Servants of the Map by Andrea Barrett

men stared at her blankly, Arnold’s left foot tapping at the smooth green grass.
    “Bianca Marburg,” she reminded them.
    “From Jocelyn’s lab?” Arnold said now.
    “Rose Marburg’s sister,” she said, grinning stupidly.
    Herb frowned, still unable to place her. “Didn’t I see you … were you
typing
? For Fu’ad?”
    She held her hands up like claws and typed the air.
“C’est moi”
she said. What was she doing here?
    “Ah,” Arnold said. “You must be helping Constance out. It’s a lovely party, isn’t it? So well organized. Constance really amazes me, the way she can do this sort of thing and still keep that big lab working … ”
    “But that last pair
of
papers,” Herb said. “Really.”
    Bianca fled. From the corner of her eye she saw the man she’d driven here, that Polish émigré, physical-chemist turned theoretical structural-biologist, Cambridge-based multiply medaled old guy, standing all alone by the bamboo fountain, watching the water arc from the stem to the pool. Pleasing Constance inadvertently, she thought; Constance fancied her home as a place conducive to contemplation and great ideas. Krzysztof raised his right hand and held it over his head, either feeling for hair that was no longer present or attempting to shade his array of freckles and liver spots from the burning sun.
    Quickly Bianca traversed the yard and the patio, slipped through the glass doors and across the kitchen, and ran upstairs to the third and smallest bathroom. The door closed behind her with expensive precision: a Mercedes door, a jewel-box door. On the vanity was a vase with a Zenlike twist of grapevine and a single yellow orchid. She opened the window and lit up a joint. Entirely typical, she thought, gazing down at Krzysztof’s sweaty pate. That Constance and Arnold and Herb and the others should fly this man across the ocean to hear about his work, then get so caught up in institute politics that they’d forget to talk to him at their party. Had it not been for the lizardlike graze of his eyes across her chest, she might have felt sorry for him.
    Krzysztof crouched down by the rock-rimmed basin and touched a blade of grass to the water, dimpling the surface and thinking about van der Waals forces even as Constance rushed to his side, burbling and babbling and asking if he was ill. When he assured her that he was fine, she asked about Cambridge, and then if he’d like a swim—but of course not, he should come sit here; he knew everyone, didn’t he? She helped himinto a long, low, elaborately curved chair, webbed with canvas that trapped him as securely as a fishnet. She couldn’t have meant to let him languish there; that would have been rude, she was never rude. She must not have known that he couldn’t rise from this snare unaided. Nor could she have known, as the faces bent toward him politely for a moment and then turned back to their animated conversations about meetings he hadn’t attended, squabbles among colleagues he didn’t know, that he’d forgotten almost all their names and was incapable of attaching those he did remember to the appropriate faces and research problems.
    The sun had moved, was moving, so that first his knees, then his thighs and crotch were uncomfortably roasted. This was the throne room, he saw. This cluster of chairs, perched where an adrenal gland would be if the pool were really a kidney: himself and Constance, Arnold, Herb, Jocelyn, and Sundralingam. All the senior scientists. Directly across the pool the junior researchers stood in tight circles, occasionally glancing his way; the postdocs and students were gathered at the farthest end of the pool, where a group of bare-torsoed, highly muscled young men tended a grill that sent up disturbing smoky columns.
    He made columns in his mind: faces, names, research projects. Then he tried and failed to match up the lists. The girl named Rose walked by and smiled at him. Although he smiled back eagerly she continued to