The Shockwave Rider (17 page)

“Sandy,” Kate murmured in the nick of time, “it’s getting late. Even later for us than it is for these nice people.”

“I—uh … Yes, you’re right. Excuse us, friends; we came a long way today.” He rose, collecting the grimy unfamiliar bills which had accumulated on the corner of the table. It had been years since he handled this much of the generalized scrip known as paper money; at the church in Toledo it had been collected and counted automatically. For most people cash payments stopped at the number of dollar coins you would drop in a pocket without noticing their weight.

“I’m flattered,” he said to the elderly man. “But you’ll have to let me think about it. We may be only passing through. We have no plans to settle here.”

He seized Kate’s arm and hurried her away, terribly aware of the sensation he had caused. He could hear his feat being recounted already along the mouth-to-mouth circuit.

As they were undressing he said miserably, “I sabotaged that one, didn’t I?”

Admitting the blunder was novel to him. The experience was just as unpleasant as he had imagined it would be. But in memory echoed Kate’s description of the graduates from Tarnover: convinced they were incapable of error.

That’s not human. That’s mechanical. It’s machines whose view of the world is so circumscribed they go right on doing the only thing they can although it’s wrong.

“I’m afraid so.” Her tone was matter-of-fact, devoid of criticism. “Not that you could help it. But to be spotted by an area secretary of the Fencing Association and then to beat the incumbent West Coast champion—yes, that is apt to provoke comment. I’m sorry; I didn’t realize you hadn’t recognized Fagin.”

“You knew who he was?” In the middle of shedding his pants he stood ridiculous, one leg in and the other out. “So why the hell didn’t you warn me?”

“Do me a favor? Before you pick your first quarrel with me, get a little better acquainted. Then you can do it with justification.”

He had been on the verge of anger. The inclination vanished. He completed undressing, as did she, and then took her in his arms.

“I like you very much as a person,” he said, and bestowed a grave kiss on her forehead. “I think I’m going to like you just as much as a woman.”

“I hope so,” she answered with equal formality. “We may have to go a lot of places together.”

He drew back to full stretch, hands on her shoulders.

“Where next? What next?”

As rare in his life as admitting mistakes was asking for advice. It too was disturbing. But it would have to become a habit if he was to stay afloat.

She shook her head. “Think about that in the morning. It has to be somewhere else, that’s definite. But this town is already halfway right … No, too much has happened today. Let’s overload it and sleep it out and worry about decisions afterwards.”

With abrupt tigerish violence, as though she had borrowed from Bagheera, she clamped her arms around him and sank her sharp tongue—sharp as her gaze—between his lips.

A LOAD OF CRYSTAL BALLS

In the twentieth century one did not have to be a pontificating pundit to predict that success would breed success and the nations that first were lucky enough to combine massive material resources with advanced knowhow would be those where social change would accelerate until it approximated the limit of what human beings can endure. By 2010, in the wealthiest countries, a classic category of mental patient was composed of boys and girls in their late teens who had come back for a first vacation from college to discover that “home” was unrecognizable, either because the parents had moved into a new framework, changed jobs and cities, or simply because—as they’d done a dozen times before—they had refurnished and redecorated … without realizing they were opening a door to what came to be termed the “final straw syndrome.”

It was also not difficult to forecast that no matter how well endowed they were with material resources those countries where the Industrial Revolution arrived late would change proportionately more slowly. After all, the rich get richer and the poor get children. Which is okay so long as lots of them starve in infancy.

What many otherwise well-informed people apparently preferred to overlook was the phenomenon baptized by Angus Porter “the beetle and wedge,” which retained its name long after even the poor nations found it uneconomic to split logs with a hammer and a chunk of steel. Even if your circular saws were pedal-driven, they were much less wasteful. Moreover, you could dictate a neat dividing line.

Beetling forward at full pelt split society. Some did their utmost to head the other way. A great many more decided to go sideways. And some simply dug in their heels and stayed put. The resultant cracks were unpredictable.

One and only one thing preserved even the illusion of national integrity. The gossamer strands of the data-net proved amazingly strong.

Unfortunately nothing came along to reinforce them.

People drew comfort from knowing there were certain objects near at hand, in the U.S.A. or the Soviet Union or Sweden or New Zealand, of which they could boast, “This is the biggest/longest/fastest frammistan on Earth!” Alas, however, tomorrow it might not be. Paradoxically, therefore, they derived even more emotional sustenance from being able to say, “This is the most primitive potrzebie, you know, still at work in any industrialized country!”

It was so precious to be able to connect with the calmer, stabler past.

The cracks spread. From national level they reached provincial level, from provincial they reached municipal, and there they met cracks going the other way, which had begun in the privacy of the family.

“We sweated blood to put the son-of-a-bitch through college! He ought to be paying us back, not sunning his ass in New Mexico!”

(For New Mexico read, at will, the Black Sea resort of Varna—or the beaches of Quemoy and Matsu where young Chinese by the thousand were content to pass their time practicing calligraphy, playing fan-tan, and smoking opium—or any of fifty other locations where
la dolce-far-niente vita
had spilled the contents of its seine-net after trawling through a nation, an ethnic grouping, or in the case of India a subcontinent. Sri Lanka had had no government to speak of for a generation.)

As much as anything else, it was the sense of exploitable talent going to waste that prompted the establishment of genius centers like Tarnover, funded on the scale previously reserved to weaponry. It was beyond the comprehension of those raised in traditional patterns of thinking that resources of whatever kind should not be channeled and exploited to dynamize ever-faster growth.

Secret, these centers—like the unseen points claimed in a fencing field—provoked consequences that now and then turned out to be disastrous.

SCENT REFUGE

Even after two solid days in his company Ina Grierson couldn’t get over how closely the man from Tarnover resembled Baron Samedi—very dark, very thin, head like a skull overlaid with parchment—so that one constantly expected a black tribe to march in and wreck the place. Some of his time had been devoted to Dolores van Bright, naturally, but she had admitted right away her attempt to help Sandy Locke by warning him there’d be an extra member of the interview board, and after that not even the influence of G2S was going to keep her out of jail.

But it was Ina the man from Tarnover was chiefly concerned to question. Sandy Locke had been hired on her say-so, whence the rest followed logically.

She grew terribly tired of saying over and over to the thin black man (whose name was Paul T. Freeman, but maybe only for the purposes of this assignment), “Of course I go to bed with men I know nothing about! If I only went to bed with men I
do
know about I’d never get any sex, would I? They all turn out to be bastards in the end.”

Late on the afternoon of the second day of questioning the subject of Kate arose. Ina claimed to be unaware that her daughter had left the city, and the skull-faced man was obliged to believe her, since she had had no chance to go home and check her mail-store reel. Moreover, the girls in the apartment below Kate’s, currently looking after Bagheera, insisted she had given no least hint in advance of her intention to travel.

Still, she’d done so. Gone west, and what was more with a companion. Very likely one of her fellow students, of course; many of her friends hailed from California. Besides, she’d talked freely about “Sandy Locke” to her downstairs neighbors, and called him plastic, artificial, and other derogatory terms. Her mother confirmed that she had said the same on various occasions both public and private.

There being no trace of Haflinger, however, and no other potential clue to his whereabouts,
and
no recent record of Kate’s code being used—which meant she must have gone to a paid-avoidance area—Freeman, who was a thorough person, set the wheels in motion, and was rewarded by being able to advise the FBI that lodging for two people had been debbed against Kate Lilleberg in Lap-of-the-Gods.

Very interesting. Very interesting indeed.

TODAY’S SPECIAL

He woke to alarm, recalling his gaffe of yesterday and along with that a great many details he’d have preferred to remain ignorant of concerning the habits of people in paid-avoidance areas. Their federal grants meant that few of them had to work at full-time jobs; they supplemented their frugal allowance by providing services—he thought of the restaurants where there were manual chefs and the food was brought by waiters and waitresses—or making handicrafts. Tourism in towns like this, however, was on the decline, as though people no longer cared to recall that this, the richest nation in history, had been unable to transcend a mere earthquake, so they spent much of their time in gossip. And what right now would offer a more interesting subject than the poker who blew out of nowhere and beat the local fencing champion?

“Sooner or later you’re going to have to learn to live with one inescapable fact about yourself,” Kate said over her shoulder as she sat brushing her hair before the room’s one lighted mirror. Listening, he curled his fingers. The color of that hair might be nothing out of the ordinary, but its texture was superb. His fingertips remembered it, independently of his mind.

“What?”

“You’re a very special person. Why else would they have recruited you to Tarnover? Wherever you go you’re bound to attract attention.”

“I daren’t!”

“You can’t help it.” She laid aside her brush and swiveled to face him; he was sitting glum on the edge of the bed.

“Consider,” she went on. “Would the people at G2S have offered to perm you if they didn’t think you were special even disguised as Sandy Locke? And—and
I
realized you were special, too.”

“You,” he grunted, “just have more insight than is good for you.”

“You mean: more than is good for you.”

“I guess so.” Now at last he rose to his feet, imagining he could hear his joints creak. To be this frustrated must, he thought, resemble the plight of being old: clearly recalling what it was like to act voluntarily and enjoy life as it came, now trapped in a frame that forbade anything except slow cautious movements and a diet prescribed by doctors.

“I don’t want to go through life wearing fetters,” he said abruptly.

“Tarnover talking!” she snapped.

“What?”

“Wear fetters? Wear
fetters?
I never heard such garbage. Has there ever been a time in the whole of history when someone with amazing exceptional gifts could be deluded into thinking they’re a handicap?”

“Sure,” he said at once. “How about conscripts who would rather maim themselves than obey a government order to go fight somebody they never met? Their gifts may have been no more than youth and health, but they were gifts.”

“That’s not being deluded. That’s being compelled. A recruiting sergeant with a gun on his hip—”

“Same thing! They’ve merely brought it into finer focus!”

There was a brief electric silence. At length she sighed.

“I give in. I have no right to argue with you about Tarnover—you’ve been there and I haven’t. And in any case it’s too early for a row. Go get showered and shaved, and then we’ll find some breakfast and talk about where we’re going next.”

IS THIS YOU?

Did you have trouble last night in dropping off to sleep?

Even though you were tired in spite of doing nothing to exhaust yourself?

Did you hear your heart? Did it break its normal rhythm?

Do you suffer with digestive upsets? Get a feeling that your gullet has been tied in a knot behind your ribs?

Are you already angry because this advertisement hits the nail on your head?

Then come to Calm Springs before you kill somebody or go insane!

COUNT A BLAST

“You’re beginning to be disturbed by me,” the dry hoarse voice announced.

Elbows on chair arms as usual, Freeman set his fingertips together. “How so?” he parried.

“For one thing, you’ve taken to talking to me in present-time mode for the last three-hour session every day.”