Sundara was still emanating pure Kama Sutra when we took our seats. Lamont Friedman, sitting halfway around the circular table from her, jerked and quivered when her eyes met his, and stared at her with ferocious intensity while muscles twitched wildly in his long narrow neck. Meanwhile, in a more restrained but no less intense way, Friedman’s companion of the evening, Ms. Yarber, was also giving Sundara the stare.

Friedman. He was about twenty-nine, weirdly thin, maybe 2.3 meters tall, with a bulging Adam’s apple and crazy exophthalmic eyes; a dense mass of kinky brown hair engulfed his head like some woolly creature from another planet that was attacking him. He had come out of Harvard with a reputation for monetary sorcery and, after going to Wall Street when he was nineteen, had become the head magus of a band of spaced-out financiers calling themselves Asgard Equities, which through a series of lightning coups — option-pumping, feigned tenders, double straddles, and a lot of other techniques I but dimly comprehend — had within five years gained control of a billion-dollar corporate empire with extensive holdings on every continent but Antarctica. (And it would not amaze me to learn that Asgard held the customs-collection franchise for McMurdo Sound.)

Ms. Yarber was a small blond person, thirty or so, lean and a trifle hard-faced, energetic, quick-eyed, thin-lipped. Her hair, boyishly short, fell in sparse bangs over her high inquisitive forehead. She wore not much face makeup, only a faint line of blue around her mouth, and her clothes were austere — a straw-colored jerkin and a straight, simple brown knee-length skirt. The effect was restrained and even ascetic, but, I had noticed as we sat down, she had neatly balanced her prevailingly asexual image with one stunning erotic touch: her skirt was entirely open from hip to hem for a span of perhaps twenty centimeters down the left side, exposing as she moved a sleek muscular leg, a smooth tawny thigh, a glimpse of buttock. At mid-thigh, fastened by an encircling chain, she wore the little abstract medallion of the Transit Creed.

And so to dinner. The usual banquet fare: fruit salad, consommй, protosoy filet, steam-table peas and carrots, flagons of California Burgundy, lumpy baked Alaska, everything served with maximum clatter and minimum grace by stony-faced members of downtrodden minority groups. Neither the food nor the decor had any taste, but no one minded that; we were all so doped that the menu was ambrosia and the hotel was Valhalla. As we chattered and ate, an assortment of small-time political pros circulated from table to table, slapping backs and gladding hands, and also we endured a procession of self-important political wives, mainly sixtyish, dumpy, and grotesquely garbed in the latest nippy-dip styles, wandering about digging their proximity to the mighty and famous. The noise level was 20 db up from Niagara. Geysers of ferocious laughter came splashing from this table or that as some silver-maned jurist or revered legislator told his or her favorite scabrous Republican / gay / black / Puerto / Jew / Irish / Italian / doctor / lawyer / rabbi / priest / female politician / Mafioso joke in the finest 1965 style. I felt, as I had always felt at these functions, like a visitor from Mongolia hurled without phrasebook into some unknown American tribal ritual. It might have been unendurable if tubes of high-quality bone had not kept coming around; the New Democratic Party may stint on the wine but it knows how to buy dope.

By the time the speechmaking began, about half past nine, a ritual within the ritual was unfolding: Lamont Friedman was flashing almost desperate signals of desire at Sundara, and Catalina Yarber, though she was obviously also drawn to Sundara, had in a cool unemotional nonverbal way offered herself to me.

As the master of ceremonies — Lombroso, managing brilliantly to be elegant and coarse at the same time — went into the core of his routine, alternating derisive pokes at the most distinguished members of the party present in the room with obligatory threnodies to the traditional martyrs Roosevelt, Kennedy, Kennedy, King, Roswell, and Gottfried, Sundara leaned toward me and whispered. “Have you been watching Friedman?”

“He has a bad case of horn, I’d say.”

“I thought geniuses were supposed to be more subtle.”

“Perhaps he thinks the least subtle approach is the most subtle approach,” I suggested.

“Well, I think he’s being adolescent.”

“Too bad for him, then.”

“Oh, no,” Sundara said. “I find him attractive. Weird but not repellent, you know? Almost fascinating.”

“Then the direct approach is working for him. See? He is a genius.”

Sundara laughed. “Yarber’s after you. Is she a genius, too?”

“I think it’s really you she wants, love. It’s called the indirect approach.”

“What do you want to do?”

I shrugged. “It’s up to you.”

“I’m for it. How do you feel about Yarber?”

“Much energy there, is my guess.”

“Mine too. Four-group tonight, then?”

“Why not,” I said, just as Lombroso sent the audience into deafening merriment with an elaborately polyethnic-perverse climax to his introduction to Paul Quinn.

We gave the mayor a standing ovation, neatly choreographed by Haig Mardikian from the dais. Resuming my seat, I sent Catalina Yarber a body-language telegram that brought dots of color to her pale cheeks. She grinned. Small sharp even teeth, set close together. Message received. Done and done. Sundara and I would have an adventure with these two tonight, then. We were more monogamous than most couples, hence our two-group basic license: not for us the brawling multiheaded households, the squabbles over private property, the communal broods of kiddies. But monogamy is one thing and chastity is another, and if the former still exists, however metamorphosed by the evolutions of the era, the latter is one with the dodo and the trilobite. I welcomed the prospect of a passage at arms with the vigorous little Ms. Yarber. Yet I found myself envying Friedman, as I always envied Sundara’s partner of the night: for he would have the unique Sundara, who was to me still the most desirable woman in the world, and I must settle for someone I desired but desired less than she. A measure of love, I suppose, is what that was, love within the context of exofidelity. Lucky Friedman! One can come to a woman like Sundara for the first time only once.

Quinn spoke. He is no comic, and he made only a few perfunctory jokes, to which his listeners tactfully overreacted; then it was down to serious business, the future of New York City, the future of the United States, the future of humanity in the coming century. The year 2000, he told us, holds immense symbolic value: it is literally the coming of the millennium. As the digit shifts, let us wipe clean the slate and begin afresh, remembering but not re-enacting the errors of the past. We have, he said, been through the ordeal by fire in the twentieth century, enduring vast dislocations and transformations and injuries; we have several times come close to the destruction of all life on earth; we have confronted ourselves with the likelihood of universal famine and universal poverty; we have plunged ourselves foolishly and avoidably into decades of political instability; we have been the victims of our own greed, fear, hatred, and ignorance; but now, with the energy of the solar reaction itself in our control, with population growth stable, with a workable balance reached between economic expansion and protection of the environment, the time has come to build the ultimate society, a world in which reason prevails and right is triumphant, a world in which the full flowing of human potential can be realized.

And so on, a splendid vision of the era ahead. Noble rhetoric, especially from a mayor of New York, traditionally more concerned with the problems of the school system and the agitation of the civil-service unions than with the destiny of mankind. It would have been easy to dismiss the speech as mere pretty bombast; but no, impossible, it held significance beyond its theme, for what we were hearing was the first trumpet call of a would-be world leader. There he stood, looking half a meter taller than he was, face flushed, eyes bright, arms folded in that characteristic pose of force in repose, hitting us with those clarion phrases: