The Jagged Orbit (12 page)

FORTY-SIX
WHY'S, AFTER THE EVENT

"Even with the advantage of a certain degree of historical perspective, such as we might expect to enjoy from our standpoint a few decades later, it is by no means easy to define the reasons why late twentieth-century society underwent so violent a process of fragmentation following a relatively long period of consolidation and homogenization. Two factors render the analysis especially difficult: first, the human mind is not particularly well adapted to reconciling information from disparate sources (e.g. personal experience with the content of a school history-lesson, data from a printed page with those from a vuset), and the alleged simplistic linearity of the Gutenberg era—if it ever existed—came to an end before it had affected more than a minuscule proportion of the species; and second, the process is not merely still going on—it's still accelerating.

"However, one can tentatively point to three major causes which, like tectonic events in the deep strata of the Earth's crust, not only produce reverberations over enormous areas but actually create discontinuities sharp enough to be uniquely attributed: what one might call psychological landslides.

"By far the most striking of these three is the unforeseen rejection of rationality which has overtaken us. Perhaps one might argue that it was foreshadowed in such phenomena as the adoption by that technically brilliant sub-culture, the Nazis, of
Rassenwissenschaft,
Hoerbiger's pre-scientific
Welteislehre,
and similar incongruous dogmas. However, it was not until about two generations later that the principle emerged in a fully rounded form, and it became clear that the dearest ambition of a very large number of our species was to abdicate the power of reason altogether: ideally, to enjoy the same kind of life as a laboratory rat with electrodes implanted in the pleasure centers of his brain, gladly starving within reach of food and water.

"Roughly sixty percent of the patients currently in mental hospitals throughout North America are there because they did their best to achieve this ambition with the help of psychedelic drugs.

"But this is not the only level on which the effects of the process are detectable. It is notorious that one of the boom industries of the twenty-first century is the charm-and-idol business, spearheaded by the multi-billion dollar corporation of Conjuh Man Inc. with its tight grip on all the Negro enclaves and most of the ex-colonial countries, and rapidly expanding into supposedly more sophisticated areas in the wake of such firms as Lares & Penates Inc.

"For once it is perfectly clear why they've had this swift and resounding success. Our society is no longer run by individuals, but by holders of offices; it's complexity is such that the average person's predicament compares with that of a savage tribesman, his horizons bounded by a single valley, for whom knowledge of the cycle of the seasons is a hard-won intellectual prize and whose only possible reaction when confronted with drought, or flood, or blighted crops, is to hypothesize evil spirits which he must placate by sacrifice and self-denial. There are no economic counterparts of weather forecasts available to the public. The data which might enable them to be issued over the vu-beams are jealously guarded by the priests serving corporation gods, and outsiders are compelled to put up with the physical consequences of mysterious incomprehensible seasons. Take a vacation; you come back to discover that an urban landmark has vanished as completely as though an earthquake had felled a mountain. . ..

"Closely allied to this first factor is the second, which might be termed the socialization of paranoia. In a single generation individual anxiety at our inability to deal with the massed resources of computerized corporations, government agencies and other public bodies has resulted in the mushrooming of contract law into a bigger industry than advertising. A simple purchase can turn into a week-long wrangle involving the submission of a contract to three, four or more computerized consultancies. There are contracts for
everything—merely
for having a tooth stopped, one must evaluate, argue over, amend, and eventually sign a document running to five or six thousand words. Parents make contracts with schools for the education of their children; doctors make them with their patients, and if the patients are too ill or too mentally disturbed to pass a computer examination, then they refuse to proceed with treatment until someone who is legally
compos mentis
can be found to act as proxy. In the richest society of all history, we behave like misers terrified of parting with a single coin.

"Accepting that behind the smiling face of that salesman, the grave sympathy of that doctor, the formal authority of that bureaucrat, there lies the indescribable power of a megabrain computer, we are naturally enough driven to endow ourselves with symbols of power of our own, and the cheapest and—as one might put it— the most vivid of such symbols are arms.

"Twice in my own lifetime I've seen my country threaten to fly apart like a tire stripping its tread: first during the black insurrections of the early eighties, and again during the war scare of the nineties. The first of these events put a new word into the language, and the second branded it on our minds permanently. The cartel founded by Marcantonio Gottschalk is deliberately structured on the lines of a family—that basic social unit which a man feels he is defending when he installs armored picture-windows instead of the old glass, plants mines as carefully as rosebushes in his front garden. And the technique has proved psychologically apt.

"Nowadays the average family changes its guns as often as our grandparents changed their cars; they have their grenades serviced like their fire-extinguishers; husband, wife and teenage kids go shooting the way people once used to go bowling. It is taken for granted that tonight, or tomorrow, or sometime, it will be necessary to kill a man.

"Along with the flight from rationality and the socialization of paranoia, there is a third factor at work which interlocks with them both. Where do you turn when traditional sources of reassurance fail you? Man needs some kind of psychological sheet-anchor and always has. In some countries it has proved possible to maintain a public image of government which meets that need, but here it was out of the question. For one thing, the majority of Americans have always been distrustful of government interference. Government is a long way away in a big country, and our mental roots go deeper back in time than the advent of modern high-speed communications. For another, the monstrous complexity of our society makes it impossible for any single man, no matter how well-intentioned, to achieve major reforms in his term of office—he's bucking too great a weight of administrative inertia. (Besides, well-intentioned men don't run for office any more! They have too much sense to expose themselves to assassination, and only delusible idiots like our current chief executive can be persuaded to don the robes of high office. Nice guys don't crave power.)

"What drove the final nail into the coffin of that particular hope, however, were the black insurrections of the eighties, which demonstrated that the Federal authorities were incapable of controlling large sections of their own cities up to and including Washington DC.

"Organized religion likewise failed—spectacularly—simultaneously with government and for roughly similar reasons, when it became clear that the so-called 'godless' rivals to our own way of life not only commanded far more loyalty but made better use of their relatively limited resources.

"People found themselves with virtually nothing left but the idol of the computer, in which the less imaginative now tend to invest their surplus of otherwise valueless faith, and a handful of what might be termed
gurus
—doctors, psychologists, sociologists, anyone who talks as though he (or she) understands and can control the inchoate forces that are universally sensed and universally feared.

"To illustrate how absurd the process has become: there are quite a number of people who call themselves 'Conroyans' after myself. I want to stress that they do so without my permission and also, so far as I can manage, without my connivance. I don't approve of my, or anyone else's, name being taken in vain."

—Preamble to lecture notes issued by Xavier Conroy to students taking his course in Contemporary American Studies

FORTY-SEVEN
PLEA OF INSANITY

Eventually Ariadne gave a harsh laugh. "Jim, you're not going to take that seriously! Aren't you overlooking the fact that Harry Madison is after all a patient here? I'm not really familiar with his case, and I know you keep saying he ought to have been discharged long ago, but you surely have to assume there are good reasons why he hasn't been! And certainly"—her tone grew more assertive—"if he's getting so well acquainted with our automatics that he can rig them to utter that sort of rubbish, that's no index of sanity. It's more the opposite!"

Reedeth dropped back into his chair as though his legs would no longer support him. "Madison can't tinker with the main data banks," he said. "All he can do is make adjustments to the remotes, like eliminating censor circuits—which is what he seems to have done to my desketary. To get at the main banks you need a secret IBM code, and however clever Harry may be I refuse to believe he can deduce
that
from just studying the remotes! Am I right?"

"Y-yes. I mean, I guess so."

"I'm
telling
you. Do you trust the automatics here?"

"Well..."

"Yes or no?"

"One has to!" Ariadne snapped.

Reedeth leaned forward. "All right then: you've just had a clear diagnosis of megalomania from these
trustworthy
automatics. A few minutes ago you consented to accept what they told you about the pythoness's oracles, didn't you? What's different in this case? Only the subject."

"Jim, you're deluding yourself," Ariadne said firmly. The sound of shutters going up around her mind, armored against anything short of a nuke, was very nearly audible in the room. Once more the cold, composed archetypal doctor-figure to which her patients were accustomed, stable pillar of authority in a chaotic universe—even her lips visibly narrowed from the soft sensuality of their recent love-making—she marched towards the door.

"If you're so eager to believe what your desketary can tell you now that one of the patients has tampered with it," she concluded, "I suggest you ask it to give you some insight into your own jealousy of Dr. Mogshack!"

And she was gone.

FORTY-EIGHT
AN ALL-STATIONS FROM ISM

"This is a pink alert for NYC east and north zones, yellow statewide, repeat pink for NYC east and north zones. It was anticipated that the X Patriot demonstrators assembled at Kennedy would disperse peacefully following the announcement that Morton Lenigo had cleared customs and immigration but unfortunately this has not proved to be the case. A number of inflammatory speeches were made claiming that his admission is the forerunner of a major kneeblank victory. X Patriots and other extremists are closing on NYC by skimmer, ground transport and possibly by rapitrans. Most are armed, many are orbiting and all are potentially violent. Citidef groups stand to stand to stand to. Await orders from Internal Security Maintenance officers. Repeat pink alert NYC east and north. Ends ends ends. Stand by for further announcements."

FORTY-NINE IF YOU'RE AFRAID OF THE DARK YOU CAN ALWAYS CARRY A FLASHLIGHT BUT THERE'S NO CHEAP PORTABLE PROTECTION AGAINST LONELINESS

On her way from the elevator Lyla checked the coin-web at the end of the corridor; like most fitted in these cheap recent apt blocks, it was big and ugly and armored and would need a bomb to put it out of action. When she dipped in the message slot, though, all she found was a drying puddle of activator fluid—the management had let it run out of fax paper again. No use having the thing in working order if there was nothing to record on.

But her spirits were too low for her to get annoyed. Her depression had set in before she left Flamen's place, and had only been aggravated by seeing him so pleased about something she didn't understand, the fruit of his cryptic conversation with the fat man called Lionel. The world had abruptly turned drab for her. Perhaps the after-effect of the sibyl-pill was responsible, but she had no previous experience to judge by. She had never before been slapped out of trance.

Worse yet: she wouldn't have believed Dan's unsupported word, but having seen Flamen's recording she couldn't contest the necessity any longer. Echo-traps had been the—mental, if not physical, and hence even worse—death of at least three pythonesses she knew of.

So there were endless problems to worry her: falling into the echo-trap (for what conceivable reason?), the uncertain consequences of trying to metabolize the remainder of the drug in the non-trance state, and that weird hangover which had caused her to speak what amounted to an oracle during the skimmer-flight to Flamen's home.

Applying her Punch key, with its unique magnetic pattern, to the lock of the apt's door, she struggled to decide whether or not the same person had been referred to as the one whose presence had driven her into an echo-trap. Allegedly—but pythoness talent was too fragile to take kindly to laboratory examination—there must have been some exceptionally powerful personality present in the audience, one whose aura of authority overwhelmed her best attempts to move away and tackle another subject.

Flamen himself? It was unlikely; they had spent half an hour or so running over the three oracles she had managed to utter in complete form, and concluded that none of them applied to him. He had been very obviously relieved.

She slipped rapidly under the deadfall, which was inactivated when the lock was fitted with the proper key and remained safe until the door was closed again, and shut out the world with a slam.

Tossing her yash to the peg—it missed and she had to pick it up and make a second try—she called, "Dan?" No answer.

Going to the icebox, she found a partly-eaten loaf with mold on it and some peanut butter so old the oil had separated. But she wasn't hungry. In the freezer compartment there was a range of blue and green and brown phials which had to be kept very cold to prolong their usable life; in one of the brown ones labeled in Dan's handwriting she found one and a half joylets and took them.

Nothing much happened. They were probably stale. She went to the kitchen wallboard and scrawled joylets in bold chalked capitals at the foot of the current shopping list. And there was no mescal ready or anything else like that, and right now she couldn't face the chore of preparing some. No liquor, no joints, no nothing in the place. She thought of Mikki Baxendale in her luxury penthouse and felt a stab of pity for Dan who had come so near to money.

But the bed hadn't been fixed and she started to be angry with him instead. Dumping herself like a badly-stuffed doll into a patched inflatable chair, she leaned back and scowled at the ceiling.

She had never felt like this before after a session. Ordinarily she was excited, pleased at the hints of relevance which peeped out of the doggerel of her oracles, eager to trace clues half-hidden in a tangle of sub-conscious associations, and by nightfall—or whenever-very sexy.

She fingered herself experimentally. It was like touching a corpse.

So once again back on the worn groove of her puzzlement, thankful that the joylets had at least lifted her depression far enough for her to regard the effort of concentration as worthwhile.

If one of the audience had obsessed her to the point of creating an echo-trap for her, the likeliest assumption was that the same person was being referred to when she spoke of someone in the hospital being more rational than the director. Who? What kind of a patient could be in the Ginsberg not because he was crazy but because he was too sane?

It was no use cracking her skull, she decided at length. She'd never been able to analyze her own oracles unaided; she wanted Dan here to talk to, the tape to play over and over so that the words etched deep into her conscious mind. Where the hell had that stupid mack gone, anyway?

To distract herself she jumped up and started on a whirlwind round of the apt with the polycleaner, gulping dust and rubbish. The morning's mail had dissolved into the sludgy mess of books before the Lar, and she scooped it all up in handfuls and threw it down the toilet. The fourth time she tried to flush the pan the water failed and the last grayish lump lay mocking her, irremovable.

Sudden uncontrollable rage took possession of her. She stormed back to the Lar's shrine and seized it by its protuberant ears. It was a Model YJK, the most suitable in the non-customized range for a pythoness or other similar talent . . . according to the accompanying sales leaflets. In form it resembled a crouching fen-nee, the big-eared desert fox.

"Luck and good fortune!" she said between her teeth. "Liar liar
liar
rotten
liar!"
At each word she gave the idol a vicious twist between her hands, hoping something would snap off, but the tough flexible plastic merely sprang back into shape; only the tail assumed a limp question-mark curve.

"In that case—" she said, and strode over to their one openable window. Flinging it up, she started to hurl the Lar the thirty-plus meters to the street below, and instantly a beam lanced out of darkness and cracked the lintel, showering her with dust and concrete chips.

Gasping, clutching the Lar to her like a child, she dropped to the floor. For long moments all she was aware of was the muscle-tension and foul taste of her own terror, and the huge thumping beat of her heart. Her mind's eye was filled with the picture of herself lying on the windowsill, as she might have fallen had the laser's alignment been accurate, with a seared line across her breasts.

Eventually she recovered enough self-possession to think of putting out the light, closing the window—very cautiously, from the side at arm's length—and replacing the Lar in its niche, distantly aware that if she had indeed thrown it away there would have been a hell of a fight with Dan. The seven-day appro was up tomorrow and if they couldn't return it they would be billed two thousand tealeaves.

Then, standing well back in shadow, she peered out of the window to see what was going on. A side-effect of joylets was to reduce auditory sensitivity; she had to strain through a kind of muffling mental blanket to perceive faint exterior sounds, but now she was paying attention what she heard took on a familiar pattern that would ordinarily have put her instantly on the alert. Barely discernible chanting and drumming, as though one were suddenly to notice the circulation of the city-monster like an amplified human pulse; a screaming child, maybe caught on the street between police barriers, parents too frightened to come out looking for it; once long ago when she was about fourteen she had heard a sober middle-class couple, friends of her mother's, quietly discussing during a riot in which one of their own sons had been stranded whether they should have another of their own were he to be found dead, or whether they were too old, and better advised to adopt. . ..

The voice of the novice Gottschalk rang out in memory, offering them—what was it?—"guns for a mere sixty-three with maker's warranty." She clenched her fists in blind frustration. Another of their damnable promotions, presumably! It was the regular Gottschalk technique: select an area where sales were below average, saturate it with rumors until someone's temper reached the breaking point and the inevitable division occurred into blank and kneeblank, and then the following day take advantage of people's frayed nerves to sell guns, grenades and mines.

But a droning from overhead disturbed her train of thought, and she dropped below the windowsill to peer upwards. She saw a police gunship hovering under its rotors, and realized that this wasn't any mere Gottschalk promotion. That was one of the big ships, capable of leveling whole city blocks. She'd seen them do it on news-tapes—

News! They'd acquired a vuset, hadn't they? Furious now at her own forgetfulness, she headed for it, turned back to blank out the windows—that sniper was too damned trigger-happy for comfort and might well fire on the reflection from the screen even if she turned it away from the window—and traced the cord along the floor until she found the leech. When she clipped it to the wall the set hummed to life.

On the Holocosmic channel: advertising. It was well into prime time by now, of course. Advertising on Global —advertising on Ninge, NY-NJ—advertising on Pan-Can... What was that? An unmarked setting, between Pan-Can the big Canadian fixed-antenna relay poised at twenty thousand meters not in orbit but on a mono-molecular cable and the adjacent channel allotted to Quebeçois French-language programs. Something had lit the screen which shouldn't have been there.

Delicately she returned the knob to the intermediate position and there was a fat grinning kneeblank in West African robes swimming in a blur of color as though a very thin film of oil on water surrounded every sharp edge between pale and dark zones. She'd hit one of the pirate satellites, probably Nigerian or Ghanaian, of which two or three were launched every year and kept their orbit over areas with disaffected black minorities until the PCC could wheedle the appropriations and fund an interceptor to knock them down. The African and Asian countries had opted out of the PCC almost as soon as it was founded, and declined to recognize its rulings.

With a perfect imitation of the harsh-sweet Gullah/ Creole/Jamaican accent affected by large numbers of knees in the black enclaves of America, the man in the screen said, "We scoop Mister Charley's lying propaganda, broze an' sis! We got
truth
an' the buckras' lies will fade afore the win', the sto'm an' tornaduh of nigra wrath! They runnin' to hahd in N'yohk City—watchah, watchah, broze an' sis!"

The screen flicked to a satellite view of New York, and instantly it was clear there was something wrong. Street lights were out over polyblock areas, and threads of silver stabbed across them: rocket-trails.

"Oh, Christ!" Lyla whispered, knuckles to teeth in a childish gesture of apprehension.

"That the X Patriots, broze an' sis," said the revoltingly smug voice over. "To'ch-berrer Mohton Lenigo fresh from tri-
yum
phant battles with the British gumment,
Cah
diff,
Blackman
-chester, Birming-
ham!
" And matching cuts of stock news stabbed in: Cardiff Castle fountaining skyward into rubble, the last white Lord Mayor of Manchester being driven out barefoot and in chains to a waiting government skimmer, Lenigo himself in Birmingham's famous old Bull Ring, surrounded by grinning knees.

"Come to kick yoh lazy nigras off yo' asses!" the voice said sternly. "When yo' gone drahve them buckras outa N'yohk—hey? Tonaht? Could be! You get
at
it, broze an' sis! Ev'y metah an' centimetah o' those
tawllll
towahs, those
deeeep
basemen'ss, they been watered with BLACK BLOOD—"

Convulsively Lyla tore the leech away from the wall and the set died.

They let in Morton Lenigo? They let in
Morton Lenigo?
They let in MORTON LENIGO?

Impossible. Incredible. No, they couldn't. She looked at herself in the faint gray light which seeped through the windows on the side away from the street, seeing her summer tan fishbelly-pallid, thinking
honky dont let the sun shin on you head it make you an easy target.

"Dan," she said in a trembling little-girl voice. "Dan?"

But he wasn't there. In darkness, silence except for the distant racket of the fighting which grew louder and softer by unpredictable turns, she waited passive as the Lar for someone or something to rescue her from the insufferable real world.