The Jagged Orbit (15 page)

FIFTY-EIGHT
A LONG WAY IN BOTH SPACE AND TIME FROM BASIN STREET THE CELEBRATED LOCUS OF INTERSECTION BETWEEN PERSONS OF UNEQUAL EPIDERMAL PIGMENTATION

Within seconds of Flamen letting himself into his office at the Etchmark Undertower—trend-setter of the post-turn-of-century buildings sunk as far into yielding earthcrust as older buildings jutted upward, in order to reach the bedrock of the Manhattan Schist in an area where it nosedived—the comweb screen lit to show Prior's face.

"Ah, Matthew!" With evident relief. "Were you held up?"

"Of course I was!" Flamen snapped. "They're diverting everything to the four points of the compass. I thought I was never going to get here at all. Did Diablo show?"

"Sure he did. He's right here in my office. I'll bring him in to see you at once. I've been keeping him hanging around a bit, I'm afraid, but I thought it best for him to meet you before we started—ah—
talking shop."

Flamen's mood lightened momentarily; he was always amused when in a fit of self-consciousness Prior gave that faintly disapproving inflection to a phrase he regarded as slangy. This particular one had a century or two of respectable use behind it, but for Prior it was still not quite kosher.

"Great, bring him in," he said aloud, dropping into his chair.

So now: the big moment. Enter, fussily superintended by Prior, the celebrated Pedro Diablo, curiously shy in manner (but perhaps that was due to the shock of being uprooted from his lifetime-familiar background), eyes darting everywhere in the room, a great deal of their whites showing. A rather good-looking man, younger than Flamen had imagined: certainly still in his thirties. But of course he already had a decade of fame behind him; that would explain the false perspective. Lean, tautly nervous, hair and beard curled in near-African spirals, wearing New York-fashionable clothing instead of Blackbury robes—a black-green striped over-suit and green shoes. . . . Flamen inventoried him as he shook hands, accepted the offer of a chair, uttered conventionalities about great pleasure and having often watched the Flamen show.

Somehow, though, despite hours of restlessness during the night which he had intended to devote to the question of Diablo, Flamen had wound up without any plan of action for today. After the formalities, there was a long interval of silence which made Prior visibly anxious. He had just cleared his throat and seemed about to utter some scrap of Smalltalk, when Flamen decided —almost to his own surprise—that he wasn't going to bother about being diplomatic.

"Well!" he said, looking Diablo straight in the face. "I guess it fits your impression of blank society, doesn't it, to find yourself here as the result of a bribe?"

Prior's jaw dropped. Flamen turned on him a smile as sweet as honey. "Freeze it, Lionel," he said. "I'm not in the right mood to be polite today, I'm afraid. I have agreed to take a bribe, and I'm feeling ashamed of myself."

"But someone of Mr. Diablo's known talent in the field—"

"Oh, sure! I respect his work tremendously. I also respect his well-known impatience with hypocrisy and doubletalk. I wish I was half as consistent."

"I'm looking to you to learn how to give up being consistent," Diablo muttered. "There's no consistency in what's happened to me these past forty-eight hours. Sure, go ahead and call me a bribe—it's something of a privilege, I guess, to be treated as the price which can buy something from you."

Who'd have thought it? I'm on the right track, Flamen told himself, pleased.

"So let's skip all the pretense!" he exclaimed. "I'll give you the bald facts why I agreed to having you sent here, shall I? We're getting interference on our show and the Holocosmic engineers say they can't eliminate it.
I
think there must be a good reason why not—it never affects any other transmission from their studios. I need the resources to stand up and argue with them, which means computer time in amounts I couldn't ordinarily afford. So I made a bargain—or rather Lionel did, but I'm in total agreement with him on it."

Diablo gave a thoughtful nod. "I see. It's all fallen very patly, hasn't it? Bustafedrel needed to find me a slot fast for fear of recriminations, you had a problem which needed Federal help, and here I am. So continue."

Flamen hesitated. "I don't mean to undervalue you—" he began, but Diablo raised a hand to forestall the rest.

"Friend, I don't care what you say, or anyone else right now. I been so undervalued yesterday. . . . You catch me?"

"I certainly agree with that!" Prior said hastily. "I mean, I told Voigt straight out: this man's worth a couple of army corps!"

"So what's an army corps worth these days?" Diablo snapped.

There was a further uneasy pause. Eventually Flamen said, "Nonetheless I am being impolite. I'm sorry. It's partly lack of sleep, and partly having had the Morton Lenigo thing under my nose yesterday and thinking it was absurd. . . . Say, what do
you
think of them letting him in?"

They're out of their skulls," Diablo shrugged. "But in that area they don't have a monopoly."

"No, it's clear that Mayor Black also finally mislaid his marbles," Flamen concurred. "Throwing you out, particularly on the say-so of an Afrikaner, is kind of like cutting your wrists to see the pretty red blood flow."

"Expect me to contradict you? I'm not modest. Also I think I'm a better melanist than he is, and since you said you don't approve of hypocrisy, I might as well lay it on record that I don't plan to turn my coat and get even. If you were hoping I'd turn up with a pack of pre-canned slanders to undermine Mayor Black or Lenigo or whoever, you were wrong. I said I wanted the letter of the Blackbury contract adhered to. It's been done. That's fair. So you can have any of what I'm carrying which I'd have used over my own beams if I hadn't been thrown out of Blackbury. I don't like blanks in general so most of what I have is anti-blank. If you're honest enough to use it, I can get along with you. All of it, of course, is the truth."

From the corner of his eye Flamen saw that Prior was goggling like a hooked fish, clearly horrified at the way the conversation was going. But for his part, he welcomed it. There was something about Diablo's aggressive manner which reminded him of his own younger self, and at the same time drew his attention to changes since then which had proceeded so slowly and gradually that he had never felt a discontinuity. It was like—yes, it was like having been lounging in a skimmer on a bright warm day, idly watching the clouds and enjoying the sun and the breeze, and suddenly waking up to the fact that you had an appointment an hour ago in a city five hundred miles distant in the wrong direction.

He thought of his promise yesterday that he was going to fix Mogshack's wagon. Why had he said that? Because he was honestly worried about Celia? He'd believed so on the surface of his mind, but the sharp edge of Diablo's personality, honed in a community where black was black and white was white and there were no shades of gray in between, had made the pretense gape apart like the splitting of a drumhead.

No. In his heart of hearts he was no longer interested in Celia; he'd become resigned months past to losing her as a wife, and once she was evicted from that role she became one person among millions, a stranger. Yet, just as he had once spoken in harsh uncompromising terms like Diablo's, so too his younger self had uttered and
meant
the formal public promises of a marriage ceremony.

It was one thing to recognize as a bitter fact that over half the marriages contracted in twenty-first century America had already ended in divorce, though the century was barely fourteen years old; it was something else again to relegate a person who had once ruled your universe to the status of a mere tool, the instrument to undermine Mogshack and demonstrate that Matthew Flamen the spoolpigeon was still a power to reckon with.

All that had been poised at the edge of awareness, worked out during the night and needing only the last-straw impact of circumstance to bring it avalanching into the open. Diablo happened to have been the bearer of that straw, and had let it fall at the moment when rational judgment warned that he dare not respond, for there was a show to be taped and comped and revised and delivered in barely two hours.

"Matthew, is something wrong?" he heard Prior say. With a tremendous effort he dragged himself back to the present.

"No, nothing," he lied with convincing casualness. "I was just considering how best to acquaint Mr. Diablo with our techniques, but I guess that's a non-problem, isn't it? You must use equipment more or less like ours in Blackbury."

Diablo scanned the computer boards which occupied three walls of the office, with a screen over each, and shook his head.

"Nope. I doubt there's a setup like this in any of the knee enclaves except maybe Detroit, and if there's one there it's probably used for defense and budgeting, not for propaganda. Frankly, I been wondering what it's all for."

"Show you, then," Flamen said, rising. "We don't have too much time to put our day's show together, but I did once comp a ten-minute show in level time, so if I have to hurry I can. . . . Let's see now!" He crossed the room to stand before the board closest to the doorway; this one was the most heavily used, as could be seen from the deep nail-marks in the tops of its keys.

"We'll start with the one that got away," he said, half-mockingly, half-angrily. "The Morton Lenigo thing. Background facts first"—he tapped a code on the board with practiced fingers. "Now that they're set up, let's take a starting point from which we can dig deeper. For instance, let's ask what the Detroit city government threatened to do in order to secure Lenigo's admission."

Diablo had come over to stand beside him and watch. Flamen was pleased to hear his very faint hiss of indrawn breath as he voiced the idea which had struck him in the skimmer.

"It was Detroit, then? You of all people ought to know. Don't worry, though. I'm not going to force information out of you. Our equipment isn't the best in the world, but it's well primed with data, and anyway I didn't have to comp that one out—I just deduced it." At the back of his mind he was aware that he was adopting this patronizing tone in order to get back at the knee for that dismaying fit of insight he'd suffered a minute earlier, and was unable to prevent himself continuing, and was dismayed all over again at that too.

Christ, he thought: I'm beginning to wonder why I still have any friends left if this is me—now. Worse yet ... do I have any friends?

But aloud, in response to the appearance on the screen over the computer board of a short list of key subjects each followed by a probability rating in percentage terms: "See here, it says the most sensitive point for them to apply pressure at is their annual tax-assessment. They've nearly satched the market for skimmers, commercial transport vehicles and their other main products, and they didn't quite compute their obsolescence program as cleverly as they intended. We could take at least a three-month blockade before we ran out of replacements, and if we had to we could welsh on the contract the Federal government made with them and start producing our own spares. Whereas they'd have starvation riots in about a month and a half; we deliberately keep down their stocks of food. However, their purchases of power and water bring in so big a slice of the Federal budget, in hard African and Middle Eastern currencies, that threatening to set up—oh, perhaps a condensation plant... Is something
wrong?"

Diablo swallowed hard. "Yes," he said in a defiant tone. "I think you're conning me. You got that in the Federal package, didn't you? It was part of the price you paid for agreeing to slot me in."

"Cross my heart it wasn't," Flamen said with a thin smile. "But I assume it's the truth, hm?"

"Well ... Oh, all right. I believe you. And it is right. Clear down to the atmospheric condensation plant We were going to break that info around the weekend sometime. I guess I don't have to explain the slant."

"Once again the knees get even with the blanks for terming a nasty antisocial act 'blackmail'?"

"We call 'em 'petards,' " Diablo said at length. "You know—"hoist with his own.' Sorry, I didn't mean to hold you up when you're short of time. But what I don't get is this." He fingered his beard, staring at the computer screen. "When you have analytical equipment like this, which can dig the background out of something as well masked as the Lenigo blackmail deal, why's there any need for a specialized spoolpigeon show? You'd think the regular news coverage would be full-depth anyway."

"I've made my living for years out of the fact that it isn't," Flamen said curtly. Then, relenting: "It's different here on the outside, Diablo. It's a big psychological thing. We look at what you can see, and we stop there. I guess we got into the habit some time in the last century, same as we—well—same as we might look at you and think 'kneeblank,' full stop. We think of news as the detached record of what took place, regardless of why: there was an earthquake yesterday, there's a riot today, there's going to be a tornado tomorrow. You catch me?"

"It fits," Diablo said, nodding. "So go ahead."

"All right. Where was I? Oh yes. Well, I'll just have all the stories comped out which I left to simmer overnight, and check the monitor back to see what's come in since . . ." The screen flashed and darkened and flashed again, factors in each successive story being evaluated and presented. "Ah, that's fine. Today we have several usable items."