Michaelmas (4 page)

"What I'm thinking," Watson had said right on top of Campion's final consonant, "is we're going to hit Berne about seven-thirty a.m. local. Limberg's still up in that sanatorium with the UNAC

people and Norwood, and the conversa-tion's flying. Then you figure that old man will go without his beauty sleep? I don't. It's going to be maybe noon local before we stand any chance of talking to that crafty son of a bitch, and that's six hours past my bedtime. Meanwhile, all the media in Europe is right now beating the bushes there for colour, background, and maybe even the crash site. Which means that the minute we touch ground, we've got to scurry our own feet like crazy just to find out how far behind we are."

"Don't their European people have some staff on the ground there now?" Michaelmas asked gently, nodding towards the network decal on Watson's comm unit while Campion sat up a little, smiling.

"Oh, sure," Watson pressed on, "but you know how string-ers are. They'll be tryin' to sell me postcard views of the mountains with Xs inked on 'em where the capsule may have come down except it's got months of snow on it. And meanwhile, will UNAC give us anything to work on? They need their sleep too, and, besides, they won't peep till Limberg's explained it all, and talked about his prizes he was fortunate enough to scoff up although he's of course above money and, mundane gewgaws and stuff like that. Norwood stays under wraps, and
he
sleeps, or else they switch us a fast one and slide him out of there. What do you bet we get a leak he's been moved to Star Control when all the time they've got him in New York, God forbid Houston, or maybe even Tyura Tam. You'd enjoy the Aral climate in the summer, Doug. You'd like the commissars, too—they eat nice fresh press credentials for breakfast over there, Sonny."

Michaelmas blinked unhappily at Watson, who was con-centrating now on the approaching liquor caddy and fishing in his breast pocket for money. He felt terribly sorry Watson felt obliged to hire Campion for an assistant when he was so afraid of him.

"Let me buy you fellows a drink," Watson was saying. Since he knew Michaelmas's drinks were on his ticket, and he despised Campion, Horse Watson was trying to buy his way into the company of men. Michaelmas could feel him-self beginning to blush. He breathed quickly in an attempt to fight it down.

"Maybe I'd better take a rain check," Campion said quickly. "Going by your summation, Mel, I'd be better off with forty winks." He turned off his comm unit, leaned back with his arms folded across his chest, and closed his eyes.

"I'd be glad of another one of these, miss," Michaelmas said to the stewardess, holding up his half-full glass. "You make them excellently."

Watson got a bourbon and water. He took off the top half with one gulping swallow and then nursed the rest in his clenched hand. He sat brooding at his stiffly out-thrust shoes. After a while, he said forcefully: "Been around a long time, Larry, the two of us."

Michaelmas nodded. He chuckled. "Every time something happens in South America, I think about the time you almost led the Junta charge across the plaza at Mara-caibo."

Watson smiled crookedly. "Man, we were right on top of it that day, weren't we? You with that black box flapping in the breeze and me with my bare hands. Filed the damn story by cable, for Christ's sake, like some birthday greet-ing or something. And told 'em if they were going to send any more people down, they'd better wrap some armour around the units, 'cause the first slug they stopped was the last." He put his hand on the sealed, tamper-proof unit he might be said to have pioneered at the cost of his own flesh.

He took a very small sip of his drink. Watson was not drunk, and he was not a drunk, but he didn't smoke or use sticks, and he had nothing to do with his hands. Nor could he really stop talking. Most of the plane passengers were people with early-morning business—couriers with certificates or portable valuta; engineers; craftsmen with specialties too delicate to be confidently executed by tele-waldo; good, honest, self-sufficient specialists comforted by salaries that justified personal travel at ungodly hours— and they lay wrapped in quilts or tranquil self-esteem, nodding limp-necked in their seats with their reading lights off. Watson looked down the dimness of the aisle.

"The way it is these days lately, I'd damn near have to send off to Albania for my party card and move south. Foment my own wars."

"You miss it, don't you?" Michaelmas said in a measured kidding tone of voice.

Watson shook his head. Then he nodded slightly. "I don't know. Maybe. Remember how it was when we were just starting out — Asia, Africa, Russia, Mississippi? Holy smoke, you'd just get something half put away, and somebody'd start it up again somewhere else.
Big
movements.

Crowds. Lots of smoke and fire."

"Oh, yes. Big headlines. A lot of exciting footage on the flat-V tube."

"You know, I think the thing about it was, it was
simple
stuff. Good guys, bad guys. People who were going to take your country away overnight. People who were going to cancel your pay-cheque. People who were going to come into your school. People who stood around in bunches and waved clubs and yelled, "The hell you will!" Man, you know, really, those were the salad days for you and me. Good thing, too; I don't suppose either one of us had enough experience to do anything but point at the writing on the wall. Neither one of us could miss the broad side of a barn, period. Right? Well, maybe not you, but me. Me, for sure."

"It's not necessary to be such a country boy with me, Horse."

Watson waved his hands. "Nah! Nah, look, we were green as grass, and so was the world.

Man, is it wrong to miss being young and sure of yourself? I don't think so, Larry. I think if I didn't miss it, the last good part of me would be all crusted over and cracking in the middle. But whatever happened to big ideological militancy, anyway? All we've got left now is these tired agrarian reformer bandidos hiding in the Andes, screaming Peking's gone soft on im-perialismo and abandoned 'em, and stealing chickens. I wonder if old Joe Stalin ever figured his last apostle would be somebody named Juan Schmidt-Garcia with a case of BO that would fell a tree?"

"Yes, the world is quite different now from the way I found it in my young manhood,"

Michaelmas said. Looking at the slump of Watson's mouth, he spoke the words with a certain sympathy. "Now most of the world's violence is individual, and petty."

Watson snorted softly. "Like that thing in New York where that freak was sneaking in on his neighbours and killing them for their apartment space. Nuts and kooks; little grubby nuts. Good for two minutes on one day. Not that you should measure death that way, God rest the souls of the innocent. But you know what I mean. Look. Look, we're in a funny racket, all of a sudden. You figure you're gonna spend your life making things real for the little folks in the parlour, you know?

Here's the big stuff coming at you, people; better duck. Here's the condition of the world. You don't like it? Get up and change it."

"Yes," Michaelmas said. "We showed them the big things, and that made the small things smaller. More tolerable. Less significant."

Watson nodded. "Maybe. Maybe. You're saying the shit was there all along. But I got to tell you, when we showed 'em a gut-shot farmer drowning in a rice paddy, it was because it meant something in Waukegan. It said, 'Today your way of life was made more safe. Or less.' But you show 'em the same guy today, and it's about a jealous husband or some clown wants to inherit his buffalo. And you know it's not going to get any bigger than that.

"It's cowboys and Indians again," Watson said. "Stories for children. It doesn't mean a thing to Waukegan, except the guy's dying, and he's dying the way they do in the holo dramas, so he's as real as the next actor. They judge his goddamn
performance,
for Christ's sake, and if he's con-vincing, then maybe it was important. It makes you sick to think he's not interesting if he's quiet about it. Man, so little of it's real any more; they've got no idea what can happen to them.

They don't want an idea. You remem-ber that quote Alvin Moscow got from the plane crash survivor? 'We would all be a little kinder to each other.'
That
is what you and I should be all about.

"Man, who knows what's real any more, and who feels it? You run your fingers over a selector and the only action that looks right to you is something they did in a studio with prefigured angles, stop motion, the best lighting, and all that stuff. Even your occasional Moroccan school-teacher hung over a slow fire three days ago can't compete with that stuff. It's not like he was a Commie that was going to corrupt the morals of Mason City, or even that he was a Peace Corps volunteer that crossed some Leninist infiltrator. It's just some poor slob that told the kids something that's not in the
Quran,
and somebody took exception to it. Man, you can get the same thing in Tennessee; what's so great about that? Is that gonna make you rush out and join some crusade to stop that kind of stuff? Is that gonna touch your life at all? Is that gonna make you hear the marching band?"

"It might cause you to sip your wine more slowly."

"Okay. Yeah, But you know damned well the big stories now are some guy dying by inches inside because he can't make his taxes and who, where, has the half million that disappeared out of the transit bill? I mean that's all right, and it's necessary, and even after your third pop or your third stick, it'll get through to you, kind of, if Melvin Watson or L. G. Michaelmas, begging your pardon, Larry, pushes it at you in some way that makes you feel like you're paying attention. But nobody dies
for
anything any more, you know? They all the only
on account of,
just like holo people, and half the time these days we just pass along a lot of dung from the lobby boys and the government boys and the image gurus like our friend the Herr Doktor.

"My God, Larry, we're just on a fertilizer run here. UNAC's just a bunch of people jockeying to get by, just like in any widget monopoly or thingumbob cartel in the world. When Norwood went, who cried at UNAC? All you heard was the haemorrhage shot 'round the world. So they shook out some expandable patsies and then they were right in there pitching again, talking about the increased effect on the goal attainment curve and all that other vocabulary they have to kiss it and make it well with. Scared green for the appropriation; scared to death they picked the wrong voodoo in school. But they're safe. They'd be sick if they realized it, but the whole world's like they are even if it would turn their stomachs to believe it.

"Christ, yes, they're safe. It's fat, fat, fat in the world, and bucks coming out of everybody's ears; spend it quickly, before the damn economy does what it did in the seventies and we have to redesign whole industries to get rich again. Smart isn't 'Can you do it, is it good to do?' Smart is

'Can you make 'em believe what you're doing is real?' And real is 'Can you get financing for it?' "

Michaelmas sat very still, sharing Watson's angle of blind vision down the aisle and being careful not to do anything distracting. He had learned long ago never to stop anyone.

Watson was unstoppable. "Norwood's up there breathing and feeling in that megabuck beauty shop of Limberg's and suspecting there's a God who loves him. I know Norwood— hell, so do you. Nice kid, but ten years from now he'll be endorsing a brand of phone. The point is, right now he's on that mountaintop with all that glory ringing in him, but that doesn't make him real to his bosses and it doesn't make him real to the little folks in the parlour. What makes him real is Limberg says he's real and Limberg's got not one but two good voodoo certificates. Christ on a crutch, I've got half a mind to kill Norwood all over again—on the air, Larry, live from beautiful Switzerland, ladies and gentlemen, phut splat in glorious hexacolor 3D, and let him be real all over every God-damned dining-table in the world. Ten years from now, he'd thank me for it."

Michaelmas sat quiet.

Watson swung his head up and grinned suddenly, to show he was kidding about any part that Michaelmas might object to. But he could not hold the expression very long. His eyes wandered, and he jerked his head towards Cam-pion. "He really asleep?"

Michaelmas followed his glance. "I believe so. I don't think he'd relax his mouth like that if he weren't."

"You catch on." Watson looked nakedly into Michael-mas's face with the horrid invulnerability of the broken. "I don't have any legs left," he explained. "Not leg legs— inside legs. Sawed 'em off myself. So I took in a fast young runner. Hungry, but very hot and a lot of voodoo in his head.

Watch out for him, Larry. He's the meanest person I've ever met in my life. Surely no men will be born after him. My gift to the big time. Any day now he's going to tell me I can go home to the

'sixties. Galatea's revenge. And I'll believe him."

Michaelmas couldn't be quite certain of how his own face looked. In his ear, Domino had been telling him : "As you can imagine, I'm getting all three sets of pulse and respira-tion data from your area, so there's considerable garbling. But my evaluation is that Campion hasn't surrendered consciousness for a moment."

Watson had been clenching at his stomach with one hand. Now he put his drink down and got up to go to the lavatory. Campion continued to half-lie in his seat, his expression slack and tender.

Michaelmas sat smiling a little, quizzically.

Domino said with asperity: "Watson's right about one thing. He can't hack it any more. That was a classic maniacal farrago, and it boils down to his not being able to understand the world. It wasn't necessary to count the contradictions after the first one."

It was extremely difficult for Michaelmas to subvocalize well enough to activate his throat microphone without also making audible grunting sounds. He had never liked strain-ing his body, and the equipment was implanted in him only because he needed it in his vocation. He used it as infre-quently as possible, but he was not going to let Domino have the last word on this topic.