Harsh Oases Read Free

spray drenching everyone’s fancy clothes, I couldn’t imagine how the original shouter had spotted it. I figured later that it was sighted against the stars it occluded in its passage.
    Eventually, the capsule splashed down, its chute billowing in the water around it like a huge jellyfish. We reached it first. I knew Colin would be smugly satisfied. But what thrill could he possible derive, when he was always first?
    Our searchlight pinned the capsule to the water like a steel butterfly on shirred velvet. People clustered at the starboard rail. Two of Colin’s crew—big, competent, and bored-looking hirelings—were casting magnetic grapples. They caught the capsule and began to haul, their muscles straining. When it bumped our side, it blew its hatch.
    Like Venus being born, wearing a silver suit and contoured unpressurised headgear, Nikki Nike emerged.
    At that instant, the sky began to bum.
    I am going to tell you that the aurorae were the most beautiful things I have ever seen, and you will not believe me, because you weren’t there. But it does not matter, because they were.
    The aurorae were the most beautiful things I have ever seen.
    Convoluted draperies of radiance, they bedecked the sky. Primarily greenish-yellow, they were tinged along their upper edges with a seepage of neon red, as if their namesake, Aurora, had lent them her hot plasma/blood. They stretched for miles in the ionosphere, seeming by perspective’s tricks to converge far away from us, as if flowing from some central source.
    And flow they did. I had always thought—if I thought of it at all—that the aurorae would be static. But they were not. They pulsed, they crawled, they slithered, like gigantic living things, too high and supernal and proud to recognize the small creatures who watched them.
    I stood entranced for an indefinite time—perhaps half an hour. The sheets of cool fire held all my self, dispersed yet intensified.
    You must believe me.
    When the last one died, I dragged my eyes and soul back to earth. At our ship’s bow, her headgear doffed to reveal a black crewcut, stood Nikki Nike, a small sacred circle separating her from the unwontedly silent Hesperideans. Her face seemed to bear some gorgeous afterglow from the heavenly display.
    And why not?
    She had made it happen.
     
    The Senator from Puerto Rico was trying to charm the skivvies off the Women’s Wimbledon winner. I couldn’t say as I blamed him, since her plyoskin outfit was little more than a glossy blue lacquer over her formidable physique. Next to them, the Archbishop of New York was arguing politics with the Prime Minister of Ireland. Both had had too much to drink, and they seemed about to come to blows. I hoped they wouldn’t. I hated to see women fight. In other corners, drinks hoisted high in a complex social semaphore, other couples and groups played their mindgames on each other. The three-piece band on the stage in the back of the room blasted forth their own quirky version of Stella Fusion’s hit, “The Climax Decade Blues.” Bodies thronged the sweaty dancefloor.
    The single club on the main island of the Hesperides is always called La Pomme d’Or. It’s an unbreakable tradition. Its owners—usually stolid businessmen, but sometimes more interesting types—come and go, lasting as long as profits or their ulcers dictate. But the long, low building with its wicker-furnished veranda and glossy mahogany bar has a life and identity of its own. No one would dare rename it. Its last owner hadn’t, and he had been almost as much a fixture as the place itself. A man named Hollister, or something like that, who never left the building until certain events that culminated in two deaths forced him out and off the island.
    The current owner was Larry Meadows. He stood by the bar now, surveying the organized chaos with a benign gaze. After all, furniture and glasses might get smashed, but he would still have had the honor of hosting the bash. And it