A World Between (13 page)

But not even this could bring Royce’s attention back to ground-level reality. His broadcast screen was plugged into the Transcendental Science channel, where a documentary on hypnoleaming had just given way to the latest installment of “Space Opera.” His compscreen, plugged into the Ministry computer, displayed the realtime audience rating of the Transcendental Science channel, which had risen to a fat 30 percent when the entertainment show replaced the documentary. His utility screen showed the total rating profile of the Transcendental Science channel over the eight days that it had been in operation, and it was an interesting rating profile indeed.

At first, curiosity value had given everything broadcast on the Transcendental Science channel the same rough 25 percent Soon, the ratings for the informational programming had dropped like a stone—propaganda was propaganda, no matter how slickly produced, and the Pacifican boredom threshold for such stuff was low. But the ratings for most of the entertainment shows had held at 25 percent or so, and a few of them, like “Space Opera,” had even shown a slow upward drift during the last week. Even “Talk to the Falkensteins,” after dipping from its peak, seemed to be maintaining a steady 19.

If they were running this as a free market channel and

selling commercial time, they’d be number one, Royce thought. But the only thing they’re trying to sell is Transcendental Science, and with these ratings, they’ve got quite an audience for their commercials.

He wondered, though, whether the commercials were really being effective. So far, the polls showed a big increase among the undecided on the question of allowing the establishment of an Institute, and little movement from the nos to the yeses. It seemed to Royce that they had grossly underestimated the sophistication of the Pacifican audience; people were watching the shows for the hell of it, but the commercials, at best, seemed to be generating merely a tolerant indifference to the product.

A neat media analysis
—too
neat. What it didn’t explain was why the ef the entertainment shows themselves were so popular. They were reasonably well done, but not exactly outstanding by Pacifican standards. It had to be something in the content, something that the audience wasn’t getting elsewhere at any level of quality.

“Space Opera” I can see, Royce thought; I like it myself. The music is pretty awful, but all those fanciful planets and alien civilizations stretch the mind in directions we’re not accustomed to. “Science fiction,” it was called according to the accessbanks, an old prespace form. But “Founding Father”? “City Streets”? “Them Good Old Mountain Boys”? What’s the appeal there? Why do Pacificans get such a flash out of watching cartoon figures of themselves acting like assholes?

Okay, it was obvious that the idiot characters served a simple propagandists purpose—the figures of fun were all social fascists who opposed total media access in one way or another. Fair enough, such people were legitimate targets of satire, and it obviously helped keep the Transcendental Science channel on the air. But how can that be all that’s going on? Royce wondered. Keep the channel on the air just to keep the channel on the air? This stuff is reaching the audience in some way I don’t quite understand...

“Bloody hell, Royce, are you still plugged in to that stuff?” Carlotta had entered the netshop unnoticed, wearing only a loinclout in the warm night.

Royce hardly glanced up at her. “Mmmm...” he muttered. “I just can’t figure out what they’re up to ... if they’re really up to anything.”

“Oh, they’re up to something, all right,” Carlotta said, draping herself over the back of his lounger. “It’s quite obvious.”

“It
is?”
Royce said, looking back up at her.

“You’ll notice they’re still stalling. Obviously, they have no real intention of establishing an Institute on our terms. They’re going to turn us down and make a big political push for an Institute on
their
terms.”

‘You read
that
from the programming?” Royce said dubiously.

Carlotta smiled her Borgia smile. “I read that from my political instincts,” she said. “If they turned down our terms now and started using this channel to sell an Institute on
their
terms, what do you think public reaction would be if I tried to rescind their permission to remain in orbit in order to shut them up?”

“Everyone’s
a media critic these days!” Royce said, in sudden comprehension.

“Precisely, love. Too dicey to risk a vote of confidence on already. You’re trying to read too much into their current programming. What they’re really after now is high ratings and guaranteed continued media access no matter what they do. This harmless, simple-minded stuff is only the opening gun in their media blitz. Give it time and watch it change.”

“Assuming they’re not really seriously considering our terms,” Royce said uncertainly. Assuming you’re not just reacting off your emotional dislike of Falkenstein, he thought.

“Oh shit, Royce,” Carlotta snapped, “you’re not really that naive!”

“Maybe not,” Royce admitted irritably. “But maybe
you’re
being a little simpleminded too.”

Carlotta scowled at him.

“Maybe you’re being a little chauvinistic. You seem to assume that ifs all a Machiavellian plot, period. You don’t consider for a moment the possibility that these people may have something real, that what they want to sell us may be something we need to buy.”

“Lord, you
have
been plugged into this channel too long!”

“Maybe
you
haven’t been plugged into it enough. Have you seen this ‘Space Opera’ thing, for instance?”

Carlotta held her nose and nodded.

“That’s all you get off it?” Royce snapped. “You don’t see past the bad music and silly plots?”

‘To
what,
may I ask?”

“A feeling...oyce said, groping for words to describe something vague and incoherent, even in his own mind. “A more dynamic sense of the future ... a vision of man’s galactic destiny...”

Carlotta studied him as if he were some strange new species of animal. “This has gone even further than I

thought...” she muttered to herself.

“What?”
Royce snapped. He didn’t like being looked at that way, he didn’t like it at all, that smug condescension, that certainty that her own perhaps incomplete vision was the whole truth and nothing but, that... that...
that Pacifican female arrogance?

Carlotta’s expression softened. She touched a finger to his nose—an old familiar signal—but now the usual electric connection between her fingertip and his groin was short-circuited somewhere. “Come on, bucko,” she cooed. “I didn’t come here to fight.” She glided around to the front of his lounger, snapped off the net console, and flipped away her loinclout. “Or to plug into that tiling.” She knelt before him. “You know what I want to plug into, bucko.”

“Is that what I am?” Royce said. “Just another pretty body?”

He said it petulantly, half-seriously, but Carlotta laughed, determined not to notice. She pulled off his shorts, took his hand, rose, and led him toward the glass doors. Paralyzed by the disjunction between the reaction of his mind and the response of his body, Royce let her have her way with him.

Carlotta flung open the doors to the veranda, and a swirling blast of wind and rain shocked Royce’s body into sensuous alertness. “It’s wild out tonight,” Carlotta said, and led him out onto the rain-soaked deck.

After the first cold shock, the wind-whipped rain became the subtle massage of a thousand tiny fingers. The surf roared and foamed beneath them and the sky fell away to infinity as stars peeped down through the dance of the clouds. It seemed to Royce as if he was a pinnacle of hypersensitive flesh at the center of a vast elemental world of rain and sky, an organ of sense thrust up by insensate nature in order to experience its own mindless majesty.

Carlotta smiled knowingly at him—perhaps all too knowingly—her rain-soaked hair pouring over her shoulders like black syrup, rivulets of water beading off her nipples. She put her arms around him, kissed him wetly on the lips, and pressed their rain-slickened bodies together, her curving softness meeting his angular hardness along a gliding interface of moistened flesh.

Then she slowly sank to her knees, sliding breasts, and then teasing, trailing hands along the length of his body, pushed him somewhat roughly up against the wall of the house, and gobbled up the last vestiges of his resistance in the warm cave of her mouth.

Royce leaned back against the pebbled roughness of the stonemeld wall, a delicious textural contrast to the sucking rhythmic softness of Carlotta’s lips, arched himself into her, stared up at the stars through the swirling clouds, felt the rain pouring down his chest onto Carlotta’s hair, and gave himself over to this sweet arching moment of bucko perfection.

And yet... and yet something inside him stood back from this stage-managed sexual production—this ecstatic synergy of sky, wind, lips, bone-hard narcissistic gratification, and yes, real love. Something whispered in his ear that this was what it was to be a bucko, but it took this and something more to be a man, The interior of a combination barbaric throne-room and opulent boudoir. A beautiful red-haired woman wearing a golden crown and a filmy red robe lies on a green velvet divan. Her legs are spread and exposed to midthigh, one red-nippled breast is exposed by a fold in her garment, as she watches with sullen hot eyes as three men sword-fight with three amazon warriors before her.

The amazons wear only metallic brass-colored shorts; their high breasts and muscular torsos glisten with sweat. The three men are tall, lean, and dark, poured into gleaming skin-tight black suits which outline every muscle of their finely sculptured bodies.

The queen’s right hand strokes her inner thighs as two of the men in black suddenly disarm their opponents by dashing in past their blades and twisting the swords out of the women’s hands by brute masculine force. The two men fling away their swords, grab the amazons by the hair, and throw them to their knees. The queen’s hand moves higher as the men in black unzip silver flies and angrily forced their defeated opponents’ to suck their enormous erect cocks. The amazons seem to lose their will and go about their task with moaning enthusiasm.

Cut to a tighter shot on the queen, her eyes hot with anticipation, as the third man, slightly bigger than the other two, clangs the sword from his opponent’s hand with a tremendous backhand blow, and smashes her to the floor with a swipe of his hand. He unzips his fly, but, ignoring the defeated amazon, he leaps to the divan, grabs the queen by her ankles, flips her over onto her stomach, tears: off her gown, and enters her from the rear. As the queen writhes and groans in outraged ecstasy, the fallen amazon crawls to the divan and begins kissing and licking the buttocks of the man in black.

The camera pulls back to a wider angle on the divan, including the two other couples. Now the other two men have the amazons spread-eagled, faces to the wall, their shorts down around their knees, panting and screaming as they are taken from behind. TTie frame freezes into a motionless tableau of angry lust.

Announcer’s voiceover: “And we’ll be back with more 'Soldiers of Midnight’ after this word about genetic design and environmental control..

“That is truly vile,” Dori Holvak said as she and Cort Varder lay naked on the bed in the pale glow of the entertainment channel screen.

“Ah come on, Dori, it’s just a pom opera,” Cort said, his hand stroking her thigh, his body inflamed with a strange and unfamiliar aching lust, so sweet as to be almost nauseating.

“Just a porn opera!”
she said, pointing haughtily between his legs. “It’s vile, it’s disgusting, it’s vicious, and you’re enjoying every minute of it!”

“So what if I am?” Coit said throatily. “It’s only a fantasy.” He moved his hand higher, and Dori twitched, pulling away from him. Somehow that filled Cort with a cold rage.

“Only a fantasy?” Don said. “But
what
a fantasy! So that’s the kind of slime that goes through your head when we’re making love?”

“That’s not true!” Cort said angrily.

“Oh isn’t it? Tell me you’re not turned on!”

Cort laughed. “All right, I admit it, it turns me on,” he said, rolling over onto her. “So what? Variety makes the heart grow fonder.”

“Not mine it doesn’t! Not
that
variety!” Dori said as he tried to enter her. She pushed up at his shoulders and tried to pull herself away from him. “Get off me, Cort, I’m not exactly in the mood!”

A weird power coursed through Cort’s body, a totally unique sense of engorged buckohood that he had never quite experienced before. He grinned at her, trying to make it a sex game, a light fantasy, something paler than what he felt, something less feral and sinister than his own strange lust.

“Well
I
am,” he said, grabbing her wrists and pinning them to the bed with the full weight of his upper body. “Come on, Dori, it’s only a little fantasy,” he added uneasily. “Give in, and you’ll enjoy it.”

Muttering imprecations to herself Carlotta Madigan snapped off the comscreen and marched into the garden. The night was cool, the blossoms fragrant, and the starry sky as clear as crystal, but none of it could soothe her anger and frustration. Falkenstein had put her off again, made excuses, further delayed his decision, and by now any doubt she had had about the true nature of his game had been quite thoroughly removed.

The new programs that had appeared on the Transcendental Science channel definitely represented a new phase in their media blitz—psychological preparation for a political showdown. ‘Every Mother’s Son.’ ‘Soldiers of Midnight/ ‘Men of Science*—comedy, pom opera, biographical drama, they were all designed to reach something twisted, atavistic, and ugly buried deep within the bucko psyche. Instinctively, Carlotta knew that this stuff was antifemale, designed to arouse the murky drive for male supremacy that had disfigured all of prespace human history, to sync that unwholesome force into support for an Institute, to use it to build a male demographic base for political purposes. And if Royce considered that analysis mere “female emotionalism,” the latest depth-polls and ratings proved it with hard figures. The audience for this crap was two-thirds male. The Institute issue was already polarized along sexual lines: 2I percent of the women in favor, but 42 percent of the men. And in the Cords, the figure had reached 76 percent! What was going on in the Cords, anyway?