The Jagged Orbit Read online

  “Who am I to define what’s rational?” he said wearily. “I mean no more and no less than I say. You comp it out for yourselves.”

  EIGHTEEN

  THE DRAWBACKS OF AN INVENTION NTENDED FOR A RATIONAL SPECIES

  Seeing Reedeth awaiting her at the point where this and another corridor joined, Ariadne Spoelstra would have liked to turn around and go back. Currently her planned program for the relationship between them was at the stage where physical proximity was being discouraged—and that, of course, was why he had chosen to waylay her. “Lying in ambush” was the term that sprang most readily to her mind; the bastions of the Ginsberg were conducive to imagery of snares and pitfalls, traps and gins.

  But she was on a pediflow, and—like so many of the devices which twenty-first century ingenuity had made available to mankind—that was something which seemed to have been destined for an altogether more rational species than the one she belonged to. It did not afford the opportunity to change one’s mind. Once riding it, one was compelled to stay with it until it reached the quiescent area at an intersection and the monomolecular flow level on the upper surface eddied out into a random pattern equating to stillness. There was no going back, only continuing to one’s starting point by a different route.

  In the course of the ten years they’d been in use, how many affairs had been conditioned by the direction the pediflow happened to take outside one’s office or apt? How many acquaintanceships, how many marriages …? How many perfect lifetime partners had been on the flow heading the other way?

  Stifling that train of thought with an almost physical effort, she composed herself for the properly curt nod and the unmistakably formal smile which were appropriate to the down-phase of the cycle of their intimacy. Reedeth, however, was clearly not in a mood to abide by other people’s rules. She had to suffer him to kiss her, though she did manage to avert her mouth.

  “Finally!” he exclaimed. “I’ve been wanting to talk with you, and—”

  I’ve been on call all morning,” she countered frigidly.

  “Sorry, but that isn’t true. You put up a Class Two interdiction at ten-ten, according to my desketary, and it wasn’t lifted until a few minutes ago. Hmmm?” He cocked one eyebrow and looked parentally reproachful.

  Bastard! But the gamble had failed. She had hoped the dialogue might go:

  “Yes, but I wanted to say this personally!”

  In which case she would have answered, “What’s the good of having a comweb system if you won’t use it?”

  And walked briskly on, having gained a major point.

  Instead of which she’d been caught in a downright lie. She sought the least damaging escape route, like a chessplayer trying to reconstruct a weak attack to provide emergency protection for the king.

  “Well, if it was really important you could have overridden, and if it wasn’t why come bothering me now?”

  “That’s just it,” Reedeth shrugged. “I don’t know if it’s important or not—that’s what I wanted to ask you. This pythoness you’ve engaged for this afternoon: who is she, anyway, and what’s the idea?”

  Chance for a counterblow. “That’s something you could have asked your desketary. The information was minuted to all staff members three days ago.”

  “As a fait accompli. With his customary secretiveness Mogshack failed to make his discussion with you available for consultation by the staff.”

  “He probably didn’t think it was necessary—any more than I would have. Just what is it that you want to be told? What a pythoness is, what she does, how she does it?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Ariadne!” Reedeth’s affability vanished like smoke before a gale. “Don’t you have a better peg to hang your life on than making men dance up and down like yoyos? If you’re that badly obsessed with your own emotional dependence, you’d better take a vacation and get over it before you communicate the problem to your patients!”

  She stared at him blankly, unable to believe that it was Jim Reedeth who had uttered such words. They were more typical of Mogshack himself, whose single-minded dedication to the principles he preached was sometimes terrifying, even though in arguments she had often enough compared it to the attitude of a Buddha voluntarily renouncing the bliss of nirvana in order to share the chance of perfect enlightenment with less fortunate beings.

  It didn’t take a trained psychologist’s insight to deduce that something had happened to drive Reedeth a long way out of his customary orbit.

  Reluctantly answering his former question before he had a chance to say anything else as cruel as his last gibe, she said,

  NINETEEN

  THOUGHT PASSING REPEATEDLY THROUGH THE HEAD OF MORTON LENIGO, FIFTH GENERATION EXPATRIATE WEST INDIAN, FOURTH GENERATION BRITISH SUBJECT, THIRD GENERATION PAN-MELANIST, WHILE IN TRANSIT ACROSS THE ATLANTIC AFTER SECURING A VISA FOR THE UNITED STATES BY PULLING THE STRING WHICH LED TO THE KNEEBLANK CITY GOVERNMENT OF DETROIT THREATENING TO WITHDRAW THEIR WATER TAXES AND INSTALL AN ATMOSPHERIC CONDENSATION PLANT

  “Festung Amerika, you monstrous Aryan bunker, it’s time for the twilight of the sods!”

  TWENTY

  YOU WERE SAYING

  “Oh—very well. The underlying thinking goes like this. Whatever it is that pythonesses actually do, it seems they get results of some kind. The evidence is overwhelming. And the only way they could achieve the success that’s ascribed to them is, presumably, because they display exceptionally high empathy with people who are relative strangers to them. I want to find out if the degree of ‘strangeness’ they can cope with extends to the mentally deranged. And since I’m assured that this girl Lyla Clay is one of the most talented of them, she’s a logical choice for the experiment.”

  Reedeth rolled a strand of his beard absently between his fingers. “On the face of it, that’s an excellent idea. It might lead to a whole new diagnostic technique if it pays off. But isn’t three days rather short notice to put together such a potentially significant operation?”

  “I contacted her mackero and this was the only date he could offer me until seven weeks from now. Apparently she’s very much in demand.”

  She added caustically, “I’m flattered that you approve of the idea, I must say!”

  “Oh, give it a rest, will you?” Reedeth snapped. “You may have quit trying to keep your private emotional entanglements from interfering with your work, but I’m at least still making the effort.” And continuing without giving time for a counterblast: “What does Mogshack think of it? Obviously he gave approval in the end or you couldn’t have set it up, but I’m surprised he didn’t balk at packing a number of patients together in conditions—now how would he have put it? Ah yes!—in conditions that are not only medically insanitary but psychologically so perilous as to prejudice many of them on the road to recovery!”

  “You bastard! You have been checking on the talk I had with him!”

  “No, I told you: it isn’t available. I just … Well, I just tried to pick the words he’d have been most likely to use.”

  For a long moment they stared at each other, face to face and much less than arm’s length apart. Suddenly, quite against her will, Ariadne felt her mouth straining upwards at the corners. She resisted for a second, then gave in. Il faut reculer pour mieux sauter, she told herself, quoting one of Mogshack’s own favorite aphorisms. One must go back to make a longer jump. And next time she jumped, she promised herself, it would be out of Jim Reedeth’s reach.

  “I still think you’re a bastard, Jim. But there’s no doubt you’re a clever one. ‘Psychologically perilous’ was his exact phrase. … Mogshack can be a bit predictable sometimes, can’t he? Though I suppose anybody who pursues one goal with unswerving determination is vulnerable to that charge.”

  Once more refuting her expectations, instead of answering her smile with one of his own, Reedeth frowned. “Yes, but I do sometimes wonder where singlemindedness shades over into fanaticism. … Never mind, though. At least he’s shown flexibility
in this matter. Like I said, I think it’s a very promising idea. Anything which will tend to reinforce the broken bridges between one personality and another has my support.”

  Piqued at his failure to acknowledge her gesture of surrender, she said sharply, “That’s a very Conroyan remark, Jim. And it isn’t the purpose of the project, anyway.”

  “I’m being driven to the conclusion that the only way some people can be made to understand—”

  But the expostulation, which had begun heatedly, lost its impetus and died away. Reedeth grinned. “Ah, hell. I’d rather compliment you on a bright idea than have a fight with you. Suppose we continue the conversation tonight, hm? I think it’s about time for your winter to come to an end.”

  “Well …”

  “Good, that’s settled. And do you mind if I attend this afternoon’s performance? I assume Mogshack will be there.”

  “No, he will not. He’ll be witnessing it, of course, but from his office. And I think it would be better if you did the same.”

  “But there’s a question I’d like to ask this pythoness myself, since you recommend her so strongly. And I understand pythonesses can’t react to people unless they’re actually in the room.”

  “A question? What about?” And her eyes said more loudly than words: Not about us—you wouldn’t dare!

  “Why, Ariadne!” Reedeth said in a mocking voice. “You’re blushing! I’ve never seen you do that before. And it looks great on you!”

  While she was still struggling to formulate her reply, there was a sweet shrill buzz from the personal communicator strapped to her left wrist. She raised it reflexively, looking daggers, and muttered, “Yes?”

  “A visitor for a patient under your care, Dr. Spoelstra. Just landed on the roof in a private skimmer. Not at all cooperative. Demanding a Class A disruption of the programmed schedule.”

  “Hell. That is absolutely all I need right now!”

  Not without malice, Reedeth uttered a deliberately loud chuckle.

  “Oh …! Very well, I’ll come and see about that in a moment!” She shut off the mike and raised blazing eyes to Reedeth’s face.

  “No, I won’t have you attending the session this afternoon! You want to consult a pythoness, you go hire one of your own. And you’d better get a good one. Empathy’s wasted if it doesn’t work both ways, and I don’t know anyone who could get through that armor-plated hide of yours!”

  “Try,” Reedeth said softly. “That’s all I’m asking, you know. If you’re scared to walk through a wide open door because you think something’s going to fall on your head as soon as you cross the threshold, you’re in trouble, darl!”

  He spun on his heel, stepped over the boundary of the intersection. In a moment the pediflow had carried him out of earshot.

  Not—Ariadne swore it to herself, barely preventing her foot from stamping—not that she had the least intention of calling after him. Not, in fact, that she ever wanted to speak to him again.

  TWENTY-ONE

  CLOSE THE DOORS, THEY’RE COMING IN THE WINDOWS!

  The jocular paranoia of the last-century song had at first seemed apt to Celia Prior Flamen following her commitment. Possibly it still was. But nowadays she merely hummed its tune to herself. Singing it aloud was pointless. No matter how much she raised her clear high voice, the sound was soaked up by the layers and layers of insulation on the walls of her luxurious retreat.

  That was what they called the cells in the Ginsberg: retreats.

  She was thirty-five, a year younger than her husband and four years younger than her brother, though Lionel always looked, acted, and apparently felt at least a decade her senior. She was also rather beautiful, having a casque of sleek brown hair which she had never dyed or patterned despite the dictates of fashion, framing a heart-shaped face with an over-large but delightfully mobile mouth, and a taut slim body which at one moment could suggest sensual languor, at the next nervous tension barely held in check by sheer force of will.

  But her mind, like a scalpel designed for healing and used for murder, had gone too deep into a place it was not intended to enter.

  Watching her thoughtfully over the concealed comweb link—the camera was behind the mirror on the dressing-table at which she spent much of her time currently, inventing new faces for herself from the lavish range of cosmetics with which she had been provided—Elias Mogshack fingered his beard. He was in a dilemma. It was not the first such, and doubtless it would not be the last. But to depart even for a moment from the transcendent certainty which the public at large associated with his name was an affront to the aura of authority that had gained him his present influence.

  Paradox: on the one hand, the overriding command to “be an individual” which he, personally, had put into common speech as a taken-for-granted byword, with the concomitant implication that a schizophrenic, for example, was obeying that command to the letter; on the other, the all-too-obvious fact that someone who was that much of an individual was (a) nonviable because he might forget to eat or turn to sykes or do any of a score of other ultimately fatal things, and (b) excessively demanding of other, competing individuals, as for example insisting that they listen for hours and days to some universal insight which, boiled down, amounted to something most adults had worked out for themselves in their early teens.

  He had a case of it right now; there were a dozen other subjects he would have deemed more worthy of his attention had he not been snagged by the question of Celia Prior Flamen.

  In principle the methods which had so caught the imagination of the public that he had been railroaded into the post of director for the Ginsberg, willingly enough of course because he wanted to see as many unfortunates as possible benefit from his teaching, were very simple. In every retreat there were data-collecting devices that monitored the sewage, the surfaces of the bed and the chairs, the very air that the patient exhaled—parameters for the construction of a computerized curve calibrated against standard examples of all the known kinds of mental disorder. Causeless anxiety, self-induced stress-response, every possible type of deviation from cool was measured and projected into the future and interpreted as therapy: drugs, hypnotism, analysis, anything available. The target was likewise simple; one might define it as the production of a personality capable of functioning viably despite the pressures of other members of the species. An ideal personality profile was raised for each patient, a beautiful symmetrical curve, and when the observed profile matched the optimum the patient was discharged. Easy.

  Except that in practice it wasn’t easy at all. …

  Take this case, for example. In theory it ought to have been absolutely straightforward. Celia Prior Flamen—like the majority of the patients here and in all other mental hospitals in the western world—had turned to sykes as an escape from intolerable reality, starting with relatively mild ones such as natural peyote and mescal and graduating to that fiercest of synthetics, Ladromide. Shattered to bits, wetting herself like a baby for the delirious pleasure of moist warmth between her legs, she had been carried here ignorant of the world.

  And responded well to treatment.

  ?

  Mogshack frowned. He looked again at the comparative curves his desketary projected for him: the green ideal, the red observed profile. There was a dent in the latter and there was no known therapy that would flatten it out. But the word was humming down the grapevine that her husband might not be able to meet the monthly bills much longer, and it was bad for the image to discharge a patient for financial reasons and then have him or her re-admitted as a charge on the state because the condition hadn’t been cleared up permanently.

  The dent reminded him of another similar problem—Madison’s—but he preferred not to consider that. With a shrug he compromised by giving orders for Celia to be issued with a green oversuit in place of her previous pale blue one, and realized in passing that it would go much better with her dark brown hair.

  TWENTY-TWO

  THE MORTON LENIGO STO
RY PART TEN THOUSAND (APPROXIMATELY)

  The Boeing Sonicruiser this morning operating Pan Am Flight 1201 London-New York, having dutifully spent its bang over the ocean, stood on its jets and began to climb down the ladder of the air towards the ground. Six hundred and two of its seven hundred and five seats were taken this time, and one of the passengers had found the legend painted over the entry door (“Soniclipper Friendship”) excruciatingly funny.

  He was occupied in unpicking the stitches along the handle of his traveling bag. It would save the American customs the trouble.

  TWENTY-THREE

  THREE KINDS OF PEOPLE IN THE WORLD

  Landing on the skimmer-park of the Ginsberg, Matthew Flamen thought as he glanced up at the tall maxecurity towers, was like parachuting among the stakes of some Brobdignagian picket fence. To picture human beings existing within those colossal blank pillars was to reduce them to the status of nematodes, burrowing under the bark of trees in utter ignorance of the greater world outside.

  He was taken aback at the violence of the repulsion with which they filled him. On his former visits—few of them, granted, and the last one already months in the past—he had been inclined to envy Dr. Mogshack, wondering what it felt like to conceive an abstract principle and see it so splendidly interpreted in the form of a building.

  Reaching in through the side window of his skimmer, he tapped the dispenser key on the underside of the dash. A small white trank dropped into his waiting palm, and he gulped it down. A nasty sneaking suspicion had been developing in his mind during the flight out to the hospital. He had jumped on Prior as though accusing him of treachery—as witness that gibe about one of the directorate taking him out of bugging range and making him a proposition—and the idea simply didn’t stand up. Prior had at least as much to lose by the cancellation of the show as he did himself; in one sense he stood to lose even more, for he had children and Flamen didn’t.