The Jagged Orbit (34 page)

"Him too?"

"You really have been hiding from the news, Mr. Flamen," Voigt said with frank astonishment. "Yes, Mayor Black was found mentally unfit for office yesterday afternoon. But I'm waiting for my answer."

"Yes, I'd like to," Flamen said firmly. "I've been watching his work while talking to you. I like it. He's very damned good. Why doesn't he want to go home, though, if Mayor Black is being slung out?"

"There's been some—ah—
friction
in kneeblank circles recently," Voigt said. "It may possibly stem from Mayor Black's invitation of Uys into the country. However that may be, we are no longer troubled by the presence of Morton Lenigo, thank goodness."

Flamen put his hand giddily to his head. "I feel as though I haven't even blinked, and the world is a different place!"

"It is," Voigt said with unexpected sternness. "We have had a week's relief from something I'd long hoped you might find the courage to attack."

"What?"

"Gottschalk propaganda. I'd hardly have believed, myself, how efficient they had made it by now, had they not found themselves directly involved in communications last weekend, and had I not been able to slap injunctions on them to conform with the Charter which forbids corporations controlling public-service vu-transmission facilities to employ them for the promotion of their own products. I don't know how long it will stick, but . . . Mr. Flamen, may I do something illegal, unethical and entirely personal? May I ask you to return the small favor I've been able to do you by devoting as much time as possible on your show from now on to detailed analysis of Gottschalk techniques for fomenting discontent, hatred and suspicion?"

It was the first time in all their long acquaintance that Flamen had seen Voigt display such emotion. He was almost shaking.

"I can stall them for weeks at least, perhaps months, before they can break out of their obligations and sell their holding in Holocosmic. Until that time, we have a chance to fight back."

"But they'll still be my employers!"

"They'll have to swallow anything you choose to put on the beams. The Charter also says that no news program—and yours counts as a news program—shall be censored because the owners of the network wish to protect an advertiser from unfavorable publicity connected with his products or services." Voigt grinned like a fat cat. "We can switch from one to the other argument faster than they can follow us, Mr. Flamen. I've had it comped, and it will work. So perhaps you'll perform the—ah—public service I suggested?"

"Yes," Flamen said fervently.

"Thank you, very much indeed. I— Why, Mrs. Flamen!" Voigt's eyes widened, and in the same moment Flamen realized Celia had got off her lounge and come to stand silently at his elbow. "We haven't met in ages. I'm delighted to learn of your recovery."

"You haven't learned the half of it," Flamen said, and put his arm around his wife's waist.

"Perhaps the rest is—ah—not for publication?" Voigt said. He cocked one bushy eyebrow. "Well, I'll go back to my own personal problems now and stop bothering you. And once again my thanks for falling in with the suggestion I made."

"What suggestion?" Celia said as the screen cleared. "I was half-dozing, I'm afraid. I didn't hear much of what you were saying."

"I'm back in business!" Flamen said exultantly. "And what's more I've got the chance to torpedo those bastards who tried to lose me. Believe me"—he clenched his fists

—"I'm going to see them go the same way as Mogshack and Mayor Black!"

ninety-eight far from being extraordinary, the idiot savant who can perform remarkable feats of mentation without knowing either how he does them or what the consequences are likely to be is excessively typical of the speCIES MAN

In the pleasant, air-conditioned, antiques-furnished study he maintained on the campus of the University of North Manitoba Xavier Conroy sat at his ancient electric typewriter pondering the outline for the networked lecture series he had been invited to give during the coming academic year. He was still having trouble organizing his argument; it was one thing to address a group of captive students in a relatively undistinguished university, something else again to have to try and make himself clear to millions of viewers.

He suspected the contract had been signed out of mere panic—the scandal of discovering that the director of the hemisphere's biggest mental hospital was himself suffering from advanced megalomania had jolted everyone, including the directors of the major vu-networks, into horrified awareness of the problem of mental hygiene which previously had been smoothed over by such facile doctrines as Mogshack's about the changing nature of normality.

Due to panic or not, though, the opportunity was too good to let slip. How best to make it clear to viewers that—?

The comweb buzzed. Turning, he saw that the screen was glowing the clear yellow indicating long-distance, and he agreed to accept the. call.

To his astonishment, the face of Lyla Clay appeared; pretty as ever, bearing the traces of tiredness, but breaking into a smile on seeing him.

"Miss Clay! Good lord!" He spun his chair to face her directly. "And to what do I owe this pleasure?"

"I want to come and study under you this year," Lyla said.

There was a moment of complete silence. Eventually Conroy said, "I'm—ah—very flattered, but. .."

"Professor, I'm getting much better at controlling my talent," Lyla said. "I haven't taken a sibyl-pill in over a month, and I'm sensing things which . . ." She bit her lip. "Well, I guess I'll have to tell you an awful lot. Can you spare the time to listen? I mean, if you say no, I'll understand, because last time we spoke things were kind of disorganized, and if you'd rather forget the whole episode, say so."

Conroy looked blank for a moment. Suddenly" he laughed. "Miss Clay, already you impress the hell out of me. I don't remember ever doing anything sillier in my life than standing up to Mr. Flamen and pledging my belief in what Madison was telling us, when only moments later he collapsed into permanent insanity. Oh— I'm sorry. He'd become quite a friend of yours, hadn't he?"

"Harry Madison was not only the sanest but one of the nicest people I ever met," Lyla said firmly. "He got me out of a terrible mess just after Dan's death, and in spite of him being carted back to the Ginsberg I've been behaving the way he showed me ever since, and I'm just getting the world to jump through hoops for me. I think you're wrong, Professor—I mean, I think you're wrong now and you were right then."

"I don't quite follow you," Conroy said after a pause.

"I'm not sure I follow myself," Lyla shrugged. "This is something which is so—so inside me that I can't explain it. It has something to do with having tried to make a living as a pythoness—"

"Aren't you still at it?" Conroy interrupted.

"No. I had an invitation from Dr. Spoelstra at the Ginsberg to come and audition, you might say, for the new director—but I said no."

"What have you been doing, then?"

"I went home. I'm calling from there. I've just been sitting and thinking for weeks on end. And arguing with my family, but that's nothing new." She gave an amusing wry grimace. "It took me a hell of a lot of effort to get around to applying to your university, but I did call up and inquire, and when they told me your course was already full I thought maybe if I appealed to you directly .. ."

"Well, I'd certainly be very pleased to accept you as a student of mine, of course, but I'm afraid you'll have to furnish a pretty compelling reason."

"I'm going to
try,"
Lyla said. "That's why I called up." She leaned earnestly to the camera at her end.

"Look, Professor, I've read some of your books and met you and listened to you, and what you said back in Flamen's office has never stopped haunting me. I hope it never will. I don't know what makes me a pythoness, and apparently no one else knows either, but—but it's not the right way to tackle whatever the problem is.
I
don't know what it is, but I think it may be that people are just shutting themselves away from each other, until it takes someone with a special mental gift and a hell of a dangerous drug to break down the barriers between us. And it doesn't
have
to be that way. I told you, I haven't taken a sib for more than a month; I've been walking around my home town looking at people, I've been talking to my parents and my brother, and I've been getting to—to
see
them all over again. I've got a mind as well as a peculiar talent, and I can control my mind, and I can remember what I learn with it instead of having to sit and listen to the replay of a tape made while I was in trance. Being a pythoness is like being a machine, which just sits there knowing all kinds of astonishing things but won't come out and share them until someone puts the proper questions to it. I'm not a machine, but a girl with hormones and emotions and some intelligence and good looks and—" She made a helpless gesture.

"I want someone to show me more than what Harry Madison managed in the short time he was free. There was this person Berry that I thought was a friend of Dan's and mine—you remember? And he squatted in our apt because he thought now's my chance to go grabbing. Friend or no friend, that was what he thought about first, not seeing what he could do to help me or clear up the mess Dan's death left, or anything like that. Professor, am I making
myself
clear?"

"Not very," Conroy said grimly. "But you're talking about the right subject. Go on."

"Well, like I said it's inside me, and I'm simply not used to bringing out things like this and trying to explain them. But there was this terrible-looking problem I had, no home, no one to help me, and Harry just evaluated it and in spite of never having met me before that same day he straightened it out. Granted he was kind of special, like he went through a locked door without a key and caught the hundred-kilo deadfall and all like that: it was using what he could do
for that purpose
which got land of branded on my mind."

"And that decided you to give up being a pythoness?" "Oh no!" Lyla scowled up at the ceiling, seeming frustrated at her own lack of ability to make herself clear. "I can't ever give that up—I
am
one, like someone has perfect pitch or someone else has night vision or someone else maybe could have a trick gift with mathematics. It's what you do with what you've got that matters. I don't want to make a fortune out of it and wind up bored and sadistic like Mikki Baxendale. I want to learn how to put this thing to work for
me,
because I can't make it work for other people until I've done that. And because of all the sense you talked about the way people are cutting themselves off from each other, I want to study under you. Not about the pythoness talent—no one can help me with that, not even the other people who possess it, because the mind's turned off while it's working full blast. But about the people the talent is telling me about. Professor, I want this so much I think it would kill me to have to wait until next year to join your course!"

"If I have to let you camp out in this study of mine because there isn't room in the dormitories," Conroy said decisively, "I'll get you here. I haven't heard someone of your age—excuse the reference, but I'm dreadfully aware of the age-gap in this environment—I haven't heard anyone as young as you talk so much sense in five minutes for the" past ten years. Right now, what with the reaction against Mogshack and my unlooked-for status as his chief rival, I'm in a position of some influence, and I'm having to try and control myself because it's been a long time . . ." He fingered his beard thoughtfully.

"I have to admit," he resumed after a pause, "that I still do find it difficult to imagine why I could have been so dogmatic about Madison being right in the things he said, when they were so patently absurd. Talking about things that hadn't yet happened, and what's more things which haven't happened subsequently—"

"Professor," Lyla interrupted, "if it hadn't been for us they would have."

"What?"

"They would have. There was this new super-computer in Nevada, wasn't there? And something went wrong with it, and I
know
what went wrong."

"Yes, of course, but— You know what went wrong with it?" Conroy echoed skeptically.

"Of course." She spoke with simple certainty. "The same thing that once happened to me. What they call an echo-trap."

Conroy's hands dropped to his lap and he stared at her for an endless moment. He said in a changed voice, "I think ... No, you'll have to explain what you mean."

"Suppose it is true that Madison was—was part of, or in contact with, or somehow
associated
with this machine up there in the future when civilization had collapsed. Then, the moment he learned that the Gottschalks had tried to buy out the Holocosmic network to stifle the Flamen show, he'd have realized he was beaten. Both ways. I mean,
it
would have realized
it
was beaten. Against the century of extra experience it had up there in 2113 it had to balance the fact that its own memory showed it had acted to prevent exactly the kind of exposure necessary to alter history and preserve enough wealthy people to buy the System C weapons when they were offered. Zink—zonk—zink—zonk . . ." She pantomimed patting an imaginary string-suspended ball back and forth in the air between her palms. Seeing the look of disbelief on Conroy's face, she broke off with a sigh,

"Sorry, Professor. It's something I'll never make dear. You'd have had to be inside my head at Mikki Baxendale's when I'd taken a subcritical dose of the sibyl drug and I sensed all these direct experiences of fighting and killing as they raced through Harry's mind. No one man in a lifetime could collect that sort of data; he'd have to be so committed to violence he'd have been killed seven times over. But to me it spoke louder than words. It told me he, or something in back of him, was turning him into a machine for killing. And he did kill. He threw that man out of a forty-fifth story window, didn't he? I've been checked up ever since. I even know what it was that made me vomit right at the end. Of all the people who've ever devoted themselves to killing, the worst were a heretical Zen sect in Japan and Korea in the fifteenth and sixteenth century, who cultivated killing literally as an art. If you can imagine the ecstasy you get from painting and music and poetry rolled up together and then suddenly realizing that this is a man's life being ended, you'll see why I was so sick."

"You've been taking this very seriously, haven't you?" Conroy said slowly, and without waiting for an answer went on. "Certainly I get the same disturbing feeling I had, as I recall, in Flamen's office—a sense of truths peering out of what I'd ordinarily dismiss as obvious nonsense. Your idea of the computer going insane because it had set up an unstable feedback from the present to the future—

"Right!" Lyla cried.

"But," he continued as though she hadn't spoken, "it's too big a break with my ordinary habit-patterns to think in those terms. You, perhaps?" He looked at her doubtfully. "Yes, I don't see why not How old are you, Miss Clay?"

"It's my twenty-first birthday today."

"And already you've had experiences most people will never have. I once saw pythoness, talent defined as the ability to think with other people's minds; does that fit?"

"Yes, I've said that myself."

"In which case, if I don't petrify your mind in a conformist pattern, I guess I might just possibly be able to help you find what you say you want. And I'm always on guard against mental rigidity."

"You're more open-minded than anyone else I know," Lyla said warmly. Conroy inclined his grizzled head.

"I haven't had a sincerer compliment in years, Miss Clay. I look forward to having you join my course, and I promise to do my best for you. We're sorely in need of people like yourself, and we're going to need them worse than ever in the next few decades. What with the withdrawal of Lares & Penates from the market on that backwash of anti-knee panic, and the reaction against that, and the sudden loss of confidence in the Gottschalks after the revelation of their internal dissensions ..." He sighed. "This old planet of ours is rocking like a badly spun top, and if we don't find a nucleus of hard-headed, sensible people to drag us back on course, we're going to go into a sort of jagged orbit like a tumbling rocket with the engines jammed, sometimes straight up, sometimes straight down, and sometimes at weird angles in between. But I've somehow managed to cling to this irrational optimism all my life, this sense of expectation that someone will turn up to rescue us in the nick of time and balance our gyroscopes for us."

He leaned back and smiled at the pretty face in the comweb screen.

"Thanks for asking me this favor, Miss Clay. Sometimes my confidence in my own judgment tends to falter. It's a fine thing to have it restored by someone as exceptional as yourself."

She looked at him for a long moment. Suddenly she pursed her lips and blew him a kiss before cutting the connection with a mischievous grin.