“Rob?”
“What?”
There was an edge to her voice. “It’s customary to say thank you.”
“It’s customary,” I said, “to give a truthful answer to a question. Like not saying you hadn’t seen Dane Metchnikov when you were with him just last night.”
She flared, “You’ve been spying on me!”
“You’ve been lying to me.”
“Rob! You don’t own me. Dane’s a human being, and a friend.”
“Friend!” I barked. The last thing Metchnikov was to anyone was a friend. Just thinking about Klara with him made my groin crawl. I didn’t like the sensation, because I couldn’t identify it. It wasn’t just anger, wasn’t even just jealousy. There was a component that remained obstinately opaque. I said, knowing it was illogical, hearing myself seem almost to whine, “I introduced you to him!”
“That doesn’t give you ownership! All right,” Kiara snarled, “maybe I went to bed with him a few times. It doesn’t change how I feel about you.”
“It changes how I feel about you, Klara.”
She stared incredulously. “You have the nerve to say that? Coming here, smelling of sex with some cheap floozy?”
That one caught me off guard. “There was nothing cheap about it! I was comforting someone in pain.”
She laughed. The sound was unpleasant; anger is unbecoming. “Louise Forehand? She hustled her way up here, did you know that?”
The little girl was holding the ball and staring at us now. I could see we were frightening her. I said, trying to tighten my voice to keep the anger from spilling out, “Klara, I’m not going to let you make a fool out of me.”
“Ah,” she said in inarticulate disgust, and turned around to go. I reached out to touch her, and she sobbed and hit me, as hard as she could. The blow caught me on the shoulder.
That was a mistake.
That’s always a mistake. It isn’t a matter of what’s rational or justified, it is a matter of signals. It was the wrong signal to give me. The reason wolves don’t kill each other off is that the smaller and weaker wolf always surrenders. It rolls over, bares its throat and puts its paws in the air to signal that it is beaten. When that happens the winner is physically unable to attack anymore. If it were not that way, there wouldn’t be any wolves left. For the same reason men don’t usually kill women, or not by beating them to death. They can’t. However much he wants to hit her, his internal machinery vetoes it. But if the woman makes the mistake of giving him a different signal by hitting him first—I punched her four or five times, as hard as I could, on the breast, in the face, in the belly. She fell to the ground, sobbing. I knelt beside her, lifted her up with one hand and, in absolutely cold blood, slapped her twice more. It was all happening as if choreographed by God, absolutely inevitably; and at the same I could feel that I was breathing as hard as though I’d climbed a mountain on a dead run. The blood was thundering in my ears. Everything I saw was hazed with red.
I finally heard a distant, thin crying.
I looked and saw the little girl, Watty, staring at me, her mouth open, tears rolling down her wide, purplish-black cheeks. I started to move toward her to reassure her. She screamed and ran behind a grape trellis.
I turned back toward Klara, who was sitting up, not looking at me, her hand cupped over her mouth. She took the hand away and stared at something in it: a tooth.
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say, and didn’t force myself to think of anything. I turned and left.
I don’t remember what I did for the next few hours. I didn’t sleep, although I was physically exhausted. I sat on a chest of drawers in my room for a while. Then I left it again. I remember talking to somebody, I think it was a straggler returning to off on the Venus ship, about how adventurous and exciting prospecting was. I remember eating something in the commissary. And all the time I was thinking: I wanted to kill Klara. I had been taming all that stored-up fury, and I hadn’t even let myself know it was there until she pulled the trigger.
I didn’t know if she would ever forgive me. I wasn’t sure she ought to, and I wasn’t even sure that I wanted her to. I couldn’t imagine our ever being lovers again. But what I finally decided I wanted was to apologize.
Only she wasn’t in her rooms. There was no one there except a plump young black woman, slowly sorting out clothes, with a tragic face. When I asked after Klara she began to cry. “She’s gone,” the woman sobbed.
“Gone?”
“Oh, she looked awful. Someone must have beaten her up! She brought Watty back and said she wouldn’t be able to take care of her anymore. She gave me all her clothes, but—what am I going to do with Watty when I’m working?”
“Gone where?”
The woman lifted her head. “Back to Venus. On the ship. She left an hour ago.”
I didn’t talk to anyone else. Alone in my own bed, somehow I got to sleep.
When I got up I gathered together everything I owned: my clothes, my holodisks, my chess set, my wristwatch. The Heechee bracelet that Kiara had given me. I went around and sold them off. I cleaned out my credit account and put all the money together: it came to a total of fourteen hundred dollars and change. I took the money up to the casino and put it all on Number 31 on the roulette wheel.
The big slow ball drifted into a socket: Green. Zero.
I went down to mission control and signed for the first One that was available, and twenty-four hours later I was in space.
23
“How do you really feel about Dane, Rob?”
“How the hell do you think I feel? He seduced my girl.’
“That’s a strangely old-fashioned way to put it, Rob. And it happened an awfully long time ago.”
“Sure it did.” Sigfrid strikes me as being unfair. He sets rules, then he doesn’t play by them. I say indignantly, “Cut it out, Sigfrid. All that happened a long time ago, but it isn’t being a long time ago, for me, because I’ve never let it come out. It’s still brand new inside my head. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do for me? Let all that old stuff inside my head come out so it can dry up and blow away and not cripple me anymore?”
“I’d still like to know why it stays so brand new inside your head, Rob.”
“Oh, Christ, Sigfrid!” This is one of Sigirid’s stupid times. He can’t handle some complex kinds of input, I guess. When it come right down to it he’s only a machine and can’t do anything he isn’t programmed to do. Mostly he just responds to key words well, with a little attention to meaning, sure. And to nuance, as as it is expressed by voice tone, or by what the sensors in the mat and in the straps tell him about my muscle activity.
“If you were a person instead of a machine, you’d understand,” I tell him.
“Perhaps so, Rob.”
To get him back on the right track I say: “It is true that it happened a long time ago. I don’t see what you’re asking beyond that.”
“I’m asking you to resolve a contradiction I perceive in what you say. You’ve been saying that you don’t mind the fact that your girlfriend, Klara, had sexual relations with other men. Why is it important that she did with Dane?”
“Dane didn’t treat her right!” And, good God, he certainly didn’t. He left her stuck like a fly in amber.
“Is it because of how he treated Klara, Rob? Or is it something between Dane and you?”
“Never! There was never anything between Dane and me!”
“You did tell me he was bi, Rob. What about the flight you took with him?”
“He had two other men to play with! Not me, boy, no, I say: Not me. Oh,” I say, trying to calm my voice enough to mask reflecting the very mild interest I really felt in this stupid subject, “ To be sure, he tried to put the make on me once or twice. But I told him it wasn’t my style.”
“Your voice, Rob,” he says, “seems to reflect more anger than your words account for.”
“Damn you, Sigfrid!” I really am angry now, I admit it. I hardly get the words out. “You get me pissed off with your stupid accusations. Sure, I let him put his arm around me once or twice. That’s as far as I went. Nothing serious. I was just abusing myself to make the time pass. I liked him well enough. Big, good-looking fellow. You get lonesome when—now what?”