The Night Mayor (25 page)

Kurtz was impressed. He touched his fingertips, then his naked palm, to the glasspex wall. He started away, and a condensation handprint faded.

‘It’s warm. Is that eternity lighting?’

‘Partly. I have the dreaming room kept at womb temperature.’

‘You dream here?’

‘Of course. The surroundings have been calculated exactly. Psychologically attuned to be beneficial to the dreaming talent. The recording equipment is substantially what you are familiar with.’

‘You have computer assist?’

‘My Household has a library tap for research. I don’t use it much, though. I actually read books. I’m not one of the D-9000’s troop of hacks. I don’t think we should be the glorified amanuenses of a heuristic pulp mill.’

‘I don’t like the machines either. They hurt.’ Kurtz was irritated. Good, that should keep him off balance. ‘What is all this about?’

‘Would you be surprised to learn that I am an admirer of your work?’

Kurtz cleared an unconvincing laugh from his throat. ‘Would you be prepared to say that on the dustjack of
Sixth Form Girls in Chains
?’

Yeovil tapped his ID into the console. The Household extruded a couch from the floor. It looked sculpted. Out of vanilla ice cream.

‘Besides yours my talent is lukewarm. I want to make use of your capacities to underline certain aspects of my work in progress.’

‘Uh huh.’

‘I am dreaming a historical piece, focusing on the character of John Kennedy, martyred president of the United States of America. Kennedy was known to be a man with a highly passionate nature. I think it not inapt that your touch with erotica be applied.’

Kurtz sat on the couch, trying to find the loophole. ‘What about the certification?’

‘I plan on sidestepping the BBDC. They have no real authority, and I am supported by my publishers and the vast public interest in my work. The Board owes its precarious existence to its claim that it represents the desire of the majority. Once that is disproved, they will fall.
JFK
has been concepted as a radical dream.’

‘How is this going to work?’

‘I’ve dreamed a guideline. The sequence you’ll work on is fully scripted. The externals are complete. However the first person is blank.’

‘Kennedy?’

‘Yes. He is emerging as a very strong figure in the dreaming. But in this scene he’s empty. I want you to amend the internals as he sexes with his mistress.’

‘Same old wet dream stuff?’

‘Essentially. But in this case the explicit material is crucial to the concept. The character of Kennedy is seminal to an understanding to the twentieth century. All of his drives must be exposed. The underlying…’

‘Yeah. Right. Let’s talk about the money.’

* * *

Yeovil balanced the newly-discharged needle gun on his fingertips as he walked across the room, and dropped the weapon into the Household Disperse. Kurtz lay face down on the dreaming couch with a three-inch dart in his brain. The tape was still running, although the Kurtz input was zero. Yeovil sucked his burned fingers. He would smear them better when he was finished with Kurtz.

He had never killed anyone before. He sadly discovered that dream was better than actual. Like sex. He stored the minor rush of emotions for future use.

The tape clicked through. The Household offered the recorder. Yeovil picked the subcutaneous terminals out of Kurtz’s head and dropped them into their glass of purple. The whirlpool rinse sucked particles of Kurtz out of its system.

Yeovil went through Kurtz’s smockpocks. A few credit cards and a bunch of ins. A couple of five-pound bits. They all went into the Disperse, along with Kurtz’s outdoor gear, porno tapes, and finger-printed brandy glass. Do it, then clear up afterwards – the secret of criminal success.

The Household presented Yeovil with his outdoor kit: a visored hat, and a padded Inverness. The tailors boasted that their garments were proof against a fragmentation charge. That was true: in the event of such an unlikely weapon being turned on the cape, it would be unmarked. Anyone inside it, however, would find his torso turned to jelly by the impact. Most footpads used needle guns, anyway.

Yeovil hauled Kurtz out to his armoured Ford. On the street he fitted an outmoded breather. It kept the smog out of his lungs as well as a more stylish domino, and disguised him.

Yeovil pressed his car in, and tapped his ID into the automatic. The smog lights upped. The streets were deserted.

Yeovil drove around central London for fifteen minutes before chancing upon a suitable dump. He slung the body over several twist-tie rubbish bags in the forecourt of a condemned high-rise. It would look like an ordinary waylaying. There were probably five similar corpses within walking distance. If the Black Economists got to Kurtz before the Metropolitans, the body would be stripped of any usable organs. The incident would not rate a mention on the local.

Back at Luxborough Street Yeovil reprogrammed his Household to forget Kurtz’s visit. He fed in a plausible dull evening at home, and wrote off the energy expenditure to various gadgets.

Then he slept. The next stage was complicated, and he did not want to deal with it late at night after his first murder. He felt a twinge of insomniac excitement, which he countered by back-grounding a subliminal lullaby.

The Household woke him early with a call. It was Tony, Yeovil’s chief editor at Futura. Tony looked harassed.

‘You’ve overreached another deadline, John. I wanted the
JFK
master back yesterday. We’re committed to a production start. And we have marketing to consider. It’s a q-seller on advance sales, and you haven’t delivered yet.’

‘Sorry.’ Yeovil stretched his mind around the problem. ‘I’ve still got a few more amendments.’

‘You’re a trekkiehead, John. Leave it alone. I told you it was finished last week. I’m satisfied as is. And I’m supposed to be a bastard tyrannical editor. We’re all expletive deleted here. The copiers are primed.’

‘You have my word as a gentleman that a definitive master will be on your desk tomorrow morning.’

‘Tomorrow morning? I get into the office Kubricking early, John.’ Tony looked dubious. ‘Okay, you’ve got it, but no more extensions. No matter how many errors slip through the finetooth. You can have Oswald miss, and re-elect the randy bugger for all I care. The next John Yeovil hits the stands Friday. Does that scan?’

‘Of course. I apologise for the delay. I’m sure you understand…’

‘If that means: Will I forgive you for being an iridium-plated prick, no way. However, my slice of your sales buys you a lot of tolerance. Ciao.’

Tony over-and-outed. He was getting near termination. There were other publishers. Offers tapped up in Yeovil’s slab every morning.

The Kurtz-assist master was still slotted. Yeovil pulled it, primed the duplicator, and cloned a copy. The master tape was too recognisable as such for his purpose. Too many slices and scribbles. Plus he would need it later. His plan did not include writing off the work done on
JFK
. The dream would be worth a lot of money. Yeovil doled himself out a shiver of self-delight.

He printed on the clone’s spine:
JFK
by John Yeovil. And under that he scrawled: review copy.

Review copy. Yeovil backgrounded an aural of Richard Horton’s review of his last dream. Just to remind himself what this was about.

‘Yeovil is lucky that his publishers have the clout to buy off his heroine’s heirs, ’cause
The Private Life of Margaret Thatcher
is quite as unnecessary and unsavoury as his previous efforts. Yeovil is genned up on period externals, and has an insidious knack for concepting his dreams so you zip through without being too annoyed. But once the headset is off, you know you’ve had a zilch experience. A few critics praise the man for his high-minded moral tone, but even they will find the lip-smacking prurience of
Margaret Thatcher
difficult to get their heads around. Yet again Yeovil bombards the captive mind with an endless round of sensuality – enormous state banquets, thrilling battles, ichor-drenched ‘tasteful’ sexing – and finally condemns all the excesses he has dragged us through with such gloating relish. He is at his worst when his heroine submits to what he has her anachronistically think of as ‘a fate worse than death’ under the well-remembered, much-maligned Idi Amin in order to save a planeload of hostages. One sympathises with the feminist group who have petitioned for Yeovil’s judicial castration under the anti-sexism laws. Finally, the man’s dreams are a far less interesting phenomenon than his publicity machine. If you’re out there taking a rest from adding up the profits, John, pack it in and join the Rural Reclamation Corps. With relief we turn to a new dream from Miss Susan Bishopric, who has made such an…’

Richard Horton was as smug a little shit as ever there was. Listening to his middle-aged parody of the adjectival overkill of a comput-assessor made Yeovil’s fingers twist his watch chain into flesh-pinching knots.

Yeovil could not decide which made him hate Richard Horton more. The Carol business, or his tridvid defamations. Carol Horton had been Yeovil’s mistress for three months. Before he had elected to sever the bond, Carol had taken it upon herself to return to her husband. Moreover she had instituted a civil lawsuit against Yeovil, alleging that he had drawn upon copyrighted facets of her personality for Pristine, the protagonist of his
The Sweetheart of Tau Ceti
. When he thought about her Yeovil still disliked Carol, but only to prove a point. Deep down it was Horton’s insulting reviews that lifted Yeovil’s loathing into the superhate bracket.

Before leaving the house Yeovil vindictively erased all his Horton tapes.

* * *

Richard Horton was dreaming. He dreamed that he was John F. Kennedy. Or, rather, he dreamed that he was John Yeovil jacking off while dreaming that he was John F. Kennedy. If Kennedy had been like the similie no one would now be around to review the dream. The Ivans would have nuked the world in desperation.

So far it had been the typical John Yeovil craptrap. The man never missed a chance to be cheap and obvious.

In the Oval Office JFK was sexing Marilyn Monroe. Why was it always Marilyn Monroe? Every dream set in the mid-twentieth century found it obligatory to have the hero sex Marilyn Monroe. The girl must have had a crowded schedule. The semiologically inclined comput-assessors called her an icon of liberated sensuality. Richard Horton called her a thundering cliché.

It was the regulation wet-dream stuff, a little harder than Yeovil’s usual hypocritical lyricism. At least there were no butterflies and gentle breezes here. Just heavy-duty sexing. Another depiction of woman as a hunk of meat. Kubrick knows what Carol ever saw in Yeovil.

Horton’s attention strayed around the scene. Perhaps he should feed the dream through the British Museum Library’s researcher. It might catch Yeovil out on an external. It was probably not worth it. Yeovil was the kind of Dreamer who got every wallpaper tone and calendar date right and then hit you with a concept that would make a computer puke.

Yeovil had peppered the sexing with memories. The lanky git was pathetically pleased with himself. Look how much research I did, screamed a mass of largely irrelevant facts. WWII, Holy Joe Kennedy, Hyannis Port.

Who wrote Kennedy’s inaugural address? That was out of character. Horton’s
dybbuk
flinched from the white-out. There was another mind crowding in, superimposed on the Kennedy similie. It was not Yeovil, he was working overtime on having JFK remember who was topping the bill at the Newport, Rhode Island jazz festival in 1960. There was someone else. A strong mind Horton could not place. It was a contributory Dreamer. Was Yeovil trying to pirate again? Eclipsing a collaborator on the credits was not beneath him.

Horton felt himself getting lost in the dream. The fiction was broken, and he was disconcerted. For an instant he thought he actually was sexing Marilyn Monroe. The woman was screaming in his ear. After all these years, the real thing.

Then it was cartoon time. The JFK similie body stretched impossibly. The return of Plastic Man. There was a playback fault. That was it. Whoever had last dreamed through this copy had left an accidental over-lay. Horton fished around for a name, but was dropped into a maelstrom of explosion imagery.

Was Yeovil experimenting with hard core? At least that would make a change.

Then the dream came together again, and Horton was locked in. Wedged between the minds of Yeovil, Kennedy and the mysterious Mr X.

Marilyn lay face down, exhausted, her hair fanned on the pile carpet. JFK traced her backbone with the presidential seal. Horton was disgusted to feel Catholic guilt flit through JFK’s mind. Yeovil was piling cant upon cliché as per usual.

‘Jack,’ breathed Marilyn, ‘did you know there’s a theory that the whole universe got started with a Big Bang?’

Yeovil’s dialogue was always the pits.

Kennedy parted Marilyn’s hair and kissed the nape of her neck. Horton felt a trekkiehead reply coming. Something hard at the base of the president’s skull. A white hot needle in his head. A brief skin and bone agony (what was that about Oswald?) then nothing.

* * *

Horton was not Horton any more. Horton was not anybody any more. His mind had been wiped. Completely, as an erase blanks a tape. Yeovil watched as the former Horton rolled on his side, retracting his arms and legs, wrapping himself into an egg.

The dreamtape was still running. Yeovil offed the machine, and pulled the clone tape. Elvis Kurtz had been unknowingly generous. He had shared his death.

Yeovil freed Horton from his headset, and gently popped his contact lenses. They had been making him cry. No point in keeping up enmities from a previous incarnation.

Yeovil wondered how Carol would take to motherhood. She always had shown an inclination to sentiment over gurgling infants. Now she had a chance to be closely acquainted with one. Horton had a lot of growing up to do.

Yeovil dropped the tape into Horton’s Disperse, and used the critic’s in to gain access to his Household. He wiped the whole day. As an extra flourish, he wiped the entire Household memory. A little pointless mystification to obscure his involvement.