“I’ll ask the kitchen,” she says.
It’s Pippi’s favorite subject: “You must be firm with your waitstaff or they’ll absolutely walk all over you. I remember my first round of firings, when we still lived in the city. It was unpleasant for a day or two, but then you forget what the old ones looked like.”
“Where’s Duncan?” Swanny asks. Everyone turns in her direction.
“He’s upstairs, no doubt, frolicking in the bedroom,” grumbles the man in the wheelchair.
“Always a good sleeper,” says Katya. Her mouth smiles; her eyes don’t. “A restful boy. I’ll see about those sandwiches.”
“May I take your coat?” Humphrey asks Swanny.
“Oh, thank you, no, I feel a chill.” Swanny smiles and resettles the fur around her shoulders. He may be heavier than she is, but he’s still not going to see her arms. “I would like to meet Duncan, if he’s awake.”
“He’s awake all right. I’ll show you.”
“Osmond…”
Humphrey’s tone is a warning, but the man in the wheelchair zooms away. His engine has surprising pickup for a medical aid. Swanny has to scurry to keep up. He backs into the elevator smoothly, then beckons with a wink: “Going up?”
Swanny resists the urge to glance back toward her mother for reassurance and steps inside the little gilded chamber. The door slides shut.
“You’re Duncan’s uncle Osmond?” she asks as they glide up into the house.
“Forgive me, yes. My manners have atrophied, along with my withered loins.”
“What a horrifying image,” Swanny says. She perches on the edge of the small ruby-colored bench. The gray curls of Osmond’s topknot look like frayed electrical wires. She has a funny urge to touch them. “Do you speak to all of your nephew’s guests so outrageously?”
Osmond regards her in the mirrored wall as he slurps his brew.
“Paralysis of the body is no disadvantage compared to paralysis of the mind,” he says. “Sometimes it takes a shock to reinvigorate a dying muscle.”
“Perhaps I flatter myself, but I don’t believe I’m in need of shocking.”
“My nephew seems to think otherwise.”
“If the family resemblance extends to repartee, I’m sure I’ll be all right.”
The elevator doors open. A bamboo cane emerges from beneath the folds of Osmond’s cape. He swings it recklessly, giving directions: “End of the hallway, last door on your left. You won’t miss it.”
Swanny steps into the hall. “Shouldn’t you accompany me? As a chaperone?”
Osmond almost spews imperial porter on her. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. He’s still chortling when the door slides shut again.
The only sound in the hallway is the eternal humming of a fully automated house. There are no windows, only a row of closed-shut doors appearing on either side of a carpet that flows in patterns like calligraphy beneath Swanny’s feet.
Ever since she first heard the name of her intended, a picture of Duncan Ripple has been forming in her mind. She has seen all of his Holosnaps (albeit usually in static two-dimensional thumbnails on her mother’s obsolescent machine), has memorized them, but in her mind’s eye he is not posed, grinning, in the driver’s seat of a HowFly, or sporting the Kevlar vest and mortarboard that signify his graduation from underschool. She imagines him instead in the most erotic pose imaginable: propped up in bed, one hand supporting his well-hewn jaw while the other leafs lazily through the pages of a book. He is a scholar in an unbuttoned shirt, with the torrid, brooding gaze of a pirate. She already plans to encourage his growing a beard.
Swanny walks down the hallway, trying to impart, as her mother always urges, some natural grace into her step. She passes an end table, where a celadon vase full of begonias fills the hallway with its scent. She hopes he doesn’t read mysteries, or those cheap spy thrillers where black-clad assassins fire stun darts from their cuff links. It would be utterly dull to discuss, hour upon hour, characters who are distinguished only by their motives to kill. Perhaps he prefers poetry—that would be refreshing. The door of his room is labeled clearly enough: ersatz caution tape zigzags across it, instructing the visitor DO NOT ENTER. How droll. She places her hand on the knob, then hesitates, half-frightened, half savoring the moment. She can already feel his caress on her cheek, his hot breath in her ear: “Swan Lenore Dahlberg, you strange, otherworldly thing—let me love you.” The years with her mother in the cold schoolroom, learning how to sit, how to speak, how to laugh, what to know, who to be, are now concluded. This is the moment before the test, and she is entirely prepared. With an anticipatory shiver, she twists the knob and enters.
A gust of air-conditioning buffets her, as though she’s opened the door onto a windy cliff. The ceiling is much higher than in the hall, and the walls are papered with a minute repeating pattern of blue and red robots shooting each other in the face. The plush blue carpet is strewn all over with toys: nunchucks, a plastic shirtless man with articulated muscles, a crossbow with foam darts, a jetpack, a giant melodica keyboard, model HowFlys with their bellies popped open, revealing empty sockets for battery packs. A vast aquarium blurps and bubbles, seething with minute crustaceans, and a seafaring death pyre somehow appears to be functioning as a sperm-splotched, unmade bed. Explosions detonate on a massive projector screen.
They say the instant before one dies lasts for all eternity. Perhaps the same also applies to the instant before one’s heart breaks in two.
A ball pit, almost overflowing with rainbow-colored plastic orbs, sunken into the floor: in it sit Duncan Ripple and a young woman, topless.
Swanny considers resorting to an old comfort. Screaming has not solved many of her problems in the past, but in this case she thinks it best. However, when she opens her mouth, nothing comes out except for a garbled croaking, at which point her betrothed and the young woman turn in her direction.
“Whoa,” says Ripple. “You’re early.”
“I am the Baroness Swan Lenore Dahlberg,” Swanny says, as if to remind herself. Her voice sounds foreign, uncharacteristically high and tremulous.
“Shit, pro,” says a disembodied communicant, speaking through the projector’s sound system—how many strangers are observing Swanny’s humiliation? “Is that your wife?”
“Gotta log off, Kelvin.”
“Fuck that, I need you to pierce this freighter before it deploys its drone hull. I am destroying on defense, back me up here.”
Ripple sighs. With a rapid fumbling of buttons, he executes a move that results in a giant fireball annihilating all other images on the projector screen.
“Boom! You’re the abuser!”
“Do a save. You should be OK on single player for the rest of the level.”
“Eh, I’ll start a new game.”
“Have a nice trip.”
“Have a nice marriage.”
“Have a nice career.”
“Let me know if you ever need one. I’m a job creator now, I’ll find you something cushy.”