Single Combat (21 page)

Now she was slipping down into limbo, incapable of violence nor even of resistance. "Twenty. Nineteen. Eighteen. Seven"een," she began.

Control: "What are you counting? Report!"

Sanger's automatic responses were laid bare. "Down from twenny."

Control: "Why are you doing it?"

"Doc'or's orders."

Physician: "Another few seconds; keep counting." He pinched the flesh around the scar, hard. She did not flinch.

Control: "What doctor, S?
Report!"

"Sixteen—dunno 'is name."

"What is the doctor doing, S?
Report!"

A final tatter of conscious resistance; then, "Cut'n you out—of me."

She was taking an infernally long time to go under, thought the physician. At least he could make his preliminary horsehoe incision, laying the skin back and clamping it. He did so.

Control stepped up its audio power. "So, are you under sedation?"

"Uh-huh." She tried to nod. The doctor cursed, held her head still.

As loud and as sweet as any transmission Control would ever make: "We can help you, S. Just tell us: is someone removing your critic?"

Help, or the promise of help, glimmered faintly in the corridors of semiconsciousness. She murmured what could have been an affirmative, "Um-hmm." Her head did not move. Her entire body became limp.

The physician adjusted his rotary tool, aligned the saw blade so that it would not spit debris into his face, flicked the switch and lowered the spinning steel teeth against the dull gleam of mastoid bone. "Won't be long now," he soothed.

It was, in fact, almost instantaneous.

The critic's detonation inside armoring bone was not as loud as the rotary saw, a muffled meaty resonance that erupted under the whining saw blade as if the physician had cut into a pressurized cartridge. A gout of flesh and bone splinters flew outward in a hideous spray, and the body of Marbrye Sanger gave one convulsive throe. Straps parted; the physician found himself hurled to the floor.

Wiping his face, using his rage to overmaster his nausea, the doctor stood again to survey what had moments before been a lovely woman in desperate need. He rolled her body over, saw the gaping wound; knew even as he checked for vital signs that no human body could survive such internal assault. Never again would she harbor desperation—or fulfillment.

The physician turned and caught the horrified gaze of the priest, and somehow this fleeting contact fanned the guttering flame of his spirit. Approaching the unconscious Quantrill he growled, "If ever we had any doubts about where our government is headed, good Father Klein,—well, I offer Exhibit A." He swept his arm outward as if offering aid to the lifeless body that lay splashed with blood and hard sunlight below the window.

Father Klein cleared his throat several times before he could speak. "Some things I have never doubted. But I don't know what to do."

"Take a blowtorch to every bloodstain you can find, and help me get this youngster to the Masonics," the doctor replied. "We've got some tracks to cover, Klein. These Search & Rescue people don't screw around."

On her next trip to the San Rafael lab complex, Eve displayed gaity like a semaphore. Chabrier, essentially a sensitive man, waited patiently to learn the invisible message that underlay her overt signals. Their drug business concluded, both retired to his lower-level chambers to transact their pleasures.

Though plenty of IEE's drugs were handy, it was Eve's pleasure to draw on the Ember of Venus for the stuff they shared. Luxuriating in her second rush within the hour, Eve plucked at the hairy mat on Chabrier's belly and sighed, "Sometimes I envy you, Marengo."

A snort was his Gallic answer.

"I mean it. Tucked away out here, controlling your own priorities,—not like that fucking madhouse at IEE."

If Chabrier had owned antennae they would have vibrated like a tuning fork; real trouble at her level, or Mills's, must inevitably have its effect on Chabrier. In feigned lazy indifference he said, "With you and the formidable Monsieur Mills at the helm? Surely you exaggerate."

Eve's turn to snort. "If we weren't controlling the media, my man, the leadoff lines alone would boggle your brains."

Chabrier recalled an old Chinese curse. "We live in interesting times," he said. "But perhaps they would not interest me."

Eve could not resist the bait. "Two weeks ago it might've been, 'Government Assassins Executed While Escaping'. According to Mills it was a damned close thing; if forensics cops hadn't identified bits of hair and bone on an ore crusher, they'd still be looking for the man." She smiled to think of Quantrill's body in a condition that no woman would crave, macerated and consumed by the system. "I met him once, you know."

"A one-day news sensation, perhaps."

"Sensation you want? You got it: 'President Young Loses Marbles." Mills tells me the Lion of Zion is about three liters low on his mental dipstick, fueling himself on booze and pussy and due for a major overhaul." She searched Chabrier's face for a sign. If that news didn't faze him, he was either wasted on her alkaloids or singularly unimpressable.

Dealing as he did with Chinese on a daily basis, Chabrier found her American slang barely scrutable and donated a show of concern. "I gather that IEE is, ah, deeply in the President's debt."

"Call it a mutual aid society. Mills is trying to diversify. Whatever a gaga president pulls down with him, IEE can maintain a stranglehold on Streamlined America."

Chabrier's smile was bleak. "As Krupp did in Germany, eh?"

Since media history is inextricable from political history, Eve boasted a modest understanding of the German firm's tactics. "Only Krupp didn't get into dude ranches, with gambling and thrill rides so big they make the Disney ruins look like backyard sandpiles by comparison. Matter of fact, I'm scheduled to look over a hell of a big ranch very soon. I'll miss you while I'm down there but it's my first ride on a delta, so it won't be entirely boring."

Chabrier's gaze was speared on a needlelike sparkle from the great jewel that hung at her throat. "I shall be with you in proxy," he said, brushing the Ember with a fingertip. Far better, he thought, for this great vache to stave off boredom with drugs than to take up some alliance with another man of a desperation equaling his own.

Eve lay back, took the amulet by its chain, let it swing above their heads where they could revel in its lightshow. "Krupp didn't have a shot at this, either," she said dreamily. "The scaled-up synthesizer is IEE's real hole-card, Marengo. I'd hate to think what would happen to you if it turned out to be a deuce."

This time her jargon was impenetrable. When she explained, Chabrier could only shrug. "To envy me, ma cherie, is to envy a man walking a tightrope over an abyss."

"I hope your progress reports to Mills don't sound that pessimistic."

"I am not a fool," he grumbled.

For perhaps thirty seconds she studied his sad countenance. Eve could not know that Chabrier's maternal grandmother in Amiens had left him a behavioral legacy, having slept with a Nazi officer to avoid a concentration camp. Yet Eve began to sense that her lover needed her for more than sexual favors. She could view this revelation as a wedge cut from her sexuality, or as a buttress added to her power. As always, she chose the pleasant alternative.

"My sweet monkeyfuck, do you think I'd let any harm come to you?"

"I think," he said slowly, "that you would not learn of it until too late to help." He knew better than to ask her for an avenue of escape. She must stumble upon the notion herself.

But Eve did not need to stumble. Her fertile imagination had long since created scenarios in which she stashed her gentle gorilla in some Mexican villa with an acre of palms waving overhead and a three-acre waterbed undulating underfoot. The problem was, Chabrier had far more potential to please her by a breakthrough which could make her awesomely rich, than he did as purely sexual outlet. Chabrier was clearly a multipurpose tool.

And if Mills found him expendable in his major purpose? What a pity, to dispose of him when he had other delightful uses! Assuming that Chabrier had an escape hatch, he would still be crazy to use it while Mills supported him. "Marengo, would
you
know in advance if you were about to get the axe?"

Doubting, and hiding that doubt, he nodded in bogus certainty.

"Then leave it to little Evie to find you a bailout procedure."

He had the courage to smile, recalling the ancient bastardized French of airmen. "M'aidez?"

"Yeah; mayday," she agreed, and began to aid him in more carnal ways.

The rawboned stranger swept in on the scruffiest, quietest hovercycle Sandy Grange had ever seen. She noted however that beneath its blotched paint, huge muffler, and dented air-cushion skirts lurked a small turbocharged diesel of the sort that might take a man a hundred klicks on a gallon of fuel. And its pannier tanks were uncommonly large.

She penetrated the man's disguise as easily as she did the machine's. "You were told right, Mr.—uh, Gold," she smiled, shifting her basketful of snap-beans to shake his hand. His fingertips, but not his palms, were callused; and his sunburn said that he had not been outdoors much until the past few days. "How long will you stay?"

He slapped dust from his sweatstained stetson and favored her with an ingratiating grin. It removed any stray doubt as to his real name. "Depends, Miz Grange. I expect to be met here for the next leg of my trip. I detoured around Rocksprings, so don't worry 'bout that. And I brought my own grub."

"But no guitar," she said in mock innocence.

"Now you're funnin' me, ma'am." The grin was suddenly lopsided.

Confidently she led him into the soddy. "Just a little," she admitted, showing him where to wash up and to lay his sleeping bag. "I believe the Scots word for 'golden' is 'ora'. Really, you might've chosen a different alias."

Ora McCarty raised despairing eyes to the roof, sighed, said nothing.

"Besides, I've seen you many times on the holo. How many towns have you passed through on the way here?"

"Not a one, little lady. They said it was either take the outlaw trail or have some work done on my face and, well,—"

"Your face is part of your fortune. I understand, Mr. Me—Gold."

"Aw shoot, you'll razz me hollow at this rate, Miz—"

"It's Sandy, Mr. McCarty. Do you know, you're the third traveler I've had here in a week? I may add another room and hang out a shingle, if this keeps up. Now if you'll excuse me, this garden truck of mine won't jump into the basket by itself."

Presently McCarty emerged, much refreshed, and wandered out to the garden. Soon he found himself picking beans—one to Sandy's four—and laughed with her when she observed, "Someday I'll tell the story of the time a future President helped me pick beans."

"But make that 'candidate,' Sandy. Election is two years off and I'm the darkest horse since Black Beauty. Nobody's afraid of me at the polls."

Sandy stretched the kinks from her back. "Nobody was afraid of W. Lee O'Daniel either—until it was too late." In her passion for books and a Texan's passion for Texas, Sandy had accumulated a fund of trivia which she happily shared with the reverend McCarty. O'Daniel had become famous in the 1930's as a cloyingly countrified guitar plunker, but rode his radio audience into the Governor's mansion in Austin—and then galloped on to Washington as a senator.

McCarty knew his faults. He was politically naive and, though far older than Sandy, found her arguments worrisome. He was a lay preacher, not a Machiavelli. He hadn't sought the Indy vote; accepted his candidacy with reluctance only after slick-talking folks in Ogden raised a campaign fund without his knowledge.

Several Indy candidates had already made their intentions known, though presidential campaigns would not intensify for nearly two years. For McCarty, things had just kind of got out of hand. Still, in face-to-face rallies Ora McCarty could say things he couldn't say on FBN holovision; for example, that a company big enough to hire ten thousand people was also big enough to accept collective bargaining. That implied unions—a topic on the proscribed list. So far, McCarty's rhetoric was much milder than that of most dissenters.

"I have an idea this fella Albeniz rigged this trip for me to talk to some union folks," he confided as they carried their produce 'truck' back to the soddy. He was not prepared for her response.

"Albeniz?
Lufo
Albeniz?"

"I talk too durn much," he gloomed.

"You said what I wanted to hear," she laughed, "but if Lufo arranged it, don't be surprised if you happen across Governor Street."

"That would surprise me, all righty," he chuckled. "I come down here 'cause I was told it might save a lot of trouble, maybe some lives, if I came alone like this."

He paused as Sandy placed fingers in her mouth and blew a long, two-note whistle with a rising terminal inflection. "I'm calling my little sis," she explained. "While you're here she'll have to, ah, tend the stock."

"You run cattle hereabouts?"

"We try," she replied vaguely, and with an amusement he could not fathom. In truth, the only way they ran cattle was to run them stampeding, the first time they got downwind of Childe's improbable steed. Childe drank goat's milk and liked it.

In good time, a scrawny girlchild pelted out of the cedar and oak scrub, moving somewhat warily as she neared the middle-aged stranger with the well-worn clothes and the fresh sunburn. But Sandy had given the 'come alone, OK' whistle and Childe's approach was only her natural shyness. Sandy introduced Childe as mute, and McCarty as 'Gold', giving each a cover story.

"You go tend the animals, hon, but be back by dark if you want supper." The little girl kissed Sandy, made a ragged-skirted curtsy that charmed McCarty and sped off again, a knob-kneed little whirlwind lacking only her attendant dust-devil.