Worlds: A Novel of the Near Future Page 10

  6 November. I really don’t know. Benny and I are trying to convince each other that it’s just paranoia. The meetings are innocent enough on the surface. Nothing’s said that would raise an eyebrow at the Grapeseed. But there’s so much goatshit mystery around it. Today a stranger sat down across from me at lunch and struck up a conversation. When the other person left he said he had a request from James: would I be willing to give a speech to a small group, comparing the state of civil liberties in the Worlds with those here. I told him what I’d told James. Nothing public. He said it would be only about forty people, and very private. I agreed to do it. In fact, I’m looking forward to it. It won’t be what he expects.

  12 November. It’s a good thing I had my notes together. Less than a day’s warning for the speech (Damon gave me the message, at Grapeseed). The speech was less interesting than the reactions. The old-fashioned communists didn’t like what I had to say about Tsiolkovski. The ones who leaned toward conventional People’s Capitalism were alarmed by the distribution-of-wealth system in Devon’s World, as, I suppose, were any fellow atheists. (Well, it doesn’t really alarm me, but I don’t consider myself anti-clerical. A job is a job.) ¶Will was there, but he didn’t say anything. I wonder about him and James. Who is whose boss, or are they equals? As far as I could tell, they didn’t even say hello. Benny wasn’t there (I talked the speech over with him, but he wasn’t invited) and neither was anybody else I knew but James, Will, and Damon. From the atmosphere of the crowd (it was more like sixty people than forty) I got the impression I was talking to a group of leaders. Love to know more about the structure of the group, and the actual size of it. But when I tried to bring it up last meeting, a real chill dropped.

  13 November. A woman in my religion class dropped a note in my lap on the way to her seat. “Take care not to recognize me.” Well, I didn’t. She must have been at the talk last night, but I was nervous in front of a room full of strangers, and rarely looked past the first two rows.

  17 November. Will came to my room tonight, and we talked for a couple of hours. He was more relaxed than I have ever seen him. ¶The main topic under discussion was the need for secrecy and his concern that I shouldn’t misinterpret the group’s motivation for it. There are conservative elements in almost every Lobby, even the labor Lobbies, that would love to have a libertarian “whipping boy.” (Which is odd in the perspective of my own reading of American history, which strongly associates libertarianism with conservatism. Terms change as attitudes evolve, I suppose. Jefferson was a libertarian but owned human slaves.) Most disturbing was his assertion that there is some group, small and highly secret, that is practicing “waster politics”—assassinations and pinpoint sabotage—which is being covered up by the government. He couldn’t reveal his source and offered no proof, other than the fact that a lot of politicians have died very young recently. He also pointed out that no competent electrical engineer would accept the authorities’ explanation for last week’s blackout in Boston (that goes along with what I heard at Worlds Club Tuesday). These assassinations have all taken place in Washington, where the government virtually owns all news media. Will believes the group must indeed be part of the government, perhaps a powerful Lobby, perhaps even a clandestine arm of the FBI or CBI. If his aim was to reassure me, he accomplished the opposite. Two nameless groups to be afraid of now, instead of one.

  26

  A weighing of parts

  If all poets had Benny’s capacity for enjoying alcohol, literature would be an easier course of study. There wouldn’t be as much of it.

  We spent Wednesday afternoon at a wine-and-crackers place near the Russell building, willing to pay a little more to get away from the being-watched feeling we got at the Grapeseed. The wine wasn’t remarkable, and I wasn’t drinking much anyhow, with management seminar in the evening. I had one glass out of the first liter, and Benny finished the rest in less than an hour. Which wasn’t unusual; it took that much to relax him.

  He was in one of his odd maniac moods, though, and the wine might as well have been tea, for all its apparent effect. It had been more than a month since the Washington show, and he hadn’t spent half of what his drawings had brought in.He signaled for another liter. “Can you imagine? Any idiot with a drafting board and a steady hand could do that.”

  “Come on, Benny; I couldn’t. And I’ve got the steadiest hand at this table. Currently.”

  “Nope.” He held a hand out in front of me, palm down. While I was trying to frame something to say, a silver five-buck emerged slowly from between the first two fingers. He rolled it down his knuckles, flipped it and caught it “Want to try?” He held it out to me.

  “Seriously, I’ll have to go to class in a while. You don’t want one of these characters to walk you home.”

  We were almost two blocks from Broadway, but most of the people were orifice-peddlers of some gender, with their usual retinue. “Might hire one,” he said.

  “What?”

  “To walk me home, spacer. Some of them’ll do anything for a price.”

  “Just keep it down to four liters. It bothers you, doesn’t it?”

  I could hear his brain grinding out some non sequitur about the wine or the whores. Instead he nodded and said quietly, “That gallery called today. They want twelve more.”

  That was twice as many as he’d sold in October. “That’s wonderful—”

  “When I said no, they offered to drop their commission to fifteen percent.”

  “You still refused?”

  The waiter brought the wine. Benny touched the flask but didn’t pour himself any. “It’s not art.”

  That was true, as far as I could tell. Good decoration, though; I had one on my wall. “So what is baby-sitting?”

  “Baby-sitting, I can read. Besides, I’m good at it.”

  “You’re good at drawing, too. How long would it take you to do a dozen scenes?”

  “Two days, maybe three. A week if I was lazy.”

  “Three months’ income for a week of work? You’re a lunatic!”

  He laughed and poured us each a glass. “I think you’ve just put your finger on it. Must be that cultural perspective James admires so.”

  “You can’t get out of it that easily. You’re being a prima donna and you know it. You need the money.”

  “No, I don’t. I need the self-respect.”

  “What’s so denigrating about using your hands, craftsmanship?”

  “Nothing!” He drank half the glass, and refilled it. “I’ll still do some drawings. And I’ll go out on the Square, as usual, and set them up on a rack, maybe do some juggling, sell them to people walking by.”

  “For a tenth what the gallery pays.”

  “Less than a tenth. But listen… you should’ve been there. They had this poster up, big doleful picture of me, puffed-up biography with all these embarrassing reviews, rising young poet who may become-nobody bought those drawings as art, or even as craft. They bought them as simple curiosities, maybe investments. People who can drop a couple of thousand bucks like a handful of soybeans, just for—”

  “That’s just it! They can afford it; it might as well be you who takes it.”

  He waggled a finger at me. “That doesn’t sound like a good communist talking.”

  “I’m not a communist.”

  “Excuse me.” He took a drink. “You live in a state—”

  “A World.”

  “You live in a world where the state, the world, owns all the capital and gives you room and board, and an allowance, and little trinkets like trips to Earth if it thinks you need them. To me that sounds like ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.’”

  I tried to keep my voice steady. “I meant communism, Earth-style. Not Marxism. But we don’t have that, either. Marx couldn’t have foreseen the kind of isolated economy you get in a space settlement.”

  “All right, Marianne.” He took my hands in his warm ones. “If we see something that take
s in oats at one end and gives out horseshit at the other, and you say it’s a Buick, well, I say it’s a Buick, too.”

  I resisted the impulse to pour the jug of wine in his lap. “You have such a poetic way of putting things. But don’t condescend to me.”

  “You were condescending to me.”

  “I’m sorry if you think so. But I think you’re confused.”

  “Now you’re getting warm.” He released me and finished his glass, and sat back with a thoughtful look. He was composing. “I am confused, but not about that. Anyone who sees clearly sees chaos everywhere. Art is a way of temporarily setting order to confusion. Temporary and incomplete; that’s why we never run out of new art. Anyone who comes to the tools of art without that sense of confusion is an invader.”

  “That’s not really fair.”

  “Nothing against dabblers,” he said quickly. “Cheaper than psychotherapy. But supposedly serious artists who think they know, know, what a human being is and where he stands in relation to the universe, they’re nothing but hacks. Propagandists for false values.”

  I filled his glass to shut him up. “Even if that’s true, it doesn’t apply to your drawings. It would apply if you were writing jingles for commercials or something. But you’ve said yourself that you don’t take the drawing seriously. You’re a dabbler yourself.”

  “There you have it. I do them to relax and don’t care to keep them afterward. It pleases me to give them to friends; it amuses me to give them to strangers in exchange for an occasional dinner or a few days’ rent. This gallery deal amounts to doing it for a living.”

  “Well? It would be an easy living.”

  “All right. You enjoy screwing, and you’re good at it. Why don’t you get a low-cut dress and join those slits at the bar? One night a week, and you’d go back to New New York with twice what you brought here.”

  I gripped the edge of the table and took a deep breath.

  “But you only give it to friends,” he said softly. “And your friends do appreciate it.”

  Before I could decide whether to wound him—he was no better at analogy than at sex—I heard someone tapping on the window next to us and looked up. It was Hawkings; I waved him in.

  “Be on your best behavior, now,” I said. “This is that FBI agent I told you about.”

  “Jesus! Does this place have a back door?”

  “Don’t be silly,” I whispered.

  “Nothing silly about healthy paranoia. Don’t you think there’s some small chance we’re being watched?”

  “They don’t have an army. But even if we are, there’s nothing suspicious about Jeff passing by on his way to class—”

  “But then there is something suspicious about our being here.”

  “So speak clearly. We don’t have anything to hide.”

  He rubbed his throat. “So why do I feel this noose, tightening around my neck?”

  “Anxiety reaction. Shut up.” Hawkings had stopped at the bar before coming over, and was bringing a liter of wine. For all his cool detachment, he was always polite and considerate. That was welcome now.

  I dragged a chair over for him and made introductions.

  “I’ve never met a poet before,” Hawkings said. “What have you published?”

  That was the right question. Usually people asked, “Have you published anything?”—to which Benny would reply, “No, I just call myself a poet.”

  Benny told him the names of his books. “Haven’t written much lately. It comes and goes.”

  He nodded. “I have to admit I don’t envy you. It must be a very uncertain way to live.”

  “More certain than yours, I think. At least in the sense that no poet ever was killed in the line of duty.”

  Hawkings smiled. “I could take issue with that. It seems to me that the death rate for poets from suicide is rather high.”

  “Touché.” Well, at least they had found something in common. Morbidity.

  “I don’t actually encounter very much violence. It’s mostly footwork and paperwork. There are scuffles and threats, often enough, but it’s not serious. In four years, I’ve only been fired at once.”

  “Safer than the subway,” I said.

  “You shot back?” Benny said. Hawkings nodded. “Did you kill him?” He nodded again. “I don’t know if I could live with that.”

  “Well, you’re not trained to.” Jeff’s voice was quiet and dry, classroom style. “It was almost purely reflex. It wasn’t even an FBI matter, technically.”

  His brow furrowed as he poured himself half a glass of wine. “I was snooping around a warehouse, after hours, but with a warrant. Some burglar had picked the same night.

  “The place was brightly lit. I walked around the corner of a stack of crates and this man was standing there, about three meters away, with a pistol pointed directly at me. If he’d taken a moment to aim, he would have killed me. Instead, he started blasting away in my general direction. He got off four or five shots, two of which struck me, before I could draw and fire.”

  “And you did take time to aim?” Benny said.

  “Not at three meters, not with a laser.”

  “Were you hurt badly?” I asked. He’d never mentioned this to me.

  “Technically. Chest and abdomen. But I stayed conscious long enough to call for a floater. My heart stopped twice on the way to the hospital, but once I was there I was out of danger. You know how good they are at that sort of thing.”

  “I do indeed.” I tried to match his dispassionate tone.

  “But that’s when I decided to go back to school and get out of field work. Just another fourteen months.”

  “I don’t suppose they were quite as, ah, efficient in trying to save the burglar’s life,” Benny said.

  “No, they just left him for the meat, for the morgue floater. That’s not as callous as it sounds. Science can do wonders, but they haven’t yet figured out how to unscramble an egg.”

  I shuddered. “Can’t—”

  “It doesn’t bother you?” Benny said.

  “Should it?” He sipped his wine carefully, looking at Benny over the rim of the glass. When Benny didn’t say anything, he added: “I know he didn’t grow up wanting to be a burglar; I know he didn’t spend years in school studying how to shoot FBI agents. I know that it was a complex of social pressures, perhaps social injustice, and plain bad luck, that led him to that warehouse.

  “And it was plain dumb bad luck that he saw me first. If I’d seen him, I would have taken a picture, then let him finish his work and leave; I was after bigger game. Still, when he pulled that trigger he committed suicide. If there’s a moral dimension to his death, it starts and ends there.”

  “I take it you’re saying you don’t think there was a moral dimension,” Benny said.

  “Not insofar as it concerned him and me. I am what I am and he was what he was; if we replayed that scene a thousand times, it could only have one of two outcomes. Depending on whether he could kill me before I could clear my weapon.” He looked at me. “There was no moral decision on my part. Both of his effective shots had hit me before I pulled the trigger. I would like to meet the person saintly enough not to kill under those conditions.”

  Benny poured himself another glass of wine. He was speeding up, which sometimes meant he was going to get funny.

  “I follow your logic, but I don’t think I would see it that way. Haven’t you ever wondered about his family, for instance?”

  “What about my family? My stepmother had a nervous breakdown. One of my line sisters said she’d never speak to me again if I didn’t quit the Bureau. She hasn’t.

  “I don’t even know if he had a family. I’m a policeman not a social worker.” He pointed at the knife on Benny’s belt. “That’s no nail file. Doesn’t wearing that declare your willingness to kill?”

  “Not to myself. Maybe to a potential attacker—I never wore one until I got hit a couple of years ago. But it’s just a bluff.”

  Hawkings smil
ed slightly. “You can’t say that for sure until the next time you run into a hitter.”

  “I’ll concede that. But I think I know myself.” I resisted the impulse to point out that he’d just been trying to convince me that that was not possible.

  “You should carry one, too,” Jeff said to me. “Even if it’s just for show. And you know enough fencing to help, if you did have to use it.”

  “I’ve got a can of Puke-O in my bag.” I’d had it when I was raped, though. “Can’t we talk about something more unpleasant?”

  I did manage to steer the conversation to more mundane regions, and it moved into politics soon enough. Benny was very restrained, understandably, but Jeff was surprisingly critical of the government, even to the point of bitterness.

  After about a half-hour we had to go on to class, leaving Benny with his wine. The freezing air was wonderful after the stuffiness in the bar, and a few flakes of snow whirled around in the traffic breeze.

  “Are you always such a radical, out of uniform?”

  He hunched his shoulders under the heavy cape. “Well… I was exaggerating a little. Trying to put him at ease. But the Bureau doesn’t much care about an agent’s politics so long as they’re just opinions. I can’t join any political groups, of course, not even a Lobby.”

  “Not even a Lobby? How can you vote?”

  “You didn’t know that?” He looked at me oddly. “We can’t. Police and soldiers don’t vote, except on local and nonpartisan referenda. Soldiers, not even those.”

  “But how can they do that?”

  “Well, it’s not the law, it’s the mechanics. If you don’t belong to a Lobby, you can’t register approval or disapproval. At least I’m a resident citizen of New York, so I can vote on garbage collection and so forth. A soldier can never be a permanent resident of any state or city, no matter how long he lives there. He can make his opinions known in the annual census, but that’s it. It’s unfair, but I think the logic behind it is clear.”