Robert Silverberg - The Stochastic Man

“Great,” Ephrikian said. “When’s the assassination due — 2003?”

“Let’s keep it serious,” said Lombroso gently.

“Okay,” said Ephrikian. “I’ll give you serious, then. What if Leydecker decides he’d like to run again in 2004?”

“He’ll be sixty-one years old then,” Lombroso replied, “and he’ll have a previous defeat on his record. Quinn will be forty-three and unbeaten. One man will be on the way down, the other obviously on the way up, and the party will be hungry for a winner after eight years out of power.”

There was a long silence.

“I like it,” Missakian announced finally.

I said, “What about you, Haig?”

Mardikian had not spoken for a while. Now he nodded. “Quinn’s not ready to take over the country in 2000. He will be in 2004.”

“And the country will be ready for Quinn,” said Missakian.

One thing about politics, the man said, is that it makes strange bedfellows. But for politics, Sundara and I surely would never have wandered into an ad hoc four-group that spring with Catalina Yarber, the Transit Creed proctor, and Lamont Friedman, the highly ionized young financial genius. But for Catalina Yarber, Sundara might not have opted for Transit. But for Sundara’s conversion, she would very likely still be my wife. And so, and so, the threads of causation, everything leading back to the same point in time.

What happened is that as a member of Paul Quinn’s entourage I received two free tickets to the $500-a-plate Nicholas Roswell Day dinner that the New York State New Democratic Party holds every year in the middle of April. This is not only a memorial tribute to the assassinated governor but also, indeed primarily, a fund-raising affair and a showcase for the party’s current superstar. The main speaker this time, of course, was Quinn.

“It’s about time I went to one of your political dinners,” Sundara said.

“They’re pure formaldehyde.”

“Nevertheless.”

“You’ll hate it, love.”

“Are you going?” she asked.

“I have to.”

“Then I think I’ll use the other ticket. If I fall asleep, nudge me when the mayor gets up to talk. He turns me on.”

So on a mild rainy night she and I podded out to the Harbor Hilton, that great pyramid all agleam on its pliable pontoon platform half a kilometer off Manhattan’s tip, and foregathered with the cream of the eastern liberal establishment in the sparkling Summit Room, from which I had a view of — among other things — Sarkisian’s condo tower on the other side of the bay, where nearly four years earlier I had first met Paul Quinn. A good many alumni of that gaudy party would be at tonight’s dinner. Sundara and I drew seats at the same table as two of them, Friedman and Ms. Yarber.

During the preliminary session of bone-doping and cocktails Sundara drew more attention than any of the senators, governors, and mayors present, Quinn included. This was partly a matter of curiosity, since everybody in New York politics had heard about my exotic wife but few had met her, and partly because she was surely the most beautiful woman in the room. Sundara was neither surprised nor annoyed. She has been beautiful all her life, after all, and has had time to grow accustomed to the effects her looks evoke. Nor had she dressed like one who minds being stared at. She had chosen a sheer harem suit, dark and loose and flowing, that covered her body from toes to throat; beneath it she was bare and when she passed before a source of light she was devastating. She glowed like a radiant moth in the middle of the gigantic ballroom, supple and elegant somber and mysterious, highlights sparkling in her ebon hair, hints of breast and flank tantalizing the onlookers. Oh, she was having a glorious time! Quinn came over to greet us, and he and Sundara transformed a chaste kiss-and-hug into an elaborate pas de deux of sexual charisma that made some of our elder statesmen gasp and redden and loosen their collars. Even Quinn’s wife, Laraine, famous for her Gioconda smile, looked shaken a bit, though she has the most secure marriage of any politician I know. (Or was she merely amused by Quinn’s ardor? That opaque smirk!)

Sundara was still emanating pure Kama Sutra when we took our seats. Lamont Friedman, sitting halfway around the circular table from her, jerked and quivered when her eyes met his, and stared at her with ferocious intensity while muscles twitched wildly in his long narrow neck. Meanwhile, in a more restrained but no less intense way, Friedman’s companion of the evening, Ms. Yarber, was also giving Sundara the stare.

Friedman. He was about twenty-nine, weirdly thin, maybe 2.3 meters tall, with a bulging Adam’s apple and crazy exophthalmic eyes; a dense mass of kinky brown hair engulfed his head like some woolly creature from another planet that was attacking him. He had come out of Harvard with a reputation for monetary sorcery and, after going to Wall Street when he was nineteen, had become the head magus of a band of spaced-out financiers calling themselves Asgard Equities, which through a series of lightning coups — option-pumping, feigned tenders, double straddles, and a lot of other techniques I but dimly comprehend — had within five years gained control of a billion-dollar corporate empire with extensive holdings on every continent but Antarctica. (And it would not amaze me to learn that Asgard held the customs-collection franchise for McMurdo Sound.)

Ms. Yarber was a small blond person, thirty or so, lean and a trifle hard-faced, energetic, quick-eyed, thin-lipped. Her hair, boyishly short, fell in sparse bangs over her high inquisitive forehead. She wore not much face makeup, only a faint line of blue around her mouth, and her clothes were austere — a straw-colored jerkin and a straight, simple brown knee-length skirt. The effect was restrained and even ascetic, but, I had noticed as we sat down, she had neatly balanced her prevailingly asexual image with one stunning erotic touch: her skirt was entirely open from hip to hem for a span of perhaps twenty centimeters down the left side, exposing as she moved a sleek muscular leg, a smooth tawny thigh, a glimpse of buttock. At mid-thigh, fastened by an encircling chain, she wore the little abstract medallion of the Transit Creed.

And so to dinner. The usual banquet fare: fruit salad, consommй, protosoy filet, steam-table peas and carrots, flagons of California Burgundy, lumpy baked Alaska, everything served with maximum clatter and minimum grace by stony-faced members of downtrodden minority groups. Neither the food nor the decor had any taste, but no one minded that; we were all so doped that the menu was ambrosia and the hotel was Valhalla. As we chattered and ate, an assortment of small-time political pros circulated from table to table, slapping backs and gladding hands, and also we endured a procession of self-important political wives, mainly sixtyish, dumpy, and grotesquely garbed in the latest nippy-dip styles, wandering about digging their proximity to the mighty and famous. The noise level was 20 db up from Niagara. Geysers of ferocious laughter came splashing from this table or that as some silver-maned jurist or revered legislator told his or her favorite scabrous Republican / gay / black / Puerto / Jew / Irish / Italian / doctor / lawyer / rabbi / priest / female politician / Mafioso joke in the finest 1965 style. I felt, as I had always felt at these functions, like a visitor from Mongolia hurled without phrasebook into some unknown American tribal ritual. It might have been unendurable if tubes of high-quality bone had not kept coming around; the New Democratic Party may stint on the wine but it knows how to buy dope.

By the time the speechmaking began, about half past nine, a ritual within the ritual was unfolding: Lamont Friedman was flashing almost desperate signals of desire at Sundara, and Catalina Yarber, though she was obviously also drawn to Sundara, had in a cool unemotional nonverbal way offered herself to me.