A World Between Read Free Page B

Royce, and never a team like the two of them in the top two offices...
    Idly thinking of Royce out there in the Davy Jones, Carlotta programmed a general weather review from the planetary observation system. The obscreen split vertically. On the left, temperature, humidity, and barometric readings; on the right, realtime images from standard observation cameras scattered around the planet.
    A heavy windless rain fell on the western slopes of the central Sierra Cordillera mountains, soaking down through the laden branches of the towering trees and turning the loamy forest floor to chocolate-colored muck sprinkled with brilliantly colored fungi....
    Rain always reminded Carlotta of that party at her Gotham tower apartment where she had first met Royce. It had been pouring that night, great driving sheets obscuring the lights of the city below and drumming against the windows. It was supposed to be one of those political gatherings put on by a rising hopeful—a great stew of power with just a flavoring of sex. And then she saw him, barechested in the then-current bucko fashion, skin-tight white pants, high black boots, a short red cloak flung casually over his bare shoulders, long brown hair, and that silly, endearing droopy mustache—a transparent attempt to look older that only made him seem even younger, even more desirable. For a moment, politics suddenly seemed so unimportant—
    A merciless sun fried the perpetually cloudless sky over the Wastes. Heat waves shimmering above the dun-gray sands caused the far-off slate-colored mountains to waver like a mirage of themselves...
    —They had spoken only once during the party, and that only briefly. Carlotta had been holding court with a small group of older Delegates, impressing them with her grasp of the issues, whatever they had been at the time, with her momentum, her easy disdain of their temporarily higher status. She turned to get a drink, and saw him, leaning up against a wall, pelvis arched forward, looking at her.
    “Like what you see, do you?” she said with as much imperiousness as she could muster.
    “You’re a winner,” he said. “I’m at your mercy, lady. You can have me if you want me.” He laughed—boyishly, ironically. “You might even persuade me to vote for you.” “You certainly consider yourself a hot little bucko, don’t you?” Carlotta said.
    Royce laughed, arching himself languorously toward her. “Don’t you?” he said, looking into her eyes.
    Carlotta moved closer, piqued by his classic bucko narcissism, leavened as it was with a saving self-irony. “I might be interested if your bark’s not better than your bite.” “Oh, I never bite,” Royce said. “Do you?”
    Carlotta laughed and flicked a finger at the V of his pants. “That’s for me to know and you to find out,” she said, snapping her teeth together—
    A sprinkling of snow drifted down from the leaden skies over Thule, lightly powdering the eternal glare ice of the frozen antarctic continent. Only the far-off domes of Valhalla fractured the endless flat white monotony of the polar cap like carefully placed dots of contrasting pigment on some minimalist abstract painting...
    —Two moments at a party like hundreds of others. A good-looking woman turning thirty and climbing up the power curve had endless young buckos offering themselves up to her, some just for the night’s pleasure, but just as many angling to make orbit around a rising star, and Carlotta had supposed that this was just another handsome and available young body in the crowd. She had thought little of it, and had gone back to politicking, perhaps with a slightly enhanced sense of her own personal charisma, certainly not thinking of that young bucko as anything more than a tasty possibility for some idle evening—
    A strange howling windstorm roared through the dense verdant jungle of Godzillaland, rainless, whipping showers of brightly colored blossoms through the tangled undergrowth. Flitbats