The Jagged Orbit (19 page)

SIXTY-SEVEN
AN OPINION UNREPENTANTLY HELD BY XAVIER CONROY DESPITE REPEATED ATTACKS ON HIS STANDPOINT BY (AMONG MANY OTHER NOTABLE AUTHORITIES) ELIAS MOGSHACK

"Man is not a rational
being,
he is a rational
animal,
and to claim that in debasing the influence of the gonads and other glands, in producing a perfectly plastic, perfectly yielding, perfectly unirritating conformist dummy you have cured a severe mental disorder is exactly equivalent to boasting that you have eliminated the risk of
tinea pedis
by amputating at the ankles."

SIXTY-EIGHT
THE LINE DIVIDING DAY FROM NIGHT ON EARTH OR ANY OTHER PLANET OR SATELLITE IS TECHNICALLY KNOWN AS "THE TERMINATOR"

There was an "atmosphere" at the Prior home that evening to which a number of factors each contributed noticeably.

Having reluctantly brought his sister Celia back from the Ginsberg Prior had found his wife Nora- talking on the comweb to Phil Gasby's wife and the latter on being introduced had said, "Ah yes, she's the one who's spent so long in the State lunatic asylum, isn't she? I trust they know what they're doing to let her out. Snff." End of conversation and beginning of neighborhood-wide scandal.

Celia's presence annoyed Nora, who smashed a dish containing reheated deep-frozen beef Bourguignon in the middle of the dinner table shortly before her brother-in-law was due to arrive and disappeared to her room with a shout to the effect that she had married only Lionel of the Prior family and not all his mentally deranged relatives. Her customary ill-temper had been exacerbated earlier by his attempts to explain why engaging the celebrated kneeblank Pedro Diablo as a colleague at Matthew Flamen Inc. entailed advantages outweighing the social stigma of working with a black man on an equal footing (relevant quotations from the dialogue: "I'll never be able to hold my head up in this neighborhood again and we'll have to move!" and "If he needs a job let him go and look for one in Africa!").

The freshness of the disastrous citizens' defense group exercise in people's memory meant that instead of the normal evening-long flow of solidarity-generating comweb calls there was a dull silence in the house and a crackling awareness that the treachery of Lionel Prior in carrying out his successful mock raid on his neighbors' homes was being discussed in scores of calls so close at hand one could almost have stolen out back and eavesdropped on the speakers.

There was additionally the terrifying notion abroad that Morton Lenigo might have arrived with the faultless blueprint for a nation-wide seizure of power by the knees and during the day the Gottschalks had announced some very expensive but unprecedentedly destructive new weaponry which in this high-priced district virtually no one could afford so soon after laying out for the regular spring models.

Throughout all of which, including the dinner, Celia retained a marble statue's calm and a polite flow of small-talk concerning her brother's business, world affairs since her hospitalization, and the various antiques he had lately purchased and put on display in the living-zone. Her imperturbability was due to the fact that she had been drugged for five months without interruption at the Ginsberg and even if she stopped taking the medicine prescribed for her immediately, it would be several days before the cumulative effect on her personality wore off.

On the arrival of her husband Matthew Flamen she was just finishing her dessert, and after a cool greeting and the offer of her cheek to be kissed, she said it was advisable for her to go straight to bed since she had been warned against overtiring herself directly after her return to the outside world, good night.

SIXTY-NINE
WHY THE CENTRAL QUEENS TUNNEL OF THE RAPITRANS SYSTEM WAS OUT OF ACTION FROM JUST BEFORE DAWN UNTIL AFTER MIDDAY

A student of chemistry named Allilene Hooper, aged 19, failed to stabilize the home-brewed nitroglycerine she was delivering to her boy friend and it exploded from the vibration.

SEVENTY
LIFE'S LITTLE IRRITATIONS

It being a martial law day there were armed police on duty at rapitrans terminals throughout the city, and under the inhuman gaze of goggle-like gasmasks Lyla rode the escalator up from platform level, dismayingly aware that behind her was this kneeblank stranger for whom, in a fit of violent reaction against the atmosphere of the Ginsberg, she had agreed to make herself responsible—not legally, for she was still under age, but morally, in that Reedeth had said quietly, "He hasn't been in New York as a free man for years, you know, and there have been changes."

What else could she have said but what she did? "There's a hotel near where I live and they don't mind taking in knees; I'll ride into the city with him and show him where it is."

And it wasn't until he said warmly, "That's very good of you, Miss Clay, because in spite of having been shut up in this place for so long he's really a very remarkable personality and a brilliant electronicist and ought to make out very well once he's discharged" . . . only then did the terrifying thought cross her mind: The
remarkable personality
was in the audience when I performed at the hospital the other day and had to be slapped out of the echo-trap and later suffered that inexplicable hangover and could it have been
him?

She kept glancing back over her shoulder, and there he was imperturbably riding up along with everyone else, a heavy bag slung on his shoulder which presumably contained what belongings he had been able to retain during his stay in the hospital, dressed in a plain gray oversuit not quite properly tailored to his stocky figure, his beard neatly brushed, his hair far shorter than was fashionable owing to a hospital ordinance she recollected reading about, something to do with the incidence of lice among patients committed after living alone for a long time in disgusting conditions.

What sort of a person? So far, apart from being introduced to him, riding down to the rapitrans terminal, and waiting a few moments for the compartments they'd signaled for to arrive, she had virtually no contact with him. They had exchanged a couple of dozen polite words, and that was that. She had gathered a little about him from Reedeth, notably the impression that but for being conscripted into the Army and suffering some kind of intolerable experience in combat he would never have undergone whatever sort of breakdown he had been hospitalized for.

And, on this return to the Ginsberg under utterly different circumstances from the previous day, she had suddenly realized why she had hated the atmosphere of the place so much on first arriving there. It had nothing specifically to do with her pythoness talent. It was due simply to her awareness that, in choosing her career, she had committed herself to a lifetime on the edge of literal insanity: thinking with other minds, perhaps one might call it ... or whatever did actually happen when she gulped down a sibyl-pill and collapsed into trance. One false step, and she might be in that hateful hospital for good.

"What thin partitions sense from thought divide," she murmured as she came abreast of the watchful police at the head of the escalator.

"Talking to yourself, hm?" said one of them with a harsh laugh. "Watch it, darl, or you'll be booked for a one-way ride to the Ginsberg!"

"Here comes a knee," said one of his companions. "Let's work him over, huh? We didn't get anyone yet today, but there's always a chance. You! You kneeblank there!"

On the firm ground, Lyla turned to look, and yes it was Harry Madison they'd chosen to drag aside and search: five tall policemen so armored and masked that one could not have told whether they themselves were light- or dark-skinned, with helmets and body-shields and pistols and lasers and gas-grenades. But there was no future in arguing. It would only make things worse if she said she and Madison were together.

Impassive, he obeyed the order to show his ID, and there was a reaction to the sight of the hospital discharge certificate: predictably, "So why didn't they send you to Blackbury?"

No reply. He was very calm, this man, Lyla noticed, very self-possessed, not in the least disturbed by what he could now see of the street, regardless of the fact that it must have undergone tremendous changes since he was last in the city: the blast-proof shields over the store windows, the two-foot-high police barricades isolating the fire-and-riot lane in the center of the roadway, the sunken gun-posts at the nearby intersections, the heavy concrete blast-walls exactly the length of a prowl car set at two-block intervals and designed to save official vehicles from being crushed if a building was demolished and spilled across the street.

Still, no doubt it had all been shown on the beams. Even being in the Ginsberg wasn't like being on another planet.

Disappointed perhaps—for they had gone so far as to make him empty his bag and proffer the contents for inspection—the policemen at length nodded Madison permission to go ahead, and one of them who had stood by idly chewing, a very tall lean young man, indeed gangling, put out his foot casually with the intention of tripping him as he hurried away. And somehow —Lyla couldn't see how—the outstretched foot was in precisely the spot where Madison next needed to step, and his weight went down on the arch without breaking stride, and by the time the pain was signaled to the astonished and furious busy there were a dozen people separating them.

"I'm sorry for the delay," Madison said as he rejoined Lyla. "There was no need to wait—I can easily find my way to this hotel you suggested."

Granted. So why had she waited? For the sake of having company, she decided suddenly. Last night she had lain beside the bed where Dan had died, where his body still rested, where—
ugh.
In cleanly modern America, one spoke of the organs, heart, liver, kidneys, for they were terms the doctors used when one was ill, and never made the connection with the tidily frozen, sterile, plastic-wrapped objects purchased for food. Dan had been opened, and the gash showed truly that men too possessed these things, these bloody wet palpitating things....

She looked around her giddily at the crowd. There was a crowd on this street, there was always a crowd on every street in every modern city. She thought: hundreds and hundreds of hearts and livers and kidneys, kilometers of gut, liters of blood enough to make the sidewalk run awash with red!

"Are you all right, Miss Clay? You look very pale!" On her shoulder a touch steadying her, for which she was grateful because the world had tilted askew.

"You get your filthy hand off that blank girl!" screamed someone and instantly heads turned for twenty paces on every side, but luckily it was an elderly woman with a pinched mouth and stern eyes under a furrowed old forehead who had uttered the shriek.

"Want him to handle you instead, you old bag?" Lyla shouted back, and there was laughter and people had forgotten it, except the old woman herself who looked murder. In this century of ours, curses upon our ancestors, even the sweet old ladies know what it is to hate enough to kill. Turn out that big purse clutched so protectively: find a Blazer like the one that stinking Gottschalk tried to sell me over Dan's warm corpse. . . .

But the instant of tension had taken with it her unexpected fit of dizziness. She said in a normal voice, "I guess I should have warned you, Mr. Madison, that even though this is a district where knees can still find hotels and restaurant service it isn't what you'd call a very integrated neighborhood."

"That's all right, Miss Clay. One expects that. And the Army taught me to look after myself, which is something I haven't forgotten."

She looked at him thoughtfully, seeing him for the first time as Harry Madison person instead of Harry Madison overdue ex-mental patient. She thought back over the echo in memory of those confident words he had just uttered, and realized that he had an extremely pleasant voice, bass-baritone, old-fashioned like a singer's with premeditated weight on individual words instead of a single monotonous rapid spate of them as in most twenty-first century speech.

And recalled that she was still alone, because Dan was dead.

Dan had had his friend Berry. Berry, she was vaguely aware, had a friend of his own—or possibly of Martha's, the girl he lived with. One needed a friend in a city like this . . . but why stop at
a
friend? Yet it was the pattern; query because making more than one was so difficult, because making the first had been such a struggle one was afraid to revert to the rebuffs and disappointments of friend-hunting?

It was too deep, too terrifying, to be considered now on a hot evening in summer, the time growing late, the sun going from the sky, the aimless dense crowds of the city moving out under the goggle gaze and as-yet silent gun-mouths of the police half eager and half fearful at the possibility of tonight climaxing in riots and rockets from the sky which brought sniper-riddled buildings down in flames.

She said, "Shall I go with you to the hotel?"

"I guess maybe it would be better if I went with you to your place," Madison countered. "Dr. Reedeth told me you had a bad thing happen last night, Miss Clay, and—and I'm very sorry. I think you look sort of sickly, and I'd feel bad myself if I couldn't repay your kindness in riding to the city with me."

There was more than superficial polite concern in the tone. She thought
Uncle
and reached back into childhood, the war scare days of the nineties when every knee was treated by every blank as a potential subversive or saboteur and she, innocently five years old, was worried because they were so teddy-bearish and the little girls in traditional checked dresses with pigtails sticking out and ending in tightly knotted ribbons and it was absurd and not Uncle Tom, Uncle
Remus—yes,
from a little later, as the scare subsided and only the mental scars could not be cured but the buildings could be mended and the new skimmers took the air in their millions, tidily disciplined into midge-swarms across the sky by masterful computers capable of organizing a billion simultaneous journeys without collisions and— anyway, Uncle
Remus
with the confidence of a man successful in life and owning something the accidentally rich would eventually learn to want, that could be offered as evidence of him too being the heir to a tradition, a heritage of entertainment and salty wit adaptable to the modern world: what else had she done to rid them of the hysterical old woman a moment past but imitate Br'er Rabbit who begged not to be thrown in the briar patch?

"Miss Clay, I think maybe I ought to take you to your doctor first," Madison said anxiously.

"Who's in charge here, me or you?" Lyla countered with a forced high laugh. "Yes, I'm sorry, something very bad did happen to me and I've got to go back to an apt where there won't be anyone else, just bloodstains on the floor to show there was someone yesterday, and there's not much use worrying, is there? People do get killed. I'll—"

Somehow she was walking with him, and managing to go the way they wanted to go instead of being pushed back and making detours and getting out of other people's way all the time as she was accustomed to. Not to the hotel, but to the block where she lived. Never mind.

"—simply have to digest the truth no matter how nasty it tastes. I ought to have warned you, though, like I said, because it's not as though I was wearing my street yash which would mean it could be assumed I was a knee like yourself, I mean here I am walking along with you and all I've got on is this pair of Nix and people are looking at us, have you noticed?, with this resentful expression, like when it's a blank it means what's that girl doing with a knee? and when it's a knee it means what's that knee doing with a blank girl and betraying the cause?"

"Yes," Madison said. "That's something any knee grows up with, Miss Clay. You don't have to spell it out, you know."

"I'm kind of trying to show that I appreciate it," Lyla said. "I mean I'm a pythoness and so I'm supposed to be more than averagely sensitive to—"

Recognized, familiar, the front entrance of her home block: the approach to the elevator.

"—other people, regardless of color. You see I was raised in this kind of
old-fashioned
background and my parents are very anti-Afrikaner and all that and I think it's a shame even though it's obvious why it happened that we got away from what was developing in the last century and—oh Christ, how am I going to get in?"

She stopped dead, on the point of entering the elevator car. "Those fucking busies! They didn't even let me pick up a key when they dragged me out this morning, nothing, I just happened to have this small change in my pocket and . . ." Frantically, the one pocket checked down to the fluff in the lining, and nothing but the phial of sibyl-pills and the money and an ID card.

"We'll deal with that when we come to it," Madison said, guiding her deftly into the elevator. She thought in the distant back of her mind: This must be what my old-fashioned parents meant when they talked about an "escort" for me to go places with, and in my present state it's kind of nice, I like it, I'm dreadfully scared about what we're going to find when the elevator reaches the tenth floor and yet somehow I'm not going Out of my skull and—

Stop.

Facing the elevator car, waiting to ride it down, the Gottschalk from Apt 10-W.

And his face uttering uncensored thoughts: Last night you tried to kill me when I was being helpful, and here you'd rather accept help from a knee, in this city torn apart by the black X Patriots who killed your man.