The Shockwave Rider (3 page)

Curiously, when you consolidate their replies they tend to cluster around the actual figure as recorded in almanacs, yearbooks and statistical returns.

It’s rather as though this paradox has proved true: that while nobody knows what’s going on around here, everybody knows what’s going on around here.

Well, if it works for the past, why can’t it work for the future? Three hundred million people with access to the integrated North American data-net is a nice big number of potential consultees.

Unfortunately most of them are running scared from the awful specter of tomorrow. How best to corner people who just do not want to know?

Greed works for some, and for others hope. And most of the remainder will never have any impact on the world to speak of.

Good enough, as they say, for folk music …

A MOMENT FOR MILLSTONES

On the point of undogging his trailer’s sealed door and disconnecting the alarms, he hesitated.

Sunday. A moderately good collection, if not a record-breaker. (He sniffed. Hot air. From the smelter.)

And she
might
be a precociously good actress …

He pictured a tribe raiding, looting, vanishing before the croakers swooped, leaving behind no one but a minor immune from police interrogation, hysterical with laughter at the success of her “practical joke.”

Therefore, prior to shutting down the alarms, he activated all the church’s electronics except the coley music system and the automated collection trolleys. When he rounded the base of the altar—ex-screen—it was as though fire raged in the whale’s-belly of the dome. Lights flashed all colors of the rainbow and a few to spare, while a three-vee remote over his head not only repeated his image monstrous on the face of the altar but also stored it, minutely detailed, in a recorder buried beneath a yard of concrete. If he were attacked, the recording would be evidence.

Moreover, he carried a gun … but he was never without it.

These precautions, slender though they were, constituted the maximum a priest was expected to take. More could easily worry the federal computers into assessing him as a potential paranoid. They’d been sensitive on such matters ever since, last summer, a rabbi in Seattle who had mined the approaches to his shul forgot to turn off the firing-circuit before a bar mitzvah.

Generally the Fedcomps approved of people with strong religious convictions. They were less likely than some to kick up a fuss. But there were limits, not to mention mavericks.

A few years ago his defenses would have been adequate. Now their flimsiness made him tremble as he walked down the wall-less aisle defined by the black rubber streaks car tires had left over decades. Sure, the fence at the base of the dome was electrified except where access had to be left for the confessional, and the booth itself was explosive-resistant and had its own air supply against a gas attack, but even so … !

Memo to selves:
next time, a role where I can take more care of life and limb. Privacy is fine, and I needed it when I arrived here. But this place was never meant to be operated by a single individual. I can’t scan every shifting shadow, make sure no nimble shivver is using it for cover!

Thinking of which as I stare around: my vision is unaided. At forty-six??? Out of three hundred million there are bound to be some people that age who have never bought corrective lenses, most because they can’t afford them. But suppose the Bureau of Health or some pharmo-medical combine decided there were few enough middlers without glasses to organize an exhaustive study of them? Suppose the people at Tarnover decided there must be a genetic effect involved?
Ow.

Memo to selves, in red italics:
stay closer to chronological age!

At that point in his musing he entered the confessional—and found that through its shatterproof three-centimeter window he was
not
looking at a little girl in a dress spattered with blood.

Instead, the exterior section of the booth was occupied by a burly blond man with a streak of blue in his tightly curled hair, wearing a fashionable rose-and-carmine shirt and an apologetic smile.

“So sorry you’ve been disturbed, Father,” he said. “Though it’s a stroke of luck that little Gaila found her way here… My name’s Shad Fluckner, by the way.”

This poker looked too young to be the girl’s father: no more than twenty-five, twenty-six. On the other hand, his congregation included women married for the third or fourth time and now to men as much as twenty years younger. Stepfather?

In that case, why the smile? Because he’d used this kid he didn’t give a plastic penny for to rid himself of a rich but dragsome older wife? Fouler things had been admitted in this booth.

Foggily he said, “Are you kin to—ah—Gaila, then?”

“Not in law, but you could say that after what we’ve been through together I’m closer to her than her legal kinfolk. I work for Anti-Trauma Inc., you see. Very sensibly, the moment Gaila’s parents detected signs of deviant behavior in her, they signed her up for a full course of treatment. Last year we cured her sibling rivalry—classic penis-envy directed against her younger brother—and right now she’s working into her Electra complex. With luck we’ll progress her to Poppaea level this coming fall. … Oh, incidentally: she babbled something about you calling in the croakers. You don’t need to worry. She’s on file with the police computers as a non-act case.”

“She told me”—slowly and with effort—“she’d stabbed her mother. Killed her.”

“Oh, far as she’s concerned, sure she did! Just like she’s unconsciously wanted to ever since her mother betrayed her by letting her be born. But it was all a setup, naturally. We dosed her with scotophobin and shut her in a dark room, to negate the womb-retreat impulse, gave her a phallic weapon to degrade residual sexual envy, and turned an anonymous companion loose in there with her. When she struck out, we turned up the lights to show her mother’s body lying all bloody on the floor, and then we gave her the chance to run like hell. With me trailing her, of course. Wouldn’t have wanted her to come to any harm.”

His slightly bored tone indicated that for him this was just another routine chore. But when he had concluded his exposition, he brightened as though a sudden idea had occurred to him. He produced a recorder from his pocket.

“Say, Father! My publicity department would welcome any favorable comment about our methods you may care to make. Coming from a man of the cloth, it would carry extra weight. Suppose you said something to the effect that enabling kids to act out their most violent impulses in a controlled situation is preferable to letting them commit such crimes in real life, thereby endangering their immortal—”

“Yes, I do have a comment you can record! If there is anything more disgusting than war, it’s what your company is doing. At least in warfare there is passion. What you do is calculated, and more likely by machines than men!”

Fluckner withdrew his head a fraction, as though afraid he might be punched through the intervening glass. He said defensively, “But what we’ve done is to enlist science in the service of morality. Surely you see—”

“What I see is the first person I ever felt justified in cursing. You have offended against our little ones, therefore a millstone shall be tied around your neck and you shall be cast into the depths of the sea. Depart from me into eternal darkness!”

Fluckner’s face grew mottled-red on the instant, and harsh anger invaded his voice.

“You’ll regret saying that, I promise you! You’ve insulted not just me but thousands of good citizens who rely on my company to save their children from hellfire. You’ll pay for that!”

He spun on his heel and marched away.

LIGHT AND POWER CORRUPT

“Yes, of course Gaila’s doing fine! What happier discovery could a kid make—what more welcome reinforcement can you offer her—than to find the mother she consciously loves, yet unconsciously hates, has been killed and in spite of that is still alive? We’ve been over that before!”

He had to wipe his forehead, hoping his mask of perspiration would be ascribed to the summer heat.

“And now may I use your phone? Alone, if you don’t mind. It’s best for the parents not to know too many details of our methods.”

In a bright room with an underfloor pool reflecting sparkling random lights across an ecumenical array of a crucifix, a Buddha and a six-handed Kali draped with roses, Shad Fluckner composed the code of Continental Power and Light’s anonymous-denunciation department.

When he heard the proper tone, he followed it with the code for the Church of Infinite Insight, then a group equating to “fraudulent misapplication of charitable donations,” then another for “assets sequestered pending legal judgment,” which would automatically deevee the minister’s credit rating, and lastly one for “notify all credit-appraisal computers.”

That should do the trick. He dusted his hands in satisfaction and left the room. There was effectively no chance of the call being traced to him. It had been two years since he worked for Power and Light, and their personnel was turning over at sixty-five percent annually, so any of half a million people might have fed in the false data.

By the time Reverend Lazarus fought his way through the maze of interlinked credit-appraisal computers and nailed the tapeworm that had just been hatched, he could well be ragged and starving.

Serve him right.

ON LINE BUT NOT REAL TIME

During a lull in the proceedings, while a nurse was spraying the subject’s throat to restore his voice, Hartz glanced at his watch.

“Even if this is a slow job,” he muttered, “you can’t run at this rate very often, obviously—less than a day per day.”

Freeman gave his habitual skull-like smile. “If so, I’d still be questioning him about his experience as a life-style counselor. But remember: once we knew where to look, we were able to put all data concerning his earlier personae into store. We know what he
did
; now we need to find out how he
felt.
In some cases the connection between a key memory and his unusually strong reaction is fairly plain, and you’ve been lucky today in that we’ve hit on such a link.”

“His identifying with the girl who was running in panic? A parallel with his own hunted life?”

“More than that. Much more, I’m afraid. Consider the curse he pronounced on this man Fluckner, and the trigger that provoked it. That was consistent with the attitudes of Reverend Lazarus, certainly. What we have to find out is how deeply it reflected his real self. Nurse, if you’ve finished, I’d like to carry on.”

MOVING DAY, OVERCAST AND HOT

Must must learn to control my temper even in face of an insult to humanity like—

What the hell?

He emerged with a gasp from coma-like sleep. Last night he had lain awake for hours with Fluckner’s threat reverberating in memory, and ultimately resorted to a pill. It took, a long time for an all-important fact to penetrate his muzzy mind.

The hum of the air compressor had stopped.

Rolling over, he checked the self-powered illuminated clock at the head of his bed. It showed 7:45 a.m. But the windows of his trailer were solidly dark, although by now the sun must be high in the sky, the forecast had been for more fine weather, and when it was stretched taut the plastic membrane of his roof was quite translucent.

Therefore the power had been cut off and the dome had collapsed. All twenty-two and a half tons of it.

Naked, feeling terribly vulnerable, he swung his feet out of bed and fumbled for the switch of the nearest lamp to confirm his deduction. The darkness was oppressive; worse, the air had grown foul already—no doubt from the deposit of dirt, grease and fetid moisture which while the dome was distended had formed an unnoticeable film but now had been condensed into a layer like the muck lining a sewer pipe.

The light duly failed to shine.

A strike? Hardly likely; those key workers who still had the leverage to close down the nation’s automated power system always waited for frost and snow before striking. An overload blackout? Scarcely more probable. There hadn’t been a summer overload since 1990. People had seemingly been cured of regarding power as free like air.

Admittedly, a whole new generation had grown up since 1990 … including himself.

A reactor meltdown?

After last year’s triple-header of disasters, the Delphi boards currently showed much money riding on a lapse of two full years before the next such. Nonetheless he grabbed his one and only battery radio. By law an all-news monophonic station was still required to broadcast in each conurbation of a million or more people, so that the public could be warned of riots, tribal matches and disasters. The cells were low on power, but by placing the set close to his ear he determined that the duty newscaster was talking about record bets on today’s football fatalities. If there had been a meltdown, radiation warnings would have been pouring out nonstop.

So what in the world … ? Oh. Fluckner?

He felt a shiver crawl down his spine, and realized that he was gazing hungrily at the little blurred glow from his clock, as though this darkness were symbolic of the womb (echoes of Gaila and those like her, condemned to grow up not as human beings but as mules, offspring of a bastard mating between Freudian psychoanalysis and behaviorism), and that mysterious glimmer presaged his emergence into a strange new world.