Slant by Greg Bear Page B

what she really thinks of them--certainly not the temporary down things that flit through her mind. It is easy to tell them about the permanent things--about her love and admiration for them--because these are so constant they hardly seem important enough to hide. It is the temporary observations, trenchant and of mixed truthfulness, the insights that make her laugh or question her fitness to be a mother, that she keeps inside, where they are soon buried and seldom recalled. "Give it to me, I swear I'll--" "What is a sw/tt?" Chloe asks from the entryway. Penelope turns her blazing green eyes on her mother. Her hair is in disarray and she looks ready to kill. "Mother, he is goating that rock, and I found it!" Goating is what her grandparents would have called hogging. Chloe does not think the word is any improvement. "What's so important about a rock?" Intuition tells her Jonathan will appear in about ten seconds and she would like the situation to be duller and quieter, for his sake but mostly for hers. "It's rose quartz. I found it and I need it for school." "She put it down in the yard," Hiram says. He looks worried. Chloe wonders if her son can see in her face that she no longer thinks he is beautiful. When he was a baby he was beautiful. "She didn't want it." "Tro merde, that's a lie! I put it down on another rock to save it." Jonathan is coming up from the bedroom. His step is fast and his footfalls heavy. Their bedroom is on the bottom floor, below the entry level, with big bay windows facing rear gardens that are now rather dismal despite a few banks of Jonathan's hardy year-rounds. "Give it to her, please," Chloe says. "Mother!" Hiram appears genuinely shocked. "You believe her?" "If she needs it and she found it, why not let her keep it? Why do you need a piece of rose quartz?" Hiram stares down at her with the same expression Caliban must have worn when Ariel played a prank on him. Chloe feels a whirl of regenerating pique. "For God's sake, Hiram, it's just a rock!" Penelope grabs the rock from her brother's hand and takes it upstairs. Hiram squats on the stairs. He is physically adept and he goes into a perfect lotus but his face is far from calm. Jonathan arrives and turns to look up the stairs at Hiram, then looks back at Chloe. Penelope is on the second floor and in her room. Jonathan's mind is elsewhere.
    I SLANT 85
    Chloe says, "What's a swutt?" "It's someone who tries to be offensive in a fibe social space," Jonathan says. Chloe seldom ventures into the ribes. She uses her pad mostly for a calendar and phone, LitVid and mail. The direct projectors might as well be removed and she will not allow Yox players, much less patches, in her house. "Offensive, how?" she asks, heading into the kitchen. She knows she has saved Jonathan getting angry before he goes out into the night. And she has saved herself from another spike of irritation at her husband. "Blow-off, slumfacing," Jonathan says, following. He is dressed in formal longsuit for his night with the Stoics, the local cadre of the John Adams Group, all well-to-do New Federalists. "A swutt is someone who's rigged an untraceable face and goats it, you know, butt and run, cut touch. Thymic misfits." Chloe looks at the kitchen. The lights have come on automatically at their entrance. The compound curves of the sink and food counter, the alcove hiding the dormant arbeiter, the stove pillar, and the air-curtain cooler are gray and black with yellow accents, really quite pretty; she is reminded of something from the nineteen thirties, a car, the Bugatti Royale, the one they only made a few of, that the famous Yox comedian Wilrude races on that track in Beverly Hills . . . On top of the comb reserved for stars . . . She turns to Jonathan and allows him to kiss her. His kissing is attentive. Jonathan, she thinks, has never delivered a bad kiss. "A little stiff tonight," Jonathan says. He is not apparently concerned, if she is being stiff, but it's the third time in as