The Jagged Orbit (21 page)

Lyla started to say something, changed her mind, changed it back again. "Harry, tell me honestly: do you think they were justified to put you in there? Do you think you were crazy? Because you certainly don't sound it, to me."

"I have a certificate," Madison said with a wry smile. It was the first trace of expression she had seen on his face, even when he was confronting Berry, and it was gone in a flash.

"Yes. Yes, of course." She cast around for words. "Well, look . . . Look, it's like this. I don't want to be alone. I'm frightened. I don't have a gun any more—it was stolen by the block Gottschalk, the one we saw by the elevator. I'd have to go out and get food or something and . . . Well, look, can you stand to keep me company for a few hours at least? Just so long as necessary? Till I feel.. ."

Her voice died and her hands hung lax at her sides and her head bowed. "I'm sorry," she muttered. "You've done much more already than I had any right to expect."

"Your talk of food is a good idea," Madison said. "I think you'll be okay later, but not right now. With a meal down you and a few drinks maybe, or a joint, you'll be able to manage. It'll make things seem more normal."

"That's exactly what I want," she said gratefully. "To make things
seem
normal, just for a while, even though I know they aren't and never will be again. Look, let's go eat right away so I don't hold you up for too long. I'll get my yash and put on some sockasins so nobody can tell I'm blank walking along the street, and I know some restaurants that don't mind mixed clientele."

She reached for the yash, which was on its regular peg; apparently Berry hadn't yet got around to throwing that out. On the point of ducking into the concealing garment, she hesitated.

"Harry, was it you?" she said suddenly, and was prepared to elucidate: "who drove me into that echo-trap, who wished a hangover on me so that I spoke an oracle out of trance."

But she didn't have to. He gave a matter-of-fact nod and held out the key he had taken from Berry for her to put in her pocket.

"Sorry," he added, and opened the door.

SEVENTY-ONE
REPRINTED FROM THE LONDON OBSERVER OF 10TH MARCH 1968

Colour—The Age-Old Conflict
by Colin Legum

Having recently spent several months in the United States, I came away sharing the view of those Americans who think that, short of two miracles—an early end to the Vietnam war, and a vast commitment to the public expenditure on the home front—the US is on the point of moving into a period of harsh repression by whites of blacks that could shake its political system to its very foundations.

What would be the likely effects of the West's leading power engaging in energetic racial repression? It would dramatise and accentuate the world colour crisis as nothing else could do. It would place a far heavier burden on the loyalties of America's Western allies even than Vietnam. It would have a traumatic effect in Africa, and directly affect the African nationalists with no alternative to inviting Communist support...

If this depressingly dark view turns out to be unduly alarmist, that could only be because the West, having seen the dangers in time, had changed the priorities of its commitments at home and abroad . . .

If ever American white society should come to feel its economic and security interests in serious jeopardy, it is quite possible that radical changes might take place. But it is not yet possible to foresee what these might be.

Similarly, if the white South African community should ever come to feel itself so isolated and threatened that it could no longer maintain the present policy of white domination, it might become interested in some genuine separation, such as the cantonal system of Switzerland. This type of voluntary separation is currently being discussed by some individuals in Israel as a conceivable solution to the problem of living beside the West Bank Arabs.

Voluntary separation—even separation into different bits of territory—is not always necessarily retrogressive. Although it is suspect to liberal minds—because of the horrors of twentieth-century racialism—liberals were the champions of all the nineteenth-century separatists who wanted independence from the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires and still today react sympathetically to the claims of Scots or of Welsh.

The current demand of Black Power in America for control over their own ghettoes is a move in this direction ...

SEVENTY-TWO ASSUMPTION CONCERNING THE FOREGOING MADE FOR THE PURPOSES OF THIS STORY

About the middle of the 1980's the money and manpower allotted to Internal Security Maintenance began to exceed that committed overseas.

SEVENTY-THREE IN ACCORDANCE WITH A COMPUTERIZED RECOMMENDATION ABOUT HOW BEST TO ENLIST THE COOPERATION OF A NOTORIOUSLY THORNY PERSONALITY

Xavier Conroy, D.Sc., Ph.D., Hawthorn Professor of Social Psychology, University of North Manitoba:
MOGSHACK INFLUENCE CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGICAL DOCTRINE HELD UNDUE BY FORMER ASSOCIATE STOP SEEK CORROBOHATIVE/CONTHADICTORY OPINIONS STOP YOUR REPLY PREPAID SIGNED FLAMEN

Flamen Spoolpigeon NYCNY 10036:
mogshack influence PERNICIOUS BUT YOU TILT AT OVERHIGH WINDMILL SIGNED CONROY

Conroy Univ. N. Manitoba:
agree windmill overhigh STOP QUERY COOPERATION IN SHORTENING IT SIGNED FLAMEN

Flamen Spoolpigeon
NYCNY
10036:
good luck signed conroy

Conroy Univ. N. Manitoba:
come ny weekend expenses PAID STOP BRING AXE SIGNED FLAMEN

Flamen Spoolpigeon NYCNY 10036:
arriving saturday MORNING FLIGHT 9635 STOP DONT THINK HOPE IN HELL BUT HATE TO MISS CHANCE SIGNED CONROY

SEVENTY-FOUR
NO ENTRY

Lyla felt she should have been terrified, but she wasn't, and she was even able to wonder quite calmly why she wasn't. She decided it was because Madison was so clearly on her side, had just saved her from what must otherwise have been a catastrophe, and moreover knew —regardless of how he knew—what she had meant when she asked that simple question: "Was it you?"

For a while after leaving the apt she didn't really think very much, but eventually, when they were back at street level, she was able to formulate casual inquiries in a normal friendly tone, and uttered them.

"Matthew Flamen offered you a job, isn't that right?"

"Yes; apparently he needs someone to cure interference on his vushows, and I know a fair amount about electronics."

"Are you glad to be—ah—
out
after such a long time?"

"I don't know. I'll wait until I find out whether the world has improved in the meantime."

"It's got worse," Lyla said positively. "I mean . . . Well, I'm still pretty young, I guess, but from what I can remember, even, it seems to have got worse. Dr. Reedeth said they had three LR's yesterday and that was good according to him because once they had nineteen in a single night, but there shouldn't be any at all!"

There was an interlude during which they walked along side by side without talking, Lyla shrouded in her yash and sockasins so that none of her skin showed, and they were able to make it along the sidewalk without trouble because other people took it for granted she too was knee. There was always a kind of weariness after an outbreak of rioting, a post-tumescent sadness as might be felt by two honest but accidental lovers realizing in the gray dawn that through transient passion they had risked starting another child on the long journey towards death.

Eventually he took up the questioning and said, "What would you have done if you'd arrived home on your own?"

"I don't know," she muttered. "I guess I might have called up your new boss. But I don't think I'd have got much help out of him. I mean . . . Oh, this is so hard to explain. I mean I like him on the outside, but I don't like him on the inside. He talks okay, but you don't get the feeling he's a man you can trust. Do you catch me?"

"Very clearly," Madison said. And: "Is that the restaurant you're taking me to, the one ahead?"

They had just rounded a corner and come in sight of a Chinese restaurant called the Forbidden City; purely in order to keep some kind of trade going in spite of modern xenophobia Chinese restaurateurs had notoriously been compelled to put up with whatever clientele offered themselves and customarily accepted mixed parties. But the main window of this one had been smashed, and there was a sign on the door, hastily scrawled in red ink: x patrots work!!! And an arrow pointing to the broken glass.

"Dan and I brought some knee friends of ours here once," Lyla said with forced brightness, and led him across the street. But she didn't even go up to the door. Behind it there was a tall Asiatic who looked past her at Madison and raised one hand warningly with fingers stiff for a karate chop.

"I guess we'd better try somewhere else tonight," she said dispiritedly, and turned away. From the corner of her eye she caught the Asiatic's teeth glinting in a grin.

There was a soul-food restaurant on the next block, but that had a sign up too, neatly printed in bright brown on solid black, denying entry to blanks, and then there was an Indian one proudly assuring the public that they too were Aryans and wanted nothing to do with other races, and a strict-Jewish one and a strict-Muslim one and a Japanese one for whites only outside which was parked a South African Voortrekker, and a Yoruba one which specialized in ground-nut chop and ...

Finally Lyla said miserably, "I'm so sorry, but it's been months since I tried to find somewhere that wasn't segregated and after the trouble last night I guess that was the final straw for lots of them. Maybe we should break up and eat separately after all."

"The hotel you recommended me to," Madison said. "Does that have a restaurant?"

Miserably she looked up at him through the window in the hood of her yash. "For all I know, the hotel may have stopped taking knee clients now and you'll have to go clear to Harlem after all."

Madison frowned and for a moment his lips narrowed so completely that they seemed to vanish. "What's done this, Miss Clay? It wasn't just one night of rioting."

"I'd like you to call me Lyla," she insisted. "I like people to be friendly to me instead of just polite! I
need
someone to be friendly! Oh God, I wish it could be like the old days my parents talk about, when you didn't mind who you met or who you worked with or who sat next to you. It's all sort of closing in on us like the walls in
The Pit and the Pendulum!"

She glanced wildly around as though actually expecting to see the buildings move to trap her.

"People didn't get killed in riots," she whispered. "They didn't! Oh—oh, poor
Dan!
"

Madison waited. Shortly she was able to go on.

"No, of course it wasn't just one night. It must have been waiting all the time people were ashamed to let it come out in the open. But something's proved to be stronger than shame. What is stronger than shame?"

"Fear," Madison said.

"I guess so," she admitted. "But why should people be so afraid?" She drew a deep breath. "I'm a pythoness, Harry. I have to get inside people's minds. I never found anything in anyone's—not even at the Ginsberg where there are all these people who are supposed to be crazy—which wasn't in me too."

She had fallen in beside him again automatically and this time he was taking the lead, heading towards the hotel she had recommended.

"Except you," she said. "You're—you're not the same somehow. And I'm frightened of that too ... I think."

At which point four large strong young men, all blanks, stepped out of a doorway and blocked their path. A bright light flashed in her eyes so that her face could be seen behind the mask of the yash and a voice said, "Mixed!" A hand clamped on hers and something jabbed into the base of her thumb and the ground rocked in a weird swirling curve like water in a spinning bowl.

Blurch. Planet revolving on ungreased axles that howled. Dim unspoken in the recesses of the brain
helphelphelp.
Scattered to the four filthy corners of the universe the bits and pieces of the person once integrally Lyla Clay. Feebly
helphelp
and not even strength to move the lips let alone power vocal cords with gust-ing breath.

Eight filthy corners.

help

too much like hard work she abandoned the struggle.

SEVENTY-FIVE
CAUTION AND PRECAUTION UNEQUAL AND OPPOSITE

They had put Pedro Diablo in a Federal-financed luxury apt development where the contract—drafted by Bustafedrel back in the days of less sharply delineated racial boundaries—included a non-discrimination clause, but it had never been invoked before and his neighbors were so horrified that during the evening (while he was being tracked down by the knee leaders who were in close touch with Morton Lenigo and had also been horrified because they had banked on using Diablo's talents as a propagandist and now he'd been fired on the say-so of a dirty blank) they were organizing a petition to have him evicted before he lowered the tone of the block.

SEVENTY-SIX
Q. WHO WAS THAT GRUNCH I SAW YOU WITH LAST NIGHT? A. THAT WAS NO GRUNCH BUT THE EGGPLANT OVER THERE

Eternities later and a different world: a world of black furry hills with a sun half green half red crossed by a slanting bar louring from a gray vertical sky.

A room? Painfully. A landscape of a room, floor plains and furniture mountains. Unheard, a river coursing down a stony cascade, obscene fungoid growths on the foothills and local weather storming and screaming and clammy heat and the stench of decay.

Crack
thunder
and ouch
lightning
and in the immediate foreground to which Lyla opened her eyes a Stonehenge of human bodies, a megalithic circle of arms on shoulders, pallid upright pillar-forms interrupted before the place where she lay by a wide-astride mandrake/
womandrake
more exactly paunch sagging over hairy pubis and skin scrawled like a toilet's wall with names and times in greasy crayon, some smeared and some freshly legible: piggy wallis 0825 della the butch 1215 HORNY HANK DUMONT 1640.

As though catching the fragments of a nuclear explosion piece by slow piece and forcing them back into the form of neatly machined metal billets Lyla absorbed the facts her senses presented and categorized them into patterns. She felt very ill and her hand hurt where a blunt needle had been jabbed deep into the muscles. Also there was a hot new pain across her right thigh. A red whiplash bar on the skin.

Multi-level floor. Fact established. Perspective restored. Ultra-modern collapsible retractable mutable furniture. On the black slopes the distorted mushrooms were human bodies some clothed and some not, some moving some not and some halfway between involved in incredibly slow lovemaking with limbs entwined and all else forgotten except the touch of skin to skin. So too in front of her not a megalithic circle but eight men wearing only boots and scrawled across the chest of each —or the upper arm if the chest was too hairy for writing on—a crayoned name gene putzi vernon hughie phil slob charlie pat. Arms on each other's shoulders they formed a horseshoe around a very tall young woman with small breasts and a premature pot-belly also naked except for a belt and sandals with interlaced thongs rising to above the knee, holding a whip and crowned with a fantastical red-blue-green wig. There was intolerable noise, not deafening but coming from all sides and overhead, as though in every adjacent room there was music and dancers' feet stamping and people arguing among themselves at the tops of their voices. Her eyes were maniacally wide and she was running with so much sweat her inscriptions were dissolving.

"She's awake!" A shout. A spray of fine spittle-drops, touch-touch on Lyla's skin. Also reported from the skin: the abrasive clutch of ropes at her elbows, on her back the sweat-slippery contact of moving muscles across hard shoulder-blades, under her buttocks wet furriness, at the nape of her neck the wiry roughness of kneeblank hair, like a terrier's coat. . . . She gasped and drove her perception into a normal mode by sheer willpower. She was sitting tied back-to-back with Harry Madison and she had been stripped.

"So what did you do with those Nix she was wearing?" roared the tall girl with the whip, and Gene on the end of the line of men broke loose eagerly, went to retrieve them, offered them with a cringing bow. Whip draped over shoulder the girl felt for the pocket and took out what there was: Punch key (let fall), some money (let fall), ID card (retained) and a phial.

"That something good, Mikki?" whined Gene. "That a good trip in that bottle?"

"How the hell should I know?" the girl bellowed, scrutinizing the ID.

Mikki? Lyla thought. Oh God. No. Let it not be Michaela Baxendale.

Booming words barely perceived through a fog of shock and terror and the aftermath of whatever drug had been used for the kidnapping: "A good trip baby, yes, a good trip, hey! Know who you collected for me, darl?"

Gene shook his head and the others craned close to hear.

"Why, it's the pythoness that son and daughter of a motherfucker Dan Kazer macks for now!" Mikki screamed, dissolving in a paroxysm of laughter. "The shitty bugger dropped me cold in the street and now here's deliverance into my hands—hey, darl?" She glowered at Lyla venomously, shaking the little phial close to her ear, and then turned to inspect it critically by the light of the red-green sun which was a dial on the wall with one pointer tilted into the green.

"Ah-hah! Enough here to go clear around if it is a good trip in this bottle!" She unscrewed the cap briskly. "But let's just be sure, huh? Let's try it on them and find out how it makes them fly!"

Giggling, the ring of men broke up, dropped on knees, grabbed—clutch at ankles, then thighs, reaching up higher greedily to crotch, also breasts: all too rapid to separate into individual events, a totality of clawing and fondling. Meanwhile behind Lyla others doing the same for (must be) Madison. She was too weak to fight them off so tried duplicity, waiting until a hand came close to her mouth with one of the sibyl-pills, prompting comment from the one branded slob: "Hey, Mikki, this must be a good trip! Look, she's opening up for it!"

And bit. Hard.

"The bitch! She bit me!" Leaping back, pill dropped, looking in horror at finger gashed across nail's base, blood pulsing out drip-drip on Lyla's leg. But in the moment of delusive relaxation to celebrate successful counter-attack a bang on the back of the head, Madison's hard skull. A whisper: "Hold his nose." The sound of a punch in the belly. Loudly: "He swallowed that okay! Try the girl again. Give us another pill, Mikki . . . No, don't bother!" Scrabbling on the black carpet. "I found the one she spat out—here it is."

Christ, what would one of the sibs do to Madison? She remembered Dan orbiting so high she thought he'd never land and that only women (something maybe to do with hormone chemistry) had the talent to metabolize the drug in half an hour.

She fought and twisted and writhed but they gathered her legs one by one and sat on them, too heavy to be forced off except at the risk of cracking bones. As her arms were already roped to hold her back-to-back with Madison that left only her head, which could be controlled by grasping her hair. Forced back, back until her neck muscles could not stretch to meet the counter-tug on her jaw and her cheek was against Madison's wiry beard, she tried to turn sideways, hold her mouth against his neck to bar the pill's entrance and didn't make it. Flip between her parted teeth, tap on her tongue, brace to stop herself swallowing it when the expected blow in the stomach came ...

Except it didn't. Shedding the relaxing men in a tumble of limbs she was lifted
hup
into the air and found herself briefly looking at the ceiling. She spat out the pill because that was the thing she most wanted to do in all the world.

The ropes tightened on her arms, first left, then right, and hurt for a fraction of a second but it was worth it They snapped. She fell sprawling and landed with one hand in a wet clammy substance which held up to the light showed shit-brown. Naturally. She got away from there, frog-hopping, wiping her hand wherever a piece of the black carpet was relatively dry, turning when she was out of reach to look at Madison.

No one else seemed to be paying much attention except Mikki and her eight booted men. The loving couples on the slopes at the end of the room went on with their slow slow parody of passion, and for the rest the world did not currently exist.

They had stripped Madison too and his stocky dark body glistened like oiled sealskin, a ridge of light on every tautened muscle. The man branded pat, as though hoping to benefit by that ebony embrace, said, "Ho-hooo!" and advanced coaxingly. A little stooped, legs apart like a wrestler's braced for the next grapple, eyes warily flicking to take in his surroundings, Madison waited until he came within reach, and—snapped. Big white gleaming teeth. An animal growl without words. As yet, only a warning: on Pat's hand, a mere line of blood traced by one canine fang, and some spittle. He paled and shook it, mouthing a curse.

"Get back, Pat,"
said Mikki, brought down from whatever plane she had been orbiting at by the shock of seeing the ropes break. "Looks like this is Dutch courage in a pill we gave him. Give me a clear field for the whip, will you?"

She made it whine through the air, confident, having used it often on much bigger opponents. As yet indeed there was no real alarm. A glance to the side showed Lyla crouching and trembling, not offering to join in. One against nine made excellent odds; Lyla could almost hear the thought And the booted young men were strong and healthy.

On a distant slope of the room someone sat up, alerted by the whip-whine, maybe: a girl wearing nothing, who first crossed her arms over her bosom for concealment, then gave a foolish grin and parted her legs to set her elbows on her widespread knees. She leaned forward to watch with concentration.

On the back of Lyla's tongue: a taste. Not the sourness of fear which was everywhere else in her mouth. Bitter/pungent/acrid? She sucked up saliva to suspend it in and rolled it forward to the area most sensitive to such flavors.

Memory clicked and she was instantly horrified. Once she had broken open a sibyl-pill before taking it, to find out if she liked the taste of the contents. She didn't. This was the same. The gelatin shell must have split, perhaps trodden by a bare foot after she knocked it aside the first time they tried to push it into her mouth. And she had noticed too late to stop herself swallowing as much of the drug as had spilled out on her tongue. Only a few milligrams, probably, but without the violence of the pythoness frenzy to burn it up what would it do to . .. ?

Crash.

Through the continuing racket of music and dancing from elsewhere in the apt, a rending noise. She jolted back to awareness of the rest of the room. With the terrible strength he had used to catch and lift the hundred-kilo deadfall on her apt door, Madison had seized a table with marble top and stainless steel legs and was engaged in tearing it apart. When one of the welds resisted him he spun and slammed the whole thing against the wall. The marble shattered and a chunk of concrete fell to the floor. A leg came loose and he raised it overhead with a howl. The man labeled vernon cringed and moaned out of reach.

Looking alarmed, Mikki cracked the whip and this time took aim for Madison's neck.

The steel table-leg intercepted the lash in the air
and it coiled around like a constrictor, Madison moving his head back without moving his shoulders, like an Indian temple dancer, just as far as was necessary for the tip of the lash to miss his right eye. He jerked, and the handle of the whip leapt from Mikki's sweaty grasp.

Bold, almost pleased, as though recognizing a worthwhile opponent, the one called Putzi who was the tallest and most muscular dived for the shattered table and himself wrenched free another of the legs.

Madison stripped the coil of the whip off his own weapon and threw it. Lyla's hands went up to the level of her ears and she heard the sound of her own fingers clapping over into the palms. The force of that throw was unbelievable, and he hadn't even drawn his arm back behind his shoulder. But the balled-up whip drove Putzi off his feet and left a continuous red pattern across his chest and belly, as though he had been struck with an old-fashioned wicker carpet-beater, a kind of sketch for a three-leafed clover.

"I'm getting out of here!" cried the one labeled Hughie. Mikki reached for him and caught him by the hair, swinging him around.

"Get him down and quiet him, you crazy fool! Want to have a kidnapping charge around your neck? You brought him here; you stay and face the consequences!"

"But you told us to go bring in a mixed-race couple!" Hughie whimpered.

"Shut up and grab that table-leg!" Herself, Mikki dived to retrieve the whip from its entanglement with the moaning Putzi's limbs.

One inch from her outstretched hand a chunk of marble, fist-sized, smashed and spattered her face and body with little stinging fragments like midges. She looked up slowly to see Madison grinning at her, inhumanly calm. Adjusting her balance, she drew back— and snatched the table-leg up, tossing it not to the still frightened Hughie but to Vernon, who caught it and charged Madison with it lifted in a killing swing.

"An thou'lt match me at the quarterstaves, thou'lt earn thee a cracked skull for thy pains," Madison said in a clear voice, and countered with such a violent riposte that Vernon's fingers sprang open and his weapon flew through the air to crash ringing against the far wall. The naked girl behind Lyla uttered a cry of delight and clapped her hands.

Quarterstaves . . . ? Lyla blinked and shook her head. For one moment there she had seemed to see not the black room with the gray walls and the half-red half-green sun, but a forest clearing with a brook across it, and men with long wooden poles disputing the passage of a broad flat log laid between the banks.

But the room was still here and the vision of the sunny glade was gone.

Recovered, furious, Putzi was running to catch up the metal table-leg, the best weapon visible, while Mikki was turning her back cautiously and heading for the far end of the room.

To make himself a shield, Putzi clutched at a light chair with a strong plastic seat and held it lion-tamer fashion, advancing on Madison. The knee retreated a little, tempting his attacker to make the first move—and shot out his arm to snatch down one of the floor-to-ceiling drapes that covered all the windows, stamp on one edge of it and with a bulge of muscles rip the heavy velvet so that he had a conveniently sized portion in his left hand.

Under bare feet the sand very hot with the sun, gritty but scarcely felt
(what?).
Lyla reached down giddily to touch her own sole and heel, expecting to contact sandy roughness and finding only a smear of the excrement which she had earlier wiped from her hand. Yet the roar of the hungry lions was
(what?)
unmistakable, the coughing noise like a slow explosion. And the watchers on the banked seats reaching up to the pure blue sky like an oppressive tent on which the gold coin of the sun hung with an expression of interest in these matters of Me and death. . . .