Single Combat (5 page)

On balance, Sandy preferred to live on her land, bought with contraband she had found. Increasingly she lived with books:
The Way Things Work; Five Acres and Independence; Baby and Child Care
, Twain and Doyle, Traven and Dostoyevsky; and of course the poetry, Benton and Reiss, Neruda, Durrell, and the bits she wrote in her daily journal. Language, she decided, could be a luxury that paid for itself.

Presently, Sandy placed the sleeping Childe on their bed, unplugged the holo, took her journal from the high shelf of valuables and sat cross-legged with the Lectroped's lamp to illumine the pages. Sandy's journal was no longer the product of indifferent grammar multiplied by creative spelling. Her books, her teachers, tutored her daily. Not that isolation and spare time for books could entirely explain Sandy's astonishing grasp of language; it may have been a genetic gift.

Between her twelfth and fourteenth birthdays Sandy knew a verbal blossoming, a becoming, that she could not explain. To call it a sea change would be to ravage a metaphor; for Sandy had never seen a body of salt water larger than a pot of soup. All right, then: demonstrably a South Texas
land
change; a broken prairie change. A Wild Country change.

Sandy's journal, 16 May

Replanted tomatoes from coldframes. Popcorn & peppers flourishing. Childe is wiser than I in ecology, for however sad his harmonies, that coyote is my garden sentry!

Thoughts on holo: it furnishes more lies than laughter. Surely no announcer can love language, the way they all butcher it. I hear so many castoff holo phrases when in town. No wonder I sorrow for the users. It must show in my face, and I cannot afford to be haughty. N.B.: ck. 'haughty' vs. 'haut'. French? Latin?

Childe's expertise in tracking brought me a queasy moment at dusk. Why? I have seen enough violence to harden me—or have I
?

Childe reads animal signatures, crossing, doubling back; A fable of flight from cruel attack. Ebony droplets end one track—For, in moonlight, blood is black
.

The holo image of Eve Simpson, once a buxom child star and now IEE's director of media research, was familiar to millions; a sultry-voiced pneumatic package and, by remote means, frequent FBN interviewer of important people. Few, including those interviewed, would have recognized the hundred kilos of Eve's real flesh which had swollen with her clout.

The public Eve, interviews and all, was an electronically-managed image. The private Eve was bloated, brilliant, willful, and in some ways unmanageable.

Boren Mills had lusted first for her famous body, enjoyed it less as he wallowed in it more, and had finally turned toward still younger, less pillowy embraces. But by that time Mills knew the inner Eve, her mind incisive as a microtome, as voracious for media techniques as she was for sex. Mills's intellectual arrogance was tempered by the knowledge that Eve Simpson's subtleties rivaled his own. By now each knew the others uses. And abuses.

"You're going too far," Eve snapped, thumbing the fax sheet Mills had carried to her condominium-sized office.

"Don't tell me the system can't handle a message uniquely tailored to each household," Mills wagged a finger in warning. "I've channeled too much money into your media research and read too many progress reports." It was such hot stuff that Mills had insisted on the electronic programs being stored in a government-controlled underground vault. There, it would not be pilferable by some industrial spy.

But Eve snorted, setting off ripples in the flesh at her throat. She had the trick of switching from the nasally sensuous to imperious tones without pause. "Not the electronics, goddammit, I'm talking about viewer reaction. Boren, you're asking for a level of message control that assumes viewers will
never
compare videotapes,
never
start a brush-fire under some Indy congressman once they have proof you're tailoring messages to each holo set."

Mills reflected on the lifetime appointments of media commissioners and waved the objection away. "Not that the Indys could do anything about it," he said.

"Legally? No, your risks aren't legal; they're charismatic." In media research, 'charisma' no longer referred strictly to people. Any message that approached overwhelming credibility was said to be charismatic. Eve was working on it. "As long as John Q. talks to his neighbor, you'll get some coalition of fruitcakes who'll call FBN's credibility on the carpet. Even if you cleaned up your act afterward, it'd be bye-bye charisma—and bye-bye to some network ad accounts for FBN. Is that what you want?"

Mills, sitting on an arm of Eve's ample couch, sighed and retrieved the fax sheet. "So the problem is still word-of-mouth," he mused. "Which means we work harder to alienate the bastards from one another."

"Divide and conquer," Eve chuckled. "Welcome to media theory. Nice to know my chief exec is still capable of an intuitive leap."

Sharply: "Don't patronize me, Eve. Papa spank."

"What would ums do," she cooed, sapphire insets winking in her fingernails as she reached out to knead the calf of his leg; "tie me down like old times? A wittle domestic westwaint for baby?"

He shifted his leg away. "How about lifting your pass to the synthesizer lab? Would that be enough restraint for you?"

A shrug; the sausagelike fingers flirted in the air. "Go ahead, bugfucker, then you'd need someone else to deal maintenance doses to your bloody Chinese slaveys."

"Someone easier to deal with than you are, my dear," said Mills, and let his threat lapse. "By the way: Young's protocol people expect us to put in an appearance when he presents those S & R citations in Santa Fe. Formal, of course."

"A politician after my own heart," she murmured, "parading his hit teams as saviors and reaping public applause for it."

"I don't know if the rover bunch will be there," he said, well aware that a man licensed to kill embodied raw potency to Eve Simpson.

"You know how I hate public display," she said, and Mills knew it was self-display she meant. "Will we be screened?"

"Not from the Prez, but they'll split-screen the dais to make the Secret Service happy. Nobody will see you—us—except Young and a few others like, oh, Lon Salter. You can ogle the beefcake all you like," he said wryly.

"It's not window-shopping I like; it's trying things on."

"Don't put yourself in a bind with Young over it, Eve. The President has some strict ethics about drugging his people."

Delighted laughter, as though Mills had sprung a salacious joke. "Shyster ethics: if you might get punished for it, it's unethical." Long ago, Mills had learned Eve's method of bedding a man who did not fancy tussling with cellulite. She merely laced his food with lobotol, a controlled substance developed to aid hypnotists in making the most intractable patient highly suggestible. While fuddled in this fashion, a man would believe whatever Eve told him, e.g., that she was the most desirable sexual provender he could possibly imagine. And he would further believe that he had hungered all his life to test the adage that whatever one can imagine, one can do.

Mills had discovered Eve's ploy two years previously, after waking one morning with a swirling recollection of boffing his blousy ex-bimbo in ways he had never before contemplated. Those memories did not please him much; the exhausted Mills had the distinct impression that, he’d spent the night with a dirty joke. His cold rage on learning her deception had left Eve frightened and astonished; she'd thought the whole business would amuse him. She had never repeated her mistake on Mills but still found lobotol her chief procurer for the one-nighters she chose like a young Messalina.

Deliberately abrading a troubled spot: "Anyhow, I don't keep my slaves endlessly hooked on heavy shit—like
some
folks we know," she arched one brow, squinted the other eye.

Icily: "If there were any other way to pursue the most awesome breathrough in recorded history,
believe
me,—I'd do it."

"Without giving anything away to John Q. or our glorious government, you mean."

Mills, now standing, showed every sign of truncating their old debate. "Eve, if you can keep your great wanton ass out of trouble at the top—and if I can get the San Rafael Desert lab to come through for us—you and I will
be
the glorious government, for all practical purposes. I know you're laying poor strung-out Chabrier every time you visit the lab; considering the stuff he pollutes his system with, I don't think your lobotol could do him any additional harm. Be circumspect; that's all."

"I don't need lobotol with Chabrier," she said, feeling that her charm had been questioned.

"Thai hash, then," Mills sighed; "whatever. I must get back upstairs; thanks for the warning on individually tailored messages, I'm sure you're right."

Her languid purr followed him to the door. "With enough lobotol in a metro water supply you wouldn't need tailored messages, luv."

"Now you're being absurd, Eve. Only half the population would be tuned to FBN and besides, a steady diet of judgment suppressants would put Mexicans in New Denver inside a month."

"But I can see you've given it a lot of thought," she said, and her cruel cupid lips mimed a juicy kiss of parting.

Mills strode to the executive lift, exasperated.

She hadn't even said whether she'd go to Santa Fe. But Mills knew her cravings; she'd be there, all right. He made a mental note to check the remote monitors at the desert lab by way of his private access code. Eve Simpson was the only soul running loose, besides himself, who knew just how Marengo Chabrier's lab was run—and for what purpose.

Cloistered in Utah's San Rafael desert region was Mills's most secure research facility, where need-to-know was as strictly monitored as on any proving ground in the world. There, Mills had carefully assembled a group of the technological elite whose drug requirements made them tractable. From Marengo Chabrier, the French program administrator, to the illegal aliens, all lived out their days behind particle-beam fences within a trackless waste. Their one goal: to find some way to scale up the mass synthesizer which China had developed during the war.

All but a few Chinese researchers had been liquidated by their own leaders, and only Boren Mills had a working model of the device. He had killed to get it. No larger than an overnight bag, the synthesizer had powered the reaction engine of a tiny Sino submarine, also providing oxygen and simple nutrients for the hibernating crew.

Now, twenty-seven months into his scale-up program. Mills rejoiced and writhed. Chabrier, physicist-turned-administrator and a druggie of broad scope, boasted that the little Chinese synthesizer could now produce small amounts of organic dyes, pheromones, heavy alcohols, and other complex chemicals using plain air as conversion input mass. But an inherent limitation existed in the size of the gadget's toroidal output chamber. The Chinese had already built the thing with its maximum output, and neither Chabrier nor subtler asiatic minds in the lab could even posit, let alone demonstrate, a rig that could do any better.

Within a few weeks, the lab would try out the new prototype which could produce an incredible range of substances, so precisely metered that it could issue a shot of bourbon or a root beer complete with effervescence. Mills was no fool; his lab personnel, Chabrier very much included, wore implant monitors that kept Mills informed of their drug abuses. He could not prevent them from manufacturing booze or Fentanyl, but he would know if any one of them absorbed any of it at other than scheduled times. And that would mean cold turkey withdrawal in a padded cell for Chabrier as well as the abuser. So far, Chabrier's vigilance was flawless.

Still more disturbing, Mills found it easier to fund the lab's exotic needs from his own pocket than to continue siphoning money from projects known to IEE board members. Those expenses were mounting, but Mills did not dare permit use of the synthesizer for cash crops; gold, pharmaceuticals, plutonium. Not yet; not until Mills had absolute control of a synthesizer that could produce its goods in staggering quantity.

To make a million copies of the Chinese model would be to court disaster. Eventually its secrets would become known to others outside his grasp and, once every citizen had access to a synthesizer, government-by-scarcity would be a thing of the past. No wonder the Chinese had purged their technocrats; in the nether corners of his mind, Mills had scheduled something similar for his own lab people—but only after they'd done their work.

Mills, who loathed procrastination, had decided to put off his decision for another year. If by that time it still seemed impossible to design a factory-sized synthesizer, he
might
order a factory full of the small ones. But: should he try to coerce his captives into building wholly automated repair equipment for the inevitable maintenance?

If 'yes', they might prove laggards, even sabotage their own work. To underestimate them would be a disaster; they surely knew their utility would end when a million synthesizers were self-maintaining.

If 'no', then Marengo Chabrier and nine other brilliant trip-freaks would be the maintenance crew, the most expensive mechanics on earth and worth it—and they would know it! The plutonium scenario, for example: what if they produced enough of it, despite the best monitors Mills could employ, to build a—well, call it a negotiating device? It could be scarifying. Hell, it was
already
scary! With a factory full of small synthesizers, his goosepimple factor would be raised to the
nth
power. It was almost enough to make Mills ask for government control.

Hypothesis 1: A special security force would help.

Hypothesis 2: A special security force would multiply his security problems. Quis custodiet?

Boren Mills's basic problem was easily stated: he had a cornucopia by the tail.