‘Hey, Margot! Catch!’ He gestured with the jet-ball but Margot turned away, feeling her swim-suit slide pleasantly across her smooth tanned skin. The suit was made of one of the newer bioplastic materials, and its living tissues were still growing, softly adapting themselves to the contours of her body, repairing themselves as the fibres became worn or grimy. Upstairs in her wardrobes the gowns and dresses purred on their hangers like the drowsing inmates of some exquisite arboreal zoo. Sometimes she thought of commissioning her little Mercurian tailor to run up a bioplastic suit for Clifford — a specially designed suit that would begin to constrict one night as he stood on the terrace, the lapels growing tighter and tighter around his neck, the sleeves pinning his arms to his sides, the waist contracting to pitch him over — ‘Margot!’ Trantino interrupted her reverie, sailed the jet-ball expertly through the air towards her. Annoyed, Margot caught it with one hand and pointed it away, watched it sail over the wall and the roofs beyond.
Trantino came up to her. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked anxiously. For his part he felt his inability to soothe Margot a reflection on his professional skill. The privileges of his caste had to be guarded jealously. For several centuries now the managerial and technocratic elite had been so preoccupied with the work of government that they relied on the Templars of Aphrodite not merely to guard their wives from any marauding suitors but also to keep them amused and contented. By definition, of course, their relationship was platonic, a pleasant revival of the old chivalrous ideals, but sometimes Trantino regretted that the only tools in his armoury were a handful of poems and empty romantic gestures. The Guild of which he was a novitiate member was an ancient and honoured one, and it wouldn’t do if Margot began o pine and Mr Gorrell reported him to the Masters of the Guild.
‘Why are you always arguing with Mr Gorrell?’ Trantino asked her.
One of the Guild’s axioms was ‘The husband is always right.’ Any discord between him and his wife was the responsibility of the play-boy.
Margot ignored Trantino’s question. ‘Those trees are getting on my nerves,’ she complained fractiously. ‘Why can’t they keep quiet?’
‘They’re mating,’ Trantino told her. He added thoughtfully: ‘You should sing to Mr Gorrell.’
Margot stirred lazily as the shoulder straps of the sun-suit unclasped themselves behind her back. ‘Tino,’ she asked, ‘what’s the most unpleasant thing I could do to Mr Gorrell?’
‘Margot!’ Trantino gasped, utterly shocked. He decided that an appeal to sentiment, a method of reconciliation despised by the more proficient members of the Guild, was his only hope. ‘Remember, Margot, you will always have me.’
He was about to permit himself a melancholy smile when Margot sat up abruptly.
‘Don’t look so frightened, you fool! I’ve just got an idea that should make Mr Gorrell sing to me.’
She straightened the vanes in her hat, waited for the sun-suit to clasp itself discreetly around her, then pushed Trantino aside and stalked off the terrace.
Clifford was browsing among the spools in the library, quietly listening to an old 22nd Century abstract on systems of land tenure in the Trianguli.
‘Hello, Margot, feel better now?’
Margot smiled at him coyly. ‘Clifford, I’m ashamed of myself. Do forgive me.’ She bent down and nuzzled his ear. ‘Sometimes I’m very selfish. Have you booked our tickets yet?’
Clifford disengaged her arm and straightened his collar. ‘I called the agency, but their bookings have been pretty heavy. They’ve got a double but no singles. We’ll have to wait a few days.’
‘No, we won’t,’ Margot exclaimed brightly. ‘Clifford, why don’t you and I take the double? Then we can really be together, forget all that ship-board nonsense about never having met before.’
Puzzled, Clifford switched off the player. ‘What do you mean?’
Margot explained. ‘Look, Clifford, I’ve been thinking that I ought to spend more time with you than I do at present, really share your work and hobbies. I’m tired of all these play-boys.’ She drooped languidly against Clifford, her voice silky and reassuring. ‘I want to be with you, Clifford. Always.’
Clifford pushed her away. ‘Don’t be silly, Margot,’ he said with an anxious laugh. ‘You’re being absurd.’
‘No, I’m not. After all, Harold Kharkov and his wife haven’t got a play-boy and she’s very happy.’
Maybe she is, Clifford thought, beginning to panic. Kharkov had once been the powerful and ruthless director of the Department of justice, now was a third-rate attorney hopelessly trying to eke out a meagre living on the open market, dominated by his wife and forced to spend virtually 24 hours a day with her. For a moment Clifford thought of the days when he had courted Margot, of the long dreadful hours listening to her inane chatter. Trantino’s real role was not to chaperone Margot while Clifford was away but while he was at home.
‘Margot, be sensible,’ he started to say, but she cut him short. ‘I’ve made up my mind, I’m going to tell Trantino to pack his suitcase and go back to the Guild.’ She switched on the spool player, selecting the wrong speed, smiling ecstatically as the reading head grated loudly and stripped the coding off the record. ‘It’s going to be wonderful to share everything with you. Why don’t we forget about the vacation this year?’
A facial tic from which Clifford had last suffered at the age often began to twitch ominously.
Tony Harcourt, Clifford’s personal assistant, came over to the Gorrells’ villa immediately after lunch. He was a brisk, polished young man, barely controlling his annoyance at being called back to work on the first day of his vacation. He had carefully booked a sleeper next to Dolores Costane, the most beautiful of the Jovian Heresiarch’s vestals, on board a leisure-liner leaving that afternoon for Venus, but instead of enjoying the fruits of weeks of blackmail and intrigue he was having to take part in what seemed a quite uncharacteristic piece of Gorrell whimsy.
He listened in growing bewilderment as Clifford explained.
‘We were going to one of our usual resorts on Luna, Tony, but we’ve decided we need a change. Margot wants a vacation that’s different. Something new, exciting, original. So go round all the agencies and bring me their suggestions.’
‘All the agencies?’ Tony queried. ‘Don’t you mean just the registered ones?’
‘All of them,’ Margot told him smugly, relishing every moment of her triumph.
Clifford nodded, and smiled at Margot benignly.
‘But there must be 50 or 60 agencies organizing vacations,’ Tony protested. ‘Only about a dozen of them are accredited. Outside Empyrean Tours and Union-Galactic there’ll be absolutely nothing suitable for you.’
‘Never mind,’ Clifford said blandly. ‘We only want an idea of the field. I’m sorry, Tony, but I don’t want this all over the Department and I know you’ll be discreet.’
Tony groaned. ‘It’ll take me weeks.’
‘Three days,’ Clifford told him. ‘Margot and I want to leave here by the end of the week.’ He looked longingly over his shoulder for the absent Trantino. ‘Believe me, Tony, we really need a holiday.’
Fifty-six travel and vacation agencies were listed in the Commercial Directory, Tony discovered when he returned to his office in the top floor of the Justice building in downtown Zenith, all but eight of them alien. The Department had initiated legal proceedings against five, three had closed down, and eight more were fronts for other enterprises.
That left him with forty to visit, spread all over the Upper and Lower Cities and in the Colonial Bazaar, attached to various mercantile, religious and paramilitary organizations, some of them huge concerns with their own police and ecclesiastical forces, others sharing a one-room office and transceiver with a couple of other shoestring firms.