name.” The bartender brought over a tray of food. Jeff, brave soul, took a shrimp; I stuck to the vegetable kingdom and selected a wedge of avocado. “A few months ago, Benny and I joined a… well, a political action group. Slightly underground, but as far as we could tell not mixed up in anything really illegal.”

“Communists?”

“Nothing so formal. Sort of radical antiestablishment, was all the people seemed to have in common. Some were communists, some plain anarchists, some even sounded like right-wing libertarians. Just people dissatisfied with your form of government” Jeff concentrated on peeling the shrimp. “No name?”

“No, they used various ‘front’ names, but they were emphatic about not having a permanent name. Benny said that probably meant they did have a name, but we weren’t deep enough to be told.”

“Sounds possible.”

“You know something about them?”

“No. Nothing from Washington. But you hear rumors.” He squeezed some lime over the shrimp. “A lot of politicians have died young lately. Conservative Lobbies, all of them.” He looked at me. “Why the hell did you get mixed up with them? I can see Benny.”

“Research… I was curious.”

“Dangerous kind of research.”

“It didn’t seem so at first—more like a debating society with delusions of grandeur. But then there was a really suspicious coincidence.” I told him about Benny meeting Katherine on the way back from Washington, and her “suicide.” Then I showed him Benny’s coded messages.

“You think Benny was more deeply involved than you were?”

“I know he was. At least, he was doing something he couldn’t tell me about.”

“Yet he went to the FBI. Or wants you to.”

I nodded. “Can you check?”

“I’m not sure you really want me to… did you ever do anything illegal for them, yourself?”

“No, just some statistical analysis.”

“Still, there might be trouble.” He looked thoughtful. “I think I can get around it; there’s no need to implicate you directly. Better wait till we get to Geneva, though. I can use the Interpol scrambler there.”

“Scrambler?”

“Safe telephone system.” He studied the two poems. “Speaking of that, have you called New New York lately?”

“No. It’s terribly expensive.”

“He might be telling you to. Why else would he capitalize ‘world’ here? Try calling on the World for peace of mind.’”

“Worth doing.”

“You don’t know this Katherine’s line name or last name?”

“Nobody’s. We went by first names only.”

“What about the day she died? Can you remember the date?”

“I can get it from my diary.” It was the day after we’d seen Chloe.

“The city might have done an autopsy. There will be a death certificate in any case, which could be useful. Is there anything else that might help identify one of them?”

I told him about James’s bugeye prosthesis, and the address of the place we usually met. He made some notes while I tried to remember everything I could. It felt good to tell him. Benny had relieved me of a large burden. Maybe I would get into trouble with the FBI. I doubted that they would hold me down and poison me.

When I’d. finished, he zipped the notebook shut and didn’t say anything.

“You think I’ve been foolish.”

“Not really. Naive, yes… you and Benny, too. What this sounds like is a handful of penny-ante thugs, fanatics with, as you say, delusions of grandeur. That doesn’t make them less dangerous than a large organization, not to you and Benny. It makes them more dangerous. They don’t have to answer to anybody.”

He took a sip of wine and continued, quietly. “That Benny found the bug in his room is interesting. It could be that they were simply amateurish and low on resources. But you can get an invisible bug for less than a thousand bucks. It could be that they wanted him to find it.”

“To test him?”

“That’s right. And he did exactly the wrong thing, tip-toeing around it. He should have confronted James with it—been outraged. Instead, he gave them every reason to believe that he’s spying on them.”

“Well, he should be safe now, I hope.”

“You say he was going to Vegas for a dryclean, and then on to someplace secret. He probably will shake them that way, but it’s not perfect. My agency could find him, for instance, and they may want to.”

“How could the FBI work in Nevada?”

“We don’t, officially. But it’s an open secret that we have thousands of people there on retainer, so to speak. Some of them are in the laundry business. Benny doesn’t know enough about the underworld to avoid them. I’d give you odds there’s a file on him in Washington now, if there wasn’t one before.”

I had a sudden intuition that James and his gang might be just the opposite of what they claimed; might be a clandestine arm of the government set up to monitor and control dissidents. I didn’t mention that to Jeff.

He put the notebook back in his purse. “Feel like walking?”

“Let’s go down to the beach. I’m a little light-headed.”

The streets were gaily lit and full of wanderers. But within a block of the beach, all the streetlights were out of commission; the beach itself was dark as the inside of a closet. And full of people.

We made love standing up under the sign SE DETIENEN PERSONAS DESNUDAS. To stay within the law we left most of our clothes on.

I like the clinging-vine position, but it’s easier in low gravity. Afterwards, Jeff sat with Ids back against the sign and I lay down with my head on his lap. We panted to each other for a while.

“This gravity,” I said. “It makes me feel like an old woman.”

He stroked my damp hair. After a minute he said, “How old are you, Marianne?”

“Twenty-two.” I’d guess Jeff to be ten years older.

“Must be the youngest post-doctoral candidate at the university.”

“I’m only post-doc for their own paperwork. Hard to translate New New’s certification ”

He ran his large hand gently over my face, tracing its shape as a blind man would. had a… disturbing experience when I was your age. Nine years ago. I was starting my last quarter of undergraduate work, and found out I had missed one physical education credit Signed up for a quarter of wrestling.

“It was frustrating. I was as strong as any man in my weight class, but I couldn’t win a angle match. Points, I’d get early points, but they’d always outlast me.

“I went to the infirmary, finally, and they said I was in excellent shape. Then I asked the wrestling instructor about it and he sat me down and told me the obvious: everyone in the class was a few years younger than me. Up until your middle or late ‘teens, you’re still a growing organism.

Then there’s a few years of stasis.” He paused. “In your early twenties, you start to die.”

“Hey, thanks. I needed cheering up.”

He traced his finger around my breast. “The funny thing is, in my case he was exactly wrong. Exactly.”

“How so?”

“Well, I kept getting weaker. Finally they sent me to a glandular specialist—the big clue was that my shoes were getting tight; my shirts seemed all to be shrinking around the shoulders.”

“You were growing?”

“That’s right I had a rare form of acromegaly. Pituitary gland thought I was a kid again. That’s why I’m so big. I actually grew eleven centimeters before medication stopped it.”

I stroked him. “It must have been pretty short before that.”

He laughed and returned the gesture. After a while he said: “Shall we do it like everybody else, lying down?”

“Me on top, though.” I’d heard stories about the sand.

The next morning I tried to call New New through the New York operator. I got a printed message advising me that all communications would be passed through a delay circuit and would be subject to censorship. Then a hard-looking male operator came on the cube.

“Name and Social Security number,” he said.

“Sorry. Wrong number.” I pushed off and looked up the number of the Cape shuttle office; punched it.

A tired man stared at me. “Before you say anything,” he said, “be advised that this call is being recorded and traced.”

“That’s all right. I just want some information.”

“Plenty of that.”

“I’m a Worlds citizen touring Europe. I tried to call New New just now, from Spain, and got some blather about censorship. What’s going on?”

“Harassment As far as we can tell, that’s all it is. You can sometimes get around the delay circuit thing by calling Tokyo. They can patch you into New New via Uchūden, if you get good operators; if the phase angle works out. I can compute optimum times for you, if you wish.”

“No, it was just a social call. Say, if I were a U.S. citizen, they couldn’t censor me, could they?”

“Not if you could prove you were calling another U.S. citizen. There can’t be a dozen left in the Worlds, though.”

“A dozen! What about tourists?”

He laughed bleakly. “Don’t get much news in Spain, do you? The last tourist came back two weeks ago. We can’t afford to send them anymore. It’s another piece of harassment, but a more serious one. You know we have to buy our fuel now, since we can’t trade with U.S. Steel.”

“I know.”

“Well, on December thirty-first, the government pulled the price controls off deuterium. Supposedly… actually, there was a long list of applications for which the controls still apply. Virtually everything but space flight. We have to pay ten times the fixed rate—but the amount we can charge for a ticket is still fixed by law! We’d lose a fortune on each flight if we shuttled tourists.

“We have enough fuel stockpiled to get every Worlds citizen home, with a comfortable margin. But it has to be orchestrated—do you have a reservation?”

“No, I don’t. It’s that critical?”

He nodded. “It’s not just the shuttle. The tug that takes you through the Van Allen belts also runs on deuterium; it has to run with a full load of passengers. So we orbit five shuttle loads each Monday.” He studied a sheet of paper. “The earliest I can schedule you is May fourteenth.”

“I’ll still be in school.”

He shrugged. “If I were you, I’d take the earliest date possible. You can always cancel and reschedule—but if the situation doesn’t improve, there won’t be any more shuttles after mid-July.”

“All right, put me down.” I gave him my name and number. “And I think I will try to call through Tokyo. What are those times?” I wrote them down on the back of my diary, thanked him, and pushed off. Translated to Spanish time and found I could call in forty-five minutes.

Getting through to Tokyo was no problem, but the patch via Uchūden put purple blotches all over the cube. I tracked down Dan at the labs.

He peered out of the cube. “Marianne?”

“Yes, darling, we have to make it quick. Do you know about the fuel squeeze at the Cape?”

“Of course. Didn’t you get my letter?”

“I’ve gotten several; nothing about that.” Damn them. “They must be censoring letter transmissions.”

“They are. You calling through Tsiolkovski?”

“Uchūden. I’ve got a reservation for the shuttle on May fourteenth. If things don’t get better—”

“Can’t you come home before then?” I shook my head. “Earliest date. Have to push off. So good to hear you and see you.”

As his image faded: “I love you.” I bit my lip for not saying it myself. It was only a hundred pesetas a second.