The Jagged Orbit (8 page)
He was still chuckling when the dismaying thought crossed his mind that perhaps he wasn't the only person on the staff whose desketary had been unexpectedly modified by Madison. He asked about that too, and was assured that so far this one was unique. Greatly relieved, he turned his attention back to Ariadne.
"I hardly need to introduce Mr. Matthew Flamen," she was saying loudly and clearly; she must have turned the pickups to full gain. "His face and voice are probably familiar to you from his five-times-weekly spool-pigeon show on the Holocosmic network. He's asked permission to record this afternoon's performance by Lyla Clay for possible eventual transmission on his show, but naturally I must ask whether anyone here objects to—"
The sound dropped suddenly and the desketary said, "Dr. Mogshack is canvassing the staff also to see if they have any objections. Do you, Dr. Reedeth?"
Reedeth hesitated. "No objection," he said after a pause. It was the safest course. If Mogshack had already consented there was no point in starting an argument.
Evidently no one else registered an objection either, for the next thing that happened was that Lyla Clay said something very softly to Ariadne, fingering her yash, and Ariadne glanced at two or three of the patients, seemed to debate a point with herself, and finally shrugged. Lyla tossed the yash aside with what appeared to Reedeth to be a moue of distaste, and stood revealed in nothing but a pair of abbreviated Nix.
"Hmmm . . . !" Reedeth muttered. "That mackero of hers is a very lucky man!"
Several of the male patients, and two lesbian ones, fidgeted in their chairs in a way that suggested they were equally impressed.
The next thing that happened, however, was merely that Lyla set off on a tour of the room in total silence, briefly studying each of the people present—including, to his obvious dismay, Flamen. She seemed nervous, Reedeth judged, and took a long time about her task.
His mind wandered off down a side alley when she reached Madison. Perhaps the answer would be to get in touch with the IBM directorate and tell them there was somebody in the Ginsberg who displayed an absolutely unbelievable gift for servicing complex automatic circuitry?
No, that wasn't the solution either. As well as hiring far too many neo-puritans, Inorganic Brain Manufacturers Inc. were notorious for having rid themselves of all their kneeblank employees, down to humble sales reps.
Could he become a Gottschalk? The arms traders were among the nation's largest consumers of high-order automatics, and no doubt they would find knee repairmen handy in their dealings with the black enclaves.
On reflection, however, Reedeth doubted whether that would be suitable employment for Madison. His Army experiences had been successfully brought under control in his mind, but it was a matter of record that his period in combat had thrown him completely off his gyros, and who could say that exposure to close contact with modern armaments would not trigger a renewal of his trouble?
How convenient it would be, he thought, if Flamen were to take up the Madison case, make a grand fuss about the plight of a knee stuck in a hospital long after he had qualified for discharge. . . . Come to think of it, it might be possible to leak the story to one of Flamen's knee counterparts, who enjoyed far bigger audiences and what was more mainly overseas.
Reedeth brightened, and made a mental note to see if he could locate a tendril of the grapevine leading to, say, Pedro Diablo. It would have to be done discreetly, but properly handled it might very well result in someone volunteering to act as his legal guardian and enabling him to get out at long last.
But there was no time now to follow that up. Lyla had completed her survey of the audience and returned to the edge of the mat they had spread out for her. She nodded at Dan, who was standing by with his recorder poised, and reached for the hip pocket of her Nix. Producing a small flat bottle which Reedeth only caught a glimpse of, she shook from it a little red capsule. Flamen tongued the switchbar of his cameras to a closeup setting and captured her swallowing the pill.
Whatever it was. Reedeth hadn't realized that pythonesses took anything to help them go into trance. Was that a commercial product, or something alchemically home-cooked from a cut-and-try formula? Once more he consulted his desketary, and this time what he learned made him stare at Lyla's slender body in sheer incredulity.
For a moment or two she stood stiffly vertical, eyes closed. A heartbeat later she fell to the mat, writhing. Her back arched as though in orgasm. Spittle leaked from the corners of her mouth as she began to pant and gasp. Her hands contorted into claws and snatched at the air as though fighting off an invisible attacker—
slash, slash!
The watchers, including Reedeth who had been prepared for such an event because the desketary had told him about sibyl-pills, tensed in alarm. The girl's muscles, contracting more violently than an epileptic's, seemed likely to tear her apart at the joints; her breasts bobbed on her torso like a pair of buoys on a rough sea. Flamen was continuing to record, but from his expression it was plain he didn't expect to be able to transmit this footage. If he tried, complaints from neo-puritans would almost certainly get him banned.
Only Dan Kazer stood by calmly, glancing every few seconds at the watch on his left wrist, his other hand holding the pause switch of his recorder. Flamen turned the cameras on him just in time to catch his look of expectancy as he let the switch go, and almost in the same instant Lyla's eyes jarred open, two deep wells into the remotest regions of her subconscious mind. From her mouth emerged a dreadful loud forced voice, baritone and masculine.
"Ghnothe safton!"
she boomed.
"That's not English," Reedeth snapped at his desketary. "What is it—Hebrew?"
"Classical Greek with a Demotic accent," said the desketary in a faintly patronizing tone; Reedeth had often wanted to get back at the smug bastard who had programmed the linguistic section of their data banks. "It's the motto from the temple of the Delphic oracle and it means 'know thyself.' "
Meantime, her muscular frenzy ended, Lyla had risen to a sitting position without using her hands, eyes still very wide and focused on nothing. She crossed her legs, turned by scuffling with her toes against the mat so that she was facing the audience, and placed her palms together before her face in a sketch for the Indian gesture of
namasthi.
There was a pause. Eventually Ariadne said, speaking directly to Dan in a near-whisper but with her head close enough to a wall pickup for Reedeth to catch the words, "Do we have to ask questions now?"
"You have to with some pythonesses," Dan responded equally softly. "Not with Lyla, though. I told you when you hired her: this girl is very damned good."
Regardless of what she might now say, Reedeth had made his mind up about one thing already. Lyla Clay must be one of the most amazing people in the world, capable of a feat he had never even dreamed of. If what the desketary had said about sibyl-pills was true, she ought not now to be able to even sit up straight. She ought to be in raving delirium.
Tension mounted. The moment before it became unbearable, Lyla said in a high clear voice like a child's, "Mother Superior couldn't be drearier! Life is oppressive and lonely and dun! Little Miss Celia envied Ophelia —Hamlet ignored her and then there was none! Rat-ta-ta-ta, rat-ta-ta-ta, rat-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta. Penny a look, gobbledegook, you can't live the life that you read in a book. Pouncing and bouncing hear what I'm announcing—it's true and you'll never hide from it. You may think you're knowing in coming and going but you can't take the 'come' out of 'comet.' As I was going down the drains I met a man with seven brains. Every brain had seven lives, every life had seven wives, every wife told seven lies, who will win the liars' prize?"
She hesitated. Seizing the chance to take a look at the audience, Reedeth noticed that apart from Dan, who seemed rather pleased, everyone in the room wore a baffled frown.
"As I was—" Lyla resumed, and checked. "No. Back in— No. As I was rolling round the sphere I met a man who isn't here. As I was going down the stair I met a man who's everywhere. Hrr
-hum.
Back in—"
Once more she interrupted herself, and a shadow of worry crossed Dan's face. Her voice grew louder and rather frightened.
"As I was sitting on the floor I met a man who's much much more! As I was lying on my bed I kissed a man who wasn't dead! As I was crying out aloud I met a man who's not allowed! As I was—as I was ..."
Her mouth worked, her hands folded and unfolded in naked terror, and she tried to hop across the soft mat frog-fashion, eyes rolling wildly in search of escape from some unimaginable predicament. Reedeth was half out of his chair. Something must be done about this—the sight of the poor girl's panic was intolerable!
But before he could do anything, Dan had shut off his recorder with an angry gesture, closed the gap between himself and Lyla with a single long stride, and slapped her on both cheeks. As though miraculously called back from a million miles away, she became herself again and looked up at him docilely.
"Was it all right?" she said in her normal voice. "What did I say?"
THIRTY-THREE
FOR FUTURE REFERENCE
At thirteen-seventeen the computer which maintained Flamen's around-the-clock news monitoring service, ever alert for hints of corruption, maladministration, yielding to blackmail pressure or other juicy scandal, logged the announcement that a large group of X Patriots was demonstrating at Kennedy Airport against the by now 95-minute delay suffered by Morton Lenigo on his way through Customs and Immigration. Police were standing by with riot guns, gas and flamethrowers and Flights 1205, 1219 and 1300 were tentatively scheduled for diversion over the Canadian border.
At fourteen-thirty it logged an all stations from the South African Broederbond recommending that Lenigo be shot immediately and Detroit be taken out with a suitably sized nuke as necessary preliminaries to the impeachment of President Gaylord.
THIRTY-FOUR
IT'S OKAY TO BE A RESPONSIBLE MEMBER OF SOCIETY IF ONLY YOU KNOW WHAT YOU'RE GOING TO BE HELD RESPONSIBLE FOR
Fuming, Lionel Prior let himself through the elaborate series of barriers which guarded the entrance to his home. It would have been far better to fall in with Flamen's suggestion and fly to the Ginsberg this afternoon, he told himself, regardless of how angry he had been at that bitter and unjustified gibe about selling out to the Holocosmic directorate. He'd have been spared one of the most embarrassing episodes of his entire life.
Attracted by the noise as he stowed his fighting gear in its rack, his wife Nora appeared on the internal com-web screen in the hallway. By the look of it she was lying out on the patio at the back of the house catching some sun, but after a first curt glance he turned his back to the camera.
"Did you have a good exercise, dear?" she asked in the formally polite tone he had grown used to over the past few years.
"A good exercise?" Prior repeated, his voice shrill. "No, it was a stinking awful exercise!"
Her manner changing on the instant, Nora said, "Well, you needn't take out your bad temper on
me!"
"Might as well give you a foretaste of what's coming,"
Prior snapped back. "We're due for the pariah treatment for the next few weeks, I can assure you of that Those
nice
neighbors of ours!"
"What on earth do you mean?"
"Let me get a drink." He slung the last of his gear on its peg and headed for the living-zone; she switched cameras to follow him, looking alarmed.
"It went like this," he resumed when he had swigged the first gulp of a strong vodka rickey. "And all because I treat my citidef responsibilities seriously compared to some people I could name! You take the knee-blank part today, Phil Gasby says when I show up— you're good, he says, you'll sharpen our wits a bit. So I said all right. If he put it like that how could I refuse with them all staring at me? And then he pulled the drop on me. There's a man from ISM waiting at the junction of Green and Willow, he says. Captain Lorimer. He'll give you your attack program."
Savagely he poured the rest of his drink down his throat.
"I don't understand," Nora said after a pause.
"Don't you? Do you know where you are right now on the analog screen? Buried under a pile of smoking nibble, that's where! Phil's defense plan that he's been boasting about so long collapsed like a pricked balloon! I had to take him out three minutes after the start. I mean
had
to. I stalled as long as I could but the idiot was right there in plain sight and nobody, blank or kneeblank, could have failed to realize he was in charge the way he was shouting and waving. So then Tom Mesner took over and made a stand on the line of Willow Road, and Lorimer told me to go in by way of Orange and that was that. Sixty-eight percent casualties in under an hour and twenty-two houses afire including ours. So then he canceled the exercise and called everyone together and told us off like—like naughty children! Tom and Phil deserved what they got, of course, because lives are at stake in a thing like this and there's no excuse for carelessness. But you know who's going to be blamed for them being scolded in public? I am, that's who!"
"But I thought we had a good ISM rating here," Nora said. "That was one of the reasons we decided to move into this district!"
"I don't know whether they had a good rating before that bastard Phil Gasby took charge," Prior grunted. "But we certainly don't have one now. Listen!" He tugged a folded paper from his pocket and spread it out "Internal Security Maintenance, exercise report number blah, district citizens' defense group number blah-blah ... Ah, here we are. Rating for Lionel Prior Class Four, rating for group as a whole Class Six,
not
adjudged competent to maintain order in assigned zone in event of civil disturbance. Remarks: the group—no, I won't read that out. It's downright libellous!"
"At least you got a better rating than the group average," Nora ventured.
"Class Four? It's ridiculous! If I hadn't tried to do Phil a favor I'd have got at least a Class Two, but Lorimer bawled me out too for not shooting him as soon as I got the chance. Think I'm going to get any credit for that, though? Not in a million years!"
He threw himself into an inflatable chair and scowled at the big picture-window. Currently if was set for a broad arid stretch of veldt with a herd of antelope browsing in the distance.
"Has Phil got picture-windows?" he concluded ferociously. "The hell he has! Those poor kids of his could be cut to mincemeat by shards of flying glass!"
There was a moment of silence. Then Nora said in the self-righteous tone of someone winning an argument through a careless admission by the person on the other side, "And you spent a hundred and fifty thousand on that Lar of yours?"
For an instant Prior was on the verge of exploding. But instead he gave a sigh. "Okay, I was conned. Every damned thing that could possibly go wrong today
has
gone wrong. If you bothered to watch Matthew's show—"
"I started out to, but the picture went fuzzy and I had to switch to something else," Nora said.
"That's exactly it. That's what I've been trying to get him to show some reaction about! But he doesn't seem to care any more! Know what the idiot did? He practically came out with the accusation that Holocosmic is trying to get rid of him, and when I tried to pick the pieces up by suggesting we call in an unquestionable expert to study the problem he blew all bis fuses and said I was selling out! Damn it, of course we're being sabotaged, but that's not something you say in range of a bug without having the evidence lined up! If this is what having a Lar leads to, I'm going to tell them right now what I think of their service!"
He drained his glass and marched over to the comweb. Nora disappeared, plainly not caring to continue the conversation after having won her point. Prior scowled at the blanked screen where her face had been a moment ago.
If only he could get her into an asylum—or any place out of earshot...!
Reaching for the board to punch the code for Lares & Penates Inc., he checked. There was a flag up over the message slot. He jabbed his hand in to retrieve the fax paper, and read it with dismay.
Eugene Voigt of the PCC needing to get in touch as soon as possible. That old fool! But right now his situation was too precarious to risk offending anyone who might later be of use. Sighing, he put through that call first.
Waiting for an answer, he looked around at the handsome expensive home he had worked for years to achieve: splendidly furnished, with real hand-painted pictures on the walls, hand-woven rugs on the floor protected by an invisible film of plastic against the scuffing of children's feet, antique ornaments thirty, forty, even fifty years old ...
"Doesn't Matthew realize what I stand to lose if he throws his contract away?" he said to the unheeding air.