She fingered herself experimentally. It was like touching a corpse.
So once again back on the worn groove of her puzzlement, thankful that the joylets had at least lifted her depression far enough for her to regard the effort of concentration as worthwhile.
If one of the audience had obsessed her to the point of creating an echo-trap for her, the likeliest assumption was that the same person was being referred to when she spoke of someone in the hospital being more rational than the director. Who? What kind of a patient could be in the Ginsberg not because he was crazy but because he was too sane?
It was no use cracking her skull, she decided at length. She’d never been able to analyze her own oracles unaided; she wanted Dan here to talk to, the tape to play over and over so that the words etched deep into her conscious mind. Where the hell had that stupid mack gone, anyway?
To distract herself she jumped up and started on a whirlwind round of the apt with the polycleaner, gulping dust and rubbish. The morning’s mail had dissolved into the sludgy mess of books before the Lar, and she scooped it all up in handfuls and threw it down the toilet. The fourth time she tried to flush the pan the water failed and the last grayish lump lay mocking her, irremovable.
Sudden uncontrollable rage took possession of her. She stormed back to the Lar’s shrine and seized it by its protuberant ears. It was a Model YJK, the most suitable in the non-customized range for a pythoness or other similar talent … according to the accompanying sales leaflets. In form it resembled a crouching fennec, the big-eared desert fox.
“Luck and good fortune!” she said between her teeth. “Liar liar liar rotten liar!” At each word she gave the idol a vicious twist between her hands, hoping something would snap off, but the tough flexible plastic merely sprang back into shape; only the tail assumed a limp question-mark curve.
“In that case—” she said, and strode over to their one openable window. Flinging it up, she started to hurl the Lar the thirty-plus meters to the street below, and instantly a beam lanced out of darkness and cracked the lintel, showering her with dust and concrete chips.
Gasping, clutching the Lar to her like a child, she dropped to the floor. For long moments all she was aware of was the muscle-tension and foul taste of her own terror, and the huge thumping beat of her heart. Her mind’s eye was filled with the picture of herself lying on the windowsill, as she might have fallen had the laser’s alignment been accurate, with a seared line across her breasts.
Eventually she recovered enough self-possession to think of putting out the light, closing the window—very cautiously, from the side at arm’s length—and replacing the Lar in its niche, distantly aware that if she had indeed thrown it away there would have been a hell of a fight with Dan. The seven-day appro was up tomorrow and if they couldn’t return it they would be billed two thousand tealeaves.
Then, standing well back in shadow, she peered out of the window to see what was going on. A side-effect of joylets was to reduce auditory sensitivity; she had to strain through a kind of muffling mental blanket to perceive faint exterior sounds, but now she was paying attention what she heard took on a familiar pattern that would ordinarily have put her instantly on the alert. Barely discernible chanting and drumming, as though one were suddenly to notice the circulation of the city-monster like an amplified human pulse; a screaming child, maybe caught on the street between police barriers, parents too frightened to come out looking for it; once long ago when she was about fourteen she had heard a sober middle-class couple, friends of her mother’s, quietly discussing during a riot in which one of their own sons had been stranded whether they should have another of their own were he to be found dead, or whether they were too old, and better advised to adopt. …
The voice of the novice Gottschalk rang out in memory, offering them—what was it?—“guns for a mere sixty-three with maker’s warranty.” She clenched her fists in blind frustration. Another of their damnable promotions, presumably! It was the regular Gottschalk technique: select an area where sales were below average, saturate it with rumors until someone’s temper reached the breaking point and the inevitable division occurred into blank and kneeblank, and then the following day take advantage of people’s frayed nerves to sell guns, grenades and mines.
But a droning from overhead disturbed her train of thought, and she dropped below the windowsill to peer upwards. She saw a police gunship hovering under its rotors, and realized that this wasn’t any mere Gottschalk promotion. That was one of the big ships, capable of leveling whole city blocks. She’d seen them do it on news-tapes—
News! They’d acquired a vuset, hadn’t they? Furious now at her own forgetfulness, she headed for it, turned back to blank out the windows—that sniper was too damned trigger-happy for comfort and might well fire on the reflection from the screen even if she turned it away from the window—and traced the cord along the floor until she found the leech. When she clipped it to the wall the set hummed to life.
On the Holocosmic channel: advertising. It was well into prime time bv now, of course. Advertising on Global—advertising on Ninge, NY-NJ—advertising on Pan-Can …
What was that? An unmarked setting, between Pan-Can the big Canadian fixed-antenna relay poised at twenty thousand meters not in orbit but on a mono-molecular cable and the adjacent channel allotted to Quebeçois French-language programs. Something had lit the screen which shouldn’t have been there.
Delicately she returned the knob to the intermediate position and there was a fat grinning kneeblank in West African robes swimming in a blur of color as though a very thin film of oil on water surrounded every sharp edge between pale and dark zones. She’d hit one of the pirate satellites, probably Nigerian or Ghanaian, of which two or three were launched every year and kept their orbit over areas with disaffected black minorities until the PCC could wheedle the appropriations and fund an interceptor to knock them down. The African and Asian countries had opted out of the PCC almost as soon as it was founded, and declined to recognize its rulings.
With a perfect imitation of the harsh-sweet Gullah/ Creole/Jamaican accent affected by large numbers of knees in the black enclaves of America, the man in the screen said, “We scoop Mister Charley’s lying propaganda, broze an’ sis! We got truth an’ the buckras’ lies will fade afore the win’, the sto’m an’ tornaduh of nigra wrath! They runnin’ to hahd in N’yohk City—watchah, watchah, broze an’ sis!”
The screen flicked to a satellite view of New York, and instantly it was clear there was something wrong. Street lights were out over polyblock areas, and threads of silver stabbed across them: rocket-trails.
“Oh, Christ!” Lyla whispered, knuckles to teeth in a childish gesture of apprehension.
“That the X Patriots, broze an’ sis,” said the revoltingly smug voice over. “To’ch-berrer Mohton Lenigo fresh from tri-yumphant battles with the British gumment, Cahdiff, Blackman-chester, Birming-ham!” And matching cuts of stock news stabbed in: Cardiff Castle fountaining skyward into rubble, the last white Lord Mayor of Manchester being driven out barefoot and in chains to a waiting government skimmer, Lenigo himself in Birmingham’s famous old Bull Ring, surrounded by grinning knees.
“Come to kick yoh lazy nigras off yo’ asses!” the voice said sternly. “When yo’ gone drahve them buckras outa N’yohk—hey? Tonaht? Could be! You get at it, broze an’ sis! Ev’y metah an’ centimetah o’ those tawllll towahs, those deeeep basemen’ss, they been watered with BLACK BLOOD—”
Convulsively Lyla tore the leech away from the wall and the set died.
They let in Morton Lenigo? They let in Morton Lenigo? They let in MORTON LENIGO?
Impossible. Incredible. No, they couldn’t. She looked at herself in the faint gray light which seeped through the windows on the side away from the street, seeing her summer tan fishbelly-pallid, thinking honky dont let the sun shin on you head it make you an easy target.
“Dan,” she said in a trembling little-girl voice. “Dan?”
&nbs
p; But he wasn’t there. In darkness, silence except for the distant racket of die fighting which grew louder and softer by unpredictable turns, she waited passive as the Lar for someone or something to rescue her from the insufferable real world.
FIFTY
THE GRAPH IS ALWAYS GREENER WHERE THE DESERT BLOSSOMS LIKE A ROSE
Conservative—perhaps because elderly—Marcantonio Gottschalk the grandfather of the clan based on the traditional Mafiareas of the New Jersey seaboard; not so Anthony or Vyacheslav or any of the other transistorized/computerized/dynamized younger generation. For them the ultimately defensible heartland, the Nevada desert: indrawn like a closing sea-anemone, waiting for the sooner-or-later moment when boom.
And here, right on schedule, boom! Anthony Gottschalk whose picture had not for five years found its way onto any official file, whose polysyllabic praenomen was not household knowledge like Marcantonio’s but who was already thinking of possible extensions to suit the eventual dignity of headship (current favorite: Antonioni; lying second: Antoniescu for no particular reason except he liked the sound of it), in his Nevada fortress with noises underfloor to signify work proceeding ace-apace on apace-iri-the-hole Robert Gottschalk—name deliberately chosen to mislead since it was impossible to hide the project completely from the scrutiny of Federal computers, capable of interpretation as some pre-ternaturally gifted new recruit vulnerable to a gun or a grenade. …
But Robot Gottschalk was vulnerable to virtually nothing. At his quasi-father Anthony’s fortress home he grew like an embryo seventy meters below the lowest basement, deep in the living rock; sounds from work on him were channeled via tunnels which would later be closed with armored doors; you’d have to risk contaminating or firing the whole western half of the continent to make sure of shattering his solid-state circuitry.
Thick-set, dark-haired but very pale with milky eyes, Anthony Gottschalk stood breathing the clean desert breeze wafting off his estate, scented with oranges, lemons, bougainvilleas, frangipanis, uncountable varieties of lovely trees and shrubs. Coup after coup shed rosy glows in his mind: sales to Blackbury of weapons stick-in-the-mud old Marcantonio wouldn’t risk for fear of Federal clampdown (and who among that gang of clowns would risk action when they found out? asked Anthony Gottschalk)—hinting in Detroit how to solve the Morton Lenigo impasse—solved today and coming along nicely, with insurrection almost on Marcantonio’s doorstep by God, wonderful!—and stacked up in the pipeline the biggest and most profitable of all, of all, of all. …
His mind calmed a little; he had been growing manic on no stronger drug than knowledge of his own impending success. Marcantonio was eighty count the years eighty! Should have been retired years ago. All very well to head the cartel in days of bow-and-arrow, now in modern age useless, short-sighted, over-cautious. Report from Robert already to hand, installation nearly complete, partial evaluations already recoverable by punching the proper code on the keyboard here …
Turning, he bent to the board and checked on late developments. Probability of sales tomorrow in New York State: $12,000,000 plus or minus $1,500,000. Sales index for whole country 35%. Grand Project realizability rating up by three points in the past hour!
Anthony Gottschalk performed a little tapdance of joy. The Lenigo revolution was well on the way. If only one could arrange for Marcantonio to catch a misdirected shot …
But no. Alas no. There in his New Jersey estate he was at least as well protected as Anthony here, Vyacheslav upstate, any other polly. It would take Robert to figure out a breach in the defenses.
He would. There was nothing else on the continent, nothing on the planet to match Robot Gottschalk: the Federal government bled white (horse laugh) by its own massive purchases from the Gottschalk cartel as the hydra of insurrection burst out like a dormant forest fire here today, there tomorrow, the day after in fifty cities at once, could never have afforded him. The nearest approach would be Oom Paul at Capetown, the computer which for over a generation had enabled five million whites to dance mocking rings around the knees who hated them. That would obviously be the second market zone for the Grand Project; he’d thought of Britain but since the destruction of Whitehall you could forget Britain. Over there people could barely afford shotguns.
And once Marcantonio had been buried—at the head of a five-mile cortège, naturally, for he had in his day been a great man—there was almost no limit to the possibilities open to the Gottschalks. Bapuji could sell to Asia and Olayinka to Africa faster than their plants could keep up. Chop-chop like a butcher’s cleaver, the slashing lines of demarcation between man and man, woman and woman, man and woman … Hmmm! Maybe not that; necessary to breed to keep up the consumer-level. … High birth-rate in Latin America still …
He laughed. What was the good of relying on his own insight any more? It had got him Robert, and Robert even before he was finished had blackmailed Morton Lenigo into the country, something the melanists here had been failing to manage for two years or more, and within hours of his arrival the sales probability graph soaring, just soaring! From this point on—mockingly Anthony Gottschalk removed an imaginary hat—Robert/Robot Gottschalk was the actual head of the cartel, regardless of who might be the titular grandfather.
Of course, Lenigo could hardly be relied on to achieve here what he had managed in Britain: the knee patrols on street-corners, armed, black and brown faces scowling at the blanks shuffling shabby to their low-paid daily grind, saving desperately even if it meant denying their children food in order to buy weapons from Gottschalk air-drops made on lonely ground in the Welsh mountains, the fens of East Anglia, the moors of Devon and Yorkshire, smuggled by blank commando units across city borders for resale at inflated prices.
Nonetheless, if his mere presence could provoke this sort of instant panic—”just add Lenigo!”—Robert would have paid for himself the day after his scheduled completion.
What more could anyone ask?
FIFTY-ONE
IF YOUR NUMBER COMES UP THEN YOUR NUMBER COMES UP AND THAT’S ALL THERE IS TO IT SO WHAT’S THE USE OF WORRYING THAT’S WHAT I ALWAYS SAY
Along about one when the troubled city was quieter and the gunships had been withdrawn without more than two or three blocks having to be razed Lyla discovered that she had fallen asleep on the floor under the folding table which with legs properly braced might serve as protection against flying glass or bits of the ceiling falling on her. She was very stiff and very cold and what had woken her was the shrill complaint of their comweb indicating that there was a call awaiting her or Dan at the end of the corridor.
It was a common trick to get doors opened in blocks like this one during riots. She ignored the noise, hating its insistence and wishing it would stop.
When after a long long time it did so, she thought about it being used to determine whether the apt was empty or not, and crawled into the kitchen where their gun was kept, dusty at the back of a closet. It was very old—Dan said it had been used in the Blackbury insurrection of the eighties—but in those days things had been built to last and it had still worked when Dan checked it just before Easter.
Straining her ears, discovering that the effect of the joylets had worn off and she could now hear normally again, she detected footsteps outside, and then there was a groan and something she couldn’t place, a verbal sound without content, and then there was a bang on the door and a voice she recognized said, “Miss Clay!”
She pointed the gun, looking to make sure the deadfall catch was set.
“Miss Clay! Ah—Bill here! I talked to you this morning, remember? I’ve got Mr. Kazer here and he’s hurt!”
What?
Moving slowly, as though through deep water, she secured the deadfall, chained the door, looked out through a crack on its right side with gun leveled and there was a lean, serious-faced young man in a black oversuit holding up Dan with both hands and blood running, dripping, streaming from his belly, down his legs, puddling, smearing, stinking in the hot night air.
&
nbsp; He put his hand out weakly to catch the jamb and she couldn’t push the door shut enough to release the chain and the Gottschalk had to drag him back and he screamed faintly and when Lyla got the door open at eternal last he almost fell through. Together she and Bill guided him to the broken bed and laid him on it; he wouldn’t straighten at first so that they could see the wound in his belly but when eventually he overcame the pain enough to roll on his back with a bit of help it could be seen that there was a monstrous gash with the shape of organs bulging through. His eyes were shut and his face was paper-white and after a moment his breathing faded.
“Get a doctor!” Lyla said with colossal, incredible effort past the need to vomit.
“No doctor will come out tonight,” Bill said. “There’s a curfew.”
“But we can’t just let him die!” Lyla spun on her heel, ran to the bathroom, looked for disinfectant, dressings, anything useful, came back empty-handed and weeping, the tears welling out of her eyes with a curious dry tickling like flies crawling down her cheeks.
“I’m afraid he is dead,” the Gottschalk said, and let go the wrist at which he had checked the pulse.
“What?”
“I’m very sorry.” Himself pale, the Gottschalk avoided her eyes, looking down at the blood which had splashed on his black oversuit. “He must have been hit with an axe, I guess, or maybe a sabre. It’s a miracle he was able to get in the elevator and shout loud enough for me to hear when he made it to this floor.”
Lyla stood like a waxwork, registering the words but not reacting.
“Oh, if only people took notice of the warnings we give them!” the Gottschalk went on sorrowfully, shaking his head. “He should have been armed—he should have been able to defend himself! You don’t need training to use things like Blazers, and no one with a mere axe or sword can get within striking distance against one of them.”