“Oodles! Edgar, where’s all that rope? But we climbed up here on something! There it is! Now, what do I do?”
“Tie big knots in it every couple of feet. How far are we above you?”
“Forty feet? Thirty feet? Edgar! Cecil! Jose! You heard him. Tie knots!”
On the floor screen Lorq watched the shadow of the yacht slip over the bergs; he let the boat fall even lower.
“Lorq, open the hatch in the drive-room when we’re—
“We’re seventeen feet above them,” Lorq called over his shoulder. “That’s it, Prince!” He reached forward. “And it is open.”
“Fine!”
Prince ducked through the doorway into the drive-room. Cold air slapped Lorq’s back. Dan and Brian held the ship steady in the wind.
On the floor screen Lorq saw one of the boys fling the rope up at the ship—Prince would be standing in the open hatchway to catch it in his silver glove. It took three tries. Then Prince’s voice came back over the wind: “Right! I’ve got it tied. Come on up!” And one after another they mounted the knotted rope.
“There you go. Watch it—“
“Man, it’s cold out there! Soon as you get past the heating field-“
“I’ve got you. Right in—“
“Didn’t think we’d make it. Hey, you want some Chateauneuf du Pape ‘forty-eight? Che says you can’t get—“
The voices filled the drive-room. Then:
“Prince! Luscious of you to rescue me! Are you going to have any nineteenth-century Turkish music at your party? We couldn’t get any local stations, but there was this educational program beaming up from New Zealand. Airy! Edgar invented a new step. You get down on your hands and knees and just swing your up and down. Jose, don’t fall back onto that silly mountain! Come in here this instant and meet Prince Red. He’s the one who’s giving the party, and his father has ever so many more millions than yours. Close the door now and let’s get out of the engine room. All these machines and things. It isn’t me.”
“Come inside, Che, and annoy the captain awhile. Do you know Lorq Von Ray?”
“My goodness, the boy who’s winning all those races? Why, he’s got even more money than you—“
“Shhhhh!” Prince said in a stage whisper as they came into the cabin. “I don’t want him to know.”
Lorq pulled the ship away from the mountain, then turned.
“You must be the one who won those prizes: You’re so handsome!”
Che-ong wore a completely transparent cold suit.
“Did you win them with this ship?”
She looked around the cabin, still panting from the climb up the rope. Rouged nipples flattened on vinyl with each breath.
“This is lovely. I haven’t been on a yacht in days.” And the crowd surged in behind her:
“Doesn’t anybody want any of this ‘forty-eight—“
“I can’t get any music in here. Why isn’t there any music—Cecil, do you have any more of that gold powder?”
“We’re above the ionosphere, stupid, and electromagnetic waves aren’t reflected any more. Besides, we’re moving too—“
Che-ong turned to them all. “Oh, Cecil, where has that marvelous golden dust got to? Prince, Lorq, you must try this. Cecil is the son of a mayor—“
“Governor—“
“—on one of those tiny worlds we’re always hearing about, very far away. He had this gold powder that they collect from crevices in the rocks. Oh, look, he’s still got lots and lots!”
The world began to spin beneath them.
“See, Prince, you breathe it in, like this. Ahhhh! It makes you see the most marvelous colors in everything you look at and hear the most incredible sounds in everything you hear, and your mind starts running about and filling in absolutely paragraphs between each word. Here, Lorq—“
“Watch it!” Prince laughed. “He’s got to get us back to Paris!”
“Oh!” exclaimed Che, “it won’t bother him. We’ll just get there a little faster, that’s all.”
Behind them the others were saying:
“Where did she say this goddamn party was?”
“Ile St-Louis. That’s in Paris.”
“Where – ?”
“Paris, baby, Paris. We’re going to a party in—“
Draco, Earth, Paris, 3162
In the middle of the fourth century the Byzantine Emperor Julian, tiring of the social whirl of the Cite de Paris (whose population, then under a thousand, dwelt mostly in skin huts clustered about a stone and wooden temple sacred to the Great Mother), moved across the water to the smaller island.
In the first half of the twentieth century, the queen of a worldwide cosmetic industry, to escape the pretensions of the Right Bank and the bohemian excesses of the Left, established here her Paris pied a terre, the walls of which were lined with a fortune in art treasures (while across the water, a twin-towered cathedral had replaced the wooden temple).
At the close of the thirty-first century, its central avenue hung with lights, the side alleys filled with music, menageries, drink, and gaming booths, while fireworks boomed in the night, the Ile St.-Louis held Prince Red’s party.
“This way! Across here!”
They trooped over the trestled bridge. The black Seine glittered. Across the water, foliage dripped the stone balustrades. The sculptured buttresses of Notre Dame, floodlit now, rose behind the trees in the park on the Cite.
“No one can come onto my island without a mask!” Prince shouted.
As they reached the bridge’s center, he vaulted to the rail, grabbed one of the beams, and waved over the crowd with his silver hand. “You’re at a party! You’re at Prince’s party! And everybody wears a mask!” Spheres of fireworks, blue and red, bloomed on the dark behind his bony face.
“Airy!’ squealed Che-ong, running to the rail. “But if I wear a mask, nobody will recognize me, Prince! The studio only said I could come if there was publicity!”
He jumped, grabbed her vinyl glove, and led her down the steps. There, on racks, hundreds of full-headed masks glared.
“But I have a special one for you, Che!” He pulled down a two-foot, transparent rat’s head, ears rimmed with white fur, eyebrows sequined, jewels shaking at the end of each wire whisker.
“Airy!” squealed Che as Prince clapped the shape over her shoulders.
Through the transparent leer, her own delicate, green-eyed face twisted into laughter.
“Here, one for you!” Down came a saber-toothed panther’s head for Cecil; an eagle for Edgar, with iridescent feathers; Jose’s dark hair disappeared under a lizard’s head.
A lion for Dan (who had come protesting at everyone’s insistence, though they had forgotten him the moment he had given his belligerent consent) and a griffon for Brian (whom everyone had ignored till now, though he’d followed eagerly).
“And you!” Prince turned to Lorq. “I have a special one for you too!” Laughing, he lifted down a pirate’s head, with eyepatch, bandana, scarred cheek, and a dagger in bared teeth, It went lightly over Lorq’s head: he was looking through mesh eyeholes in the neck. Prince slapped him on the back. “A pirate, that’s for Von Ray!” he called as Lorq started across the cobble street.
More laughter as others arrived at the bridge.
Above the crowd, girls in powdered, towering, twenty-third-century, pre-Ashton Clark coiffures, tossed confetti from a balcony. A man was pushing up the street with a bear. Lorq thought it was someone in costume till the fur brushed his shoulder and he smelled the musk. The claws clicked away. The crowd caught him up,
Lorq was ears.
Lorq was eyes.
Bliss filed the receptive surface of each sense glass-smooth. Perception turned suddenly in (as the vanes of a ship might turn) as he walked the brick street, mortared with confetti. He felt the presence of his centered self. His world focused on the now of his hands and tongue. Voices around him caressed his awareness.