“We must skip Capricorn. Aquarius, my sign,” Frigate said, “is the eleventh house. Aquarius the Waterbearer is ruled by Saturn, which symbolizes lessons, and by Uranus, which stands for opportunities. Aquarius humanizes. Aquarius is diplomatic, altruistic and inventive. Unfortunately, on the negative side, he is selfish, eccentric and impulsive.”
“Do you plead guilty?” Burton said.
“More or less. Now, Dick, we come to you, Pisces, since you were born March 19, 1821. Pisces the Fish. Harmonizes, haw! haw! Ruled by Neptune or idealism and Jupiter or expansion. No argument there. Positive qualities: intuitive, sympathetic, artistic.”
“You’ve told me, more than once, that I was a self-made martyr,” Burton said.
“And so,” Nur said, “carrying our baggage of good and bad qualities, we go to our new homes. If we could only leave the suitcases containing the bad at the door.”
16
Moving into the “pie-in-the-sky” chambers demanded much preparation. The tenants had to tour their little worlds and decide whether they should keep the present decor or “environment” or make their own. Except for Nur, who was intrigued by the chamber of dark mirrors, each finally had his or her place stripped. While the hordes of androids and robots were doing this, the tenants decided on what kind of private world they wanted. After that, they had to instruct the Computer down to the minutest details about their specifications.
Nur changed his mind. He would remain in his suite though he would visit the mirror-world now and then to meditate.
Burton surprised everybody by his unaccountable reluctance to change homes. He had always been a wanderer who grew restless if he stayed in one place more than a week. Yet he now refused to move until he had made his world exactly as he wished. Halfway through the building of his first world, he stopped the work and had it stripped again. After a long time, he started on a second design but abandoned that after two weeks.
“Perhaps he’s so unwilling to go there,” Nur said, “because it will be his last home. Where else can he go after he moves into that?”
The afternoon that the six were to move, all eight held a big going-away party in the central area. It was not entirely a joyous occasion because de Marbot and Behn quarreled just before they were to take occupancy. The Frenchman was burned up at Aphra’s refusal to live with him in his world, and, after drinking more wine than he was accustomed to, he accused her of not loving him.
“1 am entitled to my own world, the world I made,” she said loftily.
“A woman’s place is by the man she loves. She should go where he goes.”
“We’ve been through this too many times,” she said. “I’m weary of it.”
“You should be under my roof. It is my right. How can I trust you?”
“I don’t have to be in your sight every minute. If you can’t trust me, if you think I’ll hop into another man’s bed the moment I go around the corner … Is it just me or don’t you trust any woman? You were often absent for many months from your wife when you were a soldier. Did you trust her? You must have, you didn’t—”
“My wife was above suspicion!” de Marbot shouted.
“Hail, Caesar!” Aphra said scornfully. “The real Caesar’s wife, my precious little piece of shit, put horns on him. So, if your wife was as good as Caesar’s wife …”
Aphra walked away from him while he yelled at her, and she went through the doorway to the sixth house.
Weeping, she let the door close behind her. She felt as if she were also closing off her lover forever, though she had had enough experience to know that her emotions, not her reason, were speaking. How many men had she parted from and never expected to see again? It seemed like a hundred, but, actually, it must be only twenty. And she could not remember the names of some. She would, though, when the dogging screen of her past showed up again. Here, at least, she could get away from it.
She went up the steps, the door opening for her at the top, and she stepped into her world. There was another flying chair there; she got into it and soared to an altitude of a hundred feet and headed inward. Below her was South American low-altitude tropical jungle, with winding narrow rivers gleaming in the light of the false moon. The cries of night birds rang and clanged below her; a bat shot by near her and dipped toward the dark tops of the trees a few feet below her. The moon was full because she had arranged for one every night, and its light was twice as powerful as that of Earth’s. And the stars, also those of equatorial South America, were three times as bright as the real ones. In this luminous night, she saw a shape slip across a glade. A jaguar. And she heard the bellowings of alligators.