Kings of Infinite Space: A Novel Read Online Free Page A

slide that listed the project personnel—
     
RFP Development Team
     
• Rick McKellar, TxDoGS Fleet Manager, General Services Division
• Colonel Travis Pentoon, J.J. Toepperwein, and Bob Wier of GSD
• Paul Trilby, typist
    —he found a little soldier who marched to the middle of the screen, executed a perfect present arms, and saluted.
    Every twenty minutes or so, however, Paul bounded out of his chair, snatched up the RFP as an excuse, and then stopped short in the door of his cube. The upper edge of the gray cubescape came to Paul’s cheekbones, and, like most of the men in the office, he could gauge the traffic in the aisles from a distance—or some of it, anyway. It was different for women, both seeing and being seen. Callie the Mail Girl, for example, was tall enough so that you could see the cropped top of her head above the cube horizon as she trundled her cart up the aisle, but Renee—pronounced “Renny,” in true Texas fashion, a tiny, hollow-eyed woman who purchased replacement parts for massive earthmoving equipment—was invisible until you were nearly on top of her. Paul was an energetic walker, andno matter how he tried to check himself, he always seemed to be blundering into her. This elicited another angry Post-it on his computer screen:
Please do not
walk so fast in
The Aisle. You
are not the
only person
here.
     
    This note was unsigned, but he knew it was from Renee; the printing did not have Olivia’s needle-sharp precision but read rather like a child’s, or like someone trying to disguise her right hand by writing with her left.
    So now Paul felt that he was running the gauntlet every time he left his cube, as he did now. Clutching the rolled-up RFP in both hands like a club, Paul dipped his head and hurried past the doorway of the dying tech writer, almost superstitiously averting his gaze from the knobs of the man’s spine rising out of his frayed cardigan and the deepening groove between the wasting cords of his neck. It was uncharitable, perhaps even cruel, to dwell on it, but this wretched man had starred in an actual nightmare of Paul’s in which the dying tech writer had arrived at TxDoGS on his first day as a strapping six footer, as ruddy as a rugby player, only to have his vitality sucked dry by a furious, naked Olivia, reducing him to the shriveled and gray-skinned husk he was now. The imagery for this nightmare came from a space vampire video Paul had seen years ago, but recognition of its provenance couldn’t keep him from repressing a shudder every time he passed the man’s cube.
    Paul turned right down the main aisle, grateful he didn’t immediately bowl over Renee as he did two or three times a week, but noting the look of pure hatred she gave him even from the safety of her cube. At the next major intersection heglimpsed Callie the Mail Girl in the “library,” which was only a big, open cube with a metal bookcase full of ring binders just inside the door and a photocopier in the corner. Callie was sorting mail at the long worktable across from the copier. As a member of the Building Services staff she was exempt from the regime of business casual, and in jeans and a t-shirt she pressed her belly up against the edge of the table, propped herself on one long arm, and sorted the mail into piles with a flick of her wrist. She had a long, oval face, sharp cheekbones, and reddish hair cropped to within an inch of her pale scalp, which had led to a few sniggering lesbo jokes in Paul’s hearing. She was long legged and hippy in a way that Paul found immensely appealing, though he’d never had an occasion to speak to her. Still, even as he flashed by the library doorway, he managed to admire her long neck and the cant of her hip against the worktable and the deep curve in the small of her back. Callie blew out a long, bored sigh and flicked another envelope, and Paul turned left, up the aisle towards Rick’s office.
    Here he ran another gauntlet, past the cubes of the