Long before that, other, more savage passions had been awakened, ones he’d indulged as a teenage boy playing half-serious secret-agent games with his peers in the Arizona mountains. Smearing themselves with shoe polish.
Sneaking up on each other. Plinking at each other with capsules of red paint. Blowing things up. Etc.
He’d resumed his lessons, privately. No more games with paint.
But tracking down Linda, Ellen as she called herself, had lacked something of the fantastic quality he’d anticipated.
When he finally found her—a nice surprise he’d arranged, too—he’d expected to be greeted as a kindred soul; instead she’d seemed preoccupied by matters she was unwilling to share, layers of concern, woven branches of potential—so many crimes, so many villains, doing an invisible gavotte. So many loyalties to balance. So many corners to watch. She’d grown skilled at hiding her thoughts and feelings from people, too skilled. And he had hoped to touch her feelings.
Now he wondered how much of a surprise his dramatic revelations had been. She was mysteriously adept at things he was hardly aware of.
Vincent Darlington, giddy with social success, greeted Blake lavishly and ushered him into the ersatz chapel.
Space station society was a hothouse affair, fluid and incestuous, and gaudy display was part of the game. Plumes and trapezes of glitter bobbed on heads whose hair, when not shaved off altogether, had been tortured into extraordinary shapes, wagon wheels and ratchets and Morning Star maces, ziggurats, corkscrews. The faces below came in every natural color and several artificial ones, enlivened by splashes of paint and, on the men, odd swatches of whiskers. The room was filled to capacity and it seemed like everybody was trying to stand in the same place, next to the food tables. These were obviously people who appreciated Darlington’s taste, if not in art, then in champagne and hors d’ oeuvres.
Blake recognized a few of his recent companions aboard Helios, including, to his mild surprise, Sondra Sylvester’s companion Nancybeth, who welled up in front of him as he tried to push closer to the display case containing The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Nancybeth was resplendent in green plastic kneeboots, and above them a miniskirt of real leather, dyed white and hanging in fringes all the way from her raw hemp belt. Her top was thinly veiled in low-slung, purple-anodized aluminum mesh, which went well with her violet eyes.
“Open your mowffy,” she coaxed, her chin raised and her lips pooched, and when he started to ask her “what for” he got no further than the “what,” which gave her the opening she needed to shove a tube of something pink and orange and squishy between his teeth. “You looked hungry,” she explained as he masticated.
“I was,” he said, when he’d swallowed, wincing.
“Not just your tummy, Blakey. You have hungry eyes.”
Her voice fell a few decibels, so that he had to lean closer to hear her. Her six-inch mirrored earrings swung like pendulums, threatening to hypnotize him. “All the way here on the liner I could feel your hungry eyes eating at me.”
“How ghastly for you,” he said. He said it louder than he’d intended; adjacent heads turned.
Nancybeth recoiled. “Blake, silly! Don’t you understand what I’m saying?”
“I wish I didn’t.” He took advantage of her temporary retrenchment to gain a few inches toward his goal. “Have you seen the book yet? Do you think Darlington’s given it a decent burial in this mausoleum?”
“What do you mean?” she asked suspiciously. Her chin was abeam his shoulder now, and there was danger she would be swept aft. “Vince has very good taste. I think the gold on the edge of the pages goes really well with the ceiling.”
“That’s what I meant.” He’d finally reached the altar that enshrined the relic, only to discover that it was almost impossible to see; the party guests in the vicinity were using the glass top of the display case as a handy tabletop for their plates and wine glasses. Blake turned queasily away, Nancybeth still with him.
“I’m surprised to see you here without Mrs. Sylvester,”
he said bluntly.
She wasn’t sophisticated, but she had a sixth sense for the needs of others, and Blake’s matter-of-factness got through to her; she answered in kind. “Vince won’t talk to Sondra. He invited me ages ago—because he thought I’d drag her along. His idea was that she was going to rub me in his face, and he was going to rub that book in hers.”
Blake smiled. “You’re okay, Nancybeth. You call it the way you see it.”
“I’m seeing it now. And I’m calling it. But it’s not answering.”
“Sorry. Fact is, I’m looking for someone else.”
Her eyes went cold. She shrugged and turned her back on him.
He moved through the crowd searching the faces of strangers. After filling a plate he tried to get away from the crowd and found himself alone for the moment in a small chapellike room off the grotesque glass-domed nave of Darlington’s cathedral. In this small room were cases displaying objects quite different from the run of execrable gimcracks Darlington had pushed to center stage. Inside the cases Blake recognized the fossils of Venusian life that had gotten Darlington’s silly art gallery a place on the map of the solar system.
They were dusty red and gray things, fragmented, morphologically ambiguous. He knew nothing of paleontology, but he understood that these had been authenticated as the remains of creatures that had burrowed and crawled, maybe flapped and glided, during a brief paradise of liquid water and free oxygen that had prevailed millions of years ago, before the catastrophic positive feedback of the greenhouse effect had turned Venus into the aciddrenched, high-pressure inferno it was now.
The remains were more suggestive than descriptive.
Scholarly volumes had been devoted to these dozen scraps of stone, but no one could say for sure what things had made them, or left them behind, except that whatever they were, they’d been alive.
Blake brooded unhappily on the puzzle, hardly new to him, that so many people like Vincent Darlington possessed so many treasures of which they had not the slightest conception of value—aside from money, aside from possession itself.
His ponderings were abruptly interrupted.
In the adjoining room a woman’s scream rose above the babble, a man yelled, and in quick succession there were seven very loud whacks—overtaken by a long splintering of glass.
For a moment the air hung still, echoing, before everyone in the crowd began screaming and shouting and fight- ing each other to get out. Blake dodged panicked refugees and seconds later found himself in an empty room, confronting a bloody tableau.
Sondra Sylvester was writhing in the grip of Percy Farnsworth and a horrified Nancybeth. Sylvester’s heavy silk gown had been slashed by falling glass, and blood was streaming down over her livid face from cuts in her scalp. Her right arm was raised stiffly over her head, where Nancybeth was trying to pull it down to get at the black pistol that Sylvester still held in a steel grip, yelling at her, “Syl, no more, no more . . .” Meanwhile Farnsworth had Sylvester around the waist and was trying to throw her to the glass-strewn floor; he and Nancybeth had also suffered cuts on the scalp and shoulders. Sylvester’s finger tightened on the trigger and an eighth bullet smashed into the riddled stained-glass ceiling, loosing another shower of fragments.
Then Sylvester dropped the pistol, having exhausted the ammunition clip. She relaxed almost luxuriously into the arms of the others, who suddenly found themselves supporting her.
Blake helped them carry her to the side of the room, away from the glass. So much blood was pouring over Sylvester’s eyes that she must have been blinded by it— scalp wounds flow copiously, even when they’re not serious —but she’d been seeing clearly enough when she sent the first rounds from the illegal weapon into Vincent Darlington’s body.
Darlington lay on his back in a spreading pool of crimson, staring open-eyed through the shattered dome at the tops of tall trees on the opposite surface of the central sphere, his body frosted over with powdered glass.
Behind him, safe inside the case that served as a table for smeared plates and empty glasses, rested the object of Sylvester’s passion.
Sparta was inside a kaleidoscope, its broken bits of glass falling with rapid stuttering leaps into new symmetric patterns that repeated themselves endlessly out to the edge of her vision, and beyond. The slowly spinning vortex of jagged colors seemed to be sucking her into infinity. With each shift, a strung-out, whistling explosion echoed through her mind. The scene was dizzying and vivid— —and part of her consciousness stood to one side watching it with enjoyment. That part was reminded of a cartoon she’d seen on an eye doctor’s wall, a car speeding across a desert on a long straight road, passing a sign that read “Vanishing point, ten miles.”