Universe 7 - [Anthology] Read online

  He grumphed, wishing he could take another whack at the Pythagoreans. An equally satisfying target occurred to him—and a perfectly legitimate one, so long as you realized that this was a game that could be played creatively. “The Seven Subjects of Sensational Journalism: crime, scandal, speculative science, insanity, superstitions such as numerology, monsters, and millionaires.”

  Fixing him with a penetrating gaze, she immediately intoned, “The Seven Sorrows of Shackleton: the crushing of the Endurance in the ice, the inhospitality of Elephant Island, the failure of the whaler Southern Sky, the failure of the Uruguayan trawler Instituto de Pesca No. 1, the failure on first use of the Chilean steamer Yelcho, the failure of the Emma, and the South Pole unattained!”

  She continued to stare at him judicially. He realized he was starting to blush. He dropped his eyes and laughed uncomfortably. She chortled happily. He looked back at her and laughed with her. It was a very nice moment, really. He had cheated inventively and she had cheated right back at him the same way, pulling him up short without a word.

  Feeling very, very good, very free, Math said, “The Seven Years War.”

  “The Seven Weeks War, between Prussia and Austria.”

  “The Seven Days War, between Israel and the Arabs.”

  “Surely Six?”

  He grinned. “Seven. For six days the Israelis labored, and on the seventh day they rested.”

  She laughed delightedly, whereupon Math guffawed too.

  She said, “You’re witty, sir—though I can’t allow that answer. I must tell my brother that one of his colleagues—” She stopped, glanced at her wrist, shot up. “I didn’t realize it was so late. He’ll be worried. Thanks for everything, Matthew—I’ve got to split.” She hurried toward the door.

  He got up too. “I’ll get dressed and take you to his room. You don’t know where it is. I’ll have to find out.”

  She was reaching down her coat. “No time for that. And now I remember where.”

  He caught up with her as she was slipping her coat on. “But Severeign, visitors aren’t allowed to move around the Complex unescorted—”

  “Oh pish!”

  It was like trying to detain a busy breeze. He said desperately, “I won’t bother to change.”

  She paused, grinned at him with uplifted brows, as though surprised and pleased. Then, “No, Matthew,” settling her coat around her and opening the door.

  He conquered his inhibitions and grabbed her by her silky shoulders—gently at the last moment. He faced her to him. They were exactly the same height.

  “Hey,” he asked smiling, “what about the Game?”

  “Oh, we’ll have to finish that. Tomorrow night, same time? G’bye now.”

  He didn’t release her. It made him tremble. He started to say, “But Miss Saxon, you really can’t go by yourself. After midnight all sorts of invisible eyes pick up anyone in the corridors.”

  He got as far as the “can’t,” when with a very swift movement she planted her lips precisely on his.

  He froze, as if they had been paralysis darts—and he did feel an electric tingling. Even his invariable impulse to flinch was overridden, perhaps by the audacity of the contact. A self he’d never met said from a corner of his mind in the voice of Rex Harrison, “They’re Anglo body-contact taboos, but not Saxon.”

  And then, between his parted lips and hers still planted on them, he felt an impossible third swift touch. There was a blind time—he didn’t know how long—in which the universe filled with unimagined shocking possibility: tiny ondines sent anywhere by matter transmission, a live velvet ribbon from the fourth dimension, pet miniwatersnakes, a little finger with a strange silver ring on it poking out of a young witch’s mouth… and then another sort of shocked wonder, as he realized it could only have been her tongue.

  His lips, still open, were pressing empty air. He looked both ways down the corridor. It was empty too. He quietly closed the door and turned to his ivory-lined room. He closed his lips and worked them together curiously. They still tingled, and so did a spot on his tongue. He felt very calm, not at all worried about Severeign being spotted, or who her brother was, or whether she would really come back tomorrow night. Although he almost didn’t see the forest for the trees, it occurred to him that he was happy.

  Next morning he felt the same, but very eager to tell someone all about it. This presented a problem, for Math had no friends among his colleagues. Yet a problem easily solved, after a fashion. Right after breakfast he hunted up Elmo Hooper.

  Elmo was classed and quartered with the mathematicians, though he couldn’t have told you the difference between a root and a power. He was an idiot savant, able to do lightning calculations and possessing a perfect eidetic memory. He was occasionally teamed with a computer to supplement its powers, and it was understood, as it is understood that some people will die of cancer, that he would eventually be permanently cyborged to one. In his spare time, of which he had a vast amount, he mooned around the Complex, ignored except when he came silently up behind gossipers and gave them fits because of his remarkable physical resemblance to Warren Dean, Coexistence’s security chief. Both looked like young Vermont storekeepers and were equally laconic, though for different reasons.

  Math, who though no lightning calculator, had a nearly eidetic memory himself, found Elmo the perfect confidant. He could tell him all his most private thoughts and feelings, and retrieve any of his previous remarks, knowing that Elmo would never retrieve any of them on his own initiative and never, never make a critical comment.

  This morning he found Elmo down one floor in Physics, and soon was pouring out in a happy daze every detail about last night’s visit and lovely visitor and all his amazing reactions to her, with no more thought for Elmo than he would have had for a combined dictaphone and information-storage-and-retrieval unit.

  He would have been considerably less at ease had he known that Warren Dean regularly drained Elmo of all conversations by “sensitive” persons he overheard in his moonings. Though Math wouldn’t have had to feel that way, for the dour security man had long since written Math off as of absolutely no interest to security, being anything but “sensitive” and quite incapable of suspicious contacts, or any other sort. (How else could you class a man who talked of nothing but ivories, hurt vanities, and pure abstractions?) If Elmo began to parrot Math, Dean would simply turn off the human bug, while what the bugs in Math’s walls heard was no longer even taped.

  Math’s happy session with Elmo lasted until lunchtime, and he approached the Mathematics, Astronomy and Theoretical Physics Commons with lively interest. Telling the human memory bank every last thing he knew about Severeign had naturally transferred his attention to the things he didn’t know about her, including the identity of her brother. He was still completely trustful that she would return at evening and answer his questions, but it would be nice to know a few things in advance.

  The Commons was as gorgeous as Math’s apartment, though less eccentrically so. It still gave him a pleasant thrill to think of all the pure intellect gathered here, busily chomping and chatting, though the presence of astronomers and especially theoretical physicists from the floor below added a sour note. Ah well, they weren’t quite as bad as their metallurgical, hardware-mongering brothers. (These in turn were disgusted at having to eat with the chemists from the second floor below. The Complex, dedicated to nourishing all pure science, since that provably paid off better peacewise or warwise than applied science, arranged all the sciences by floors according to degree of purity and treated them according to the same standards, with the inhabitants of the top floor positively coddled. Actually, the Complex was devoted to the corruption of pure science, and realized that mathematics was at least fully as apt as any other discipline to turn up useful ideas. Who knew when a new geometry would not lead to a pattern of nuclear bombardment with less underkill? Or a novel topological concept point the way to the more efficient placement of offshore oil wells?)


  So as Math industriously nibbled his new potatoes, fresh green peas, and roast lamb (the last a particularly tender mutation from the genetics and biology floors, which incidentally was a superb carrier of a certain newly developed sheep-vectored disease of the human nervous system), he studied the faces around him for ones bearing a resemblance to Severeign’s—a pleasantly titillating occupation merely for its own sake. Although Math’s colleagues believed the opposite, he was a sensitive student of the behavior of crowds, as any uninvolved spectator is apt to be. He had already noted that there was more and livelier conversation than usual and had determined that the increase was due to talk about last night’s storm and power failure, with the physicists contributing rather more than their share, both about the storm and power failure and also about some other, though related topic which he hadn’t yet identified.

  While coffee was being served, Math decided on an unprecedented move: to get up and drift casually about in order to take a closer look at his candidates for Severeign’s brother (or half brother, which would account elegantly for their different last names). And as invariably happens when an uninvolved spectator abandons that role and mixes in, it was at once noticed. Thinking of himself as subtly invisible as he moved about dropping nods and words here and there, he actually became a small center of attention. Whatever was that social misfit up to? (A harsh term, especially coming from members of a group with a high percentage of social misfits.) And why had he taken off his gray kid gloves? (In his new freedom he had simply forgotten to put them on.)

  He saved his prime suspect until last, a wisp of a young authority on synthetic projective geometry named Angelo Spirelli, the spiral angel, whose floating hair was very black and whose face could certainly be described as girlish, though his eyes (Math noted on closer approach) were yellowish-brown, not green.

  Unlike the majority, Spirelli was a rather careless, outgoing soul of somewhat racier and more voluble speech than his dreamy appearance might have led one to expect. “Hi, Fortree. Take a pew. What strange and unusual circumstance must I thank for this unexpected though pleasant encounter? The little vaudeville act Zeus and Hephaestus put on last night? One of the downstairs boys suspects collusion by the Complex.”

  Emboldened, Math launched into a carefully rehearsed statement. “At the big do last week I met a female who said she was related to you. A Miss Severeign Saxon.”

  Spirelli scowled at him, then his eyes enlarged happily. “Saxon, you say? Was she a squirmy little sexpot?”

  Math’s eyebrows lifted. “I suppose someone might describe her in that fashion.” He didn’t look as if he’d care much for such a someone.

  “And you say you met her in El ‘Bouk?”

  “No, here at the fortnightly reception.”

  “That,” Spirelli pronounced, scowling again, “does not add up.”

  “Well,” Math said after a hiatus, “does it add down?”

  Spirelli eyed him speculatively, then shrugged his shoulders with a little laugh. Leaning closer, he said, “Couple weeks ago I was into Albuquerque on a pass. At the Spurs ‘n’ Chaps this restless little saucer makes up to me. Says call her Saxon, don’t know if it was supposed to be last name, first, or nick.”

  “Did she suggest you play a game?”

  Spirelli grinned. “Games. I think so, but I never got around to finding out for sure. You see, she began asking me too many questions, like she was pumping me, and I remembered what Grandmother Dean teaches us at Sunday school about strange women, and I cooled her fast, feeling like a stupid, miserably well-behaved little choirboy. But a minute later Warren himself wanders in and I’m glad I did.” His eyes swung, his voice dropped. “Speak of the devil.”

  Math looked. Across the Commons, Elmo Hooper—no, Warren Dean—had come in. Conversation did not die, but it did become muted—in waves going out from that point.

  Math asked, “Did this girl in ‘Bouk have black hair?”

  Grown suddenly constrained, Spirelli hesitated, then said, “No, blond as they come. Saxon was a Saxon type.”

  After reaching this odd dead end, Math spent the rest of the afternoon trying to cool his own feelings about Severeign, simply because they were getting too great. He was successful except that in the mathematics library Webster’s Unabridged, second edition, tempted him to look up the “seven” entries (there were three columns), and he was halfway through them before he realized what he was doing. He finished them and resolutely shut the big book and his mind. He didn’t think of Severeign again until he finished dressing for bed, something he regularly did on returning to his room from dinner. It was a practice begun as a child to ensure he did nothing but study at night, but continued, with embellishments, when he began to think of himself as a gay young bachelor. He furiously debated changing back until he became irked at his agitation and decided to retain his “uniform of the night.”

  But he could no longer shut his mind on Severeign. Here he was having an assignation (a word which simultaneously delighted him and gave him cold shivers) with a young female who had conferred on him a singular favor (another word that worked both ways, while the spot on his tongue tingled reminiscently). How should he behave? How would she behave? What would she expect of him? How would she react to his costume? (He redebated changing back.) Would she even come? Did he really remember what she looked like?

  In desperation he began to look up everything on seven he could, including Shakespeare and ending with the Bible. A cross-reference had led him to the Book of Revelation, which he found surprisingly rich in that digit. He was reading, “And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour…” when, once again, there came the seven chimes at his door. He was there in a rush and had it open, and there was Severeign, looking exactly like he remembered her—the three points of merry green eyes and tapered chin of flustered, triangular elf-face, silver spectacles, salmon blouse and green grandmother’s skirt (with line of coral buttons going down the one, and jade ones down the other), the sense of the other four crucial points of a girl under them, slender bare arms, one clutching silversequined purse, the other trailing coat of silver fox—and their faces as close together again as if the electric kiss had just this instant ended.

  He leaned closer still, his lips parted, and he said, “The seven metals of the ancients: iron, lead, mercury, tin, copper, silver, and gold.”

  She looked as startled as he felt. Then a fiendish glint came into her eyes and she said, “The seven voices of the classical Greek actor: king, queen, tyrant, hero, old man, young man, maiden—that’s me.”

  He said, “The Island of the Seven Cities. Antilia, west of Atlantis.”

  She said, “The seven Portuguese bishops who escaped to that island.”

  He said, “The Seven Caves of Aztec legend.”

  She said, “The Seven Walls of Ekbatana in old Persia: white, black, scarlet, blue, orange, silver, and (innermost) golden.”

  He said, “ ‘Seven Come Eleven,’ a folk cry.”

  She said, “The Seven Cities of Cibola. All golden.”

  “But which turned out to be merely the pueblos of the Zuni,” he jeered.

  “Do you always have to deprecate?” she demanded. “Last night the ancients, the Pythagoreans. Now some poor aborigines.”

  He grinned. “Since we’re on Amerinds, the Seven Council Fires, meaning the Sioux, Tetons, and so forth.”

  She scowled at him and said, “The Seven Tribes of the Tetons, such as the Hunkpapa.”

  Math said darkly, “I think you studied up on seven and then conned me into picking it. Seven Came Through, a book by Eddie Rickenbacker.”

  “The Seven Champions of Christendom. Up Saint Dennis of France! To the death! No, I didn’t, but you know, I sometimes feel I know everything about sevens, past, present, or future. It’s strange.”

  They had somehow got to the couch and were sitting a little apart but facing each other, totally engrossed in the Game.

&n
bsp; “Hmph! Up Saint David of Wales!” he said. “The Seven Churches in Asia Minor addressed in Revelation. Thyatira, undsoweiter.”

  “Philadelphia too. The seven golden candlesticks, signifying the Seven Churches. Smyrna’s really my favorite—I like figs.” She clenched her fist with the tip of her thumb sticking out between index and middle fingers. Math wondered uncomfortably if she knew the sexual symbolism of the gesture. She asked, “Why are you blushing?”

  “I’m not. The Seven Stars, meaning the Seven Angels of the Seven Churches.”

  “You were! And it got you so flustered you’ve given me one. The Seven Angels!”

  “I’m not any more,” he continued unperturbed, secure in his knowledge that he’d just read part of Revelation. “The seven trumpets blown by the Seven Angels.”

  “The beast with seven heads, also from Revelation. He also had the mouth of a lion and the feet of a bear and ten horns, but he looked like a leopard.”

  “The seven consulships of Gaius Marius,” he said.