New Writings in SF 20 - [Anthology] Page 12

  The affected, oily manager stopped him in the lobby one evening, beaming with delight. ‘Mr. Berkley,’ he called, ‘I just wanted—that is—well.’ He cleared his throat. ‘When you first came you were, you know, painfully young and, er, crude. There were complaints from the other, uh, residents. I was on the verge of asking you to, ah, leave the Manor. To step down to a standard ELS someplace or, considering your credit rating, to move to one of the— Apartments—where you could be eccentric’ Noting Jason’s growing irritation, he forced a large, false smile. ‘What I’m trying to say is, it’s so good to see you finally living up to your credits, Mr. Berkley,’ and with a nervous laugh he slithered away across the fluorescent blue carpet. Jason stood for a moment cooling down and then with a flash of insight he saw that the obnoxious manager was socially correct. More than that, he was correct for the Jason who was emerging more fully every day. His indulgences were a sort of necessity, a means to promote growth. His clothes, his pleasures were extensions of himself. That they met with social approval was convenient, but that they were naturally part of him was all-important.

  Brusquely as ever, Monihan came for him one Friday in early summer and moved him again. ‘Re-opening an old line,’ he explained. ‘Computer blocks. Used to install them in multi-purpose remotes. The higher your clearance, the more blocks your key opened. Got too complicated,’ he added, ‘and they went to source blocks. Another company.’ He leaned back, fished out a cigar, and lit up. ‘Today, source blocks literally change a hundred times a day. Suppose you add a wrinkle: a micro-adjust key. Just before you use the remote, you match your key to a servo that adjusts it to everything in your clearance level.’ He looked quizzically at Jason, who said, ‘It should work. But then, computers aren’t my special area.’ Monihan snorted. ‘Forget computers and think keys. Besides, you won’t be doing the creative work. I have three other brains for that,’ he grunted. ‘You’re going to review the old line and see how much of it you can shrink or discard, then pass on the essence.’ So it went, and so it continued through the summer and on into winter. He got similar jobs and stuck with each until he completed it to his own and Monihan’s satisfaction. There were times when he pictured, in a flash of inspiration, the finished product which supposed was far beyond his present abilities, but he remained observant and recognised with humility that the men above him arrived in their own ways at his conclusions. Sometimes they produced a better answer, though once or twice he knew that his design would be more effective. And it was while they were huddled over the final drawings, of one such product that he met Ruth Hayworth.

  Intent on schematics, he had become aware that the others were silent and over the end of the desk his glance dropped to a small, elegant sandal. It was like stop-action video: his gaze moved in jumps up the sheer, skin-tight aquapants, from trim calves to tapered thighs, to flaring hips; skittered over rounds of straining, translucent mesh, and was captured by a pair of amused, jade-green eyes. He stood up jerkily, reddening as he pushed down his rolled sleeves, knowing that she had already glimpsed the plate in. his arm. Yet, aside from a warm, bright smile when they were introduced, Ruth had paid him no special attention. Instead, she unrolled the sheets of cover drawings she had brought and they had all gathered over the desk to admire the ‘finished’ product. She was good, definitely. It was all exactly as the unit ought to look, yet somehow a little more impressive, more promising, displayed at just the right angle to flatter its lines. Jason joined in the general praise.

  It was not, Jason realised later, accident that had brought her to his table in the autoteria a few weeks after. As before, her outfit was both daring and severe, revealing in contour, concealing in the appropriate places. It had the simplicity of elite credits. She was no older than he and still he stammered and moved clumsily, hating himself for his nervousness. Yet she seemed not to notice and after a while he had grown more assured. Lunch was over all too soon and he was back at work, bemused by it all and slow to think his way into the material in front of him. A few luncheons later he was amazed to hear himself suggest that they take in a wraparound. It had somehow, he also realised later, been the only time he was to suggest what they might do together.

  Ruth Hayworth moved in a world which Jason had only dimly perceived. Far beyond the edge of his own interests. Now, nevertheless, he was slowly but surely drawn into it. ‘Pick me up at 19:00,’ she said. ‘We’ll go to the big art bustout.’ And they went, mingling with the zany too-rich and noisily too-poor patrons and artists. Ruth introduced him to some, pointedly avoided others and carried on a constant chatter of criticism, background, information about the pieces, ’the people, the new movement. ‘You’ve got to hear the Troncon programme tonight,’ she told him, and he sat through an evening of devastating, ear-destroying symphony, listening as she explained the theory of sub-and supersonic underlay during intermission. Bit by bit, despite the hectic quality of their dates, a clear picture of the girl emerged. She was the daughter of a VP in Tundra Oil, an extremely high-credit man, and an indulgent mother who supplied anything she could put on the Family AP. With that, plus her own skill-credit rating, the girl lived as well as anyone could in a prairie province town. She had everything; talent, brains, beauty and credits; and she became intent upon using them all for Jason.

  Not that she was the only woman in Jason’s life. There was also Michelle Maigret—May-grey—as she tartly informed him the day they first crossed swords. She was, Jason supposed, one of the inconveniences of his creeping success at Western Safety. At twenty, he was now assigned by Monihan to a Junior Design Engineer, at last allowed to work out the occasional innovation under the watchful eye of Stan Bolton. And Miss Maigret. Stan could have warned him, but it appeared that the older man was more than a little afraid of her himself. Jason had taken considerable trouble with his latest project, introducing a clever little scrambler circuit of which he was duly proud. Then, with no preamble, Michelle Maigret had stalked in, dropped the circuit drawing on his desk, X-ed a corner and said coldly, ‘Drop it.’

  It had not been exactly delicate, and he responded with vigour. She read him his lesson bluntly and dispassionately. ‘As cost analyst for this project, I say it goes. Oh, yes,’ she agreed, ‘it’s beautiful. Ingenious. And it adds credits that push our sales extrapolations below margin.’ She won. She won several other arguments with Jason, but then no one could remember her ever having lost. It seemed incongruous that she, perhaps five years older than Jason, could thoroughly cow men twice her age, yet in her crisp, businesslike way she ticked off the hard facts and they wilted. Monihan was the only man to whom she showed deference and he treated her with a manner of near-equality.

  Jason learned to accept her judgments and found, eventually, that she was rather attractive beneath the gruff exterior. He sensed that when she was particularly sharp with him she was using some sort of over-compensation and gradually he decided that she recognised a potential in him but that she was patterning herself somewhat after Monihan, who wouldn’t be caught dead giving a compliment. Those deep brown eyes gave nothing away, the small, full body inclined not an iota further towards him, but there was that slight extra edge to her voice. He was, he reflected much later, still naive enough then to think he had figured it all out.

  Meanwhile, his leisure time was more and more taken over by Ruth the energetic, Ruth the constant guide and mentor, who seemed never to tire of taking him to new, supposedly exotic places. She gave him her time, her knowledge, her friends and interests, and he marvelled at how selfless she was. She never allowed him to choose the places they went or to use his credits, never saw the inside of his ELS, though they spent hours in hers. It was as if she were determined to present him with a complete new life.

  The culmination was, as such things so often are, a combination of sweet and bitter, of exultation and despair. In the crisp autumn air, touched with a trace of woodsmoke, they explored rocky little paths above the picturesque hunting lodge which her father seldom used. She d
elighted in showing him all the secret gadgets in and around the cabin, things which clashed with the raw majesty of the great silent peaks above them, Jason had felt his heart wrench at the first sight of those mountains, remembering his final rebellion in that other cabin far to the south. But he let Ruth go on, filled with the pleasure of giving, all through the short day and into the quick-dropping chill of twilight. Then, in the cheerful flicker of the great stone fireplace, she had given him the last thing of all. Slipping softly from his arms, she had stood before the fire, eyes glowing, full lips trembling and slowly loosened the belt of her long robe. She stood naked, breathtakingly beautiful in the golden light, and then came to him, arms open, heart pounding,

  Jason had been surprised at the total assurance of his body, at the dual quality of participation and distant observation in his mind. It was manhood triumphant, and yet, in his absolute innocence, he knew that something was lacking. The woman who embraced him, enfolded him, was giving a great gift, but he, in return, was allowed to give nothing. Nothing but a brief spasm of his own future, doomed he was certain to quick extinction. In the fading light of the dying fire they lay together and she traced the letters of the plate in his arm with a fingertip so light that there was barely a tingle. ‘Poor Jason,’ she said. ‘The things they must have taken from you. I want so much to make it up.’ The words and their real meaning kept repeating in Jason’s mind through the night, through their periods of desire and exhaustion. At base, though Ruth could never understand it, was a patronising, selfish motive. If she weren’t so thoroughly in love with life, Jason thought hollowly, she might have made a magnificent early martyr. A great, swollen red moon poured pale light into their bedroom and with sorrow as old as Adam’s he stroked the sleeping girl’s blonde hair; her face puffy with the satiation that comes of righteous giving.

  The rest of their weekend was a mixture of impulsive sorties into the glorious colours of autumn and periods of passion in the artificially rustic cabin, but it was always the same. Jason became a practised lover, still awed by the sexual responses of his body but chafed by the repetition of Ruth’s giving without awareness of his isolation. At the centre of their relationship was an empty space and Jason intuitively grasped that it was an extension of the similar emptiness in Ruth’s own life. They returned by robotflit on Monday evening, Jason still repelled by any suggestion of using the motorway, and he acknowledged a sense of relief.

  Oh, they continued their intimacies. Well into the winter months they would end a frantic evening of ‘culture’ twined in the age-old position, snug in the confines of Ruth’s ELS. Yet Ruth herself slowly tired of the ritual and became a bit angry with herself when she dimly recognised that she could go no further with Jason. There was no more she could give now than what she had offered so unselfishly so many times. What else she expected she couldn’t explain, but she saw that whatever it was would never come. Jason was tender, Jason was grateful, but Jason was still— Jason. By January they were meeting less often, by February not at all. There was no scene, no formal parting, only a drawing apart till they smiled and talked vacantly when they shared a table in the autoteria.

  Jason sorted out and made part of his character the intangible things he learned from it. There were now, however, other problems which kept him occupied. He was still assistant to Stan Bolton, though he knew he had in fact outgrown the job. Bolton was affable, but there was a tension in the man that belied his surface assurance. Strangely enough, it was not during the nerve-wracking initial stages of a project that he tightened up. It was after the breakthrough that Stan (‘Call me Stan, Jase,’ he had said heartily) became jumpy, almost secretive. Jason had discounted his suspicions until he could no longer thrust away what was clearly evident. Bolton was working at his absolute limit. He would never be more than a Junior Engineer, was perhaps not suited for that level, since one cannot keep working indefinitely at one’s limit. Yet he survived and how he did it was beyond Jason. Until the day in early March when Jason got the answer.

  They had grappled for weeks with a tricky little problem, an elusive matter of placing an unshielded modulator amid raucous, indiscriminate circuits crammed into a ring face. Diplomatic Corps. Designed to open locks that supposedly didn’t exist. So said Monihan, who thus obliquely informed Jason that at least his security clearance had gone up. It had really been his baby, as the micro-circuit specialist, and he had stayed long nights alone with Stan, seeking the solution. When it came it was perversely simple. A red-eyed Jason, rubbing the sweaty stubble on his jaw, had wandered home cursing himself for not seeing the answer long before, though in the morning he gained a just pride in the completed diagram.

  Some days later Monihan appeared in the doorway, Michelle Maigret behind him, and held up the binder. ‘Great job, Stan,’ he said with rare praise. ‘You’ve got a classic here. Should be good for a few juicy contracts.’ He placed a hand on Stan’s shoulder and added, ‘Especially that modulator chamber. A stroke of genuine genius.’ Jason had looked up, expectant. Stan had flushed uncomfortably, muttered something trivial like ‘always willing to please’, and launched into speculation about the present project. He looked at Monihan and Michelle, at sketches, anywhere but at Jason, who sat with a cold feeling growing in the pit of his stomach. He sat, and realised that Stan was waiting in agony for him to claim his due. To Jason’s acute eye, the Junior Engineer was so wound up that his reaction would be totally unpredictable and with mixed feelings of disgust and self-recrimination he held his tongue.

  What to do about it? He knew now why he was still assistant to Stan. Over the next few days and nights he puzzled it over, seizing and discarding notion after notion. From sick disgust he swung to savage anger, then to weak helplessness. He didn’t know what might happen when he and Stan came face to face, but Stan, with guilty cunning, avoided the confrontation. He took a combined holiday and tour of parts plants to the south, leaving abruptly with his family and with Monihan’s blessing. Jason, in the meantime, remained to do a mass of routine items, circle round and round his problem and end without a definite course of action.

  Fortunately, it was during this time of torment that Michelle Maigret slipped casually, informally into his life. As Ruth had done, ages ago it seemed, she sat with him one day in the autoteria and they chatted over lunch. She had begun with a trifle of shop talk and then quite deliberately dropped it. Speaking of other things, politics, books, people, she had become warm and animated, creating an illusion of decreasing stature, shrinking authority. No! That was wrong, Jason decided after their third or fourth meeting. The illusion was that of the stern, formidable woman of statistics and efficiency, a cultivated posture calculated to ensure acceptance in a largely male environment. At twenty-six or seven she had made herself as indispensable as anyone could be in this society, where jobs for skill-ratings were all too scarce and mindless button-pushers abounded. Michelle was clearly, very clearly, an intelligent and vital human being, with her own special desires and needs.

  April first had nearly passed when Jason, struck by the date on a scanner memo, tidied up his desk a few minutes early and on rash impulse stuck his head in at her door. ‘It’s my birthday, Michelle,’ he explained. ‘Would you like to help me celebrate?’ He felt awkward as he had not been in years, but she smiled and said with genuine pleasure, ‘Why I’d love to.’

  There was one restaurant where Jason had spent pleasant evenings alone, lingering over the luxury of good food, good surroundings and good service. He and Michelle sat long after they had finished eating, free of frenzied Musak or impatient queues. In the real candlelight her eyes were huge and dark, the small face like cool ivory against the background of lush tapestries. Jason had the strange sensation that his very spirit was expanding as they talked. Nothing of consequence was said, but yet it was deeply significant that he spoke of things he had painfully reasoned out, that she accepted them, matched them with her own, and they traded private things, the dreams which were themselves.

&nb
sp; On the fragile span of the high-level walkway they paused, silent, and looked far down into the distant cacophony of the city, all the way to the rushing, disquieting blur of light ribboning the motorway and Jason turned and gently drew up the tall stylish collar of her cloak, hiding the tiny ears and short black hair. At twenty-one, he was beginning to grasp the true meaning of an old phrase: ‘Peace within us.’

  * * * *

  They lay lazily in an alder-fringed recess on the bluff of the North Saskatchewan, welcoming the uncommon heat of a June day and looked across the alluvial beige of the swift river, the rich brown ploughed land, towards the hazy outline of the city. This was the first time that she had suggested a place and she had offered it shyly, partly because she didn’t want to impose and partly, he understood, because it was a special, private place which she had found. The path had been indistinguishable from below and as they stood breathless on the summit she had waited in girlish embarrassment for his approval. Then they had settled to talk, chins propped on hands, stretched out on his huge, shaggy blanket in the comfort of one another’s company.

  Later they were quiet, pensive, and Michelle turned to gaze into Jason’s eyes. Still without speaking she pushed herself up and knelt, taking his hand in both of hers. He rolled on to his knees and cupped his free hand behind her head, drawing her forward to kiss her tenderly, then with increasing strength and quickening breath. She raised his hand in hers to her throat, held it there between her palms almost in an attitude of prayer and then dropped her arms to her sides. As if entranced, he slowly slipped the seal of her tunic downward, all the way to the hem and the short garment parted slightly. He kissed her again, a long reassuring touch, and softly put his hands on her shoulders, pushing the tunic out and back, down her arms and away. Through the new leaves of the alders, dappled sunlight wove a soft pattern across her small, full breasts, and he bent to rest his cheek against them as she sank slowly back on to the blanket. She lay beside him barely moving, throat pulsing, gazing mutely as he traced the line of her curving hip, sliding filmy cloth under his hand. And at last, with a breaking storm of passion she drew him to her, crying out gently in her need.