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"Howie's dumped a deadline again," Hawke sighed. "Sorry, Jus', but if he won't write progress reports for Delphium, we'll just have to do it for him."

"We, meaning Justine Channing," I said, and slapped a sheaf of notes between my breasts. "I'll never get my work done if I have to nurse that little creep through every waking hour."

Cabot Hawke fondled his mustache, a period piece that went with his graying sideburns and tweeds over big shoulders. All of it lent him the panache of a twentieth century colonel. While clawing my way above the ranks, I'd learned to read every one of Hawke's nuances. Whenever he stroked that brush, he was reminding himself who he was: Projects Director of Delphium Corporation. "More like once a week," Hawke grunted, leaving his half-acre desk to drape an arm over my shoulder.

I knew that move, too: he was showing me the door. But nicely; when Hawke wasn't nice during business hours, I could be bitchy at night. Who was it said, "Reciprocity works both ways?"

"Try and forget how the man looks," Hawke rumbled softly. "To board members, he's beautiful. The day Howard Prior leaves Delphium, our best CanAm Federation contract goes with him. So you wipe his flat nose for him, find him more old tapes of Vivaldi and Amirov if he wants you to. Whatever." He patted my rump as if identifying "whatever."

I stopped in the entryway, using a haute couture stance from modeling days, regarding Hawke through my fall of auburn hair. Narrowing my eyes, I said, "Maybe I will."

Hawke showed me his strong teeth—half of them implants—and refused the bait. "You're the most overpaid administrator in CanAmerica," he slandered, "because you prod my prima donnas to create their polymers and scenarios and translations. I don't always tell you how to do it, and I refuse to worry about it. So don't be a prima donna, baby; be an administrator. Go minister."

"By God, maybe I really will," I muttered, trying to believe it.

"Just don't forget to spray," Hawke's basso chuckle followed me, loud enough to be heard down the corridor. "God knows what musty corner Howie's hands have been in. Some of his germs must be centuries old."

I headed for the lower-level complex and out of executive country, reflecting that Hawke was only half joking. Once, a year before, I'd driven Howie from Baltimore to the remains of a Library of Congress annex—Howie couldn't find Delphium by himself much less a specific ruin around Washington—and I'd waited while Howie snooped for records of the Sentinel project. That was after the news that the Tau Ceti expedition had found leavings of a dead civilization.

Delphium had signed Howard Prior up before other thinktanks realized what that news meant in terms of study contracts. But working with Howie was a nightmare: the man could not keep things in proper order. And I key my life to the observance of order. Hawke could joke that I made neatness into a vice, but one day he'd find himself outmaneuvered by my sense of order. Taking my orders.

Nothing will ever divert me from that goal, by that path.

On the annex trip, Howie hadn't emerged for hours. All his cassettes were used and he looked like he'd been crawling through conduits—grimy, smelly, tear-streaked. Evidently they were tears of joy because the little twit had found a cache of music recordings. Howie's degrees from Leeds and Yerkes had made him a world-class expert in interspecies communication problems, but his mania was old music.

He was delirious over his finds, music by Purcell and Porta and one, Haydn, I'd heard of. Never mind that he upset my schedule, never mind that the Sentinel Project of the 1980's was a wipeout—small wonder, since the Tau Ceti civilization had quit transmitting five thousand years before. Still, little Howie began regular forays into those archives. But not with me. Hawke teased me later when I complained. But I say, once burnt by a four-hour fiasco with a filthy little nigger, forever shy!

Actually, Howie was mostly Caucasian, with a British scholar's accent and a sallow complexion, lighter than Hawke who quicktanned religiously. But Howie's maternal grandmother had been an aboriginal in Queensland. Those mixed-up—disorderly!—genes made him the image of a loser. Knobby little body, squashed nose, and hair almost kinky enough to be sculptured. The one time I suggested cosmetic surgery to him was the last time Howie tried to get cozy with me for months. I can't ever forgive the look I saw on his crumpled features.

All he said was, "It's fatuous to brag about what you can't help, Justine. It's worse to apologize." But what I saw in his expression was not self-pity.

It was clemency. The hell with him. . . .

Let's face it: Howie wasn't interested in bettering himself. That's another reason why I wasn't interested in keeping my options open with Howie. I stopped outside the door to his tiny office, took a few sniffs from my compact, and feeling suitably mellow, stepped inside. Into chaos.

* * *

Fax notes everywhere, cassettes underfoot, Howie in shirtsleeves capering at his data terminal with a light pencil like some scrawny shaman crooning a non-tune. That would've been enough by itself, but humming and twanging through it, the speakers played something just far enough from sensible music to set my pearly-whites on edge. "Howie, have you gone . . ." I began.

His wave cut me short and suggested I shut the door in one motion. Before he turned back to the terminal, I caught his glance. It was whimsical, guilty, appraising. And like a fool I thought his office bedlam was the reason.

Howie was talking. Or rather, his terminal was, synthesized from his voiceprint and contrapuntal to the music. But it didn't have Howie's educated Yorkshire diction; it spoke in standard CanAm, which didn't seem to bother Howie but nearly drove me wild. How could I tell which voice should take precedence?

" . . . not sure whether the Greeks did it first. But Porta proved you can write music to be played right side up or upside down," said the Howie terminal.

"Invertible polyphony," the real Howie said to me, eyes agleam, his light pencil marking time. "Bach tried it in this fugue." He punched an instruction. His grin invited me to enjoy it.

Instantly the terminal voice stopped and instead we were hearing what Howie claimed was Bach. I could take it but preferred to leave it and said so.

"Ah, but listen to it inverted," he begged. Another punched instruction. More Bach—I guess.

Howie closed his eyes in bliss. I closed mine too, and raised my fists and shouted, "HOWIE, WHEN WILL YOU LEARN SOMETHING AS EASY AS A PROGRESS REPORT?"

Finger jab, and a silence of anechoic chambers. Then as I waited for his apology: "Justine, when will you learn something as easy as calling me `Howard'?"

"If the diminutive fits, wear it," I snapped. "I'm here to do your paperwork, since you prefer to play with your stolen ditties."

"Ah, no," he breathed, smiling at a private whimsy, no longer appraising. "Not stolen; lost, and now found." He let the smile fade while I whiffed at my compact again. It's easy to overdo a hit from a compact, which is why Howie disapproved of my doing it, which is why I pretended to overdo it. Instead of an apology, I detected patronage. Nobody patronizes Justine Channing. Nobody.

"So you must work, because I play," he murmured finally. "If you hate that so much, Justine, why do you do it?"

I shrugged. Why did everybody do it? To get somewhere. Too elementary to repeat.

"Answer one question," he prodded gently, "and then I promise to help you draft a report synopsis."

"I'm listening," I said.

"Why do you do it? Help me draft the report, I mean."

Well, he'd promised a quid pro quo. "The federation gets your report, Delphium gets its quarterly check, and Cabot Hawke gets off the hook." Howie just looked at me. "All right, and then Hawke lets me off the hook! More or less," I hedged.

"Hawke and you. More and less." He nodded like a wronged parent. "And I, less still."

"Life is a billion-way parlay, Howie. To be a winner, you pick winners. I don't care what you think about me and Hawke."

"I didn't mean that. I meant, we fool ourselves about our motives. A good turn has a selfish component; we try to be more, while the system is biased to make us less."

"Hell, if you don't push for number one, you'll never amount to anything."

Howie looked at, then through me, and then began to laugh a soft hollow-chested wheeze that lasted a long time. "We obviously wouldn't be as we are," he said at last, terminating his private joke. "Very well; into the breach of the report, as it were. What tale did we spin for the analysts last time? Must have a clear sequence," he added, as if he'd said something clever.

I passed him "his" last progress report—I had written it—and waited while Howie scanned it. Half of his work was unraveling Cetian arts. Every child knew that the quasimammals on Tau Ceti's major planet had been nuts about communication. Their color sense had been so acute that the Cetians could leave a complex message with a single dot of color. Hue, shape, size, sequence of spots; all affected Cetian message content. The trouble was that nothing that remained of Cetian media told us why they weren't still there.

Picture a planetful of garrulous ground sloths, carefully documenting each war and yardage sale, every farce and footrace of a dominant culture. Now picture them disappearing suddenly without trace or announcement, centuries before our Egyptians built Abu Simbel. Cetian science yielded no clue. Cetian art, someone guessed, might yield some hints.

Howie worked, or rather played, overtime for months before he discovered that Cetian communication went to hell just before their disappearance. The Cetians produced one final piece of abstract visual art, a huge blob of varicolored tiles by some philosopher-priest, and they reproduced it as proudly and as often as we copy the Mona Lisa. And then their commentaries began to decay fast.

Howie's last report had concluded: "Cetian language became more chaotic with each sleep period. The hue variable was abandoned, and we infer that the Cetians fell prey to some epidemic that first confused, then consumed them. During the next quarter we will run content-analytical surveys of late Cetian story mosaics," and made other vague promises I'd added.

"Hawke must be glad that I'm not making much progress," Howie mused as he read the last paragraph.

I donated a cool smile. "Just enough, not too much. The riddle's been there a long time, Howie. Why work yourself out of a job overnight?" Wink. Even if he rarely made heavy passes at me anymore, Howie liked my little winks and nudges—and they didn't cost me much.

He studied me without expression except that the broad nostrils flared and contracted, reminding me of a skinny little hippo lost in thought. Then he grunted and began to read my write-up of his Proxima Two translations.

The Proximans had disappeared several million years ago; so long ago that it took two expeditions to discover remains of a race that had vanished, like the Cetians, suddenly. They'd been sea-dwelling invertebrates with enough savvy to build pearlescent craft that explored their land-masses, then build others that took them into orbit. We hadn't a clue to Proximan language until a xenologist suspected there was meaning in all the bubbles.

I mean, of course, the bubble generators that were still blurping away in the coral cities Proximans had built. Give our pickaninny his due: it was Howie who thought to run analyses of covariance of the size, frequency, gas composition, and absorption rates of the bubbles. Those little isotope-powered bubble generators, he figured, hadn't been put there just for decor. And Howie was right. They'd been for entertainment and news; Proximan media broadcasts.

Thanks to Howie, we knew the Proximans had a strict caste system, high art, and a suspicious nature, even in those bubble messages. Howie's current work was often a case of guessing what the Proximan sea-cities didn't want to talk about.

Howie sighed while reading my last paragraph: " . . . further study of a long, curiously-wrought sequence that was found programmed into bubble generators in widely-separated cities. The sequence may have been a rare cooperative effort by Proximans to unify several mathematical theories. The effort was barely underway when, after a brief period of linguistic decay, the Proximans vanished."

"Most of that is eyewash, you know." Howie tapped the fax page without rancor. "Oh, it's glossy enough, and harmless—but who told you all that sodding rubbish about unifying theories? My work suggests the Proximans were studying a single message."

"Pity you didn't write this yourself, then," I flared, and waited for my apology.

And got it. "True. If I leave it for someone else I must expect something to get lost in translation. I really do apologize, Justine. We might do better this time, eh?"

I remarked that it was up to him. He edited what I'd written, then spent the next hour extracting bits on the Ceti problem from his computer terminal, putting them in order for me. Sure enough, Howie had fresh surmises which I arranged, then rechecked.

At first I thought I'd misplaced a fax page. "Damn, this passage isn't Ceti. It's Prox stuff."

"No, you've got it spot-on," he said with a final inflection that teased me to continue.

"But—it was the Cetians, not the Proximans, who went gaga over a piece of art."

"The Cetians," he replied, nodding and leaving his chin up as he added, "and the Proximans." And he watched me with that damnable catch-me-if-you-can smile of his.

I made a dozen intuitive leaps, all into black holes of confusion, in ten seconds. I could feel the hair begin to rise on the nape of my neck until I decided Howie was kidding me.

He decoded my glance and began quickly: "That massive Cetian colorburst? Its title translates roughly into `Rebirth' or equally well as `Climax.' The work of one individual who couldn't explain it. Pure inspiration. Also," he added slowly, "pure message. Our Cetian artist just didn't understand his own message at first."

I tapped an extravagant fingernail against my faxes, denying the gooseflesh creeping down my spine. "But you understand it?"

"Lord no," he laughed. "It has a level of abstraction that escapes me." More seriously then: "Exactly the same as the Proximan problem, Justine. It involves a different idiom."

I swallowed and sat down. Mostly, I wondered how to tell Cabot Hawke that his prize egghead had cracked his little shell. "No. You can't seriously imply that—that the Ceti mosaic has any connection with a string of bubbles. In another star system. Five million years apart. It's beyond reason, Howie!"

The little monkey was grinning. " 'Tis, isn't it? I keep trying to decode that mosaic and what the Proximans called their `Coronation Lyric,' but so far I haven't the foggiest."

"The hell you don't." My mouth was dry. I compared his conclusions again. "The short bubble message commentary that preceded the Coronation Lyric: any room for error in your translation? I mean, saying their lyric thing was an inspired piece of art?"

"Not much. I gather it unfolded like Coleridge's vision of Xanadu—only our Proximan wasn't interrupted. He got to finish undisturbed."

"Just before the Proximans all disappeared."

"Not quite. Proximans considered it only great art at first. They didn't tumble immediately, as the Cetians did; they had a puzzle to solve."

In the back of my head, a small voice reminded me that none of this was on my faxes. Howie didn't want it in the reports. What else had he held back? I half-closed my eyes and smiled. "You think the Cetians and Proximans were communicating," I said.

"Unlikely. There are other possibilities."

I persisted. "But a direct connection between the art and the disappearances?"

"Between the messages buried in the art and the disappearances," he corrected. He was glancing at me: hair, cleavage, mouth.

I moistened my lips with my tongue and said softly, "If you're right—Howard—how big is this news?"

He was still focusing on my mouth, pole-axed with desire. "Pick a number," he said like a sleepwalker. "Quite a large one."

"But only if you can translate those messages."

"Can you keep a secret, Justine?"

"Try me." If he missed that entendre he was no translator.

"I suspect neither message can ever be decoded by humans. There's something missing, as if each message were tailored exclusively for a given species. A Cetian, I suspect, could never have translated the Proximan message. And so on."

"But who could have sent such messages?"

"Ah," he said, a forefinger raised, and then turned the gesture into a wave of helplessness.

I let it all sink in, and let Howie take my hand while I raced over the possibilities. If Howie chose to report that the translations couldn't be made, his study contract might be terminated. That meant major problems which Hawke would pass down to me. If Howie did break those codes, assuming he wasn't march-hare mad with his whole scenario, it might mean a Nobel.

There had to be some way I could profit from this thing, without risking anything. As Howie interlaced his fingers against mine with his sad, tentative smile, I squeezed. "You realize I'm obligated to report all this," I said.

He jerked away. Carefully, voice shaking: "You don't have to report pure oral conjecture, Justine. That's all it is right now. I shared it with you in strictest confidence."

Time to set the hook. "If it's ever discovered that I held back crucial information, it will ruin my career," I said. As though Cabot Hawke hadn't shown me that the reverse is true! "You're asking me to be a full partner in this, Howard."

"I suppose so," he said. "All right. Yes, I am."

I'd landed him. Ruffling his kinky thatch with one hand, I stood up. "You won't be sorry, Howie. Just keep trying to decode those messages." I stacked my faxes neatly and headed toward the door.

"You're assuming," he said dreamily, "they haven't already been decoded for us." I must've stared, because he started ticking items off on his stubby fingers:

"Brancusi's `Bird in Space' can be expressed mathematically. Maya glyphs. Altamira cave paintings. It may have been what Hesse had in mind with his bead game in Magister Ludi. Or"—he gave a happy giggle—"I could just be bonkers. But I'm in training for the search, Justine. That's what I was doing when you walked in."

"Training for the Interstellar Olympics," I teased.

"Or for the twilight of the gods," he replied thoughtfully. "You understand that secrecy is vital if there's danger?"

Well, I thought I did: to keep some other weirdo from jumping his claim. "Trust me," I said, and left him.

Two minutes and a broken anklestrap later I was with Hawke, babbling so fast he had to help me open my compact for a settle-me-down.

* * *

As usual, Hawke traded me fresh perspectives for what I gave him. As we lay on his apartment watercouch he blew one of my curls from his lips and reached for a cheroot. He lit it, and fell back beside me puffing happily.

Wrinkling my nose: "I've come to think of that stink as the unsweet odor of your success," I gibed. At Hawke's age, he wasn't always successful.

"Be glad it doesn't smell like Howie Prior," he replied, and I could feel his furry barrel chest shaking with amusement.

I bit him. "That's for your innuendo. And for refusing to explain this afternoon."

"About Howie's fear of gotterdammerung? Seems clear enough, Jus'. He thinks there could be some magic formula that wiped out two entire civilizations." Hawke dragged on the cheroot, studied its glow. Then, reflectively, "Well, well; what a weapon in the wrong hands."

Trust Hawke to think in those terms. He was still chuckling to himself as I prompted, "And in the right hands?"

Long silence. Then, "There probably wouldn't be any right hands. Classic paranoid fantasy—and I'm not at all surprised to find our little Howie entertaining it." After a moment he added, "Watch him, Jus'."

The idea of Howie Prior being violent was absurd, and I laughed. "I probably outweigh him."

"You miss the point. He doesn't need muscle to be dangerous. Humor him. Keep an eye open for his private computer code. I don't want to wake up one morning and find him bootlegging full translations to the highest bidder because he thinks it's all that important."

What good would it have done me to insist that Howie was not capable of such sharp practice? To Cabot Hawke, the world was populated only by Cabot Hawkes—and certainly not many Howies. I promised I'd give all the support Howie asked for, and then changed the subject. My mistake.

* * *

Howie Prior wanted to lie on his bony arse high up in the Sistine Chapel. Not on a muffled skimmer, which wouldn't have required so many permissions, but on a rickety scaffold which took me weeks to arrange. But Delphium has clout, and Howie got to play Michelangelo. It got him nowhere.

Howie had more fun as Constantin Brancusi and I had hell finding sculpture replicas. But we found photos of the man's studio and the airy, white sunsplashed rooms had charm—until Howie put dust covers over the pieces I'd collected, to recreate the ambience the sculptor had kept. When Howie donned outmoded funky clothes and a little pointy woolen cap, I walked out. He said he needed to be Brancusi for his work, but hadn't told me how far he was willing to take it.

Well, Brancusi didn't take him very far.

When Howie asked me to find him a place in Clarens, Switzerland, I almost called Hawke. Then Howie showed me photos of the view he wanted, and I agreed. A tiny pension in a Swiss hotel was easy enough to locate. Why shouldn't I make the arrangements over there and enjoy Howie's madness before Hawke realized how much it cost?

"Which Swiss are you going to be?"

"Try and find me some Mahorka tobacco. It's Spanish," he unanswered.

"Picasso?"

"And get me an appointment with an internist," he added. "I must know the proper dosage."

"For what?"

"For just a touch of nicotine poisoning, if you must know. We don't want to overdo it, do we?"

"We don't know what the hell you're up to. We," I stressed it again, "get queasy thinking about postmortems. So no, goddammit, we aren't going to find you any poisonous tobacco."

I hated that look of his, the gaze of a saint caught with his hand in the till. "I don't want to pull rank, Justine. I know what's needed. I promise not to get very sick on nicotine. I intend to get well with it."

"You're ill? That doesn't surprise me—"

"We all are. Please don't act the nanny; the role ill-suits you." He didn't have Hawke's subtlety; he just pointed at the door.

I went. I could already smell Alpine meadows.

* * ** * *

The Swiss were an enterprising lot who understood money better than most. In a week I was back with a real tan and an itch to return. Meanwhile, Howie had collected a trunkful of manuscripts and custom-tailored old formal clothes. And yes, he was already dosing himself with nicotine and smoking strong tobacco as well.

Handing him the packetful of travel vouchers, I tried to get him to endorse another trip for me. Lowering my voice for vibrancy: "There's a nice room below yours at Clarens. Surely you'll need me for, um, something."

"I'll need all my concentration, thanks. I couldn't do justice to the problem if I were constantly thinking of a lovely woman just downstairs."

I tried once more: "It could be so romantic, Howard."

"Too right," he muttered, tasting me with his eyes, but sadly—like a man craving cheesecake who fears he'll miss the last rowboat out of hell if he stops for a nibble.

"You really must think you've got it this time," I said.

The little chin came up. "Yes, I do. Seems obvious now. Ah—where're my tickets?"

"In your hand, fool. What will you do without me? Well, give me a call when you're through with your Swiss mystery," I said quickly, and made a toujours gai exit.

So Howie went alone to Clarens carrying his damned Mahorka tobacco and his double-damned, old-fashioned manuscripts and high-collared shirts, and I didn't see him again for almost a month. But I know he went there because I spoke with him by vidphone several times. I even had to wire money to a doctor who visited Howie in his pension. The man confirmed that Howie's neuralgia was probably from nicotine poisoning. I sent money to Howie's concierge, too, as a bribe to keep her from taking the muted upright piano from Howie. It wasn't loud, she admitted; merely calamitous. She might have been describing the nightmares I was having by then. In each of them, I was kept marking time while tacky little people passed me.

While Howie was gone I backtracked him. His Delphium account showed he'd taken a taxi to the old library annex before deciding on his Swiss trip. I unearthed no hint of what he went there for. I got Howie's passplates—Delphium's personnel files are thorough—and wasted hours searching his grungy little apartment for a gap in his files, notations of his computer access codes, anything to build a scenario on. I found nothing of interest, beyond the poster-sized blowup of a candid holo that faced Howie's desk. I wondered when Howie had taken it; nice, but it hadn't captured the real me.

I figured there was an even chance that Howie would wind up in a loony bin, in which case Cabot Hawke would seek some heavy explanations from me. And I hadn't any, until it occurred to me that Howie might be ignoring his personal bills while in Switzerland. Paying his bills gave me slender reason to search his apartment. The rent bill would include the number of times his door passplate was used, so Howie would eventually know someone had been there.

Utility companies can be so-o-o understanding when you offer to pay overdue bills. They weren't angry at Howie. CompuCenter wasn't, either; his bill for the past few weeks had been hardly more than the base rate. Hardly more? Well, his apartment terminal had been used for only thirty-nine minutes since his last payment. A trifling sum, which would be carried over since it had, after all, been spent within the past few days.

Within the past few days?

I kept the tremolo from my voice, thanked them, rang off. Somebody had been using Howie's apartment, and very recently.

I called his apartment manager and offered to pay his rent. Yes, Howard Prior was slightly delinquent. Gentle, sweet man, honest to a fault; not to worry.

I simpered into the vidphone, "Howie wanted me to take care of things, but he's an absent-minded dear. Did he sublet the place or let any of—our friends use it?"

The manager consulted her terminal, then said, "No. His door passplate's been used only once in the past few weeks."

"Would you know when that was?"

"Uh—just today, about noon." She cocked her head. "Something wrong?"

Something goosefleshcrawlingly wrong. "No," I smiled past my chill, then thanked her and rang off again. That single entry at noon had been mine. No one else had passed through that door in weeks.

Yet his apartment terminal had been used very recently. And CompuCenter long ago stopped permitting remote processing through private terminals.

I stood gazing down at Howie's desk terminal, then at my picture on Howie's wall, until my neck began to prickle. I sensed a presence. Maybe not exactly human. What if someone had been in his apartment all this time? In fact, what if someone were still there with me, watching me, silently waiting in the shadow-haunted bedroom? The sensation of an unseen presence became a hobgoblin that forced me out of Howie's apartment at a dead run.

By the time I reached Delphium, my panic had transmuted to rage and I knew just the pickaninny to take it out on. I passplated myself into Howie's office, intending to call him from his own office for a little therapeutic Swiss sturm und drang. 

I didn't need to make that call. Howie Prior, in the flesh, sat on his desk, swinging his legs and grinning like an imp with a forefinger across his lips. He didn't need the gesture. I tried to speak but couldn't find the breath for it.

* * *

"Don't you ever tell anyone I started hyperventilating," I said, still leaning against his door, willing my hands to stop shaking as I found my compact. "I don't know what industrial espionage you're up to, but I could blow your whole show. You're going to tell me about it right now, Howard Prior. Right now," I repeated.

"You again called me `Howard,' " he said smiling. His face, ugly as it was, bore a frightful beauty, his dark eyes shining deep under his brow ridge, teeth bright between pale lips. I mean, he looked—haunted, but unafraid. Exalted. All right then: beatified.

I keyed Cabot Hawke's emergency priority code on the vidphone, leaving it on hold so that I needed only to press the execute bar. "You look like hell frozen solid, Howie. And you've got me suspicious, and you don't want to do that unless you're after big trouble. Set me at ease."

"That's why here am I."

"You can start by telling me who's been using your apartment terminal this week."

"I did. A few things there to verify were, and easiest it seemed—"

"A lie. You haven't been through that door in weeks. Anyhow, you can't afford to shuttle back and forth from Europe and Delphium sure as hell hasn't bought you more tickets, and your concierge has orders to call me if you disappear or start acting crazy. And stop talking funny, you're beginning to scare me."

"Sorry. I hadn't thought how to you it might look. But I assure you, I several times my terminal used. Maybe a half-hour."

Again that unspeakable sunburst smile of a madman or a bright angel: "However, yes I can afford anywhere to go I bloody please. And so can you, Justine."

My suspicions made a quick test-connection. "You broke the Cetian code and sold it!"

Softly, lovingly, so quietly I almost missed it: "Broke I the human code." He caught himself garbling the phrase and slapped his knee. "Human communication breakdown: it's wonderful. Don't you want to know where was hiding our message?"

"I want to know what it said," I hedged.

"Life lastingever," he said, obviously amused now by his own speech patterns that suggested an unhinged mind. He opened his arms, palms up, and continued: "Freedom to discover, to anywhere go. To pain an end. That is part of what it said. Forgive my troubled syntax," he chuckled. "I must sound a bit queer but—but you see, once you, um, internalize the translation, you needn't obey any of the nasty little hierarchies that hag-ride us until we can't see Godhood staring us in the face.

"We even make languages into stumbling blocks; help it we cannot! This word must go here, there another, yonder that phrase. Change the sequence, the pecking order, and you may impair the meaning. Precedence. Status The stuff of our shell protective."

"What's wrong with protection?"

"Nothing—if you're an embryo. The translation is our egg tooth." Seeing my headshake, he added, "We can use it to peck our way out of the egg of the hereandnow."

He had all the earmarks of a loser who had hit on some nutcake rationale for giving up the good fight. By now he'd probably drained his savings, telling himself it didn't matter. If and when he came to his senses again, Howie was going to be damned sorry. "Howie, do you suppose neuralgia from a self-poisoning could just possibly have a teeny weeny something to do with your outlook?"

"Indirectly—but the translation the crucial thing is. To share it with you first I chose. Than yours, no one's need could be greater."

"Enough of your ding-y bullshit! You should've said nobody's single-minded determination could be greater," I said proudly.

"Wrong-headed determination amounts to the same thing," he sighed.

"I know my priorities," I said in anger, "and I'll tell you yours. First let me see the damned translation."

"Lor' love you, Justine, you don't see it, you—empath it. The code was based on cardiac rhythms our. I think was Stravinsky too much the cold intellectual to realize what with the Sacre he had done. Didn't have crypt-analysis to guide, poor man; and suffering he was from his tobacco habit in Clarens." A sense of sorrow and wonder suffused Howie's face. "Imagine how he might have exulted once the Sacre—the Rite—translated was into his own human rhythms."

"Talk sense! Once the right what was translated?"

"The Rite of Spring; Le Sacre du Printemps! Stravinsky said it was really a coronation of spring. Proximans had their Coronation lyric to free them; Cetians had their Rebirth mosaic. And since primitive times, societies human have to something like this tuned into. Frazer, in The New Golden Bough, said the celebration of spring is to the expulsion of death a sequel. Frazer just let notions of sequence bugger him up. Stravinsky didn't—until later rewrote the music he." Animated, pleased as a kid, Howie rushed on. "If the Rite of Spring you've ever heard, you know it's from metric patterns liberated."

"I wish you knew how you sound to me," I warned him.

"Only at first," he said chortling. "Monteux the conductor thought raving mad Stravinsky when the piano score first he heard. Himself Stravinsky complained that badly overbalanced were some parts. So rewrote it he. Harmonies were more than dense; impenetrable they were. Until now," he said, as if in prayer, and looked at me shyly. "Gibberish to you this is, suppose I."

I had to rearrange Howie's chatter in my head, and the thought that he might be teasing me tempered my confusion with fury. "So you've been playing Stravinsky; that much I understand. And it sent you around the bend."

"Listened—truly listened—to the translation, I once only." He turned to his keyboard. "Fed it I into memory with a recording old of the composer's recollections. Listen." He punched an instruction.

The voice from the speaker was aged, unemotional, precise. Old Stravinsky's accent sounded more German than Russian. And with it, beneath it, was a soft thudding asymmetry that I took to be an abnormal heartbeat.

Except that it was informing me, its message as clear as speech.

Howie had run two audio tracks together. On one track, Igor Stravinsky was saying, "Very little immediate tradition lies behind the Sacre du Printemps, however—and no theory. I had only my ear to help me. I heard; and I wrote what I heard. I am the vessel through which the Sacre passed . . ."

Then only the second audio track, the drumbeat whisper of some thunderous concept I hadn't been listening to, emerged into the silence beyond the old man's words. I thought, And Howie listened had to it once only, and then I screamed.

It couldn't have been more than a few moments later when I felt Howie's skinny hands stroking my shoulder. I lay in a fetal crouch on his floor hands over my ears, and there was a dampness between my legs that had nothing to do with sex. I could hear my torturer murmuring, "Let it free you, Justine." At least he had stopped that subversive mindbending throb of—knowledge? Heresy? I didn't have a label for it, but I loathed it.

I swiped at his arm as I struggled up, waiting for my strength to return. "Free me from what, you stupid abo? My sanity?"

"Your shell of needs," he said, still kneeling uncaring that I towered above him. "Needs that into a cage we made. Restrictions terrible of imprisonment in hierarchies, and time, and space."

I reached for my compact; checked to see that its gas cell had nearly a full charge, and took a nice long hit to quell my tremors. "All my life I've trained and fought to be somebody, Howie. Now I'm halfway up the ladder and you want to do me the favor, the FAVOR, of mindwashing me into—what? Some kind of born-again Buddhist?"

"Anything timeplace you choose," he said. "Forever," he said. "It offers such freedom that honest to be, I'm growing restless with you. You heard some of it. You know, too."

He was right. It had taken only a minute of that telepathic thudding seduction to push me to the brink of an internal precipice. Another few moments and I knew, positively, I wouldn't have given a damn for my job, or getting Hawke's job, for as long as the madness lasted.

Well, I'd been strong enough to resist. But what if I could get Hawke to listen! Ah, yes; just as Howie wanted me to listen. "Howard, is your translation stored in your private access code?"

"No," he said with a smile, and showed me. "It is for access free. It no longer to me belongs, Justine. Returned I to arrange its broadcast, and to first with you share it."

He turned away to his terminal. I triggered my compact, holding it under his nose while gripping his head with all my strength. For only an instant he struggled, then relaxed against my breast, head back, smiling up into my face. "More proof, my love?" He inhaled deeply, deliberately.

He kept on breathing the stuff until I felt the thumping in his little body diminish, falter, quit. Even before that, though, something abandoned his gaze.

As long as his lungs were pumping, I held on. He'd gone berserk, I rehearsed, but I'd been too strong for him. Kept my compact hissing too long out of pure terror. It would be self-defense, and I was sure Hawke would back me. I was sure because I would soon have Hawke working for me.

Howie's heart was still. That had a message for me, too; it told me I'd go on winning, no matter what.

I checked Howie's terminal again, momentarily horrified that I might not be able to retrieve that demonic message. It was there, all right. I changed its address so that only I could locate it again—or so I thought. I stretched the body out on the floor, then remembered to rip my blouse and to use the dead fingernails to drag welts along my throat. When I left Howie's little office I staggered convincingly.

Hawke left a conference in midsentence when he saw me on his vidphone. In his study, he fussed over me in real concern. Gradually I let him understand what I'd rehearsed. I've always been able to evoke tears on demand.

At the crucial point, Hawke showed no suspicion. "Dead? And you didn't get a copy of his translation? Damn, damn, damn," he muttered, then patted me distractedly. "I'm not angry with you, Jus'. You can't be blamed."

I made it tentative: "I—might be able to find it. In his office. Uh—hadn't we better get rid of . . . ?" I waved my hand instead of saying it. Hawke knew very well there are some things I'd prefer not to say aloud.

"You sure you're up to it?"

I took a deep breath, smiled my bravest smile, nodded. I said, "We wouldn't want the police stumbling onto Howie's translation before we do."

A few minutes later I had something more to worry about. Howie Prior's body was gone. "Look," I said to Hawke, balling my fists, "I did not imagine it. I—may have been wrong about his heart stopping." I hadn't been.

"Or else someone removed his body. I'm trying to figure out how and why," Hawke said.

I moved to Howie's terminal, readied my fingers at the keys. "I'm feeling barfish," I said as preamble in a vulnerable little-girl voice that seldom failed. "I may have to . . ." I had intended to "find" Howie's translation and then leave quickly while Cabot Hawke absorbed it. But I swear, I never touched a key.

"We pause for a special bulletin," said a familiar voice; Howie's, of course. If he wanted people to listen, he had to ease them into it in a familiar way. "If carefully you listen, this is the very last bulletin special you will ever need."

The next voice was Stravinsky's. I heard the ravishing velvet hammer of propaganda beneath it, thrust my thumbs into my ears, and hummed while I tried not to feel the message vibrating through me.

Hawke didn't notice me. After a moment he sat down, his face transformed in something beyond sexual rapture. I could almost understand, dimly, the message throbbing through my shoe soles. When I eased out of the room, Cabot Hawke was lost in Howie's translation.

* * *

En route to Hawke's office, I kept hearing stray bits of that voiceless communiqué from every open doorway, and hummed louder. By some power I couldn't yet guess, Howard Prior had plugged his translation into every channel of every terminal and holovision set in existence. I had to put my heel through Hawke's speakers but finally, insulated by his plush pile carpet and my loudest soprano, I could feel free of that hellish persuasion.

Two hours later I left Delphium. There wasn't anybody there anyway. Then I left Baltimore. There wasn't anybody there, either.

I slid into the driver's couch of a roadster, abandoned like many others with its motor still whirring, and sang "Ain't We Got Fun" at the top of my voice until I could rip the wires from the dashboard speaker. I saw no traffic as I sped north.

I m not sure why I stopped for the hitcher; maybe because he was the only person I'd seen in an hour. Maybe because he was a good-looking hunky specimen. But when I say he acted altogether too goddamn familiar, I'm understating. He talked as if he were my alter ego. "Free choice have you. No one's going to force you to listen, Justine." Those were his first words as he settled in.

I was already accelerating. "How did you know my name?"

"I listened," he said with the ghost of a wry grin. "To give it a try you ought before the machines run down," he went on. "You wouldn't want stranded to be."

"It's you who gets stranded," I said with finality and braked hard. "Out, buster."

He shrugged. "Losing interest I'm, anyway. Like Prior Howard," he said, stepping out.

It seemed perfectly natural that this total stranger knew all about Howie. "That one's lost interest in everything," I said.

"Did you think that you Howard killed?" His hand described a capricious fillip in the air. "Howard translated."

"Why are you doing this to me?"

"Expiation. I'm—was—the Omaha Ripper. Mind never, you don't want the details."

I already knew them. Who didn't know about the manhunt in Omaha? "Got it," I said; "you're a hallucination. Why aren't you in Nebraska?"

"Good question," he said, and winked from existence without even a pop of displaced air. I drove on, a bit more slowly. My odds-on favorite explanation was that my mind had begun playing tricks. To punish itself, maybe? "Nice try," I told it.

Near Harrisburg I was running low on fuel when Cabot Hawke flagged me down. I was quite cool; I'd half-expected something of the sort. I switched off the motor and lounged back, very much in the driver's seat.

"I'm expiating too," Hawke said with no previous greeting. "I'll even try to speak this ridiculous language in a way that won't spook you."

"Spook is the operative word," I said. "I'll settle down, Hawke. And then I'll be flying high in the number one slot, and with all your motivations peeled away, where will all you poor bastards be?"

"Everywhenandwhere. The Eocene. The Crab Nebula. What's the point of being number one, Jus', when there's no number two?"

"Plenty of folks who don't speak CanAm," I said.

"They don't have to," Hawke said gently. "The message is perfectly clear if you only listen, whether you speak Tagalog or Croatian. Or Hohokam. Or if you're newborn or deaf," he said in afterthought. "The vibrations, you see."

I'd never heard of a Hohokam, and that bothered me. How could something be dredged from my subconscious if I'd never heard of it? Oh: I'd simply invented it, like the whole conversation. Simple. "You'll come around," I said pleasantly. "And I'll be waiting."

"I wish you were all that interesting," Hawke said mildly. "Anything I can do to convince you? You're starting to bore me."

My tummy rumbled. "Sure. I could use a ham and cheese on rye, and a cola. Oh, and some fuel."

"Don't wait too long," he said, and turned away. And vanished. In the seat beside me was a thick juicy sandwich and a cola; my fuel gauge read full.

I stayed at an inn on the Susquehanna where the machines had already stopped, and spent a few days unwinding in the Executive Suite. That got to be tiresome; no maid service.

Finally I drove back to Baltimore. My fuel tank is always full, and there's always a sandwich and a cola when I want one.

No one else roams the Delphium complex to keep me from clearing out Hawke's desk for myself, reading his private journals, learning how trivial the sonofabitch thought I was before I showed them all. I keep in shape with a fire ax whenever I find a locked door in Delphium. Or anywhere else in Baltimore. Now and then I see a shimmer of something down a silent hallway, or against a moonlit sky, and it makes me think of great shadowbirds at play.

I keep reminding myself that they'll get tired of it pretty soon. Then they'll have to start all over again at square one. Bottom rung of the ladder. That's my most comforting thought, so I think it a lot. At other times, I reflect on the truth of one of Hawke's old phrases.

It's lonely at the top.

 

MILLENNIAL POSTSCRIPT

Every New York editor who read the previous story rejected it. The first one I asked who lived far from the madding status ladder and had a casual view of it, bought the piece. Recently there's been a gradually accelerating move from the rat race in many cities though, to take everybody's favorite example, Manhattan is a more friendly town today than it has been for fifty years. One of my favorite New York editors now works from home—in Arizona. There are several good reasons, including computers. Now that our homes are wired we're sliding toward a true post-metropolitan culture.

With two architects in the family, I see evidence of this process almost daily. Some of it is encouraging, and some not. The long-term outcomes aren't so clear but, to take examples dear to my heart, what's to happen in ballet and classical music? Some things may, for the foreseeable future, always need close physical proximity by a bevy of artists. If we don't fund those artists decently, many of them will seek other joys, and few small towns boast a Bolshoi or a London Symphony Orchestra. The trend in this country is to remove tax support from the arts. Does this mean we are kicking the cornerstones from the foundations of fine arts? During the past decade the symphony orchestras of both Denver and San Diego have fought to recover from receivership.

What we need is some way to make telepresence work among many artists. Then one day we may enjoy the musical and balletic splendor of The Rite of Spring by artists who are performing simultaneously from a hundred and fifty different locations. As long as we're after improved quality of life, we can't afford to ignore the things that flourish at their very best only in cities. Meanwhile, if government won't support the fine arts, it's up to us individually.

 

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