Awkward pause. Someone: “Sheeting hole, I think he’s right.”
“Dreck. I recall distinctly on New Year’s 2000 we all—”
“And the commentators did say that wasn’t right, it comes back to me now.”
“The hole, let’s make him do it anyway.”
“No, got to fly by the course we set in the first place.”
Silence in the immediate vicinity.
“Gwinnie, I’m dreadfully afraid he’s right. He is, you know.”
Nods.
“Well, how funny! Lucky for him you came along, isn’t it, Norman? Never mind, sparewheels, there’s bound to be someone else. Break it up and let it fall free, hm?”
And, as she contrived to brush against Norman on her way to match orbits with a circulating waiter: “Fix you later, you clever brown-nose!”
“You’re welcome to try, darling,” Norman said. “You’re welcome to try.”
* * *
SITUATION: suddenly and to Guinevere’s enormous chagrin, a real party flying high and free in a genuine party-type orbit.
* * *
“Chad Mulligan? Never in a million lightyears!”
“I so testify.”
“Not the fat Afram?”
“No, the one with the beard.”
“The lean Afram?”
“Sheeting hole! No! The WASP talking to both of them.”
“Christ, everybody’s been saying he was dead!”
* * *
“Mel, I think some time later on we might break out a few caps of that stuff I asked you to bring. There’s a too-clever bleeder here I’d like to fetch down from orbit.”
* * *
“Hi, Don. Elihu, this is my roomie Donald Hogan—Chad Mulligan, Don.”
“Hi. Now, as I was saying, what McLuhan didn’t foresee although he came sheeting close to it was—”
“I’m delighted to meet you, Mr. Masters, but this is about the last place I’d have expected to run into you.”
“When Norman called on me the other night he mentioned this party and said I should come if I wanted to see the kind of problems Aframs still have to cope with in this country, so I thought it over and decided he was probably right, I ought to.”
“You won’t get the full measure of Guinevere’s ingenuity just standing by and watching, sir. You need to be someone like Norman, who’s about on her own level, not someone with cachet like yours.”
“Why?”
“If you’d turned up wearing your ordinary street-clothes she’d only have made you pay some kind of nominal forfeit—standing on your head for ten seconds, or singing a song, or taking off your shoes. Something that wouldn’t have interfered with your enjoyment of the rest of the party, I mean.”
“That’s what one generally expects at a forfeits party, isn’t it?”
“There’s been a change since you went abroad, sir.” Why all this “sirring”? Must be a subconscious response to the fact that as of this morning I’m officially Lieutenant Hogan! “A few years ago that was true. Not any more.”
“I see. I think. Give me examples.”
“Oh … Well, I’ve seen her compel guests to daub themselves all over with ketchup—and shave their heads bald—and crawl around the floor on hands and knees for an hour, until she got tired of enforcing that—and, if you’ll forgive me going into such details, to piss themselves. That comes later and is used to get rid of people she doesn’t want to stay around when the orgy starts.”
“That goes without saying, does it?”
“Oh yes.”
“Is that why people stand for such treatment?”
Chad Mulligan broke in; for the past few moments, unnoticed, he had abandoned the conversation he was having with Norman and had been listening to Donald and Elihu.”
“Sheeting hole, no! At least I’ll wager it’s not why Norman keeps coming, unless you’ve got a well-concealed masochistic streak—hey, Norman?”
“Some people come out of masochism, definitely,” Norman shrugged. “They like to be publicly humiliated. You can generally spot them; they’re blatantly infringing whatever the rule of the evening is, but steering clear of Guinevere’s direct attention until fairly late when they’ve drunk enough or smoked or ingested whatever they need to give them sufficient offyourass for the show-down. Then they go in for cringing and begging to be let off and being jeered at for spoilsports—the whole shtick—and generally they come while they’re getting the treatment. Which of course makes everything free-falling for them and that’s why they accepted the invitation anyway. Harmless, mostly.”
“I was asking about you, not them,” Chad said impatiently.
“Me? I keep coming here because—okay, I’ll open up wide. It’s a constant challenge. She’s a mean bitch, but she’s never yet caved me in on one single forfeit, and there have been times when there were thirty or forty of her pet sparewheels yelling for me to pay one. That’s why I keep on accepting. And frankly it seems to me like a damned stupid reason. This one is going to be my last, and if you weren’t here, Chad, and if I hadn’t conned Elihu into coming, I’d have left already.”
Donald looked at Chad Mulligan. He still only half-believed that this was the genuine article, but the resemblance to the pictures on the jackets of Mulligan’s books was unmistakable—the keen eyes peering out from under heavy brows, the hair combed diagonally back, the neatly trimmed moustache and beard setting off the cynical line of the mouth. There was a more dissipated look to the face in reality than there had been in the publicity shots, but maybe that was due to age rather than actual surrender.
He hoped so.
* * *
“Darling, you do the zock marvellously! You have the genuine free-fall touch!”
“Why, Gwinnie, that’s sweet of you.”
“There’s just one trouble, darling. The zock is strictly a this-minute dance, isn’t it?”
“Forfeit! Forfeit!”
“I’m afraid they’re right, darling, much as it pains me to insist. Don’t you know any of the old dances? How about the shaitan? That goes to this kind of rhythm, I think.”
“Of course it does, Gwinnie. I’m terribly sorry, I should have thought. You want me to do the shaitan for my forfeit?”
“That’s right. But—somebody hand me that dish of honey from the table there? Thank you, lover-girl. Hold this in between your elbows while you’re demonstrating it.”
“But—Gwinnie! It’ll get all over everything!”
“That’s the idea, darling. Come on now, and make with the whole bit. I want to see you touch the floor with the back of your head.”
* * *
“Well, yes, I am a bit out of sorts, I guess. You see, I’m taking this metabolic-rebalancing course that the Orbital Clinic provides for people who don’t respond to Triptine—you’ve heard about that? Uh-huh. And there’s one drecky drawback, which is it makes you much more susceptible to colds, so I’m full to here with counteragents and what with one thing and another my hormones and enzymes are going over Niagara in a barrel. I say, is that twentieth-century or nineteenth?”
“Of course, it’s public knowledge that if the Nark Force was given the funds and support it needs to enforce the legislation it’s supposed to the government would be out on its ear tomorrow. But the discontent needed for a genuine revolution is being drained off into orbit somewhere and that suits Washington fine.”
“So they got these two volunteers, you see, this codder and this shiggy who didn’t give a pint of dreck about doing it in public, and they laid on this exhibition of human reproductive processes for Shalmaneser.”
“No matter what they say I can’t tolerate adherents to a cult which doesn’t respect the human rights of non-members. That’s bigotry irrespective of what verbal haze you generate around it. And these Right Catholics with their insistence on unrestricted breeding are trespassing on the human rights of everyone else’s children. They sheeting well ought to be banned.”
“Right acr
oss the block from where my brother-in-law lives. And such a mild-mannered old codder too, he said. Just picked up this butcher’s cleaver and chopped the heads off the kids he was looking after, then went up on the roof with this crate of empty bottles, and started hurling them down on the people below. Killed one, blinded another, had to be fused by a police copter. Could be anybody, you see—and without universal personality-profiling how can one be sure who’s going to turn mucker?”
“Well, we’re pretty lucky, you see. We managed to get into a club—about fifteen couples, all celebrated their twenty-first, very nice people—and there’s a sitting rota so we get to look after the prodgies of members who have clean genotypes. There are nearly a dozen altogether and one of the shiggies is supposed to be preg with twins. Marvellous. We can reckon on having prodgies around the place at least one night a week. It’s not like having one’s own, but—well, there’s no help for it. We have schizophrenia on both sides of the marriage and the risk is far too great.”
“Oh no. Philip is much too young to come along to a party like this. Time enough later on to become sophisticated and cynical and debauched like us oldsters, that’s what I keep telling him. Of course he doesn’t like it—goes on all the time about what other parents allow their prodgies to do at his age—but one doesn’t want to see the bloom of innocence rubbed off too soon, does one? You’re only young once, after all.”
“Frank and Sheena? Oh, they went to Puerto Rico. Didn’t have any choice—they’d sold the apt, bought the tickets, got jobs out there … But they were furious! Said they were going to get out of the States altogether as soon as possible so they could after all have their own prodgies. But lord knows where they can go. Can’t see them roughing it in some benighted backwater country for long, myself, and of course they’d never be allowed back if they did start a family after being forbidden to do so here.”
“You heard what happened? Thought they were being clever. Found someone in the Eugenics office who was open to—ah—persuasion and got themselves a forged genalysis. Went to a private clinic, and the karyotype said they were going to have a mongoloid idiot. Twenty-five thousand buckadingdongs it cost them to get that gene certificate, and they had to have the kid aborted after all!”
“We got ours through the Olive Almeiro Agency. Very big operation. Naturally it can’t be passed off as our own—my wife is even fairer than I am and the kid is dark, hair, skin, eyes, the whole shtick—but we could have waited five, six years for a baby to match our own genotype and then not been able to afford the cost.”
“So when these two had finished Shalmaneser said where’s the baby? And they said oh, you have to wait nine months for that.”
“Look, I don’t mind panhandlers as such—in fact I think it’s a damned good idea to license them because at least that gives you the option of choosing whether you’re going to support a given individual case instead of simply taxing you and passing the money on in welfare allotments to wastrels and vagabonds. But the way the union has got whole districts of the city sewn up now and insists on kickbacks and drives non-members out of the area—that’s more than I can swallow!”
“Oh, are those the new Too Much joints? May I try one? I heard very good things about the strain. Thanks. I hope Gwinnie doesn’t recognise them or she’ll make us pay forfeit on them and I don’t like the look in her eye. She’s building up to something really nasty, I suspect.”
“The draft got his balls. They’re cracking down very hard at the moment. Did everything he could—turned up for the board with mother in tow, wearing one of her dresses, orbiting like crazy, and they took him anyway. He’s in that horrible army hospital St. Faith’s right this minute undergoing aversion therapy for ambivalence and tripping both at once. It’s absolutely inhuman, and of course if it works when he comes back he won’t want to know any of his old friends, he’ll be one of their automatic push-button people, a good solid respectable citizen. Doesn’t it make you want to weep?”
“One thing about this crazy party, I do depose—I never expected to see so many shiggies at Guinevere’s place looking like shiggies instead of like sterile-wrapped machines. Do you suppose she’s testing the temperature to see if she should move the Beautiques over to the natural trend?”
“Happened all in a moment. One second, just a bunch of people walking down a street, not going any place in particular, and the next, these brown-noses clanging on big empty cans with sticks like drummers leading an army and all sorts of dreck flying through the air and windows being smashed if they weren’t out already and screaming and hysteria and the stink of panic. Did you know you can actually smell terror when people start rioting?”
“Louisiana isn’t going to last much longer, you know. There’s a bill up for next session in the state legislature which will ban child-bearing by anyone who can’t prove three generations of residence. And what’s worse they’re only offering five to two against it being passed. The governor has his two prodgies now, you see.”
“I was in Detroit last week and that’s the most eerie place I ever did set foot. Like a ghost town. All those abandoned factories for cars. And crawling with squatters, of course. Matter of fact I went to a block party in one of them. You should hear a zock group playing full blast under a steel roof five hundred feet long! Didn’t need lifting—just stand and let the noise wipe you out.”
“It’s more than a hobby, it’s a basic necessity for modern man. It fulfils a fundamental psychological urge. Unless you know that if you have to you can kill someone who gets in your way, preferably with your bare hands, the pressure from all these people is going to cave you in.”
“I graduated with a master’s rating on throwing knives and a grade one rating on hand-to-hand. I already have a marksman certificate on bolt-guns, and next I’m intending to collect one for projectile weapons—rifles, pistols and crossbows.”
“Sure you can come around, but don’t hope for too much. I’m living in a group, you see, and there are eight of us, so I don’t feel much need for variety. Also we have two kids and our shrinker says they have positively Polynesian emotional stability so the last thing I want is to interfere with a setup that’s paying such fine dividends. It’s the extended family bit, of course.”
“Nevada’s mavericking again, did you hear? There’s a bill up for next session to recognise polygamy and institute proper marriage and divorce laws to cover it. Up to groups of ten, I think it says in the draft.”
“Don’t lie to me, darling. I saw that codder’s blip go up on your screens the moment he asked you to dance. I’ve told you before and I’m telling you again, I don’t mind you bivving it privately but I won’t stand for it in public. So I’m an old-fashioned block, so I’m still your wife and if you want me to stay that way you behave when you’re in company—catch me?”
“So Shalmaneser said well, if it takes nine months, why were you in such a sheeting hurry at the end? Haw-haw-haw!”
“I’ve been hoping to have a word with Chad Mulligan, but I can’t pry him away from those Aframs he’s talking to. I want to ask him whyinole when all our dreams are about wide-open spaces and room to move and breathe we like to cram ourselves together at parties till we can’t hardly cross the floor of a room without shoving aside twenty other people.”
“Look, lover, you carry it off very well but I fly a perfectly straight orbit and what’s more I’m married so why don’t you find someone who likes to biv and stop harassing me?”
“I got one of these super disposalls, too, because the garbage clearance down our block is five weeks—catch me, five!—overdue. And the first day I try to use it comes in this sheeting little pest and says I’m violating the clean-air laws. Great balls of dreck, clean air! There hasn’t been any clean air in our neighbourhood for sheeting weeks because of rotting dreck all over the streets and now it’s beginning to block the passages!”
“Yes, but what’s the use of arguing about politics these days? Isn’t such a thing as politics. There’s
just a choice between the ways you’re going to cave in through force of circumstances. Look at Common Europe, look at Russia, look at China, look at Africa. The sheeting pattern’s the same except in some places it’s gone further than others.”
“Look, Schritt—all right! Look, Helmut! If you don’t get off my orbit and let me fall free for a bit I’m going to stand right up where everyone can hear me and pull rank, do you hear me? I don’t give a pint of whaledreck if Chad Mulligan does sound subversive to you—he happens to be talking to our ambassador to Beninia and I’m interested in what they’re saying. I was told to carry on with my ordinary activities and if you’ve read my original brief you sheeting well ought to know that it includes being interested in everything relevant or not relevant to my assignment. Now go dig a hole and lie down in it!”
“Things are getting tough again in India, apparently. It’s the protein that was lost when the slit-eyes poisoned the Indian Ocean. And by the way, I hear the containment programme is running behind—a current spilled over past one of the barrages and they’ve been hauling out contaminated fish as far north as Angola.”
“I have this new autoshout of GT’s that programmes itself on a signal from the satellite. Haven’t missed a show in three weeks through rescheduling. Should get one.”
“I use nothing but Kodak Wholopan R myself. The rating is 2400, to start with, which means there’s practically nothing you can’t catch, and there’s ninety-five per cent recovery on a division factor of twenty, which means you never need more than one print and a pair of scissors.”
“No, that’s what’s so extraordinary. Freefly-suiting is terrific exercise, a sort of dynamic tension method because all your muscles are working against each other. Of course, you have to watch your calcium balance like a spy, but there are treatments which actually improve it over normal Earthside levels now.”
“The acceleratube makes commuting perfectly possible. I can get to work quicker from Buffalo than I used to when I lived in Elizabeth.”
“I think I’ll have to take copter lessons.”