The Sheep Look Up (20 page)

All the time, though: this feeling that the world was
bound
to go to hell! Okay, so it’s true these mothers have turned prairies into dustbowls and used the sea for a giant sewer and laid concrete where there used to be forests. So stop them! Don’t just let them walk over you, crush you face-down into the dirt!

Crush them first!

That strange cold Peg: she must, he concluded, be queer, because she didn’t—not only not with him, not with anybody. (Not even with Felice whom he’d naturally assumed to be her girl, who did, though also not with him. Shit!) Yet she seemed somehow happy.

Found something here. What? Resignation? Could a former crusading reporter and campaigner for Women’s Lib be satisfied with such a drab existence?

Well, the fact stood. Even though Felice had left after a week or so, uttering some kind of weird apology to everyone and saying she’d had a fantastic vacation—hell,
vacation,
in a place where work literally never stopped!—Peg had stayed, and seemed content, inasmuch as you could figure out what she was thinking behind that lovely but stone-cold face ...

If he’d been asked before he came here, “Are you a Trainite?”, Hugh would have answered that he was without hesitation, on the strength of having taken part in Trainite demonstrations at college. Recruiters for the big corporations came around all the time nowadays, not just in spring and summer, because the number of students taking up science and engineering had fallen by around 60 per cent and those taking business management by 30 per cent and those who couldn’t get into something constructive like agriculture or forestry (which generally meant emigrating, of course) preferred to drop out. So these frantic recruiters were a nuisance and now and then one of them gave particular offense and it was necessary to dump him in a dirty river or strip him and paint the skull and crossbones on his belly.

The people here, though, weren’t in the least like the Trainites he’d known outside. And obviously this was more what Austin Train himself had had in mind. This cat Jones had been a personal friend of Train’s, and he’d had the guy to stay several times before he vanished. (He wasn’t dead; Hugh had learned that much for certain. Nobody, though, would admit to knowing where he was.)

He struggled and struggled to make sense of what was going on around him, and bits of it fitted fine. Only whenever he thought he had the pattern straight in his head, something turned up which completely screwed him.

The simple life bit, the natural foods—so far, so good. Also the clothing woven from natural fibers which would rot: cotton, linen, wool. Fine. The composting of vegetable peelings and such, the sorting and cleaning of the inescapable cans, the return of plastics to the nearest reclamation company, which called for a once-monthly trip by the communal jeep. Great. But if it was the simple life they were after, how come they used electricity? It was all very well to say it was clean power and could be generated from waterfalls and tides. The fact stood: it hadn’t been. And their insistence that tomorrow it would have to be and (here it came again, the same dirty argument) they were rehearsing for tomorrow, devising a viable life-style by trial and error—that didn’t convince him. Sixty-some people in this wat, and this the largest out of only about four or five hundred in the whole of the States and Canada: how many of the human race were going to learn about this life-style before the crunch came? Every day in the news some fresh warning sign!

Of course it was as well they did have electricity, or his car would still be stranded where Peg and Felice had found him. Instead they’d brought the batteries in and recharged them, and now it was here and any time he wanted to get the hell out, he could. He was becoming daily more tempted. The whole scene here struck him as play-acting.

They listened to radio news a lot and talked a lot about things he was sure they didn’t properly understand, like the Honduras war and the starvation in Europe since the Med stagnated. And didn’t give. Somehow. Even the kids. There was this Rick in particular that made his skin crawl, Zena’s adopted son (and formerly Decimus’s; the cat being dead you’d think they might stop talking about him, but they never seemed to, especially Rick who claimed that when he grew up he was going to find the person who’d poisoned his dad. Christ!)—this Rick, anyway, kept hanging around him all day maybe because other people were busy, and asking crazy questions he couldn’t answer, like why isn’t the sun always square overhead when it’s noon on the clock and if you can’t tell me what book do I look in for the answer, huh? He wanted to be an astronomer when he grew up, he said. Fat chance. They were closing down observatories all over.

What the hell did all this have to do with being a Trainite? Out there those stinking bastards raping and murdering and poisoning ... Christ. Where’s a pistol? Where’s a bomb?

He tried to read Austin Train’s works. They had a complete set. It was dull.

The only person he met during his stay at the wat whom he took to was an outsider, laid off from the Bamberley hydroponics plant: a light-colored cat about his own age, named Carl Travers. He had a vague feeling he might have seen the guy before, but he wasn’t sure.

Carl looked in pretty frequently, and talked friendly, but didn’t show any inclination to stay—wouldn’t have come so often but for being out of work. He had good khat, which right now Hugh didn’t dig too well because it intensified his feeling of having too much energy all pent up inside and no way to let it out, and also pot. So now and then they went out together for a smoke. It had to be out. The Trainites didn’t approve.

“You got family?” Hugh said one day when they were pretty high, parked in Carl’s second-hand Ford on a curving mountain road watching the sun sink red toward the haze along the coast.

“Like brothers and sisters,” Carl said.

“Older, younger?”

“Younger except Jeannie. I don’t see her too often. She married into the fuzz. This cat who got made like a hero in the avalanche.”

“Ah-hah?”

Time passed. Impossible to tell how long. It was the high.

“You?”

“No.” Don’t count the Bamberley gang as family. Never mentioned that bunch of creeps to Carl.

“That why you’re at the wat?”

“Hell,
I
don’t know why I’m at the wat.”

“You don’t like it?”

“Nope. You live with your folks?”

“Shit, no. Furnished room, other side of town from them. Self-supporting, me. Working man. I mean, I was.”

More silence. To roll another joint.

“Thinking of moving away. Wait till hell freezes over before they reopen the plant. Never liked the work anyhow.”

“Where to?”

“Maybe Berkeley.”

“Ah, shit, California you don’t see the sun one year’s end to the next! Whole state stinks!”

“Maybe so, but they gon’ have that big quake one day soon, and I’d kinda like to be on hand and laugh ... Got friends in Berkeley,” though. Was in college a year.”

“Me too.”

“Dropped out?”

“Dropped out.”

More silence. To burn up the joint.

“Make the scene together?”

“Yeah.”

“Man, I’m
high.
Want to screw?”

“Yeah.”

BEFORE WE ARE SO RUDELY INTERRUPTED

“I have an appointment with Mr. Bamberley,” Michael said, and glanced at the wall clock. “I see I’m a few minutes early, though.”

“Oh, you must be Captain Advowson!” the girl at the reception desk said brightly—but not very clearly; there was something in her mouth and her voice was hoarse. On the corner of her desk, an open package of throat pastilles. They scented the vicinity strongly with menthol. “Do sit down and I’ll tell Mr. Bamberley you’re here. Would you like me to take your filtermask?”

“Thank you.” He undid the strap and gave it to her, and she added it to a rack where there were already eight or ten dangling.

Moving to a chair on the other side of this spacious ante-room, he glanced back at her, and she noticed and smiled, thinking it was because she was pretty. In fact it was because she reminded him of the nurse from Noshri—the same shade of fair hair, the same general cast of features. Though much plumper and lacking the dark undereye pouches that marred Lucy Ramage’s good looks.

He’d seen her twice again since their meeting on the plane, once in the flesh at the UN building and once late at night on TV, on a talk show run by a woman called Petronella Page. She’d sat dead still, impervious to even the most subtly vicious verbal jabs, and recited a low-voiced account of incredible suffering which the commère had tried to interrupt, and tried again, and each time failed. Cold as falling snow, settling ultimately into a dead weight of horror, huge, massive, stifling, the words followed one another until when they turned the cameras on the audience they weren’t quite quick enough to avoid the sight of a girl in the second row fainting and falling from her chair.

When she started on accusations of deliberate genocide they brought the next commercials in early.

Who the hell
had
poisoned that relief food? Someone out to discredit Western aid programs must have got at the affected consignment, opened the cartons, sprayed the contents, resealed them. Even though Duval insisted that this was inconsistent with the uniform distribution of the drug throughout the interior of the pieces he’d examined ...

How much longer was that damned inquiry going to drag on? He wanted more than anything to go home, but he was under orders to remain until the distinguished international jurists now sifting the evidence issued their final report. If he survived that long.

Gingerly he touched a bruise at the corner of his jaw. About a week ago he’d been to a party, six blocks from his hotel, and he’d been incautious enough to walk home after midnight. Someone had jumped him with a blackjack. Luckily the bruise was the worst effect.

Also he’d developed conjunctivitis two days after his arrival, and as a result was still wearing a piratical black patch over his left eye. Then he’d been warned to get rid of his beard, because the police didn’t like them, and a minor shaving cut—on the side opposite his bruise—had become infected, and he’d been assured it was because he’d been stupid enough to shave with regular tap-water. No one he’d met at the UN used anything but an electric shaver, and in fact the drugstore clerk from whom he’d bought his razor and shaving cream had looked puzzled and tried to insist on his buying a bactericidal after-shave lotion as well. But he’d thought the man was just trying to squeeze out a drop of extra profit.

Now the cut had festered into a miniature boil, with an ugly white head on it. It was protected by a bandaid, but sooner or later he feared it would have to be lanced.

Incredible. But he’d been told repeatedly that every stranger to New York suffered the same way. The natives, of course, were resistant, but anyone from more than say a hundred miles distant lacked the immunities the residents had acquired.

And even the residents weren’t too happy... At one of the many parties around the diplomatic circuit which he’d been obliged to attend he’d met a girl in her middle twenties, pretty with dark hair and a good figure, very drunk although the party had only been under way for an hour. She was looking for an ear to bend, and out of politeness—or perhaps boredom—Michael lent her his. She was working at the UN as a secretary, because, she said, she’d wanted to do something to improve the world. And found it simply wasn’t possible. She claimed that she’d hoped to marry a man she knew from college, who turned her down when he learned she wanted to work for those stinking commie-front bastards; that he was so far from unique that she’d lost friend after friend until now her only social life was on this level, these endless formal cocktail parties where people of a dozen different nationalities misunderstood one another at the tops of their voices.

“But we’re all stuck on this same ball of mud, aren’t we?” He heard her voice again in memory, nearly breaking into a sob. “And the only people who seem to care are the wrong ones, I mean the ones you’re not supposed to be friends with. I met this Uruguayan the other day, Fernando Arri—something, I forget. But did you hear what happened to him?”

Michael shook his head.

“He was going home to the place where all the Uruguayans live—they’re not allowed off Manhattan, you know, and they have to live in this block near the UN Plaza—and it was raining, and four men who’d been pretending to shelter under an awning jumped him. Kicked him in the balls and knocked out four of his teeth.”

“Good lord,” Michael said. “Did the police—?”

“Police!” A hard brittle laugh, like a scream. “They were the police! They found the sole-marks of a police boot on his face!”

At which point she sobered, almost like magic, because it was time for the party to break up, and said, “Thank you for listening to my drunken babbling. Unless I get someone to take me seriously now and then I think it must really all be a dream. Can I buy you dinner? You deserve it.”

And, when he hesitated, she added, “I know a marvelous restaurant where they still have real food.”

Which was the bait he couldn’t resist. Everything he’d eaten here tasted to him of plastic and chewed paper.

Over the meal—which was good, despite his astonished discovery that what he thought of as everyday basics at home, such as ham and herring, appeared here in the “gourmet” section of the menu and were charged extra—she talked calmly and reasonably of fearful things. About her elder sister who had borne two children in New York, and they were both sub-normal: not moronic, just slow, the older beginning to read at last after his ninth birthday; about flowers she had tried to grow in a window-box at her apartment, that wilted and dropped their leaves after a week; about the cost of hospitalization insurance; about the panhandler she had found wheezing against a wall, begging a quarter for oxygen; about the rain that melted stockings and panty-hose into holes. Michael had experienced New York rain. It had ruined one of his uniforms. But at least he was able to revert to mufti now.

And then, when he escorted her home—by taxi, of course—she said on the threshold, “I’d like to ask you up and make love. But it’ll have to be next time. I have another week to go before it’s safe.”