The Martian Viking (15 page)

"We all need to know something," Madame Psychosis replied in a profoundly understanding tone. "Life is an endless quest, leading us from the womb to the tomb, and on to the great karmic cycle that joyously and eternally repeats itself as we become one with the Universe."

Ronindella didn't want to admit it, but what the cybershrink was saying made a lot of sense. And the 'gram was a lot better than what they had at the Video Church . . .not to mention the music. It was almost as if she were hearing a heavenly host singing on high.

She seemed to be floating herself, a celestial spirit casting off all her worldly cares, high above the entire cosmos, the galaxies spinning around her. She felt giddy, almost bodiless. When she glanced down, she felt detached from herself. The entire universe revolved with her at the center. She felt so real, so . . .so true to herself. It was glorious.

"Are you happy?" Madame Psychosis asked in a gentle voice.

"Yes . . .no . . .I mean, I don't know." Ronindella felt very far away from this conversation, almost as if somebody else were speaking for her, and yet she knew that this was her voice, coming from her mouth, her vocal chords, her mind and soul.

She was very confused.

"Please tell me what's troubling you," Madame Psychosis said from somewhere out in space. "Perhaps I can help. It's always better to have someone to talk to, to confide in. Your secrets are safe with me."

"But doesn't the . . .government . . .?"

"There is no government here, only friendship, only love."

Ronindella wanted desperately to believe that. She felt loved, but she didn't know exactly where she was anymore. It was just like before, with Ryan. But that had gone bad. Ryan had made her feel loved, and now he was . . .

"Ryan," she said.

"What did you say?" Madame Psychosis asked in a way that suggested there was nothing more important to her in the entire universe than hearing Ronindella repeat herself.

"Ryan."

"Ryan?"

"Ryan Effner. He's . . .one of your patients."

"Yes."

"I need to know . . ." It was a tremendous struggle to talk about this, for some reason. " . . .I need to know why he's . . ."

"All information about my patients is private," Madame Psychosis admonished her.

"Well, if you could just give me . . ." Hosts of angels drifted by, playing harps and blowing sonorous trumpets. The tips of their gossamer wings almost brushed against her face, they were so close to her.

"What do you want me to give you, Ronindella?"

"But I didn't tell you my name," Ronindella said, suddenly frightened. "How did you . . ."

Madame Psychosis seemed to be everywhere, smiling down at Ronindella like the mother of all creation. "It's all right, dear," she said. "Don't be alarmed. What difference does it make?"

Ronindella's panic subsided as if it were the ocean at low tide. Of course, it was the credit card. That was how she knew. But what difference did it make? For that matter, what was it that she had thought made a difference?

Her confusion melted away.

"You're beginning to see clearly now," Madame Psychosis said. "I can sense it."

"Yes." It was absolutely true. Her vision was focusing, becoming crystalline. It was wonderful, as if she were seeing for the first time in her life. And yet it was also as if she were beyond using the optic nerves, the retina, and the vision centers of the brain. She had seen as precisely as this before once upon a time, perhaps before she was born, and it was only the limitations of her flawed human flesh that had prevented her from such clarity of vision for all these years, a lifetime.

God, she had been missing so much!

Ryan said goodbye to the two party androids the Sect had sent over. He would be billed for the time and any maintenance fees incurred from overuse. It would be costly, but he thought the androids well worth the price.

He'd heard about erotic androids before, but he'd never actually used one. Only Conglom-approved religions like the No-God Sect were legally licensed to procure such wonderful machines. Of course, there were plenty of bootleg operations, but that wasn't the way Ryan did things. It might have been cheaper, but only if he didn't get caught. A roll in the hay with two supple beauties wasn't worth joining Beeb on Mars.

Besides, he thought as he slipped out of his robe and into the shower, this wasn't about sex. It was about living with Ronindella. He couldn't join that cockamamie Video Church, even if it was Conglom sanctioned. He was far too much of an intellectual for that.

The chemical spray slapped his skin and invigorated him, waking him from the lethargic afterglow of sex. He thought about taking some exercise, but he kept thinking about Ronnie. How was she reacting to what she'd seen on the phone? What if she went into a terrible depression? She always said that visits to the Video Church cured that. What if this stunt only drove her back to those hyenas at the Church?

He shut off the spray and grabbed a towel, telling himself that Madame Psychosis wouldn't screw things up that badly.

Would she?

Rubbing his hair dry, he went back into the bedroom, stark naked, thinking for the first time that it was possible for Madame Psychosis to have her own hidden agenda. For example, what if the Conglom was observing all this? What if they had decided that he wasn't productive enough at work, and were looking for an excuse to terminate his job? He would be sent to Mars, or Luna, or even worse, to the asteroid belt.

He'd never come home again.

Sitting on the bed, he found his hands shaking. He tried to convince himself that they had nothing on him, but he couldn't be sure. There might be a Pre-Emptive Agent lurking just outside his apt. After all, the No-God Sect might not have been condemned by the government, but they were hardly at the top of the charts. No, not like the Video Church, which told the government exactly what it wanted to hear, and voluntarily gave a tithe to the Conglom. Separation of church and state was something Beeb used to talk about, but it was a thing of the past—if it had ever existed. Ryan might be in trouble already, with such subversive ideas floating around in his head. He consciously suppressed all thoughts questioning the government. Instead, he told himself what an upstanding citizen he was.

Well, once Ronindella agreed to see Madame Psychosis, everything would be all right. They'd soon both belong to the New Age Church, which was indeed near the top of the charts. They'd have most of Beeb's pay coming in, and maybe Ronnie would get a real job, instead of depending on the Church to bail her out when she got into debt. It seemed to Ryan that she worked harder for them than if she were employed, and got a lot less out of it. Only her status as a mother saved
her
from going to the moon, as far as he could see.

Should he call to see what Ronnie was doing now? See how she was taking it? In some ways, she was pretty fragile.

No, he had to trust Madame Psychosis. She knew best, with the accumulated knowledge of mystics through the ages stored in her memory droplets. He had to be patient, to wait and see what happened.

If he just bided his time, everything he wanted would come to him.

"WE'VE CROSS-REFERENCED data from the archecoded onees," Angel Torquemada said, "and, as a result, we now know where the enemy is hiding."

Johnsmith had been daydreaming, but that comment focused his attention on the lecture. In fact, most of the people in the underground meeting room stirred at the same moment as him.

"Are there any questions?" Torquemada said.

"Yes," Frankie Lee Wisbar said. Frankie was one of the many new people at these meetings, since the entire onee supply had been contaminated, and everyone at Elysium now hallucinated about Viking ships every time they touched an onee. "How did you cross-reference this data?"

"Simple. We looked for semiotic clues about the Arkies in the hallucinations that our people suffered."

"Semi-what?"

"Semiotic. It's the science of understanding signs. It's been around for a long time, but it's only recently been adapted to onees."

"How does it work?"

"We look for variations in the hallucinations that subjects report while under the influence of onees. We file these and look for symbols that recur. We then cross-reference these, looking for unconscious clues that previous users have left imprinted in the onees' matrices."

"Previous users?" a thin man named Smedley asked from the back row.

"Yes, these bootleg onees are generational of necessity. The technology to mass produce them is apparently unavailable to the Arkies."

"Then how do they make them?" Felicia asked.

"They imprint them directly from the human nervous system," Torquemada said.

Johnsmith recalled the effect his onee had exerted on Alderdice, that first time his friend had used an onee. He had noticed that Alderdice picked up some of the same imagery Johnsmith had enjoyed. His assumption had been that it was coded onto the onee in the factory, but that might not have been the case. Torquemada was saying that onees picked up some imagery from everyone that used them.

"Factory images, unmuddled by repetition, can be perceived perfectly only by the first user. It is the intention of the Arkies to insert subversive imagery onto otherwise harmless onees."

The prisoners took that in, a few of them nodding in understanding, the rest just looking puzzled.

"But why?" a woman asked. "What's the purpose of this subversive activity?"

"Nothing less than to disrupt the government of the Conglomerated United Nations of Earth."

It was one of the few times Johnsmith had heard anybody use the full name of the government since he was a schoolboy. It sounded kind of formal, and yet strangely nostalgic at the same time, in a sick way. He didn't feel like singing the International Anthem, that much was for sure.

"But we've outsmarted this criminal element," Torquemada said, grimacing with pleasure.

Johnsmith wondered if Torquemada thought he was smiling, and if he realized that, technically, by Conglom law, they were all part of the same criminal element he was condemning.

"Now we're going to seek them out and destroy them in their lair," Torquemada said, his voice rising with something like emotion. "We're going to search out and destroy the entire Arkie operation."

"We are?" asked an incredulous Alderdice V. Lumumba. "But how?"

"Through a military operation that will be carried out with surgical precision."

Audible sounds of understanding sounded throughout the room. This was not only the reason they had been trained, then, but also the reason their reactions to onees had been so thoroughly documented. They had not only been the semiotic bloodhounds through which the Arkies were to be ferreted out, but now they were going to be sent to kill or be killed by guerillas so skilled in survival that they could live in the wilds of Mars and penetrate the heavily guarded Elysium compound.

And to think that Johnsmith had been happy he wasn't sent to Luna or the Belt.

"An expedition will be mounted at oh six hundred hours tomorrow morning, with the following personnel armed and suited for an extended stay on the outside."

Johnsmith sank as far down into the uncomfortable plastic chair as he could manage, irrationally hoping that he would somehow not be called.

"Fulci," Angel Torquemada read from a clipboard, "Barenko, Wisbar, Smedley, Eddleblute . . ."

Johnsmith closed his eyes, imagining how bad a military adventure on Mars could be, especially after the disastrous firefight he had been in already. They had only ventured a few hundred yards from the compound and a handful of people had been killed; the fact that Torquemada had not revealed where the Arkies' camp was located made him think that this was going to be a major undertaking.

" . . .Eaton, Sandke, Lumumba . . ."

Oh shit, Alderdice had been picked, thought Johnsmith; better him than me, though. He felt slightly ashamed at that reaction to hearing Alderdice's name called.

" . . .Kassoff, Wu, Biberkopf . . ."

There it was. He was going to be sent out to die in the morning. Great. Johnsmith swallowed, feeling his adam's apple move almost painfully in his dry throat.

He didn't hear the rest of the names on the list. It depressed him so much to think of what was going to happen to him tomorrow that he couldn't think of anything else . . .except for Smitty II. The poor kid wouldn't have a father anymore. Well, it was better than having a convict for an old man. He hoped that Ryan was a better example to the boy than he'd been, but that was a dubious proposition.

It occurred to him that Torquemada was no longer talking. Their fearless leader was gathering up his notes and getting ready to leave.

"Mr. Torquemada," Felicia said, loud enough for everyone to hear, "you didn't call my name."

Torquemada looked down at her, but said nothing. Everyone in the room was watching Felicia.

"I'd like to go along on this expedition," she said.

"We need reserves," Torquemada said with an air of finality. "Not everyone will be able to go." He stepped away from the podium and started toward the door.

Felicia bit her bottom lip. "I'd like to volunteer to go in someone else's place."

Stopping in mid stride, Torquemada turned toward her. His death's head grin spread across his gaunt features. "Why, that's commendable," he said. "Commendable, Burst."

"Then you'll do it?" Felicia asked. "I really want to go, to see some action."

"May I ask why?"

"I want to pay them back for the way they attacked us that night," she said. "And I want to prove to myself that I've learned how to be a good soldier since I've been at Elysium."

Torquemada stared at her intently. Was he buying this? Johnsmith wondered; it was doubtful. It seemed likely to Johnsmith that Felicia was hoping to get a chance to go over to the rebels. But the way she was acting lately, who could tell?

"What do you say, sir?" Felicia asked.

"You'll get your chance," Torquemada said. "But not this time."