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,” 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.”