The Jagged Orbit Page 10

  “Such as …?”

  Her pretty face soured like cream when you add lemon-juice. “You’re not a kid, Mr. Flamen. How the hell do you think someone learns to identify with the maximum number of other people? You do what they do! You starve with them, you sleep with them, you eat and drink with them, you let them do to you what they want to do, and you don’t pass judgment. But I don’t imagine that’s a point of view you’d appreciate.”

  “Why not?”

  “Sorry. Didn’t mean to be offensive. But as I understand it … Hell! I admit, I never watch your show. We didn’t even have a vuset in the apt until yesterday when one of Dan’s friends gave us his old one. But you’re a spoolpigeon, and don’t spoolpigeons make their living by pointing shocked fingers at people so the narrow-minded self-righteous prurient mass audience can pretend they’re horrified?”

  “Yes, I do pass judgments,” Flamen said after a pause. “But I like to think, at least, my victims deserve what they get. Liars, cheats, stuffed shirts, small-minded power-hungry empire-builders … I can’t stand hypocrites. I doubt if you can.”

  “I hope that’s true,” she said. “I’d like to like you. I always want to like people.”

  “And I like to be liked. Trouble is, in my line of business, no matter how carefully I choose my targets the bystanders are apt to catch the shrapnel, and it makes everyone kind of—ah—diffident. …” Flamen leaned forward and peered at the handsome development of well-spaced modern houses they were flying over. “We’re almost there. Just another minute till we land.”

  FORTY-ONE

  I SPEAK WITH THE TONGUES OF MEN AND OF ANGELS AND HAVE NOT CHARITY

  Boomed the radio evangelist* at the top of his lungs over the British “pirate” station in 1966:

  “You know the streets in your neighborhood you wouldn’t dare to walk down alone after dark! You know the streets you wouldn’t want your kids to walk along on their way home from school!”

  “What in the world is he going on about?” said his audience, and switched off.

  *He was an American.

  FORTY-TWO

  PERIHELION

  “I like you much better in the summer phase of your orbit,” Reedeth said, stroking Ariadne’s hair. In reply she sank her teeth into the fleshy part of his upper arm, and he jerked away with a cry.

  “You’re always so smug when you’ve worked your tensions off on me!” she snapped. “There’s no need to think I’m completely defenseless, though—even now!”

  Reedeth sighed, rubbing the horseshoe shapes left by her bite. She sat up and swung her feet over the edge of the consultation couch; it wasn’t as luxurious as a bed, but it had done well enough.

  “Are you sure that thing is shut off?” she asked for the fifth or sixth time, nodding at the desketary.

  “Yes, yes and yes,” Reedeth muttered. “I told you: when Harry fixed it he set it up differently from the regular way. We’ve got to get that man out of this stifling environment! He’s got talents which … Ah, never mind. I wanted to go on talking about you. Can’t you think of anything except defending yourself?”

  “It’s not rational to enjoy being vulnerable!”

  “No more is it rational to operate on the paranoid assumption that everyone else is out to do you damage. And what else are you doing when you get through to a patient’s basic traumas but taking advantage of his vulnerability?”

  “Logic-chopping,” Ariadne said ill-temperedly. “You have to make an incision before you repair a hernia, don’t you, or a perforated ulcer? But you don’t go around with your skin hanging open in great gaping wounds on the off-chance that someone may need to get at your internal organs!”

  “No more do you go around wearing clanking armorplate. Though I grant you some people treat their clothes like armor and give you the impression they’re always on the watch for bows and blowpipes. But what’s the archetype of the perfectly defended man? It’s the catatonic.”

  “That sounds like one of Conroy’s arguments.”

  “Applause!” Reedeth said mockingly. “It is indeed. I’ve always thought it was a striking point and I still do. But tell me this—no, hold it.” He raised a hand to forestall her interruption. “Seriously, Ariadne: what made you all of a sudden cave in like you did? Do you know? You’re always talking about proper detachment from one’s own emotions, and I concede it is good not to be at their mercy. You’ve blown your safety-valve, and it was marvelous, and I wish I could tell you just how good it was … but now, what do you think made it happen? I’m playing fair. I think I know how I worked it, and I’m giving you the chance to figure out the same thing so that if you want to you can guard against a repetition.”

  She plucked thoughtfully at her lower lip; realizing what she was doing, she snatched her hand away angrily.

  “I … Well, I suppose it was your confidence. I was in a rather confused state, and faced with your absolute certainty the idea of arguing with you on top of everything else I was having to cope with—it was simply too much.”

  “Yes, that was my conclusion. Now here’s something else I want to know.” Reedeth sat forward, his arms around his knees. “What made you feel the session with the pythoness had gone wrong? I thought it was a remarkable success for a trial run, and ought to be repeated as soon as possible.”

  “It wasn’t supposed to end the way it did, with her mackero slapping her face. It was meant to last about half an hour. And I was terrified for a moment. You know about the drug these girls use to go into trance?”

  “Yes, the sibyl-pills. I asked my desketary. That girl must have a fantastic metabolism to recover with nothing worse than a temper-tantrum. But apparently it’s a well-documented phenomenon. There’s quite a lot about it in the literature. Didn’t you check up beforehand?”

  “Of course I did! But—” Ariadne bit her lip. “It’s one thing to be told about it, though, and another to see it happening. That must have shaken me as much as anything, and when Flamen complained about his wife’s condition I didn’t exactly give him a civil answer, and then he came out with his threat to take her away. I could just picture Mogshack bawling me out for that, too. And you caught me at that precise moment, when I was wide open. As you very well knew, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. But I’m not going to apologize.”

  “I didn’t expect you to.” Rising with a shake of her head, she reached for her clothes and began to put them on.

  FORTY-THREE

  A REMARKABLE INSTANCE ON THE PUBLIC SCALE OF THE REAL-LIFE IMPLEMENTATION OF XAVIER CONROY’S DICTUM ABOUT THE PERFECTLY DEFENDED MAN

  Following Paraguay’s declaration of independence from Spain Dr. Francia, the dictator known as “El Supremo,” adopted a simple foreign policy: no one was permitted to enter or leave the country and trade was absolutely forbidden.

  FORTY-FOUR

  A FIRM DECISION TO GO INTO THE WAGON-FIXING BUSINESS IN A BIG WAY

  “Oh, so that’s your wife!” Lyla exclaimed, her yash trailing on the floor behind her as she crossed Flamen’s living-zone towards the place of honor where a looped-tape cut of Celia endlessly re-cycled. “I recognize her now. It’s an awful shame—she’s lovely!”

  “Thank you,” Flamen muttered. “Not quite as sweet-tempered as you might think to look at her, I’m afraid … but of course most of that must have been due to her condition. Never mind. Sit down. Dial a drink, whatever you like.”

  He had brought the tape-reels from the cameras he kept in the skimmer; slipping them into the playing sockets, he waited for the faint whine that indicated the mechanism had brought them into synch.

  “The stuff’s in real-time order, of course,” he warned. “I’ll skip the beginning and spin forward to the place where you started to prophesy. I—”

  The comweb buzzed.

  “Damnation! I’m not in!” he snapped at the automatics.

  “Able Baker override!” Prior’s voice countered, and the screen lit to show his face. He was about to say something
else when he realized that Flamen wasn’t alone. His jaw dropped.

  “Matthew, have you gone crazy today? It could have been one of the Holocosmic directorate calling, or anyone else with the Able Baker rating for your phone. And you’re married, damn it—to my sister!”

  “Like all neo-puritans you have a mind like an open drain,” Flamen said wearily. “But since you are piped in, you might as well stay tuned. This is Lyla Clay, the pythoness. She was performing at the Ginsberg and I taped her trance. We’re just going to play it over and see if I can use some of it on the show tomorrow.”

  Prior looked instantly alarmed. “Medical ethics?”

  “You a registered medical practitioner?” Flamen shot at Lyla. She gave a dumb headshake. “Good. No problem there then. And I have clearances recorded from all the patients and authorization from the staff. Stop worrying. But while I have you here there are two or three things I want to say. First off I owe you an apology for this morning. I didn’t see what you were driving at. I should have known better than to blast off the way I did.”

  Instead of being mollified, Prior looked even more disturbed. “Ah—do you think we should discuss private matters with …?”

  “With a stranger listening? Lionel, I watched Miss Clay work this afternoon. I tell you straight, there aren’t any secrets when this girl’s around. And anyhow I don’t care. I’ve been making my living for years by dragging skeletons out of people’s closets—it’d be hypocritical for me to try and pretend I haven’t any of my own. So I’m sorry about what I said this morning. All right?”

  “That’s mainly what I called up about. I’ve picked up the pieces for you.” A trace of smugness appeared in Prior’s expression. “But that I’m not going to talk about in public, if you don’t mind.”

  “Look, if I’m in the way—” Lyla said, anxiously getting to her feet.

  “You stay right where you are,” Flamen said. “I want to talk about the Ginsberg for a moment. Lionel, do you know anything about Mogshack’s methods, or have you always taken his reputation on trust like that Lar of yours?”

  Prior flushed beet-red. “Matthew, if you’re going to descend to cheap cracks like that—!”

  “Lionel, I want to know. I saw Celia this afternoon and she’s being turned into a vegetable. Have you any idea what they do to people in there?”

  “Yes, of course I do. I checked up very thoroughly, and so should you have, apparently. Mogshack treats his patients in accordance with the most advanced modern therapeutic techniques. For each patient he draws up a specially computed personality profile, and then the computers design a normative curve towards which the aberrant behavior is gently directed by various methods such as—well, I’m a layman in this area, naturally, but I guess they use drugs and …” He made an all-embracing gesture. “Anyway, they try to help the patients become self-reliant again.”

  “It sounds more as though they sew a straitjacket and trim the poor devils to fit,” Lyla said, and clapped her hand to her mouth. “Oh! Sorry—I didn’t mean to butt in.”

  Flamen gave her a musing look. “Yes, the more I think about it the more I think you’re right. Lionel, how soon can I get Celia out?”

  “At the end of the month, of course, when the contract comes up for renewal. Unless you have a quarter-million tealeaves to throw away like it says in the penalty clause.”

  “But is there anything to stop me having her case independently comped?”

  “Right now there’s practically nothing you can’t have comped,” Prior said, and Flamen realized belatedly that he was almost bursting to pass on his news.

  “Out with it!” he rapped. “I’ll vouch for Miss Clay.”

  “Well … Oh, okay. How does free Federal computer time suit you?” He leaned back grinning plumply at the expression on Flamen’s face.

  “Are you serious?”

  “Sure. There are strings, but I’ll tell you about them later. The deal’s worth it, though.”

  “Christ, it’s bound to be! How much?”

  “Whatever we need to fix the sabotage problem. Plus. No limit.”

  “In that case,” Flamen said with enormous satisfaction, “the sabotage isn’t the only thing I’m going to fix. There’s also a certain little red wagon.”

  FORTY-FIVE

  THE SOUND OF A CODE BEING BROKEN IS USUALLY THE SAME AS THAT OF SOMEBODY SNAPPING HIS FINGERS

  “And this thing her mackero talked about,” Ariadne said. “An echo-trap.” She shivered. “He seemed to mean that the mind could get stuck on one subject over and over, like a loop of tape. … Jim, you did make sense out of what she said, didn’t you?”

  “So did you, without choosing to admit the fact. It wasn’t only seeing her get up when she shouldn’t have been able to move which jolted you off base. It started earlier, when she warned you that you can’t take the ‘come’ out of ‘comet.’ That’s a classically exact diagnosis of your trouble. You’re a highly-sexed woman, and you can’t abolish that fact simply by trying to fly a cometary orbit and spending most of your life a long way from the sun.”

  “Sun!” Ariadne gave a harsh laugh. “I’d hate to have you as the light of my life!”

  Unperturbed, Reedeth continued, “Sun S-U-N—son S-O-N—a second-order pun: you’re trying to deny a strong maternal instinct which is going to cause trouble unless you—”

  “Oh, this is a puerile parlor-game!”

  “Sorry.” He looked at her steadily. “Are you questioning a computer analysis of your own file?”

  “You had the gall to pry into my personal file?”

  “Of course not. But as soon as she’d finished prophesying I asked my desketary for the closest match to each of the sections of her oracle, and it named you right away. The others—No, come to think of it, you should he able to spot at least one of the other two. I’d always been told that pythonesses talked in riddles, but I guessed two of her subjects before the computers confirmed them.”

  “I’d better sit down,” Ariadne muttered, and moved to a chair. Swallowing hard, she resumed, “Well, I suppose one of them was Celia Prior Flamen?”

  “Naturally. Mother Superior—Prioress.”

  “But there’s nothing remarkable about that. Flamen’s a public figure, and though I don’t suppose he exactly advertises his wife’s presence here it can’t have been hard to learn of it.”

  “And ensure that she was in the audience? She only went to green this morning.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “I’m not arguing,” Reedeth cut in. “I’m just saying the oracle is a good capsule diagnosis. She resents her husband’s devotion to his career, doesn’t she?”

  “Hmmm … Yes, I see: ‘Hamlet ignored her,’ meaning her husband always in the center of the stage. It fits, I grant you that. How did the rest of it go—something about envying Ophelia?”

  “Precisely. Not to mention ‘and then there was nun’—religious recluse-type nun. ‘Get thee to a nunnery, go!’ She’s in retreat; we even have to call the cells retreats here, thanks to Mogshack’s mealy-mouthedness. So in essence what the pythoness said, and what the computers seem to have confirmed, is that she should never have been brought here in the first place because shutting her up enables her to feed on a diet of self-pity. Does that make you feel any happier about Flamen’s threat to take her away?”

  “Well, obviously if the computers say she’d be better off outside … But how could sending her back to her husband help? It was his company she couldn’t stand in the first place.”

  “So look for an alternative. I don’t know what she needs, but it’s bound to be something which can engage her most violent emotions. You can’t escape self-generated tensions by withdrawing from external stress. In a case like hers you need the outside pressures as a source of distraction.”

  “I’ll check it out,” Ariadne muttered. “But taking the word of a pythoness … What’s Mogshack going to say?”

  “He’s going to mourn the loss of a patient. He alway
s does. But you’re not taking her word unsupported. He can hardly question the judgment of his beloved computers. All Lyla Clay has done is direct our attention to places we hadn’t looked before. It was a terrific idea of yours, you know. Perhaps there ought to be staff pythonesses in mental hospitals.”

  She gave a wan smile. “Who was the third subject?” she said after a pause. “I can’t figure it out.”

  “To be candid I don’t think I’d have guessed either. Though he was on my mind, because he’s always oh my mind. Harry Madison.”

  “What? I think you’d better play over the recording for me. I don’t see, that at all.”

  Reedeth instructed the desketary to comply, and when they had once more finished listening to the high clear voice of Lyla as it peaked towards an inexplicable climax of terror, Ariadne shook her head in bafflement.

  “Liar’s prize! A man who isn’t dead! What conceivable connection could that have with Harry?”

  “I asked, and that’s what I was told.” Reedeth drew a deep breath. “The only conclusion I can come to is that—well, perhaps he’s told the computers more than he’s told us.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Look, everyone knows Harry Madison has been fit for discharge for months, but he’s trapped in here by a legalistic snarl-up. He can’t be discharged in his guardian’s care as the law demands because the Army doesn’t want to know about him. I can’t discharge him in my own care because it’s not legal—my current license is for hospital practice only. And he’s the only knee in the place, which means he’s avoided by most of the other patients. It’s small wonder, isn’t it, that spending all day with his machines he’s taken to making them his confidants?”