After that he had to be Donald Holtzer again, and Holtzer was not troubled by such thoughts.
.v.
Almost within sight of Lakonia, the Banshee caught up with a shower of rain, quite likely the same one that had provided Danty with that puddle where he had found mud for his face. At the first drops the wipers chirred into action and the windows attempted to close. But Danty, lost in thought, was sitting with his elbow on the passenger door, and the automatics uttered a whine of complaint.
Rollins snapped at him. With a murmured apology he moved his arm. The glass socketed home in the spongy seal around the roof, and Rollins breathed an audible sigh of relief.
“You wear lead, hm?” Danty suggested, and gave a pointed scowl at the counter on the dash next to the gun. Its needle was well down in the white sector. By reflex Rollins also glanced at it, and then flushed; indicating the road ahead slick with wet as far as could be seen.
“You want to get soaked. get out and walk!”
He looked and sounded as though he fully expected the counter to zoom into the red any moment.
Danty shrugged. So it wasn’t rational to be that afraid of rain; there was Sr-90 and C-14 in everything you ate and drank, and unless you wore lead underwear you were constantly at risk from the long-life gamma-emitters like Cs-137. But, as he reminded himself wryly, Rollins was far from the only person in the world who did irrational things.
Maybe he did wear Koenig’s, at that. He wasn’t apt to admit it to a stranger, though.
Then the superway rounded the shoulder of a hill, and he caught his breath. Still in bright sunshine, by a freak of the rainstorm’s course, there was Lakonia laid out before them.
Symptom of a terrible disease, like the “hectic flush” of tuberculosis, conveying the illusion of vigorous health, or like the frenzied mental brilliance of terminal syphilis? Some authorities regarded it that way. They claimed that
Lakonia was an ersatz, a surrogate; this city built around an artificial sea, they said, was a palliative to dull the guilt suffered by those who had poisoned first the Great Lakes, then the rivers, and ultimately the inshore waters of the oceans past the point at which a man could swim in them.
Yet in its way-and seeing it now Danty was the last person who could have denied it-it was a place of mad magnificence, a rival to the Pyramids and Babylon.
Its towers rose, white, purple, green, and gold, to meet the sun: towers like stalagmites, like poplar-trees; towers like stacks of coins, each offset on the one below; towers like spun sugar-candy, glittering, and towers like frozen waterspouts. High delicate bridges linked them here and there, slung on ropes of spun carbon-fibers seeming weak and thin as spider webs yet capable of carrying cars nose to tail in both directions, and the thicker, ivory-colored single rail of the hover line swerved and swooped from one to the next. And all these pinnacles admired their reflections in pure crystal water-moats around the towers’ roots, canals planned to a scale beside which Venice paled.
In any case, Venice had collapsed.
Uniting all these waterways, the New Lake: man-made, spanning eight miles shore to shore, which gave Lakonia the first syllable of its name.
It was early yet, and there was no way of telling whether the nearby rain might not drift in that direction, but the bright mirror of water was alive-with swimmers, with sailboats, with powered launches towing water-skiers and man-carrying kites. At least, the nearside of the lake was swarming with them. Some mile, or mile and a half, from the shore, they seemed by tacit consent to turn back, to face again towards the high lovely towers and the artificial beach of white imported sand. It was as though on the farther shore there was something they were afraid to approach. Yet, looking in that direction, an uninstructed stranger would have seen nothing more foreboding than a stand of tall dark trees, force-grown redwoods two hundred feet high, above which curled a faint wreath of smoke.