The Venus Belt (23 page)

Lucy was the smart one—she’d stepped out for a lube job or a henna rinse or whatever she was getting these days. “Look, did you say I was i
n
vestigating Aphrodite, Ltd.? He did a couple of pieces on the subject not too long ago and came up pretty empty.’” There’ve been U.S. Pres
i
dents more accessible than Malaise was turning out to be.

The System’s best-known bridesmaid swallowed and looked at his watch. “Tell you what: come on down. We’re setting up in the lobby. Try and stay out of the way, maybe he’ll give you a minute after the ‘cast. Will that do?”

“Guess it’ll have to.” I lit another stogie on the same attention-getting principle that generates deliberately annoying comme
r
cials—maybe they’d give me what I wanted just to get rid of me—and followed him to the elev
a
tor. Downstairs it was a regular Pentagon fire drill, tangled-up machinery, technicians snarling hysterically, more trailing cable snaking across the ca
r
pet than you could swing a whole jungl
e
ful of Tarzans by. And, no matter how technology progresses, TV people still feel the need for enough light to bleach the hairs inside your nose. I found a darkened, relatively quiet corner and parked myself.

The whole asylum suddenly fell silent as the Journalissimo manifested himself in a ten-ounce smoky-silver tunic, tastefully selected to match his eyebrows. Or perhaps the other way around. He paused cer
e
moniously here and there, dispensing pleasantries and personal advice upon those who couldn’t defend themselves, made his way to the focus of all those bright lights, draped his jacket on the back of a complicated, gimmicky chair, and sat down in his pinstriped shirt-sleeves to pass judgment on a stack of har
d
copy some humble scriptperson had laid b
e
fore him.

He looked up just once, directly at me, an odd perplexity in his gray-blue eyes, shook his head, and returned to the stopwatch in his hand. Occ
a
sionally he’d slash the copy with a stylus and read it softly to himself, sto
p
ping frequently to suppress a lingering cough. Seen this close, he r
e
mained the same stern grandfather North Americans had grown up watc
h
ing and believing for half a century: sandy-gray—was it a hairpiece?—bushy salt-and-pepper eyebrows; a gritty little semivisible mustache that made him look just like a branch manager of Confederate Mutual Life. Beneath the wise and weathered face, he favored neutral, conservative attire—a swell trick in this particular corner of the universe. Even his deep midwestern voice had the same sandy-gray quality, an i
n
exorability that had become the standard for Confederate enunciation. In a culture almost totally devoid of authority figures, despite the compet
i
tion of a thousand other networks, his word carried the weight of divine revelation.

Earlier that morning, when Navigation Rock first got wind of his inte
n
tions, I’d taken time to look him up in the
Encyclopedia of North Ame
r
ica.
Born in 140 A.L., he’d been a print reporter long before going ele
c
tronic just in time for the 1957 War Against the Czar. “He’d landed with Conf
e
derate volunteers in Antarctica and parachuted into the Kingdom of Hawaii when the Russian-supported Hamiltonians were driven into the sea. He’d been with Admiral Heinlein, a fellow Missourian, at the Battle of the Bering Straits.

Impressed by the Confederate Lunar colonists’ use of propaganda to finish off the Czar, he became an enthusiastic space advocate, although it had taken him nearly thirty years to get out here himself. Now his daily pr
o
grams from Ceres Central were a fixture. To many, Malaise was the very soul of credibility, a veritable walking catalog of Boy Scout virtues, the si
n
gle most convincing and authoritative person on the ‘com. To some few curmudgeons, he appeared brisk, remote, self-important gravity personified. It was rumored that his rivals called him Titanpants.

Well, you can’t please everybody.

Abruptly now, he set aside his stylus, stretched, and slickerseamed his jacket. An attendant brought him mouthwash in a baggie. He gargled, spat, and sat again, precisely at the instant that a chimp wearing a headset pointed a hairy finger at his solar plexus.

“Good evening. Twenty thousand miles above the golden face of Ceres hangs the nerve center of interplanetary transportation, Navigation Rock. We’re here tonight to report a series of bizarre events that...”

From there he told about the installation’s failure, the evidence of sab
o
tage, and what was being done about the damage. A ‘com screen b
e
hind him flashed with views of the asteroid’s inside-out ocean, the killer whales responsible for the guidance and safety of half the System. Reg
u
lar news followed; Malaise introduced each segment, and in between, with the studio cameras off, conferred in quiet tones with his assistants, touching up his notes as he received the latest on a dozen different d
e
veloping stories.

***

Tuesday, March 16, 223 A.L.

At last, the famous sign-off: “That’s the way it looks. This is Voltaire Malaise, good night.”

Then they did the whole thing over again for relay to those planetoids out of range on the “other side” of the sun. When the lights finally went out, somebody brought Malaise a towel and a sandwich that would have been architecturally impossible on Earth. I saw Roger Benton whisper something urgently and point in my direction across the expropriated lobby. M
a
laise frowned, gave Benton a few sharp words, and vanished into the next room, rubbing his back and coughing.

I’d been robbed. Again.

The System’s number one second banana sadly shook his head all the way over to where I was sitting. “Mr. Bear, I—”

“Bet you say that to all the detectives.” I got up and relit my cigar, tr
y
ing to think how Humphrey Bogart would have done this: “Look, swee
t
heart, I’m gonna see him, one way or the other. For the time being, I’m as
k
ing nice, see?” (Was that a little Edward G. Robinson sneaking in there at the end? Nyahh.)

Benton fussed and fluttered in a way that had me wondering. I was just a P.I., after all—
I’d
’ve told me where to get off. Suddenly he brig
h
tened. “Er, uh...wait a minute, I’ve just had an idea!” With this he pract
i
cally ran out of the lobby. When he came back fifteen minutes later, he looked pos
i
tively reprieved. “It’s all set. I remembered what you said about your flivver being stolen. Well,
we’ll
take you and your friend back to Ceres. Voltaire gets rather bored unless he’s piloting himself—which the network’s insu
r
ance won’t allow—maybe he’ll find it diverting to talk with a real detective for a couple of hours. How’s that?”

“Friend, I was ready to kiss this marble good-bye hours ago. Meet you at the south pole—I’ll be the third penguin on the left.” I started to walk away, then stopped: “And Roger, we’re all rootin’ for you. Old Voltaire can’t last forever.”

***

“Stop, smiling
—
we don’t do ‘happy news’ here!”
Malaise took another pull at his baggie, then folded his arms across his chest. Hoarseness had crept back into his voice and his back was apparently still bothering him. “Drives me out of my excretion-coated ever-loving mind. Blast it, why didn’t som
e
body
tell
me you were taking a shot at Aphrodite? You’d think they all work for another bloody network!”

I grinned, reluctantly liking this irritable shirt-sleeved Scotch-drinker who inserted what serves Confederates for profanity into every off-camera sentence. Old Voltaire wasn’t so bad after all, and neither was his whiskey. Lucy had absorbed somewhat more than a drop or two through her internal nutrient system and settled down in a comer by the bulkhead behind us, making soft humming noises.

Just resting her eyes.

Malaise pointed at the autopsy report I’d been carrying around since the
Bonaventura
, along with terrifying holos from Dr. Scott. “Read me that again, the part about the woman self-destructing. Great Albert’s ghost, how long’s this technology been kicking around without anybody noticing?”

Once aboard the network cruiser, I’d begun filling him in on recent hi
s
tory, bits and pieces he immediately decided added up to some “grand co
n
spiracy against Civilization.” Lucy’s somewhat hyperprosthetic cond
i
tion had added a certain amount of credibility. He’d reported her “assa
s
sination” himself, the night it happened.

“Which shows I’m right,” he concluded bitterly, “and the network’s wrong. We have to be more incisive, do more checking. If this’d been caught by another net...I’m going to get on it right away, and Bear, let this be a lesson to you: I’m not an unimpeachable authority on anything. But plague take me, as long as I’m managing editor of this madhouse, I’m going to bloody well
try
!”
He twisted painfully and shouted back over his shou
l
der, “Do you people hear me,
we’re bloody well going to try!
”

That’s one thing his staff seemed to agree about in private: Voltaire M
a
laise was trying. He’d done a sort of double-take when I stepped aboard his cruiser, as if wondering where the hell he’d seen me before. God knows I’m used to it; I’ve got a sort of standard-issue mug. Then he’d quieted down, folded his arms, and listened off and on for a solid hour, nodding here, shaking his head there, as I reeled off my adventures.

There were continuous interruptions: the guy had been
born
asking “what’s new” and was foully impatient at even the small degree this excu
r
sion (the net’s idea, he grumbled) was keeping him out of touch. Every ot
h
er minute he got updates, drafts of pieces planned for the next beamcast. He’d read them, making corrections: “Soften that ending a little” or “That’s bullshit, and everybody knows it.”

I was surprised at the ruthless way he screened his personal opinions out. He was a pro—insisting on the title “managing editor” and no ot
h
er—and told me there were only two kinds of people in the world (I agree: those who say “there are only two kinds of people in the world,” and...), profe
s
sionals and amateurs. The Confederacy, in his view, was history’s first
am
a
teur
civilization, and he didn’t much like it.

“They all think they can casually switch from farming or mining to co
n
struction, banking—Constitution take ‘em, even to
newscasting
—any time the mood hits ‘em. Bloody dilettantes don’t understand a division-of-labor economy, specialization. Nobody respects
credentials
any more! Maybe it’s true after all —the public’s a great beast and shouldn’t be allowed even to vote.”

I laughed. “Well, we’re very nearly there. Nothing left to vote on, rea
l
ly.” And much the same was true back in the States—except that it’d been accomplished differently: only about 10 percent of the electorate were e
x
pected to turn out next year. Propertarians thought it was a good sign.

“We could be
moving
,”
answered Malaise, “on the march, outward to the stars. Instead, precious time and energy get wasted, dissipated, fiddling around in a country that hasn’t anything to do with us.”

“The States? I wouldn’t exactly call that a waste. I wouldn’t be here without that ‘fiddling.’”

Abruptly, Lucy took an interest in the proceedings. “The stars are mighty patient, sonny, an’ anyway, that time an’ energy you’re reallocatin’ so c
a
sual-like belongs t’private individuals. Shucks, they may think goin’ to th’
stars
is a waste, mightn’t they?”

The newsman glowered. “Which only proves the limitations of am
a
teurs. Blast it, woman, they’re
wrong
,
somebody needs the authority to make them see it!” He slammed his half-filled baggie to the floor, where it lay wiggling like hospital jello.

“Hold on there, boy! As I recall, we had a Revolution or two settled just that little point.”

“What if we did? Circumstances change. Times are different now, and—What’s that, Roger?”

Benton had come up behind him with a Telecom pad emitting groans and whistles of a particularly repulsive nature. “It’s those signals, sir. The ones from interstellar space. They’ve started up again.”