The Jagged Orbit Page 4

  It wasn’t the first time they’d attempted to mislay him, moreover. They’d tried it directly following Celia’s breakdown, hiring a venial psychiatrist to testify that her resorting to sykes was due to her husband’s systematic disregard of her needs and preferences, this constituting sadistic cruelty. A person capable of such behavior, they’d argued, was unfit to perform before the great viewing public. (Horse laugh—if you dug into the private lives of the Holocosmic directorate you’d come up with material for another Hundred and Twenty Days without the need to plagiarize, and long ago Flamen had made himself a quiet promise that if they ever squeezed him hard enough he’d go out in a blaze of glory by swapping his last-ever taped show, duly approved by the network’s computers, for another in which he gave chapter and verse on the directorate’s vices.)

  Their real lever, though, had been fulcrumed on her commitment to the Ginsberg, a public hospital, instead of to a private sanitarium, and that Prior had miraculously undermined in the shocked tones of an adoring brother: whose reputation stood higher in the contemporary world than that of Elias Mogshack its director, universally acknowledged field-leader in remedial psychiatry—who here among admitted laymen would question the brilliance of one appointed to oversee the mental hygiene of populous New York? So, a rapid compromise whereby he undertook to meet the cost of her incarceration himself instead of leaving her as a charge on public funds, and consequent inevitable disaster.

  At the time Flamen had wondered why the directorate gave ground so swiftly. He stopped wondering the moment the first of the swingeing monthly bills arrived, together with the unchallengeable State-comped contract to which he had carelessly committed himself. He didn’t have to consult a computer to discover that he was cornered. And he couldn’t provide a cushion by, say, moving to a less expensive house. He was compelled to maintain that standard of living which was quote appropriate unquote for a person to whom Holocosmic allotted five slots a week. His accountants were first-rate and his tax demands were laughable, but he couldn’t weasel out of his obligatory expenditures. He was defeated before he started by the scale of Holocosmic’s computers; his own were good, but for equipment like theirs you had to hire computers like his to write the programs—no human being could manage it.

  So knowing the knife was in: what to do? Make overtures to a rival network? Suicide—apart from the obvious truism that when only one spoolpigeon had managed to stay in business no network was likely to be interested in hiring a newcomer, he’d be dropped on his butt within hours on some specious but adhesive charge such as disloyalty to his employers. Also he would instantly stop being able to meet Celia’s hospital bills out of income, and the penalty for premature removal was colossal. Though Mogshack’s last report had been cautiously optimistic, it was clear that Celia was not by any means fully recovered. So that left one possible solution: hold his audience. Somehow. Anyhow. It was his only resource, the computer factor which showed a higher rating for him personally, Matthew Flamen, than for an all-advertising segments.

  And in an age when people were far too preoccupied with their own business for even the most savory scandal and gossip to attract their attention …

  Definitely a Red Queen’s Race, he told himself. And I’m running short of breath.

  FOURTEEN

  AN OBJECT LESSON CONCERNING A VERY IMPORTANT SUBJECT

  Eugene Voigt didn’t go quite so far as to turn off his screen, but he did disconnect his ears after the first minute or so of the eager-beaver’s diatribe. They were an excellent design, by far the best he had ever worn, and he liked the location of the silence trigger particularly; it was concealed under the drooping eaves of his moustache and could be inconspicuously activated by a mere touch of the tongue. Besides, it was offered as a regular feature instead of as a customized option. It would be worth sticking with this brand for a while—at least until rival manufacturers overtook it. And it was hard to discern what room was left for improvements short of direct sub-dermal implantation.

  The eager-beaver (his name was irrelevant but he held a resonantly-titled post in the lower echelons of the PCC) kept talking for a full quarter of an hour, but Voigt had realized what he was going to say within the first few seconds and none of the phrases he caught by idle lip-reading contradicted his first guesstimate. When the tirade finally subsided he said, “Forget it. It won’t work.”

  “But Holocosmic clearly intends to—”

  “You won’t make it stick,” Voigt told him firmly. “You won’t make anything stick. The subject of communications, on this planet of ours, is dead.”

  FIFTEEN

  IT’S A COMMON PLATITUDE THAT KNOWLEDGE IS NEUTRAL BUT EVERY NOW AND THEN IT WOULD BE USEFUL IF IT WERE ON YOUR SIDE RATHER THAN THEIRS

  It was hot outside; it was much hotter inside because the lighting was old-fashioned and there had to be a hell of a lot of it. Pedro Diablo’s dark skin shone with perspiration. But his white teeth shone even brighter. He was enjoying himself.

  “One final time!” he coaxed. “I swear they’re going to lap this up in Conakry and Lumumbaville!”

  The actress playing King Leopold of the Belgians sighed and replaced her pale, effeminate, beardless whole-head mask, then trotted obediently across the studio floor to her place for the scene, her bottom waggling as she went. Down to her waist she was wearing a full-dress military uniform jacket, the breast ablaze with orders and decorations, but her steatopygous buttocks were concealed by nothing more than a sort of docked horsetail of grass-stems. It was a great image, especially for areas where there was strong Muslim influence and the concomitant view prevailed that women had no souls.

  “Got those fetters ready?” Diablo called to the props man. “Remember I want them to break a sight easier this time than they did last! Bad associations if they take longer than five seconds—out of time-scale with the rest of the show. What the hell?”

  He stopped dead in the very middle of the floor, on his way back to the control bubble, and realized that there were two armed macoots facing him.

  “The Mayor wants to see you,” the one on the right said. His tall plastic mask—black-grounded, but with slashes of red, yellow and brown on the cheeks—made his voice resonate eerily.

  “Tell him to wait!” Diablo snapped. There were very few people in Blackbury who could say that sort of thing to a macoot, but he’d been doing it for years. “I’m right in the middle of a show—can’t you see?”

  The second macoot drew a casual smoking line on the floor with a low-powered beam from his laser. “He said now, white trash. You coming on foot, or as butcher’s meat?”

  “What did you call me?” Furious, Diablo took half a pace forward, then canceled the movement as the laser’s muzzle jerked upward significantly. Those guns were the legacy of Anthony Gottschalk’s last visit; he’d recently canned a show about them—in which for obvious propaganda reasons they were reported as having been developed right here in the city—and he had no illusions about the effect of concentrating two hundred fifty watts in a space no larger than the tip of a sewing-needle.

  There was an eternal pause. Eventually he said, “Okay. O-kay. But I sure hope he doesn’t hang me up too long.” And he added to his cast and technicians as he moved towards the door, “See you back here after lunch, you-all!”

  Awaiting him at the studio entrance was a black official Voortrekker convertible, the Capetown-built skimmer-cum-groundcar which was the world’s most expensive means of private transport. Mayor Black owned six of them personally, a matter about which Diablo had never been entirely happy despite the rationalization that the South Africans and the American knees were allegedly on the same side in the ultimate analysis; the argument smacked too much of the similar one which had justified the admission of Black Muslims to meetings of the Ku Klux Klan back in the last century. He scowled more deeply still as he was forced into the back seat of the Voortrekker by the macoots, who joined him, one on each side. The vehicle hummed off in the direction of the Mayo
rs palace, the way ahead being cleared by the remote override which put the stop lights to red on all the cross streets at the touch of a button on the dash.

  In spite of everything, Diablo sat with his mouth firmly shut. He had no idea what could have led up to this, but his best guess was that Mayor Black had got out of bed on the wrong side this morning. When he was in that sort of mood, he tended to enjoy re-asserting his authority over anyone who contributed to the economy of Blackbury, and Diablo certainly fell into that category. His canned vushows were among the city’s chief sources of foreign exchange, quite apart from their propaganda value, and it had revolutionized their relationship with the American Federal authorities when they started to be able to pay their power and water taxes in hard currency like cedi and riyals.

  He made a mental note to trace the macoot who had publicly insulted him and make sure his future was blacker than his backside. It would be difficult, in view of his issue mask, but in a small community like this one it wouldn’t be impossible.

  Regardless of that, though, he kept telling himself, someone with Pedro Diablo’s status had no reason to be afraid of a fit of bad temper on the Mayor’s part.

  He kept on telling himself so until he was actually shown into the Mayor’s presence—if you could call being herded into a room at gunpoint “being shown.” For Mayor Black was not alone. Seated next to his enormous desk was a honky: a thin man with a straggly apology for a beard supplemented by mismatched rozar flock, very pale hair combed carefully across the pink baldness of his crown, knees primly together and hands folded on his lap.

  Then Diablo’s heart sank like a stone in a deep well. He knew that stern, thin-lipped face. The features of Herman Uys, top South African expert on race, were perhaps as well known as any in the modern world.

  He was still struggling to work out why Uys’s presence in Blackbury had been kept secret from him, Pedro Diablo, when the Mayor uttered his only statement of the interview.

  “Out of town, mongrel. You have three hours.”

  SIXTEEN

  THE POINT AT WHICH THE OUTLAY ON MAINTENANCE BEGINS TO EXCEED THE COST OF CHANGING TO A REPLACEMENT

  Without warning Flamen’s comweb circuit reverted to normal and he found himself back in touch with Prior. The moment he realized, the latter’s face took on a shifty expression which Flamen recognized from years of close association: the look which signified that he was about to put over some really monstrous con job on the assumption—almost always justified—that the person he was dealing with had overlooked some very subtle trap. He might be naïve in some matters, as witness his ready acceptance of a Lar as everything the advertising claimed, but when it came to closing a deal weighted in his own favor he was brilliantly devious. That, chiefly, was why Flamen put up with him. He had never dared tarnish his own image of himself by learning the whore’s-trading skills required to keep afloat in the cut-throat ocean of modern business, yet he correspondingly did not dare to forgo them altogether. Prior was a perfect compromise: the epitome of self-deluded honor, who could dismiss the most flagrant kind of cheating from his conscience on the grounds that he had thought of it and he could not possibly be a dishonest man.

  Flamen tensed. If he, now, was to become the target for Prior’s personal talent …

  “Matthew, as far as I can comp it out,” Prior began, “you just made a very serious charge against the directorate of Holocosmic.”

  “I don’t recall making any sort of charge against anyone,” Flamen said hastily. “But if you have something important and urgent to say, why not …?”

  He cast around in his mind for a chance of privacy. Everything said over the comweb in these offices, as in the offices of any firm contracted to the Holocosmic network, was monitored, analyzed and if necessary relayed to the directorate. Ah yes!

  “Why not ride out to the Ginsberg with me and call on Celia?”

  “Not this afternoon,” Prior said.

  “Oh, come now! She’s your sister as well as my wife, remember.” A hamhanded attempt to get something discreditable on the record; it failed.

  “I’m booked for exercises with my citidef group,” Prior said, ever the solid, responsible member of society. “Besides, you know that Dr. Mogshack disapproves of intrusions from his patients’ former environment, and I wouldn’t care to go against his judgment.”

  “I regard contact between husband and wife as highly normalizing, even if he doesn’t.” The juiceless old stick, Flamen added to himself—but it wouldn’t do to utter the comment aloud, not when he had so narrowly scraped under the blade of Holocosmic’s guillotine by appealing to Mogshack’s reputation.

  “That’s as may be,” Prior shrugged. “Nonetheless, the point I’m getting at is this.” He hesitated, with an air of calculation. “Matthew, to be blunt, I think you’re becoming a trifle paranoid about this trouble we’re having on the show. While I concede”—switch to reasonable concession-making tone—”it’s debatable whether Holocosmic can be said to have afforded us maximal cooperation in our attempts to eliminate the interference fouling up our transmissions, it’s something else altogether to associate that with failures of our internal comweb here at the Etchmark.” Back to stern, fatherly manner, though he was only three years Flamen’s senior: the standard rôle of the knowledgeable worldly manager protecting the admirably idealistic star of the show from his own lack of cynicism.

  “So I suggest,” he concluded, “you authorize me to call in an outside expert to substantiate these suspicions of yours. They’re far too grave to be allowed to pass unchallenged.”

  Flamen stared at him incredulously. Outside expert? Had Prior taken leave of his senses? What “outside expert” could outfox Holocosmic’s own computers—what court could anyone persuade to believe in the fantastic notion of a major network sabotaging its own transmissions? Only one explanation occurred to him for Prior’s extraordinary behavior, and before he had time to think it over the pressure of anger had driven him to blurt it out.

  “What happened to put you on Holocosmic’s side all of a sudden? Did one of the brass take you out of bugging range and make you a proposition? No matter what kind of a minefield I’m driven into, I can’t jump clear! I have bugs keeping watch on my bugs!”

  He was distantly aware that the look on Prior’s face had shifted from smugness to pure horror, but he plunged on anyway. “And if I could afford bugging to that standard, you’re the first person I’d sic ’em on! Not wanting to go visit your own sister when she’s in the hospital!”

  He cut the circuit with a trembling hand before he said anything more damaging to his prospects. If that particular exchange ever came up in court, he reflected bitterly, he’d be hard put to it to argue that concern for Celia had motivated his temporary loss of control. The suggestion of calling on her this afternoon had been strictly a spur-of-the-moment improvisation so that he could talk to Prior out of eavesdropping range.

  But it would have to be done now, of course. Scowling, he headed for the door.

  Almost immediately, to his horror and dismay, he realized just how over-hasty his reaction to Prior had been, but he put off facing the consequences as long as he could.

  SEVENTEEN

  IF “MEDIA” IS THE PLURAL OF “MEDIUM” THE QUESTION IS: HOW MANY OF THEM ARE FRAUDULENT?

  “Have I ever watched a pythoness perform?” repeated Xavier Conroy, over the border up Canada way. This was a crummy run-down poverty-stricken sort of a college, but living far enough in the past not to mind that his reputation was a horse-drawn hearse for his career. “No, I never have. But the phenomenon is interesting, and well worth discussing. How do you view it?”

  The boy who had asked the question stumbletongued. “I—I guess I don’t really know.”

  “You ought to have formed at least a tentative conclusion, though. It’s a subject which fans out with all kinds of stimulating and provocative implications. Come to think of it, there’s one place at which it touches directly on what I’ve been sa
ying recently about the increasing reluctance of people to commit themselves to anything without a watertight contract, preferably computerized. So we could do worse than make it the class assignment for the week. I’ll give you a few guidelines first.” Conroy combed his grizzled beard with his fingers and corrugated his brow deeply.

  “One might well start by considering the nineteenth-century cult of spiritualism, table-rapping and table-turning, attempts to commune with the dead and the readiness of the public to go on believing in patently charlatanous mediums. Now that was effectively conditioned by the rigid propriety of Victorian society. What started off as a perfectly proper and indeed quite scientific investigation of certain improbable phenomena developed in an age of tight corsets and strict social etiquette into a desperate, irrational yearning for direct contact between individuals. Yes?”

  A girl in the front row, whose name he knew to be Alice Clover because it was on the illuminated reference board before him but whose face he was completely ignorant of because at every class since the beginning of the year she had kept her street yash on, had raised her hand.

  “Do you mean that it’s irrational to pay attention to pythonesses?”

  Conroy hesitated, looking over the array of students and taking especial note of the girls. About a quarter of them were in street yashes, like Alice who had just spoken; the remainder wore a fantastic galaxy of costumes ranging from a height-of-last-year-fashion oversuit with inflated bosom and buttocks to a waist-length orange wig and a pair of shabby Nix.