The Jagged Orbit Read online

  However, his personality profiles, though stable, had continued to deviate from the predetermined optimum for a man of his background, race and abilities, and moreover a stern directive from the Bureau of State and Federal Relations decreed that no kneeblank patient should ever be released with the least shadow of doubt still hovering over his case. News of such an action, blown up by some skilled propagandist such as Pedro Diablo, could far too easily be turned into a legitimate casus insurrectionis and bring down black wrath on all their heads.

  Yet it seemed damnably unjust to Reedeth that Madison should be cooped up indefinitely for what amounted to no more than eccentricity. …

  He grew aware that Madison had made a formal reference to the desketary being in a mechanical double bind and asked permission to fix it. Belatedly he nodded, and Madison wheeled in the obese reparobot on its eight soft wheels and deftly connected its terminals to the faulty appliance.

  Watching, Reedeth wondered what the directorate of IBM would say if they knew their expensive, elaborate installation for the Ginsberg Hospital was being serviced by one of the inmates.

  He let some time pass in silence, not being in the mood for casual chat, but eventually he forced himself to speak at random. It couldn’t be very pleasant for Madison to be the only knee in the entire hospital; he deserved to be talked to whenever the chance arose.

  “Ah—Harry!” Reedeth picked on the only subject he could call to mind. “That damned machine you’re fixing: know why it quit on me?”

  “Well, you gave it something it couldn’t handle, I guess.” Madison didn’t look up from his work.

  Reedeth snorted. “I was describing Dr. Spoelstra to it, and some damned censor-circuit must have cut in. It’s ridiculous!” He heard his tone growing heated and was unable to prevent it. “Who’s supposed to be in charge around here, me or some arrogant computer with a load of its designer’s prejudices built in? I mean, I hadn’t said anything more—more detailed about Dr. Spoelstra than you could see by just looking at her!”

  He caught himself, gave an embarrassed grin, and turned back to the window. Did Madison ever talk about his therapists with the other patients? It wasn’t likely, in view of the high-order segregation Mogshack insisted on: not only racial, religious, sexual and all the other commonplace social boundaries, but also categories of mental disorder formed dividing lines within the hospital.

  If he did, though, so what? He’d only be discussing a shared area of experience. Even if it constituted an invasion of privacy—a view which on the intellectual level Reedeth would have been prepared to contest after his third or fourth drink—the staff members were necessarily of object status to the patients, part of the environment like furniture and lamp-posts.

  Another minute or two passed, he grumpily gazing out of the window, Madison occupied with supervising the reparobot. Finally there was a discreet cough, and Reedeth turned to find the kneeblank standing by the door awaiting re-admission to the corridor beyond. The automatics permitted staff members to leave an office without waiting for the assigned occupant’s authority-something Reedeth had frequently found a nuisance when Ariadne Spoelstra chose to cut short one of their all too frequent arguments—but an inmate had to be let out, to prevent him running away from therapy.

  Sighing, Reedeth gave the necessary order; the door slid aside, and man and machine departed.

  Abruptly yielding to an impulse that was likely to involve him in arguments not just with Ariadne but with Mogshack himself, he said to the now functioning desketary, “Damn it, I hadn’t finished telling you about Dr. Spoelstra when you went on the blink! Now you just sit there and listen, hear?”

  Without allowing time for a response, he categorized those other anatomical attributes of his colleague which he so violently craved and so seldom enjoyed as he would have wished, until at last he ran out of breath in a welter of crude Anglo-Saxon terminology. At the back of his mind was the vague idea that he could make the red light flash again, and armed with this incontrovertible evidence he could make a formal complaint to Mogshack about the inability of the automatics to cope with the regular language of an abreactive therapy session.

  But the lamp remained dark. Hie desketary merely said in its ordinary voice, “Very good, doctor. I have stored those data. Are they for general release to the staff or to yourself only?”

  “Myself only!” Heavens, if Mogshack were to take it into his head to review Ariadne’s file and found that outburst on it duly credited “authority of Dr. Reedeth” …!

  But how come the machine had accepted the unashamed obscenity of what he had just said, whereas before it had broken down under what was actually no more than a bunch of compliments? He felt sweat prickle on forehead, nape and palms. The reparobot couldn’t have intervened; it was strictly programmed to restore the authorized status quo. So it could only have been …

  Excitement gripped him. He sat down hastily behind the desketary and set about establishing whether that was the only improvement Madison had carried out.

  It wasn’t.

  Twenty minutes later, tugging at his beard in a repeated gesture of impotent anger, he came to grips at last with the suspicion that had been haunting him for months.

  It’s a monstrous injustice, keeping Harry Madison here. It isn’t that he’s crazy. Maybe he never has been crazy. We just don’t understand the peculiar way in which he is sane.

  TEN

  THE BLACKER THE BURY THE NEATER THE RUSE

  Waiting for clearance at the frontier, Fredrick Campbell held his briefcase—symbol of official status—before him like a ridiculous cardboard shield. The hands which gripped it were slippery with sweat. Overflights were not in the city-federal contract here; he had had to ground his skimmer a hundred meters back along the decaying concrete of the ancient freeway and walk to the point where he now stood among a kind of mushroom-forest of lidded concrete tubs. From slits around their rims dark suspicious eyes focused on him, and he knew that invisible hands were poised to let loose a landslide of destruction on him if he made one unprogrammed move.

  Looking straight ahead, he contrived to shift his eyes enough to determine that one of the Gottschalks had been here since his last visit—and a senior polly at that, perhaps one of the really top-level reps like Bapuji or even Olayinka. No monosyllabic would be entitled to dispose of the kind of equipment which betrayed itself to his trained scrutiny. But weaponry analysis wasn’t in his official brief; Bustafedrel was careful to maintain the traditional fiction that armaments were irrelevant to their negotiations with municipal co-contractors. Doubtless, of course, during the next few days someone from ISM would drop by—casually—and raise the matter while chatting to him,but he wasn’t expected to bring back detailed information.

  He was profoundly grateful. He felt horribly naked out here. He felt, in a word, flayed. Which was exactly the effect Mayor Black must have wanted to produce. This whole transaction could far more easily and quickly have been conducted by comweb, but then it would have denied him the opportunity to gloat.

  Lonely, perspiring in the cruel summer sunlight, he found his eyes settling once more on the signs adjacent to the main guardpost. They said: blackbury, formerly brownbury.

  One of them also said (but this was not part of the original wording, only a scrawled addition in hard-gloss paint): Honky dont let the sun shin on you head it make you an easy target.

  ELEVEN

  HOW NOT TO GET PLACES IN A HURRY

  “Talk about a Red Queen’s Race,” Matthew Flamen said moodily, dialing a drink from the liquor console in his compulsorily well-appointed office deep in the Etchmark Undertower.

  “What?” The round face of Lionel Prior, which had appeared one moment earlier in the lifesize comweb screen, stared at him blankly. Prior was Flamen’s manager, agent, chief confidant and universal dogsbody. He was also his brother-in-law, but that was the least important part of their relationship.

  “Lewis Carroll,” Flamen said. “Running as hard
as you can and only managing to stay in the same place.”

  “You mean it’s from a book?”

  “Sure it’s from a book. Don’t tell me—don’t tell me!” Flamen raised a weary hand; finding it had picked up the waiting drink on its way, he sipped. “You don’t read books because they contaminate the purity of your approach to the medium. One of these days it’s going to dawn on you that it also makes you ignorant and ill-educated. What the—?”

  In the middle of his last utterance, Prior had disappeared and a swirl of multicolored blobs now filled the screen, accompanied by a very faint but disturbing howl as of a mad dog lost in fog far off across a haunted marsh.

  TWELVE

  MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE RAUNCH

  On the wall of the duplex penthouse home of Michaela Baxendale, nineteen-year-old sensaysh—still; only just still; it had been a long run since age fifteen—a large automatic meter displayed a swinging needle which this morning had edged into the red zone of the dial. Time for another spell of work.

  Cursing, she walked naked around the eleven rooms into which the current party had spread, kicking as many bodies as she could into wakefulness, ordering them to drag out the ones which were completely inert. Having dialed the robots to clear away the broken furniture and the soiled rugs and fetch some new ones, she started gathering up the material that came to hand. There was a satch filter in the comweb slot which routed advertising circulars directly to the sewers, but one item had evaded it: yet another stern letter from the city sanitation authority complaining about the lack of toilets in the apt. She’d had them taken out and enjoyed watching them crash forty-five stories to the street.

  She re-composed her standard reply: “I was picked out of the gutter, wasn’t I? You can’t expect me to lose my gutter habits overnight!” It had been a clincher four years ago when Dan Kazer launched her upwards towards penthouse level. It made a mess of things, but what the hell? There were always more things. Besides, some troubledome out in Omaha was compiling a thesis on the significance of bodily effluents in the later works of Michaela Baxendale. It wouldn’t be fair to undermine him.

  Along with the letter, then : a 1979 Johannesburg phone directory, a pre-pseudorganic edition of The Golden Bough, a Krafft-Ebing which retained the original Latin passages—that would do. She spliced chunks of them together and by nightfall the meter on the wall was healthily back into the green.

  THIRTEEN

  NORMAL SERVICE IS UNLIKELY TO BE RESTORED

  Prior’s picture came back and he was scowling. “That settles it!” he fumed. “Don’t we have enough trouble already without our own comweb right here in the Etchmark going into some crazy orbit?”

  “You want to talk without being interrupted, darl,” Flamen said wearily, “you just shift your butt over here. Hell, you’re only the other side of that wall!” Not that that invitation was likely to be very well received, he glossed silently. Prior was a totally different personality from himself, with strong neo-puritan leanings, and his commitment to the principle of keeping a spoolpigeon show on the beams seemed to be rooted not so much in an abstract dislike of hypocrisy—which was what Flamen liked to think of as his own standpoint—as in a wish to improve the mask of proper social behavior, the impervious coffin to hide the corruption within. Hence he kept his distance, dealt with people by choice via a comweb screen, feeling face to face contact a waste of the facilities which financial success had brought to him. It made him a perfect buffer in negotiations between Matthew Flamen Inc. and the Holocosmic directorate, but sometimes it became ridiculous.

  For example, now.

  Exactly as predicted, Prior said huffily, “Matthew, one doesn’t expect to have to—”

  Abruptly Flamen ran out of patience. “On the contrary, one does expect to have to! Unless one does something to cure the trouble! How many breaks did we have on today’s show—five, was it?”

  “Ah …” Prior swallowed. “Yes, I’m afraid so. And the longest ran nearly fifty seconds.”

  “And in the face of that you think it’s surprising when our comweb goes wrong? Come off it, Lionel, you aren’t that naïve! Or—well, come to think of it, maybe you are, the way you abase yourself by kowtowing in front of that lump of plastic you call a Lar!”

  “Matthew, a man’s personal choice of religion is—”

  “When did you last bother to check our own computers? We have seventy-plus in favor of L&P being a college-educated front for that kneeblank outfit Conjuh Man Inc. Pickings from the black enclaves apparently aren’t enough for them, so they’ve decided to expand and milk some gullible blanks as well. If you’re anything to judge by, they’re going to be a roaring success on a par with the Gottschalks!”

  Prior’s eyes bulged. Cruelly Flamen gambled on his habitual unwillingness to be seen giving way to emotion even in the presence of someone he had worked with for years. He let silence stretch elastically; then, at the last possible moment, brought up the important subject again.

  “What did you call me about, anyway? Got some brilliant idea for tomorrow’s slot which will drag the viewers back by the millions?”

  Recovering with an effort from the shock Flamen had administered, Prior mumbled, “Well, the audience figures are holding up pretty well, considering. And that’s mainly what counts, I guess.”

  “So if they’re holding up why do the interruptions make you so furious? Darl, you know as well as I do that if someone carried out a physical check of the sets that are nominally tuned to my show, they’d find that half of them have the color and hold controls deliberately set adrift. Who watches three-vee at midday nowadays except while they re orbiting? Hell, the viewers probably even like the interference!”

  Looking anxious, Prior came back with a reflex answer. “Matthew, you’re too modest. You’re one of only a handful of people who can still hold an audience for a talking show. You mustn’t run down your own talents.”

  “I don’t have to. It gets done for me.” Flamen sent the rest of his drink down in one long gulp; when it struck the pit of his stomach he felt marginally better. “Do me a favor, darl—think for a moment, hm? Does this mysterious interference ever hit during a commercial? It does not. Does it even hit when we have a good juicy piece of tape from the site and scene of some nauseous scandal? Uh-uh. It hits when I’m on camera and at no other time. Truth, darl?”

  Prior would have liked to contest the statement, by his expression, but the facts were self-evident. He nodded sadly.

  Flamen set his glass in position for a refill and hit the console stud. “So what you want I should do?” he said. “Have the situation comped? Darl, why should I need to? Recall the background: they eased us out of prime time with the bribe of fifteen minutes daily instead of ten, didn’t they? Then they chopped down the bonus with extra advertising. Fine, it’s a convincing argument—here’s this fabulous audience that more and more sponsors want to reach—but the fact stands that our fifteen-minute slot is down to twelve and a half and apt to get shorter still. Meanwhile the number of items we have comped out on network say-so rises steadily. Don’t you think they’re being a trifle over-sensitive for people who want to hold an audience?”

  He paused, but Prior didn’t say anything.

  “I read it this way,” he resumed. “They can’t afford to simply show me the exit—I’d collect a palladium-plated handshake for breach of contract. So they’re merely hoping I’ll get annoyed enough to start yelling, when they could clobber me for like insulting the Head of Programming and the PCC wouldn’t be able to touch them. So I suggest you make like me and hang on as long as you can. A hundred thousand tealeaves a month isn’t something you can collect by knocking on the first door you pass.”

  Halfway through the last sentence Prior stopped paying attention. Flamen deduced from his expression that at his end the screen had either switched to another picture or blurred out altogether again. He made to cut the circuit, but changed his mind. It was amusing to watch the normally imperturbable Prio
r mouthing curses which couldn’t be heard because at the same time as the vision outward had failed so had the sound inward.

  But his enjoyment was short-lived. His smile vanished as he reverted to contemplation of the truth which Prior was resolutely declining to face for some such superficial reason, perhaps, as the idea that the directors of the Holocosmic network were—like Brutus—“honorable men.”

  “A man can smile and smile and be a villain,” he murmured, briefly pleased with the aptness of the quotation but almost at once dismayed by the image of the smiler with the knife. What other explanation could there be for the interference which was cropping up daily on his program and on no other transmission from the Holocosmic studios? It simply had to be sabotage.

  Worse yet, it must be connived at by the directorate. Had it been due to infiltrators, Holocosmic would have stopped at nothing to eliminate it; they were as concerned as any company in the world about maintaining internal security. Instead of which, again and again the engineers had fobbed him off with declarations of their inability to trace the trouble.

  The logical conclusion was that they wanted to move his slot over and make room for yet another all-advertising segment. It was against the regulations laid down by the Planetary Communications Commission, of course, to run more than twelve hours’ continuous advertising out of the twenty-four, and getting rid of their last spoolpigeon would take Holocosmic over the prescribed limit. But the PCC was a bad joke and had been for years: an ancient watchdog without any teeth.