The Shockwave Rider (2 page)

The responses were drearily predictable. The girl should apply to the courts and have herself declared of age, she should tell her mother at once, she should denounce her father anonymously, she should get a doc-block put on his credit, bale out of home and go live in a teener dorm—and so forth.

“Lord!” he said to the air. “If I programmed a computer to feed my confessional booth, people would get better advice than that!”

Nothing about this project was working out in the least as he had hoped.

Moreover, the next item enshrined a genuine tragedy. But how could one help a woman still young, in her thirties, a trained electronics engineer, who went to orbit on a six-month contract and discovered too late that she was subject to osteochalcolysis—loss of calcium and other minerals from her skeleton in zero-gee conditions—and had to abort the job and now was in danger of breaking bones if she so much as tripped? Without chance of appeal her guild had awarded her contract-breaker status. She couldn’t sue for reinstatement unless she worked to pay the lawyer, she couldn’t work unless the guild allowed it, she … Round and round and round.

There’s a lot of brave new misery in our brave new world!

Sighing, he shook the forms together and piled them under the scanner lens of his desk computer for consolidation and a verdict. For so few it wasn’t worth renting time on the public net. To the purr of the air compressor was added the hush-hush of the paper-sorter’s plastic fingers.

The computer was secondhand and nearly obsolete, but it still worked most of the time. So, provided it didn’t have a b-d overnight, when the shy kids and the worried parents and the healthy but inexplicably unhappy middlers and the lost despairing old ’uns came back for their ration of spiritual reassurance, each would depart clutching a paper straw, a certificate redolent of old-fashioned absolute authority: its heading printed in imitation gold leaf declaring that it was an authentic and legal Delphi assessment based on contributions from not fewer than ____* hundred consultees (*
Insert number; document invalid if total fails to exceed 99
) and delivered under oath/deposition in presence of adult witnesses/notary’s seal ** (
** Delete as applicable
) on ____ (month) _____ (day) 20_____ (year).

A shoddy little makeshift, memorial to the collapse of his plans about converting the congregation into his own tame cima pool and giving himself the place to stand from which he could move the Earth. He knew now he had picked the wrong pitch, but there was still a faint ache when he thought back to his arrival in Ohio.

At least, though, what he had done might have saved a few people from drugs, or suicide, or murder. If it achieved nothing else, a Delphi certificate did convey the subconscious impression:
I matter after all, because it says right here that hundreds of people have worried about my troubles!

And he had made a couple of coups on the public boards by taking the unintentional advice of the collective.

The day’s work was over. But, moving into the trailer’s living zone, he found he did not feel at all sleepy. He considered calling up somebody to play a game at fencing, then remembered that the last of the regular local opponents he’d contacted on arrival had just moved out, and at 2300 it was too late to try and trace another player by calling the Ohio State Fencing Committee.

So the fencing screen stayed rolled in its tube along with the light-pencil and the scorer. He resigned himself to an hour of straight three-vee.

In an excess of impulsive generosity, one of the first people to join his church had given him an abominably expensive present, a monitor that could be programed with his tastes and would automatically select a channel with a suitable broadcast on it. He slumped into a chair and switched on. Promptly it lit the screen, and he found himself invited to advise the opposition party in Jamaica what to do about the widespread starvation on the island so as to depose the government at the next election. Currently the weight of opinion was clustering behind the suggestion that they buy a freight dirigible and airlift packages of synthetic food to the worst-hit areas. So far nobody seemed to have pointed out that the cost of a suitable airship would run into seven figures and Jamaica was as usual bankrupt.

Not tonight! I can’t face any more stupidity!

But when he rejected that, the screen went dark. Could there really be nothing else on all the multifarious channels of the three-vee which held any interest for the Reverend Lazarus? He cut out the monitor and tried manual switching.

First he found a coley group, all blue-skin makeup and feathers in their hair, not playing instruments but moving among invisible columns of weak microwaves and provoking disturbances which a computer translated into sound … hopefully, music. They were stiff and awkward and their coordination was lousy. His own amateur group, composed of kids fresh out of high school, was better at keeping the key and homing on the tonic chord.

Changing, he found a scandal bulletin, voicing unprovable and slanderous—but by virtue of computerized editing not actionable—rumors designed to reassure people by convincing them the world really was as bad as they suspected. In El Paso, Texas, the name of the mayor had been mentioned following the arrest of a man running an illegal Delphi pool taking bets on the number of deaths, broken limbs and lost eyes during hockey and football games; it wasn’t the pool
per se
that was illegal, but the fact that it had been returning less than the statutory fifty percent of money staked to the winning bettors. Well, doubtless the mayor’s name had indeed been mentioned, several times. And over in Britain, the secretary of the Racial Purification Board had invited Princess Shirley and Prince Jim to become joint patrons of it, because it was known they held strong views on immigration to that unhappy island. Given the rate at which poverty was depopulating all but the areas closest to the Continent, one could scarcely foresee Australians or New Zealanders being impressed. And was it true that last week’s long-range rocket attack on tourist hotels in the Seychelles had been financed by a rival hotel chain, not by irredentist members of the Seychellois Liberation Party?

The hell with that.

But what he got next was circus—as everybody called it, despite the official title ‘experiential reward and punishment complex.” He must have hit on a field-leader—perhaps the most famous of all, which operated out of Quemadura CA taking advantage of some unrepealed local statute or other—because it was using live animals. Half a dozen scared, wide-eyed kids were lining up to walk a plank no more than five centimeters wide spanning a pool where restless alligators gaped and writhed. Their eager parents were cheering them on. A bold red sign in the corner of the screen said that each step each of them managed to take before slipping would be worth $1000. He switched once more, this time with a shudder.

The adjacent channel should have been spare. It wasn’t. A Chinese pirate satellite had taken it over to try and reach midwestern American émigrés. There was a Chinese tribe near Cleveland, so he’d heard, or maybe it was Dayton. Not speaking the language, he moved on, and there were commercials. One was for a life-styling consultancy that he knew maintained private wards for those clients whose condition was worsened instead of improved by the expensive suggestions they’d been given; another was for a euphoric claimed not to be addictive but which was—the company marketing it was being sued by the FDA, only according to the mouth-to-mouth circuit they’d reached the judge, he was good and clutched, and they’d have cleared their profit and would be willing to withdraw the product voluntarily before the case actually came to trial, leaving another few hundred thousand addicts to be cared for by the underfunded, overworked Federal Health Service.

Then there was another pirate broadcast, Australian by the accents, and a girl in a costume of six strategic bubbles was saying, “Y’know, if all the people with life-style crises were laid end to end … Well, I mean, who’d be left to actually
lay
them?”

That prompted him to a faint grin, and since it was rare to pick up an Australian show he had half-decided to stick with this for a while when a loud buzzer shrilled at him.

Someone was in the confessional booth at the main gate. And presumably at this time of night therefore desperate.

Well, being disturbed at all hours was one of the penalties he’d recognized as inescapable when he created the church. He rose, sighing, and shut off his screen.

Memo to selves:
going into three-vee for a while might be a good idea. Get back in touch with the media. Or has priesthood used up the limited amount of public exposure the possessor of a 4GH can permit himself in a given span of time? If not, how much left?

Must find out.
Must.

Composing his features into a benign expression, he activated the three-vee link to the confessional. He was apprehensive. It was no news to the few who kept in circuit that the Billykings and the Grailers had counted seven dead in last week’s match, and the latter had come out ahead. As one might expect; they were the more brutal. Where the Billykings were normally content to disable their captives and leave them to struggle home as best they might, the Grailers’ habit was to rope and gag them and hide them in some convenient ruin to die of thirst.

So the caller tonight might not be in need of counsel or even medication. It might be someone sussing out the church with a view to razing it. After all, in the eyes of both tribes it was a pagan shame.

But the screen showed him a girl probably too young to be inducted in either tribe: at a glance, no older than ten, her hair tousled, her eyes red-rimmed with weeping, her cheeks stained with dust down which tears had runneled. A child who had overreached her ability to imitate an adult, presumably, lost and frightened in the dark—Oh! No! Something more, and worse. For he could see she was holding a knife, and on both its blade and her green frock there were smears so red they could well be fresh blood.

“Yes, little sister?” he said in a neutral tone.

“Father, I got to make confession or I’ll be damned!” she sobbed. “I shivved my mom—cut her all to bits! I guess I must have killed her! I’m
sure
I did!”

Time seemed to stop for a long moment. Then, with what calm he could summon, he uttered what had to be said for the benefit of the record … because, while the booth itself Was sacrosanct, this veephone circuit like all such was tied into the city police-net, and thence to the tireless federal monitors at Canaveral. Or wherever. There were so many of them now, they couldn’t all be in the same place.

Memo to selves:
would be worth knowing where the rest are.

His voice as gritty as a gravel road, he said, “My child”—aware as ever of the irony in the phrase—“you’re welcome to unburden your conscience by confiding in me. But I must explain that the secrecy of the confessional doesn’t apply when you’re talking to a microphone.”

She gazed at his image with such intensity he fancied for a moment he could see himself from her point of view: a lean dark man with a broken nose, wearing a black jerkin and a white collar ornamented with little gilt crosses. Eventually she shook her head, as though her mind were too full of recent horror to leave room for any new shocks.

Gently he explained again, and this time she connected.

“You mean,” she forced out, “you’ll call the croakers?”

“Of course not. But they must be looking for you now in any case. And since you’ve admitted what you did over my mikes … Do you understand?”

Her face crumpled. She let fall her knife with a tinkling sound that the pickups caught, faint as fairy bells. A few seconds, and she was crying anew.

“Wait there,” he said. “I’ll be with you in a moment.”

RECESS

A sharp wind tasting of winter blew over the hills surrounding Tarnover and broke red and gold leaves off the trees, but the sky was clear and the sun was bright. Waiting his turn in line at the best of the establishment’s twenty restaurants, redolent of old-fashioned luxury up to and including portions of ready-heated food on open display, Hartz gazed admiringly at the view.

“Beautiful,” he said at length. “Just beautiful.”

“Hm?” Freeman had been pressing his skin on both temples toward the back of his head, as though attempting to squeeze out overpowering weariness. Now he glanced at the window and agreed, “Oh—yes, I guess it is. I don’t get too much time to notice it these days.”

“You seem tired,” Hartz said sympathetically. “And I’m not surprised. You have a tough job on your hands.”

“And a slow one. Nine hours per day, in segments of three hours each. It gets wearing.”

“But it has to be done.”

“Yes, it has to be done.”

HOW TO GROW DELPHINIUMS

It works, approximately, like this.

First you corner a large—if possible, a very large—number of people who, while they’ve never formally studied the subject you’re going to ask them about and hence are unlikely to recall the correct answer, are nonetheless plugged into the culture to which the question relates.

Then you ask them, as it might be, to estimate how many people died in the great influenza epidemic which followed World War I, or how many loaves were condemned by EEC food inspectors as unfit for human consumption during June 1970.