“It’s good to see you,” he said.
I said, “I’m glad to see you too. You look different in a gravity field.”
He nodded. “Yes. So do you. I like what you’ve done with your hair.”
There now, just what I needed: a nice sample lie to calibrate my bullshit detector. I knew perfectly well that my hair looked awful. “Thank you for the gallantry,” I said. “It was ungodly hot in Queensland. The hair was always wet, and it kept crawling down my neck, so I had them hack it all off. I think I’m going to end up regretting it.”
“No, really, it suits you well.”
Okay, now see if you can get him to make some true statements for comparison, and we’ll get this polygraph interrogation started. “I just hit dirt a few days ago. I can’t get used to this up and down nonsense. It seems so arbitrary, like making all music be in the same key. And I can’t believe how much my feet hurt!”
He nodded. “My first couple of days dirtside I couldn’t imagine how humans had ever put up with gravity. It was just barely tolerable back when we didn’t know any better—but now, something’s simply got to be done about it. You must be exhausted.”
“Irish coffee helps,” I said. “It’s great for reconciling you to gravity: it’s got up and down built into it. The booze calms you down and then the coffee wakes you up.” Small talk, small talk—
“Small talk,” he said.
I nodded. “What do you say—stick to small talk until we’ve eaten?”
He nodded back. “Sounds sensible.” The waiter arrived, and Robert ordered Irish coffee, “like the lady.” The waiter nodded gravely, turned away—then stopped outside Robert’s field of vision, pointed at him, and gave me an exaggerated thumbs up. Keep this one. When he returned a few moments later with the coffee, he stopped behind Robert again, pointed at the coffee and fanned himself: this glass had whiskey in it, in good measure. I slipped him another wink when Robert wasn’t looking. I hoped Robert was going to tip him well, since I couldn’t. Robert ordered something to eat and I said I’d have the same and he twinkled away, delighted at his role in my little intrigue.
“So you just got into town? Where are you staying?”
I’d anticipated the question, and had decided there was no reason to lie. I told him the correct name of my hotel. It didn’t seem to matter; I need never go back there again. He nodded and said it was a good place, and I agreed.
Whatever it was we had ordered arrived. As we ate we kept jousting with our eyes, making contact and then finding reasons to look away, busying ourselves with the food. I felt like I was drowning in quicksand. No, in slowsand. But there was no hurrying things. I didn’t want him to have any busy little distractions available when I started asking pointed questions.
Which led to: what pointed questions? I had been thinking about this moment for something like two weeks now, and I still did not know how to play it. Should I go right for the jugular, tell him everything I knew and all I had guessed, and demand a response? Or keep what I knew to myself, give him to understand that I wanted to resume our relationship, and see what he said about that? That could lead in short order to a bedroom, and what would I do then?
Or should I indicate ambiguous feelings, which would allow me to prolong our contact without having to go to bed with him? The problem with that one was, it made it easy for him to get rid of me if he didn’t want to be under close scrutiny. No, the smart thing to do was feign passion and try to get as far inside his guard as I could. Feigning passion is natural for a performer. I could always plead gee-fatigue when things got intense.
But as I watched him eat, watched his slender fingers move, I knew I just could not go through with it. Perhaps it was exactly what he had been doing to me, all those passionate days and nights back in Top Step. But I could not do it to him.
The plates were empty. The second round of Irish coffees arrived. Mine was again denatured. The waiter winked at me for a change.
Well, then? Charge right in or dance around it as long as possible? Cowardice and caution both said to stall. Crazy to risk everything on one roll of the dice. Lots of misdirection first, then slip it in under his guard while he’s trying to figure out how to get into your pants.
“Chen Po Chang?” I said suddenly.
“Yes, Morgan?”
And there it was.
“It was on your tongue, wasn’t it?” That’s it, baffle him with misdirection.
“Yes.”
“Which one got it? Ben, or Kirra?”
“Kirra.”
I nodded. “I just wondered. You knew they’d both be meeting the Harvest Crew.” Under the table, I slid my hand into my handbag. Just the one question left, now. “Why?”
He seemed to think about it, as if for the first time. He started to answer twice, and changed his mind each time. Finally he said, “For my species.”
“For your species.” I seemed to be having trouble with my voice. “And what species would that be? Insect, or reptile?”
“Homo sapiens,” he said calmly. “It’s us or them. Us or Homo caelestis. The universe isn’t big enough for both of us.”
“Why not? What could the two species possibly compete for?”
“Nothing at all. And everything. That’s the point. Here below we scurry about like blind rats in a two-dimensional maze, hungry and thirsty and horny and terrified and alone, fighting like rats for food and power and breeding room and a chance to live before we die. And right over our heads, at the literal top of the hierarchy, there fly the angels, free of everything that plagues us, needing nothing, fearing nothing, looking down with fond amusement at our ape antics. Of course I hate them. Who would not?”
“For God’s sake, this planet would have gone to pieces years ago if it weren’t for—”
“And that too is the point. It would be bad enough if they kept themselves aloof, ignored us in our misery—but how can we not resent their monstrous charity? How long can the human race stand playing the role of the idiot nephew who must be cared for by his betters, the welfare client who has nothing conceivable to offer his benefactors in return? The racial psychic damage which that awareness causes is half the reason the world is so close to hysteria, so angry and self-destructive.”
“So you want to exterminate the hand that feeds you.”
“It may come to that,” he agreed. “Sometimes I think that it might be enough to drive them from human space, to force them far above or below the ecliptic or out beyond Mars where we don’t have to keep seeing them and interacting with them, take their damned Promised Land off somewhere where we don’t have to look at it every day, right overhead, just out of reach.”
“But it’s not out of reach—”
“Oh shit, it is too! If all the Chinese in the world lined up at Suit Camps, how long would it take the last one to pass Top Step? Assuming a sufficient mass of Symbiote could be brought to orbit without pulling Luna out of its track.”
“If the world wanted to, it could build more Suit Camps.”
“And it doesn’t. Most of us know in our guts that Stardancers are just plain inhuman. They’re alien. They’re like ants. They’re a hive-mind. They’re our enemy, and they’ll be a damned hard one to beat.”