The Gorgon Festival by John Boyd Read Free Book Online Page A

downstairs, Ester was ready to start serving, but she was worried. “Joe’s unhappy. I promised to have a drink with him before my fitting. Now, he’s up there, getting stewed on vodka, and he promised he’d keep calling here until I join him.”
    Wine soothed her. The soup was delicious, and she was serving the salad when the phone rang.
    “You answer it, Alex. Tell him I had a nervous breakdown.”
    A plea in her eyes overcame his trepidation, and he arose and went to the phone. “Doctor Alexander Ward speaking.”
    For a moment he could hear heavy, angry breathing and then the phone clicked.
    “He hung up on me.”
    It was an unsettling episode, but he composed himself over salad. After all, Joe Cabroni was not Normandy Beach, and Ward had survived stronger antagonisms. To allay the tension, he asked, “Darling, if you could keep forever young, with no body changes, would you like to be a mother?”
    “If I could stay as I am, forever, I would grow boys spaced five years apart to keep a fresh crop to entertain me after you’ve gone.”
    “That would be incest,” Ward pointed out.
    “Of course, but what is incest if it isn’t mother love gone hog wild? And grandmothers can be fun, too.”
    The phone rang again and Ward answered promptly. “Ward, here. What the hell you want?”
    Again the heavy breathing, less angry but far more irregular, and the click.
    “This is sheer harassment, a police technique to keep you on edge, and he’s drunk,” Ward said, returning to the table. “Where were we? Oh, yes. You were having sons by your sons’ sons… After a thousand years of inbreeding, genetically, you would be practicing self-stimulation.”
    “Oh, no, Alex. I’d have someone to talk to.”
    Guttering candles sparkled in her eyes as she envisioned eons of ecstasy. Ward realized he was not getting a grass-roots opinion, but one of her ideas was thought-provoking. Without mortality as a basis for morality, there might be a direct ratio between lewdness and longevity.
    Over dessert the phone rang again, and Ester’s eyes flared in outrage. She lunged at the telephone, picked it up, and said into the mouthpiece, “Listen, you. I’m having dinner with my husband whom I love and who loves me. You can quit harassing us and you can forget that date, you vodka-swilling pig. If you call this number again I’m going to swear out a peace warrant. My husband explained your technique and I know all about you…”
    Suddenly Ester held the phone in her hand and looked at it in bewilderment. “The bastard hung up on me.”
    Ward glanced at his wrist. It was precisely 8:15.
    By now, Cabroni had passed out and the call had come from Ruth. If she judged him by the implications of Ester’s remarks, he had violated the first canon in the ethics of adultery, he had told all to his wife and laid the blame for his lechery on his mistress.
    Early the next morning, Ward telephoned Ruth, giving the signal—ring, hang up, and ring again. She didn’t answer. By ten he was engrossed in a mathematical definition of electricity, but he remembered to call again. At lunch he ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and called her twice. She was still sulking, so he gave up. He would wait and let her call him as she chose to throw off her peevishness.
    After lunch he became thoroughly engrossed in a definition of organic electromagnetism, plotting from Riemannian geometry in kinematic time and equation which amalgamated space-time, gravitation, electromagnetism and organic chemistry. Ward was aware that he was defining the corpus Dei , but all was secondary to the sheer fun of theoretical mathematics.
    By five he had completed substantiating the rejuvenation phenomenon, but ecological doubts still nagged. He wondered if the maternal drive was a function of E 1 (Ego enhancement) or of S 16 (Love). The sub-sixteen defined love as a variable of sex attraction in an area somewhat more specific than hallucinations and self-delusions. S 16