Maelstrom by Paul Preuss Page A

quick Dane, a wanderer and diarist who sent long letters by radioing to his friends around the world whenever he could scrape up the tolls, and who had washed ashore in Paris after crossing North Africa on foot. “I should worry that I’m not worried, but what can I do?” He gave everyone a sunny smile.
    Blake saw that Leo had an ego problem–his ego wasn’t as big as he pretended it was, and he depended absolutely on constantly being rescued. Leo would probably respond quickly to the processes of the group, but whether he was the sort of material the Athanasians were looking for was yet to be seen. Of all the guests, Leo was the only one who did not profess a goal beyond the present. He maintained that he was happy with his life the way it was.
    Lokele was muscular and tall, a West African black who’d been brought to the Paris suburbs as an infant. His parents had died in the influenza epidemic of 2075–“And then I met many, many nice people, but never did they stay long enough to let me get to know them,” he said, smiling, “so I began to hit them to keep them from running away”–until at last he ended in a rehabilitation camp after being convicted of robbery and assault. The Athanasians had picked him up a week after his release, after a week of fruitless job hunting, just as his hunger and despair and determination to stay out of work-shelter were tempting him to rob again.
    Of wit and deftness Lokele had plenty. He needed education. He needed socialization. His family and his culture had been destroyed; the bureaucracy had failed him. Blake wondered if and how the Athanasians would pick up the pieces.
Bruni was German, broad-shouldered and blond. She’d been living in Amsterdam for the past two years because work-shelter there involved little or no work, but she’d become bored and moved to Paris.
     
“Would you like to tell the other guests how we met you, Bruni?”
     
“That pimp tried to force me to work for him, but I refused.
     
“You said, ‘No thank you’?”
     
“I broke his arm.”
     
“And when his big friends tried to help him?”
     
“I broke their knees.” She said it without humor, her arms crossed, staring at the floor.
     
In fact the Athanasians had whisked her out of the way of the police, who thought they were responding to a riot.
    Bruni’s anger was held on a spring catch, and in discussion it sometimes exploded into insults and obscenities. But it was clear enough what Bruni wanted; she wanted simple love. Blake wondered how the Athanasians were going to give her that.
    And when it was Guy’s turn. . . . “I am from Bayonne, the Pays Basque. My parents speak the ancient tongue, but I did not learn it. I was not home much because I was with the circus.” The circus, as subsequent confession revealed, was a cheap carnival that worked northern Spain, and while with it, Guy had learned a great many ways to cheat. “I was very good at telling fortunes, but they arrested me for that in Pamplona and I had to spend a week in their filthy jail before they sent me back.” His post-deportation adventures, getting from the border to Paris, were intricate but not interesting, he claimed, but he expressed a confused desire, inspired by the pseudo-Egyptian hocus-pocus of his fortune-telling act, “to learn the true language of the ancient Egyptians. For I have heard that the Basques are the descendants of a colony of Egyptians. . . .”
At which earnest pronouncement, everyone nodded politely.
    In the few days Blake had spent in the Basque country before coming back to Paris, he had prepared this cover story as carefully as he could. If the Athanasians bothered to check, they’d find that there really was a disreputable little carnival with a clandestine “Egyptian” fortune-teller–Blake had encountered it on a previous trip to the continent–presently in Catalonia, if it had kept to its flexible itinerary. Blake hoped that denials of Guy’s existence on the part of