The Ardath Mayhar MEGAPACK®

by John Maclay

  Stifled moans, uncontrollable whimpers, shrieks cut off in mid-wail by gritted teeth. No wild histrionics, you understand. Moana orchestrated and directed the thing, and I felt a chilly certainty that she had presided over the real thing more than once.

  They carried me back and dumped me onto the straw. I seemed to be only semiconscious. After a while, I felt a hand on my forehead, then a wet handkerchief was applied, evidently engaged in wiping away the blood. (Real blood, too, from a pig.)

  I grunted, then opened my mouth and felt about where the bridge had been. “Teef gone,’ I breathed. “All right, though.”

  The man sighed and sat down beside my head. “I didn’t know until they carried you away how much it had helped just having someone nearby,” he said. “I’ve been a real rotter, I know, but you must forgive me. My name is Jeffrey Elliston. While I regret that you must be in this predicament, I am glad you are here, if you see what I mean.”

  From there on in, it was a cinch. Not in one day or in two did the story come out, but as I pieced together the bits of information he let slip, I realized that Moana and her superior had not exaggerated. This was a story of major proportions—if only I could get it broadcast. It was entirely too hot for that to be an easy thing to do.

  On the fourth day since my beating, they came for me again. This time I did not return, but I got Moana’s assurance that they didn’t intend anything terrible for Elliston. He had, after all, only been doing his job. But that job!

  Moana met me in the same steel cell. This time, her superior was with her, dressed in a no-frills uniform that sported a modest general’s “wing” insignia on the collar. His dark eyes lit with interest as I entered, and he rose and extended his hand. “Mr. Wills. So glad. I did not introduce myself, simply as a precaution, before. I am General Karamea. Sit down and tell us what you have learned. We could not put sensors into your cell, for your cellmate had a telltale implanted in his skull to detect such things. You have something similar, I think?”

  “All first-ins do, General,” I said. “Not, however, bug detectors. Might be handy at that.” I sat and looked across the small room toward the General and Moana.

  “You were right, you know. This is a very big, very difficult, very nasty story. I may lay my neck on the line and get it cut off. If so, I want your word—both of you—that you will bring the truth before the Whole Earth Federation, if I am silenced, or killed, or simply disappear without a trace.”

  They both nodded, their eyes serious in their oval faces. Then I saw the resemblance. It sidetracked me for a moment.

  “You—you’re his daughter!” I said to Moana, and she smiled.

  “Who else could he trust with a thing of this nature?” she asked. “Now, do go on with your story—”

  “It isn’t easy,” I began. “I’ve worked in holocasting my entire adult life, and before that I dreamed of working in it. I’ve bucked policy, don’t doubt it, but I never had any real suspicion that Global or her sisters were doing anything really unethical. Now I’ve got to grit my teeth and admit that the system is rotten to the core.” I paused and looked about, found a glass, and poured water.

  “Elliston is an agent provocateur. I thought those went out with the twentieth century, but evidently I was wrong. He has spent his working life going around the world, when things got too dull for his bosses’ ratings, and stirring up grassfire wars. Planting false evidence, framing innocent officials—at least officials who were innocent of whatever he framed them for. He was the one, as I guess you suspected, who inflamed the Neo-Primitive Aborigines to the point at which they went to war against the other three factions in the N.B. setup. He assassinated their most important religious leader, in case you didn’t know. That brought things to a boil much faster than he had intended.

  “His employers, it seems, didn’t do their homework very well. They didn’t reckon with the built-in tensions and resentments down here. Or, indeed, with the legacy of hatred and suspicion the whites left behind when they went. Now you are stuck with a full-scale war of unguessable length, and the world can only look to its own frivolous desire for entertainment for its cause. Global and Trans-Terra and CIC, through their mutual ‘public relations’ set-up, are guilty of fomenting war.”

  Karamea sighed and looked down at his thin, strong hands, which were clenched together in his lap. “We feared as much. It would be terrible if we were merely stupid enough to fly at each other’s throats like beasts. It is infinitely worse if we have been maneuvered into it for the entertainment of those who sit continents away and watch us die in full color and three dimensions.”

  I grinned at him. “You know, his sensor didn’t pick up the recorder in my shoe heel. I got every word on indestructible tape. And now I’m going to get you to give me my gear, so I can key in the satellite transmission code.”

  In half a minute, I had the code on its way. I waited a second, until the steady hum told me the way was open, then I coded “Imperative and immediate override of editing,” for the first time in my own experience or that of anyone else I knew. When I began to run the tape on my player, it went out uncensored to every receiving set tuned to Global at that time.

  * * * *

  The systems would have shot me, make no mistake. My hosts, however, hid me out until the Whole Earth Fed had time to take things in hand and curtail the activities of the media. That took a bit of time—but I didn’t mind. Moana and I found that we had more in common than just steady nerves. I was really a little sad when the all-clear sounded, and I had to return to New Boston to face my employers.

  Moana, of course, had years of work ahead of her. The war went on for six or seven years—I can’t remember which, for the Middle East broke loose before the end of the New Britannia affair. I thought of her, though, every time I caught a ’cast of the nasty little pitched battles and ambushes that went on there for so long.

  Global, to say the least, was not happy with me. I had been sent to cover a flare-up and had nailed them with a major infraction of international law. They would have nailed my hide to the wail, except for the fact that I returned to New Boston a bona fide hero. In the face of public opinion, they had to swallow their ire and keep me working.

  People, you know, aren’t callous or cruel. Not intentionally. They like a lot of excitement and interest, but they want it to be spontaneous. All you have to do to prove that is to call something like the mess Elliston caused to their attention. A lot of heads rolled, to be sure, but mine wasn’t one of them.

  So I was still a first-in, and because of the strange twists and the personality factors in the story I had covered, I was now prominent among my peers.

  War is a crazy business, and holocasting is even crazier.

  SOLO PERFORMANCE

  Perhaps the most self destructive thing a culture can do is to try to dictate the course of the arts. To do that for political correctness is even worse.

  Lerovik sat with the instrument in his lap, his fingers precise on the keys. Mozart purled away over the tops of the pine trees, down the declivity to the small lake below the cabin. Beyond the lake, the music was lost among the conifers that ringed his hiding place. He was careful not to open the volume stop too far—you couldn’t be too careful.

  He was all but lost among the intricacies of the work when his alarm rang, bringing him out of his hidden world with a jerk. He felt shocked, disoriented, as he unplugged the precision amplifier and slid the minipiano into its waiting case. This was, in turn, lowered into its cavity in the deck of the cabin. He replaced the worn planking carefully, backing away to make sure no unevenness revealed the opening from any angle. Only then did he disconnect the alarm and engage the scanner that would show him who was invading his privacy.

  He was shaking, and that disgusted him, for he had no real fear of THEM any longer. The seven years he had spent in the solo cells of Artistic Control had burned out all his capacity
for terror and anguish. Now his mind was at ease, and only his body shook with remembered stress.

  Years in that sterile box, battered by the brutal cadences of the Anatonic School of Proletariat Music, appalled him still, but he had learned to shut off his senses. He repeated to himself the words of an early critic on the “new music” (the man had vanished into those same cells, after the Conformist takeover): “One can experience a comparable aesthetic impression by visiting a boiler factory while munching on uncooked spaghetti,” Alor Vespi had said. Lerovik never, in his years of trying, bettered that description.

  Though he was less qualified to judge the impact of the Movement on the other arts, he felt Artistic Control probably managed to remove any possibility of human pleasure or enlightenment from them all. The human dimension was not admitted by Conformists, which explained, no doubt, the multitude of problems that arose to plague the system over the past fifteen years.

  Though the system sterilized the news media, it hadn’t eliminated intelligence, try as it might. Word circulated among closet intellectuals, and he knew, along with a few confidants, that Earth’s government was on the edge of ruin. Unrealistic policies in politics and agriculture, business, and education were bringing down the regime. Unless the newly formed Alien Trade Commission made some miraculous deal with one or more of the worlds in the Intergalactic Consortium, the situation on Terra would reach a flashpoint soon.

  Shaking his head, he stared into the scanner, arranged to read sensors set along the approach to his cabin. Ah. There was the intruder!

  A dung-colored hover-car made its way up his overgrown track. Within the clear passenger bubble, he could see three figures. No weapons—but he didn’t trust that impression. Those were Conformity Monitors, for at least two wore spinach-green uniforms proclaiming that service.

  He folded the scanner into hiding and drew straw matting across its hiding place. He was still shaking, but he stretched, shook himself, then straightened and dropped into a Meditation. Internal harmonies flowed through him, and he relaxed.

  He had learned to do this during his long years in the cell. Despite the recorded chaos with which they tried to subdue his nature, he retreated into a soundproof spot in his soul that contained nothing except the logical precision of Mozart or Haydn or Vivaldi, Telemann, Brahms, or Chopin. He rethought his interpretations of the music, discovering in those strange circumstances potentials for expression that he might never have found, left to his old life.

  His hands flexed in his lap, running soundlessly through the music playing inside his head, as it had done throughout his confinement. When he was released he went to a colleague who owned a piano, treasured despite the illegality of possessing it.

  By then, Lerovik’s hands had gained a life of their own. The years of concentration on the inmost meaning of music made them capable of rendering it without thought, only emotion. He had made a long run of it, playing concerts in abandoned buildings, isolated parks, sometimes the homes of the music-starved. All dared much even to attend, and many helped to transport the instrument in secret, passing word of the event to those interested. Defying the controlling Conformists, they put their lives in jeopardy.

  He listened as the hover-car sat with a tired thump on the unkempt grass below his deck. The grass itself was anathema to the regime, who had tried, Lerovik thought, to cover the world with asphalt and concrete.

  He stood, pleased to find himself fully in control. These people could prove nothing against him. He was no longer concertizing, and no one had ever revealed the fact that he had done so since his release. The officials might suspect, but there was literally no evidence, and even a Sniffer couldn’t penetrate the hiding place of his mini.

  He erased expression from his face and moved to the edge of the deck. Below, a lumpy woman in a baggy uniform struggled out of the car and stared up at him. His heart thudded violently, but only once. When it calmed, it tapped counterpoint to the harmonies filling his mind.

  “Monitor Sverdla,” he said, his voice coldly correct, though he would have liked to throttle her then and there. It had been her persistent nosing into his career, her discovery of his aberrant use of classical music, her testimony that sent him to the cells.

  Rudely arrogant, she gestured to her companions to climb, uninvited, to his deck. When she mounted it herself, her square face was flushed and mottled. It was not, he thought, exertion that caused her high color, for there was a strange expression in her slaty eyes. Frustration? Resentment, certainly, but also anger.

  He motioned for the newcomers to sit, took his place, and looked them over. He didn’t recognize the others. One was small, fair, and thirtyish. His uniform, though green, was a different shade, and his insignia looked like that of the Alien Trade Commission. It was a new agency, but Lerovik was almost sure.

  The other was about Lerovik’s age, fortyish. Stolid and silent, he was much like all Sverdla’s other assistants, uncommunicative as a stump, though the younger man kept looking sidelong at the musician.

  Sverdla cleared her throat, her unease apparent. The pianist felt curiosity building in him—what duty had brought her to his door? A disagreeable one, he knew, for arresting him would not have made her uncomfortable. What, then?

  “Musician Lerovik,” she began, in that impossible tone they all used, “there is need for you in a matter of extreme urgency. Though you have not always conducted yourself as a loyal citizen of the Conformity, there has never been a question of your devotion to our world. Now it needs you...your talents. Your...”— she struggled as if the words strangled her—“...classical repertoire.” She looked as if she had uttered an obscenity.

  Lerovik felt blank with astonishment.

  Sverdla stared at him, her obsidian eyes angry and ill-at-ease. “Ambassador Sissingham has a vital request. Control has agreed that specific circumstances warrant relaxation of the letter of the law. Though we still oppose your prior activities, we find your expertise necessary. Ambassador, will you explain?”

  The younger man straightened on his hard stool. His face, as was proper with a good Conformist, was expressionless, but his coal-black eyes sparked with interest. “In this isolated spot,” he began, “you probably have not learned about unrest in some areas of our world. Even among our most ardent supporters there are schismatic tendencies, some even sliding back into Humanism.”

  He glanced nervously at Sverdla. “Restrictions on grace and harmony are being eased, and some composers and artists are beginning to indulge in...harmony.” His voice lowered as if he, too, found a word obscene. “There is economic dislocation as well. The public seems unwilling to produce for the common good. Suicide is becoming a problem. Of course, these are symptoms of a lack of dedication to Conformist ideals, yet understanding does not solve the problem.”

  Lerovik smiled. “An unusual confession for one of your beliefs. A thing defined is a thing controlled was, I thought, your dogma.”

  Sissingham continued, “My agency is charged with dealing with extraterrestrial beings. We found a world producing a substance that, suitably refined and used, could easily subdue all resistance on this planet. This species has a moon on which they grow animals for food. The substance, dispersed into the atmosphere there, creates euphoria, but it does not affect the health of those who inhale it. It controls their livestock without constant supervision. We have tested it, and our subjects become completely passive and suggestible.”

  “How can this possibly involve music?” Lerovik interrupted.

  “The dominant species is unusual, its individuals totally self-directed. Worse, they are romantic in their tastes. They scorn our own artifacts, our arts, our techniques. After examining every product of our world, they found only one thing they desire. This was smuggled to their world by outlaws, giving them access to an art outlawed here.”

  “And what is that?” the pianist asked.

  The man looked
ill. “Mozart. A molecular recording of your rendition of all his piano works reached them. They want more, in living performance. They want you.”

  “Surely there is someone else who refused to recant the classics,” Lerovik objected.

  Sissingham shifted and blushed. “Unfortunately....” Sverdla caught his eye, and he changed his words. “Fortunately, Artistic Control succeeded in curing such aberrations. You are the only classicist left alive and functioning. We ask you to go to Agarica for the good of your world. They will honor you, for they assure us you will be their most valued asset.

  “Your work excited them unaccountably. The offer of all existing tapes of our Anatonic Music was refused—rudely. Only you will satisfy them.” He coughed. “In case you might think to inform them of the use to which we intend to put their ‘agricultural product’, you will be fitted with a device to release toxins into your blood the instant you speak or write any message concerning our intentions.”

  Lerovik clasped long fingers about skinny knees and regarded the trio on his deck. However reluctantly, they brought him the opportunity to live freely, practicing his art to appreciative audiences. He could not refuse.

  “I will need the finest obtainable minipiano, for use in transit, even though that requires only ten days. I cannot allow my hands to grow stiff, and this requires daily practice. I will also need, shipped to Agarica, a grand piano. The Steinway at the museum, if put into order by an expert, would do. A computer can tune it, once it is in place.”

  Sverdla’s mouth twisted, but she said, “It can be done.”

  “In addition,” Lerovik said, staring straight into her eyes, “Carelia Hoehner must be released from detention. Her hands must be re-broken and repaired, so she can work them into playing condition. Whether she is now sane or mad, she must go with me to Agarica.”