clapped delightedly. “Calvin!” she cried, and scampered off.
Wallace forced himself to turn slowly, by which time Evil Incarnate, Inc. had already set up shop at the big round table on the opposite side of the room. Too insecure to arrive without a protective claque, Piper had gathered his dwarfs around him, commanding the whole table so that no one could get at the food, and annexing most of the available chairs in one swoop. Arms extended languidly on either side, he took an audience as his due. That ghastly simian was always a draw, though gurgling fans got their comeuppance soon enough—already, from the sound of a yelp and covering titter, the hateful beast had managed to bite a hand that fed it. Shortly, standing room behind the circle filled up, while energy bled from other corners. Alternative conversations grew lack-lustre while trickles of prima donna pessimism drizzled to Threadgill’s ear: “You realize there are actually some people who believe that human population can expand infinitely?”
Wallace smiled. So Piper had noticed he was here.
Calvin was the prime of a type. They saw only mayhem and degradation, for you can only see what you are, and squalor was what these deformities were made of. Piper would never perceive the canniness of the planet or the ingenuity of his own race, for his vista was smeared with greenhouse gases and acid rain. Would Calvin ever bother to read articles about new high-yield hybrid crops? Or Simon’s irrefutable evidence that far from being a drag on a poor country’s economy, population growth was its greatest asset?
For as often as nihilists concocted “solutions”, they raised the prospect of any salvation to prove it wouldn’t work. All progress was palliative, and their favourite phrase was “too little, too late”. Some were content with keening, others with debauchery. Clubs of Rome lived high, having already consigned their people to the trash heap. There was money in fear, but you had to move quick—Famine! 1975 didn’t sell well in 1976. How many copies of The Limits to Growth and The Population Bomb now yellowed in Oxfam outlets? These gremlins had squealed that civilization was finished ever since it had started. They were a waste and an irritant, but they were decorative.
Should they remain in self-important think-tanks competing over who could concoct the most gruesome scenario for the year 2000, Wallace was content to let them hand-wring their lives away. Another sort of dread merchant, however, he could not conscionably ignore.
Because Calvin Piper had never been all talk. To give credit where due, the man was bright, effective and fantastically well connected. He was a seducer. His ideas, in their extremity, had a sensual thrill. He would never be satisfied with predicting disaster—he would help make it happen.
Wallace might have relaxed when Calvin was fired, reduced back to the Bacon spoiling on the walls of his Karen lair, unemployed. Wallace knew better. The very appearance of inactivity over at that cottage gave him chills. Calvin could not bear to be still; he did not have the spiritual sophistication. Released from the constraints of bureaucracy, Calvin was less demoted than unleashed. Why, that scoundrel had had no visible means of support for the last six years. But look at him: his slacks were linen, his shoes kid and outside the A-frame undoubtedly sat his new four-wheel-drive. What, pray, was he living on? Wallace may have dwelt in the realms of the ancestors for most of the day, but he was still aware that it was on the detail level that you found people out.
It was late enough for Wallace, who liked to be in bed by nine o’clock, to make his exit, but he did not want to appear to be fleeing because Calvin had arrived. Wallace might be repelled but he certainly wasn’t frightened. And there was one woman creeping over to his side of the house who stood out from the rest, if only because of her outfit. Long hem, high neck: she was hiding. Brown hair sloped either side of her face as she tiptoed towards the veranda, hoping to make it the distance of the living room without being caught. When he looked closely, he thought her rather prettier than much of the Lycra-nippled competition, but she did not have the conviction to match. That was half the game with beauty, keeping your head high, and she stared at her sensible shoes. Beauty was deception, and you had to have the shyster’s smooth sleight of hand to pull it off. This one thought of herself as ordinary; consequently, she was. Wallace didn’t think about these things any more, though as the theory fell to hand like the drop of an apple there must have been a time when he thought of little else.
He almost left her alone, so apparent was her desperation to be overlooked, but were she allowed to achieve what she thought she wanted—solitude—she would be miserable. More, he couldn’t resist a woman whose instinct with Calvin Piper on stage was to sneak in the opposite direction.
“Pardon—” At his hand on her sleeve, she jumped. “Have you a clue where I might get a spot of tea?”
She stumbled through something about the kitchen, leaving him in no doubt that contact with another human being was the most fearsome thing that had ever happened to her.
He returned with his cup to find her on the veranda as if they had an assignation. “Astonishing sky, isn’t it?” A moan of assent. About her frantic desire that he should go away he had no illusion. But winning her from a bogus trip to the loo was a snap. “Sorry,” he introduced, after an unencouraging but obligatory exchange about where she was from and where she lived. “I’m Wallace Threadgill. And yourself?”
That was all it took. She stopped leaning over the railing and gaping dolefully at the Jasper Johns Equatorial skyscape and faced him with keen reassessment. “Eleanor Merritt.” Though she needn’t, she shook hands, and he was struck by the fact that now, far from wishing he would disappear, she was suddenly worried he might leave.
“And what brings you to this blithe bacchanalia?”
She laughed, dry. “Awful, aren’t they. I always promise myself I won’t go. And then the alternative is staying home …”
“What’s wrong with home?”
“Malicious furniture.” Her eyes kept darting to his face, then back over the rail.
“I’m surprised you’re not attending to our charming ersatz host. Funny, you’d never know, would you, that this wasn’t his house? And how high are the chances that he and his whole band of cronies weren’t even invited?”
“Some people are very—comfortable, socially.” A diplomat. “I’m not. I like to think I’ve improved, but I doubt it. Every time I walk into a party I feel thirteen: dressed like a ninny, terrified of dancing and wishing I’d brought a book.”
“How does such a shy creature come to be in Africa?”
“Family planning,” she groaned.
“Ah.” That explained the shift.
“And you—you’re the heretic.”
He smiled. “Quite. And how long have you—?”
“Nearly twenty years. I was with the UNFPA before Pathfinder, and the Peace Corps before that.”
“Peace Corps I could have predicted.”
She stood more upright. “Everyone finds the Peace Corps so hilarious. That we’re a sad little sort. But it’s done some fine—”
“Look at you. You’re already getting kali.”
“I just don’t think it’s fair—”
“Perhaps you and I are such natural enemies that we should acknowledge irreconcilable differences and skip the fisticuffs.” He made a motion as if to part.
“No,
