Algis Budrys - Michaelmas

Brisk in the air-conditioning, jockeying for position, the aircraft passengers proceeded to the gate, where cameras, microphones and dignitaries did their work, but not as smoothly as the UNAC press people, who lubricated the group through its passage toward the ground-vehicle dock. Camera crews eddied around the main knot of movement. “The dignified gentleman with the rimless glasses is Mr Raschid Samir, your director,” Domino said. Mr Samir was directing general shots of Michaelmas debarking with Norwood and Frontiere. He had an economy of movement and a massive imperturbability which forced others to work around him as if he were a rock in the rapids. “He will follow you to Star Control with the crew truck and await instructions.”

Michaelmas nodded. “Right. Good.” As they moved out of the terminal building proper, he was concentrating on his position in the crowd while plotting all the vectors on Norwood. Two crews at the nearer end of the dock were covering most of one side of the astronaut as he strode along, grinning and still shaking hands with some of the local UNAC people. Frontiere was staying close to him, thus blanketing most of his right flank. Other camera positions or live observers were covering the other approach angles almost continuously. Michaelmas stepped sideward in relation to a group of press aides moving along beside Campion and Clementine. While they masked him from forward view, he shifted the strap of the terminal from his left shoulder into his hand, and then stepped behind a dock-side pillar. The bus was there, snugged into its bay, white and black, the roof chitinous with accumulators, the windows polarized, the doors folding open now while the party rippled to a halt. Norwood half turned, directly in front of Michaelmas, almost in the doorway, tossing a joke back over his shoulder, one hand on an upright metal stanchion, as the group narrowed itself down to file in. Michaelmas was chatting with a press aide. “We’re crowded here, aren’t we?” he remarked, and laid a corner of the dangling terminal up against Norwood’s calf muscle just below the back of the knee, so gently, so surely, so undetectably that he half expected to hear the pang of a harmonic note. But instead Norwood sagged just a little on that side before his hand suddenly gripped the stanchion whitely, and his toe kicked the step riser. His eyes widened at betrayal. He moved on, and in, and sat down quickly in the nearest of the individual swivelling armchairs. As the bus filled and dosed, and then rolled out through the insulated gates, Michaelmas could see him chatting and grinning but flexing the calf again and again, as if it were a sweet wife who’d once kissed a stranger. I could have done worse by you, Michaelmas thought, but it was nevertheless unpleasant to watch the trouser fabric twitching.

The bus rolled smoothly along the ramps among the towers, aiming for the hills and then Star Control. “Would you like to speak to Norwood now?” Frontiere asked, leaning across the aisle. “We will arrive at quarter to three, so there is half an hour.”

Michaelmas shook his head. “No, thank you, Getulio,” he smiled, making himself look a little wan. “I think I’ll rest a bit. It’s been a long day. I’ll catch him later.”

“You look tired,” Frontiere agreed, annoyingly.

Michaelmas cocked an eyebrow. “Let Campion continue to interview him. There must be one or two things he would still like to know.”

Frontiere winced. “Listen,” he said softly, “you say Campion has a good reputation?”

“I say, and so do others whose judgement I respect. He has a fine record for aggressive newsgathering.”

Frontiere nodded to himself, faintly, wryly, and grunted. “Somehow, that’s small comfort.”

“It’s the best I can do,” Michaelmas said. Down the aisle, Clementine had turned her seat to form a conversational group with Luis and Campion. Campion was talking intently. Clementine was responding and gesturing, her hands held forward and curved inward to describe shots, in the manner that made all directors resemble Atlas searching for a place to rest his burden. Luis sat back, his arms folded across his chest. Michaelmas reclined lower in his seat. “I would like to see Papashvilly as soon as possible after we reach Control. My crew chief is Mr Raschid Samir, and he’ll be arriving by truck at the same time.”

“Yes, that’s arranged. Pavel is waiting for you. He says to meanwhile tell you the story about the aardvark and Marie Antoinette.”

“It’s the same story about the aardvark and Isadora Duncan, except that the Isadora Duncan version is better, since she is wearing a long scarf at the time.”

“Ah.”

“And could you let me know if you hear from Ossip about the sender?”

“On the instant.”

“Grazie.” Michaelmas settled his head deeper between the sound-absorbent wings of his chair and closed his eyes.

Domino said: “The joke about the aardvark and Isadora Duncan is the same as the joke about the aardvark and Annie Oakley, except that Annie is firing a Sharps repeating carbine.”

“Granted,” Michaelmas said absently. He was comfortable and relaxed, and remembering Pavel Papashvilly in the back room of a chophouse around the corner from Cavanaugh’s down on lower Eighth Avenue, after a recording at Lincoln Center.

“Cosmonautics and culture,” Papashvilly was saying, leaning back on a fauteuil with his arm lightly across the shoulders of a member of the corps de ballet, “how allied!” The footage had been of Papashvilly at Coppelia, first walking at night like a demon of the steppes among the floodlit fountains of the plaza, afraid of nothing, a meter and a half in height, eyes flickering with reflections, grinning. The pause at the great glass doors, the head tilted upward, and the photosensitive mechanism swinging them apart without further human intervention. Now the click of heels on marble gave way to orchestrated music, and the opening credits and title came up. Then at the performance he had smiled and oohed and aahed, hands elevated and tracing patterns in the air, and he had stood and applauded and shouted. Now he passed a palm delicately along wispy fabric at the dancer’s pale shoulder. “What thin partitions,” he murmured, winking at Michaelmas. He laughed, the dancer gave him a knowing sidelong look, and they all three had a little more steak and lobster and some more Rhine wine. “That will be a good thing, this visit. I know you American people are disappointed about Walter.” He paused and took a sip, his lips pressed hard against the rim of the glass, his eyes looking off into a dimmer corner of the little room. “It was a stupid, needless thing, whatever happened. We are not after all any longer doing things for the first or second time, correct ? But it is now for an understanding to be made that he and I and all the others, we are for all the people.” He put the glass down and considered. “And we are from all the people,” he had added, and Michaelmas had smiled a little crookedly. When he had seen the dancer’s hand on Pavel’s thigh he had excused himself and gone home.

The UNAC bus passed from the last tangle of feeder ramps and entered the straightline highway into the hills. There was no speed limit on this road; the passenger chairs moved a little on their gymbals as the acceleration built. A nearly inaudible singing occurred in Michaelmas’s ear; something in the system somewhere was cycling very near the frequency he and Domino used between him and the terminal. A mechanic had failed to lock some service hatch. Noise leaked out of the propulsion bay. Michaelmas grimaced and ground his teeth lightly.

Coarse, scoured, and ivory-coloured in the sun beyond the windows, the foothills rose under the toned blue of the sky.