They waved at him, he waved at them—he exchanged a few words with Danny and Angie and Mark when the music changed and they left the dance floor—how are you doing? Seeing anybody? New job? And from him to Angie and Danny: Congratulations on the wedding.
Seen any others of the old gang? however, was anathema as a question. He’d kept his distance from these three, and didn’t socialize. They didn’t have that much in common anymore, didn’t occupy the same stratum of society.
Polishing more than a handful of social contacts cost more energy than he had these days, and he was glad that his three old acquaintances didn’t propose to join him in a dinner well under way. He enjoyed the last of his entrée, drank a second glass of wine, shut his eyes in the general noise of quiet conversations around him, and let the tension flow out through his fingers and toes. He was trying not to think more deeply about Ardath.
He remained concerned about the changes in her, however, which seemed too many, too fast. He worried about the day she’d age, and how she’d take it, and where she’d go, when his own career was a very healthy, government-funded, extended lifetime—so long as he didn’t personally piss off Brazis or commit one of the hundred and one fatal rule infractions.
Not hard rules. No theft. No drugs. No illicits. No criminal associations. No dinner with three old friends over there—not because they weren’t probably completely respectable, these days, but because if he did, they’d have government investigators raking over theirpasts, maybe to their detriment.
All his friends had to pass muster. And intimate relationships outside the department just couldn’t happen.
That was the killer. You could work out arrangements for a personal life in government service: a prospective mate could be sucked into the offices, given some adequate job, and earn an equivalent security clearance, but you’d better be damned sure, thoughtful, and permanent about your choice. Divorce that mate, and you might both be reassigned somewhere less nice within those office walls. The PO didn’t like attachments or tag ends that hung out into the ordinary world…especially tag ends that hung out down in the Trend.
And if a tap should get fired from his job, worse thought, he got to spend the rest of his life wondering how the world down there was getting along, what that sandy plateau was becoming, how the people he’d come to know almost as family were doing in their day-to-day lives—and no one in the Project would ever give him those answers. Lose his security classification over some infatuation? Even a passionate attraction? It was like a musician agreeing to be cut off from music if he fell in love inconveniently—or ever changed his affections. It was a painter agreeing to go blind if he fell in love. It was the one cruel downside of his extravagant lifestyle, and it had happened more than once in the long, long history of the department. A significant number who’d fallen afoul of the infamous Rule 12, the personal relationships rule, and gotten into some insolvable personal entanglement, had subsequently gotten in trouble with the Project’s secret police, or spiraled down with drugs, with drink, with a series of unsuccessful relationships inside the Project, spreading disaster around them as they went. Or they just ended up discreetly killing themselves.
Nasty line of thought. He wasn’t going to let himself make that fatal mistake. Wasn’t going to associate with anybody outside the walls. Wasn’t going to get fired. No way. No relationships outside the Project. If you were going to be a tap, you had to come in young and full of hormones, that was one thing, and that fact gave the Project trouble. He’d applied just for a job, his hope when he made the try: just a job and a good salary, in computers. But his application kept getting shunted through to other departments. When his application had gotten up as high as it could get, and when he’d found out he was under consideration for the Project, he’d been stunned; when he’d learned he might become one of the taps, he’d been scared as hell.
But attracted by the pay scale. Give it that. Attracted by the security. So attracted he’d been like every other tap that had come in from beyond the security wall: he’d been seeing the glamor and ignoring the other facts of his proposed life.
But when he was actually about to get the tap, Brazis himself had had a sobering talk with him about Rule 12. He’d been bone-ignorant, but still ambitious. Having seen his parents trying to make ends meet on two salaries, and seeing what he could make if he went that track, he was blinded by the prospect. He’d sworn on a stack of mission statements that he’d remain faithful and true to the department, avoiding all outside entanglements forever and ever, amen.
They’d run a further battery of drug, health, and psych tests and opted him in, seeing something in him, he supposed, that he never could figure, and completely ignoring the Freethinker business, which he’d thought would be a deal-breaker. He’d been eclectic in his studies, unable to settle, except for the certificate in computers. He’d hoped for employment in the technical wing and ended up opted in behind the security wall as that most rarefied of Project entities, a tap.
Then, Marak having made his pick, contrary to all Project hopes, Brazis had had a quiet fit and called him in for another interview, asked him excruciatingly pointed and personal questions for an hour and stared at him for another few minutes as though he were something under a microscope. He’d tried hard, since then, not to have another interview with Brazis until he’d put a few successful years behind him in the job he’d risen to. Maybe a successful paper or two. Maybe a geological memo going somewhere. He wanted something extravagantly positive in his record, to justify Brazis’s signing off on his assignment.
He knew he was bright. He knew he was incredibly lucky. He knew that an eclectic academic background was one of the assets that had gotten notice from the Project, but utterly outrageous chance had landed him in the assignment he had. He personally liked Marak…if you could like somebody on his scale…he more than liked him: he found in that strange, calm personality a stability that he’d never had, a matching curiosity that opened his mind to question after question, an insatiable hunger for knowledge he’d never known could be accessible. But now that he’d found his place in life, he absolutely dreaded anything that could threaten that good fortune. Meetings with old friends and his extended family always left him anxious, remembering what he’d been, where he’d been headed, where he was now, and how fragile the whole structure was.
Crystal eggs, parental expectations, and the cold, impenetrable wall behind which the PO worked. He didn’t wantthe PO raking through his immediate relations…or making trouble for Ardath.
Damn, he wished he hadn’t had to tap out on Marak today when he had. He hoped there’d be a perfectly functioning new camera waiting for him tomorrow. He could imagine those vistas, the red river gorge, the long steep fall to the pans on the other side, and the trembling knife-edge of the arcing ridge between. He could imagine the slow movement of tectonic plates that had created the place, the flow of lava in geologic ages before plates became locked in place, before the hammerfall had set them free again…
“I always see you alone,” his waitress said, picking up the remnant of his dinner. “Are they friends of yours?” With a nod at the other table.
“Old acquaintances.”
The young woman lingered hopefully, stayed to talk, and Procyon, at first irritated, not wanting any closer communication to spoil his nonrelationship with his favorite waitress, still fell into her game. There was no departmental rule against sociability, and he liked her well enough—played at her little flirtation, but only just, and, mindful of Ardath and her kindness to the hopefuls, he didn’t give her any real encouragement to escalate the game. She was maybe twenty. Bright. She got good tips. She’d find whoever she was looking for. Someday.