The Jagged Orbit (7 page)

TWENTY-NINE IT IS ONE THING TO TALK GLIBLY ABOUT THE DETERMINISM OF HISTORY BUT ANOTHER THING ALTOGETHER TO FIND ONESELF CAUGHT UP IN HISTORIC FORCES LIKE A DEAD LEAF ON THE GALE

As the sun tilted away from the zenith, so the sustaining anger leaked away from Pedro Diablo's mind, and he was suddenly brought face to face with an appalling truth.

It's not hate. It's terror.

He looked at his own dark-skinned hand and watched it shaking, detachedly, because he could not really accept that a trembling due to fear had its origins in the mind that he Pedro Diablo was used to occupying. He was a maker of fear, not a victim of it.

Here I am. How? Why?

The reasons were as many-layered as a constructional sandwich of industrial plastics. Superficially one might say—but what was the good of superficialities? The Diablo reputation was founded on the ability to look far deeper into any given situation than most people could manage without a computer handy to consult. An atavistic talent, on a par with being able to multiply six-figure numbers in the head because it was too much trouble to go find the log-tables, but in a context like Blackbury very damned useful indeed.

Out here, in the open so to speak ... ?

He shook his head. It was no good trying to guess about his personal future. He could draw analogies with people in similar predicaments in the past—mainly in the far past—but nothing more. He could for example compare himself to a Jewish physicist thrown out of Nazi Germany, or one of the South African intellectuals deported during more recent crises by the Afrikaners, but it didn't help. Until this very morning he had been a loyal, cooperative, and indeed an admired and respected proponent of the ideals which Blackbury stood for. To be kicked out on the say-so not of one of the resident knee geneticists but of some stinking foreign honky—that was just too much for his mind to digest.

His hands folded into fists so abruptly there was a faint clapping sound. For an instant his mind had been dominated by lust for revenge. He was a master propagandist; his work at the insignificant Blackbury vu-station had had repercussions far beyond the range of the antennae, being rebroadcast by half a score of black-owned, black-financed satellite relays. With his long-term intimate knowledge of the private lives of Mayor Black and his counterparts elsewhere, he could make the whole notion of Negro enclaves into a bad joke. It would take a week.

But the desire was fading as rapidly as it had come. To turn his coat was beyond his powers of adaptation. Right now he almost regretted having been so dogmatic with the Federal rep who had been compelled to carry him out of black jurisdiction. Better, surely, to have taken time to think things over, perhaps look for employment outside North America ...

Still, there it was. He had insisted on making it a matter of official record that the Blackbury-Washington contract be fulfilled, even though the very term made it certain that the contract must be an anachronism. This was still a honky country, but Washington had been a black-majority town for decades, and identifying it now with the Federal government was a mere symbol—the real seats of power were to be found in the dispersed centers set up during the war scare of the nineties, mostly in the Deep South where Mister Charley could be relied on to come running with gun in hand at the least threat of a knee revolt. Who should know that better than a man who'd exploited it often and often in his own programs?

His mind teemed with new possibilities. It wouldn't stop, and why should anyone expect it to? For ten years he'd fostered his talents; they couldn't be switched off like a vuset. Perhaps the cruelest thing Mayor Black had done to him, apart from taking a honky's say-so in deporting him, was depriving him of an outlet for his ideas. As though he were a time-traveler who'd spent years perfecting his Latin only to misfire and find the target city had been overrun by the Goths last week. . . .

On the other hand—and he brightened a trifle at the realization—he had been spared what would have happened in the inverse situation. Suppose some dark-skinned misfit had been deposited at the outskirts of Blackbury: instant directives would have come down telling the local vu-station to get him on the beams right away, coax him into virulent denunciation of his former friends before his wrath had cooled.. It was as much to guard against that risk as because he was genuinely afraid of the way he might be treated that he had insisted on full compliance with the Blackbury-Washington contract.

But, as a mercy, he had been spared the expected siege of cameras and mikes, interviewers and political agents. He might have said, in his first outbreak of fury, things he couldn't have lived down. And after all it was Uys, the white Afrikaner, who had been at the bottom of his trouble. Venial, power-hungry, oversexed, whatever his faults might be, surely Mayor Black was too intelligent to go on undermining his own position! Sooner or later he was bound to realize that in dispensing with his internationally famous vu-man Pedro Diablo he was throwing away one of his most valuable weapons, and that that must be exactly what Uys had wanted in the first place!

There was a shrill buzzing sound. He jumped, then made the automatic mental correction. That was the noise a comweb made out here when someone was calling up. Back in Blackbury, of course, the call-sign was the thump of an African speaking drum uttering the Yoruba phrase for "come and listen." He was going to have to rid himself of a hell of a lot of ingrained reflexes, like a typist changing to a machine with a different keyboard layout. But he would just have to suffer in silence.

Sighing, he announced that he was ready to accept the call.

THIRTY
I AM BECOME AS A GOD, AND SEE ALL THAT PASSES WITH THE EYE OF AN EAGLE

It was almost surprising that a room large enough to hold an audience of forty for the performance by the pythoness had been incorporated in the design of the hospital. The emphasis Mogshack placed on unbreachable privacy was so intense that there were no assembly halls, open sitting-rooms nor even a gymnasium. Mogshack himself preferred not to deal with his staff face to face; he "retired and regrouped" so frequently that weeks might pass without even his senior assistants encountering him in the flesh.

However, worried for fear his plans might later need to be altered in the light of experience, the architect had insisted on some areas of the hospital being fitted with retractable walls, and taking away half a dozen of these in a sector temporarily not occupied by patients created a space adequate for the performance.

The audience had already begun to assemble when Reedeth switched on his comweb screen to watch the proceedings. He had never had the least intention of insisting that he be physically present, but he had been unable to resist the chance of making Ariadne blush. He chuckled as he glanced over the green-clad patients entering the room, but his amusement faded the instant he realized that among the first of them was Harry Madison.

There must be some way to return that man to the outside world! Mogshack ought to have done it months ago; why he hadn't was hard to understand . . . unless (and a familiar demon rode the concept, snickering) he was indeed hoarding his patients like a miser. Perhaps one could confront him and argue that having one solitary kneeblank under his care was a potential source of disturbance for his other patients?

Reedeth sighed. If one were to pursue the implications of the Madison case to their ultimate conclusion, one might far too easily decide that anyone so totally unpredictable must be, by definition, unsuited to ordinary society. Those modifications to the desketary, for instance: could a normal person have done them so deftly and rapidly? Without being an expert, Reedeth was better grounded in cybernetics than the average layman—had to be, since so much of modern psychotherapy depended on computerized insights—and he was prepared to swear that the designer couldn't have envisaged these changes.

Additionally: asked to guess whether Madison would be interested in watching a pythoness, he would at once have answered in the negative. All the psychoprofiles ever raised for him had indicated strong opposition to anything that smacked of the unscientific or the supernormal. Yet here he was not only turning up but arriving ahead of time, as though eager.

So what had persuaded him to accept the invitation —mere boredom? That alas was all too likely. Madison's impassive demeanor, Reedeth noticed, was a complete contrast to that of the other green-clad patients. They without exception were visibly nervous. It was plain that they were relieved at this breach of their customary isolation, but at the same time alarmed at being in the real-Life company of so many other people after weeks, months and in a few cases possibly years of contact via comweb screens.

Come to think of it, that meant—and Reedeth clapped his hand to his forehead as the point struck him—he was witnessing an event unprecedented since the foundation of the Ginsberg. And it was Ariadne, of all people, who had brought it about.

"That girl must be a Conroyan at heart!" he said to the air, remembering to add a rider and instruct the desketary not to store the comment.

So who was this girl Lyla Clay whose reputation had sustained Ariadne through what must have been a long and difficult argument with Mogshack? He had a vague general idea of what pythonesses were supposed to do and why people liked to watch them doing it. One could hardly live in twenty-first century America and not number a handful of pythoness-fans among one's acquaintances—not to mention hi-psi fans, Lar-worshippers and people even further off the traditional western orbit. But he had never actually watched a pythoness at work, and the name of this particular girl was strange to him even though Ariadne had assured him that she was among the most talented of all. Abandoning the room where she was scheduled to perform, he switched from one to another of the more than three thousand cameras he could pipe into his screen, wondering if he could spot her on the way up.

Shortly he caught the image of a dark-haired young man riding a pediflow in the right direction, accompanied by a girl in a bullet-proof yash. The pythoness and her mackero, presumably—yes, it must be, for Ariadne herself was coming to greet them at the next intersection in due compliance with Mogshack's code of good manners. That prescribed condescension from those who were wealthy enough to afford privacy towards those who were not, in such matters as appearing personally to welcome visitors from below the poverty-line.

In spite of the obscuring yash, it was possible to discern that the pythoness was young and graceful in her movements. Reedeth found himself hoping that she wouldn't be compelled to keep the yash on in front of the patients.

THIRTY-ONE
EXCERPT FROM A RELIABLE GLOSSARY OF TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY USAGE

Mackero
(MAK-uh-roh)
[Fr.
maquereau
mackerel, colloq. pimp; cf. "mack"] Manager, agent (e.g.) for young self-supporting female (photographic model, freelance singer, pythoness, e.g.); specif. male, not derog. unless abbr.