If he was surprised he didn’t show it. He raised his eyebrows, but that was all. No matter how grave the situation might be, Hotch wouldn’t let it show.
‘It’s a native war from now on,’ he acclaimed. ‘There’s not an alien left in either fleet.’
‘You mean the Brazilians rebelled too?’
‘I wish they would! The green bosses hopped it and left them to it.’
The King offered to put Hotch down at Buckingham Palace, the centre of all the official machinery. Hotch greeted the suggestion with scorn.
‘That stuff’s no good to me,’ he said. ‘Put me down at my headquarters in Balham. That’s the only chance of getting our fighter planes in the air.’
This we did. The pilots had already set the aircraft in silent motion through the stratosphere, and within an hour we slanted downwards and flashed the remaining five hundred miles to England.
London was peaceful as we hovered above it three hours in advance of the raiders. Only Hotch’s impatient energy indicated the air of urgency it would shortly assume.
But what happened on Earth after that, I don’t know. We went into space, so I have only a casual interest.
It’s like this: the King showed me space.
To see it with the bare eyes is enough, but on the King’s set of multi- and null-viewpoint vision screens it really gets hammered in. And what gets knocked into you is this: nothing matters. Nothing is big enough to matter. It’s as simple as that.
However big a thing is, it just isn’t big enough. For when you see the size of totality – I begin to understand now why the King, who has seen it all the time, is as he is.
And nothing is important. There is only a stratified universe, with some things more powerful than others. That’s what makes us think they are important – they’re more powerful, but that’s all. And the most powerful is no more significant than the least.
You may wonder, then, why the King bothers with such trivial affairs as Britain. That’s easy.
When I was a young man, I thought a lot of myself. I thought myself valuable, if only to myself. And, once, I began to wonder just how much it would take for me to sacrifice my life, whether if it came to it I would sacrifice myself for a less intelligent, less worthwhile life than my own. But now I see the sacrifice for what it is: simply one insignificance for another insignificance. It’s an easy trade. So the King, who has ranged over a dozen galaxies, has lost his war, his army, and risks even his own life, for Britain’s sake. It’s all too tiny even to hesitate over. He did what he could: how could he do anything else?
Like the King, I was quickly becoming incapable of judgement. But before it goes altogether, I will say this of you, Hotch: It was a low trick you played on the King. A low, dirty trick to play on a good man.
AN OVERLOAD
They always met by television. Usually it was once every three months. Always it was with much argument. The meeting chamber, though in a secret location and possessing neither door nor windows, had a dignity wholly befitting its role. Its walls were panelled with ancient, grained oak. The floor was deeply carpeted. Mahogany, another near-extinct and much-valued wood, had been used to make the incomparable boardroom table. On its dark shining surface rested six holo television sets arranged so that the stage-screen of each could view all the others.
Today Sinatra was sour. ‘You know what I think?’ he said, stubbing out a cigarette with a derisory gesture. ‘I’ll tell you: I think this thing’s not worth talking about.’
Bogart gave a typical puzzled frown, his shrewd preoccupied eyes shifting from side to side as he spoke. ‘If it bothers us it’s worth talking about. This guy Karnak seems to be making progress.’
‘Aw, nuts.’ Sinatra’s blue and disturbingly hot eyes came to rest on Bogart; his lean face was sardonic, his wide mouth wryly twisted. ‘He’s just another bum.’
‘Remember Reagan,’ Bogart continued defensively. ‘Not so long ago he was sitting right here with us. Until, that is, he got over-confident, began over-extending, thinking he could get into SupraBurgh. Suddenly there he was, dying on a rising curve.’
Cagney shook his head sadly. ‘Not even viable for the voters any more.’
‘I remember what it was like seeing him go. Spooky.’
Sinatra chuckled. ‘Sure I remember Reagan. He had it coming: that’s what you get for messing with SupraBurgh. None of us will make that mistake again.’ He paused reflectively, a cigarette held midway to his lips. ‘You know, sometimes when I go over my piece of his holdings I think I can hear him whining through the circuits.’
‘We all can,’ Raft said shortly, in a flat gravelly voice, ‘because we all took a piece of him. I like to think he’d be happy knowing we profited by his fall. But I’d also like to think it can’t happen to me.’ The grisly crack came deadpan out of Raft’s poker face. Cagney and Schultz grinned slightly.
‘It can’t,’ Sinatra affirmed. ‘We’ve got things sewn up too tight now.’
‘If we stick together it can’t,’ Bogart corrected. ‘Maybe Reagan wouldn’t have hit the dust if some of you guys hadn’t been so quick to pull the rug from under him.’
‘Yeah, okay, that’s right,’ said Sinatra hastily, cutting off the angry protests from the others. ‘If things get rough we stick together, okay? Karnak has only taken one ward so far. That’s a long way from being a threat. Now let’s get on to other business. Take a look at this.’
An oak panel slid aside to reveal a holo stage. A simple sine wave moved slowly across it, was momentarily transformed into a stationary bell-shaped probability curve, and then broke up into a dizzying sequence of graph curves, the axes standing out in contrasting colours.
Filling in with a terse commentary, Sinatra watched the flickering curves calmly. ‘I guess you can get the picture from this. Intricative Products, working in harness with Stylic Access Services, are on their way to capturing the whole of the design-percept market. This will mean that a lot of smaller businesses not currently in syn will be brought in syn. Now here are the production breakdowns leading through to maybe four months’ time.’
A new set of dancing, swinging curves appeared, at the rate of two a second. Sinatra held one of them for a few moments.
‘Here’s the aesthetic/inventive index of the stuff we’ll be releasing in a short while now.’
The display went into motion again. ‘I’m giving you the picture because I don’t want you to go upsetting the caper. Putting smaller people out of business isn’t just a matter of seizing their markets, it’s also a matter of denying them operating capital. Now for a short while my activities will create something of a vacuum in the field of property in-decor, an associated area of commerce. Some of you, particularly Lancaster and Cagney, might be tempted to pour money into it. But it’s a fact that capital flows easily from property in-decor to design-percept. So back off, willya? Otherwise you might louse up my operation.’
The display ended and the holo stage showed an indefinite empty depth, tinted pale lilac.
Raft grunted.
‘And why should we want to do you such a favour?’ he asked.
‘Oh, I wouldn’t ask you to do it as a favour,’ Sinatra replied mildly. ‘Just so as to be open and above board, I’ll show you the current programme of another of my properties, Up-SupraBurgh Road Mercantile.’ The holo started up again, dazzling in its rapid disclosure of professional information. ‘If this doesn’t give some of you cardiac arrest, it should. It shows just how ready I am to start forcing the pace in the Up-SupraBurgh outlets. Before long I could – if I wanted – squeeze you out of some of these routes altogether. You wouldn’t like that. So it’s a straight deal. I’ll back off SupraBurgh if you’ll back off property in-decor.’
‘We all agreed not to try to monopolise the upgoing routes,’ Raft said without expression.
‘I hope I won’t have to,’ Sinatra told him affably.
‘What are you trying to put over on us, Frank?’ It was Lancaster who spoke no
w, anger edging into his softly incisive, muscular voice. ‘Let’s take another look at that crap you just handed us.’ And he projected Sinatra’s own graphs back on the wall holo. ‘It’s kind of funny how it compares with what I’m doing in Up-SupraBurgh.’
More curves, Lancaster’s graphs this time, glittered out at them in quick succession, like spitting out pips. ‘Get that, Frank? Put it together, all of you. Frank is telling us he and I share seventy-three per cent of the upgoing trade. Add your own business to it, and how do you explain a total of one hundred and eighteen per cent?’
‘Are you calling me a liar, you –?’ Sinatra lunged towards Lancaster, an incredulous, outraged look on his face. He gesticulated at the wall holo. ‘This is how you put those figures together, and this is what it means in a year’s time.’ And while he spoke he shot an even faster display at the holo stage.
Cagney spoke up lazily. ‘Frank is always talking about bringing out-of-syn business into syn. What for? I notice most of these properties seem to wind up in his own stable. What are you gonna do, Frank? Bring the whole of UnderMegapolis into syn?’
‘Sure!’ bellowed Sinatra. ‘I’d like it that way!’
Bogart lit a cigar, blowing aromatic smoke that appeared to drift out of the holo and into the room. ‘Great,’ he observed. ‘So whenever anything goes wrong the voters have nobody to blame but us.’
‘Yeah, that would be great all right, wouldn’t it?’ Lancaster echoed.
There was a moment’s silence. Sinatra calmed himself, glancing around him at the hexagon of power that made up the syndicate: himself, Bogart, Lancaster, Raft, Cagney, and on Sinatra’s left, Schultz, a furtive, dour figure who spoke but seldom.
‘Nothing ever does go wrong in the outfits I run,’ he declared.
‘Nothing except the credibility of your own accounts,’ Lancaster answered tightly. ‘Let’s put your figures to the test, Frank. How about if we analyse them this way?’
The argument raged back and forth. The graph displays flickered so fast as to be on the edge of visibility, merging into a rainbow blur.
As the vert-tube dropped for mile after mile the golden glitter of SupraBurgh vanished. There was a brief, limbo-like transit through the abandoned area of Central Authority; then Obsier was plunged deep into the planet and entered UnderMegapolis.
Forms, hues and vistas slid into one another as the level-within-level mightiness of Obsier’s home supercity swung past. This was the kind of immensity, the kind of power, he was familiar with: ancient yet eternally modern, below reach of the sun, a deep thrusting place of hegemonies. It impressed him anew to return to it in this fashion, falling like a bullet in the v-tube.
Obsier had to admit that SupraBurgh, perched above it, using it as a foundation, was stunning – but in a way that was alien and frightening, spreading up and out like a great tree to glory in the sunlight that struck, unnaturally to Obsier’s mind, out of a naked sky. Equally unnatural were the interstellar ships that occasionally arrived to settle like birds in that tree, or, again lake birds, winged up to depart from it. The spectacle of those vanishing craft was most unnerving; Obsier found it a tremendous relief to escape from that oppressive feeling of vast expanses, of air and sunlight.
It was even a relief, despite the failure of his mission, to know that he had seen SupraBurgh’s horrors for the last time. Thankfully blotting out the repellent images from his mind, Obsier thought it almost incredible to reflect that at their founding the two conurbations had been governed as a single city: Megapolis; and that only gradually had the functions of Central Authority withered away as disparate physical environments (one underground, one up in the air) inevitably gave rise to divergent social and economic forms: divergent traditions, divergent languages, and finally divergent governments.
Just how long ago that had been could be judged from the fact that the deserted section where Central Authority had functioned (even now its empty corridors were left tactfully undisturbed by both sides) had originally been at ground level and now was half a mile into the Earth. Megapolis, a huge plug drilled into the planet’s skin, had sunk by its own weight. Its floor was now so close to the mohorivic discontinuity that UnderMegapolis was able to tap heat from the basaltic mantle beneath.
The v-tube decelerated fiercely, and shortly came to a halt. Ahead, the greenish radiance of serried strip-lights stretched away into the distance. Clutching a sheaf of documents, Obsier made his way towards a nearby Schultz In-Town Transit Services station.
‘So they wouldn’t wear it?’ Mettick asked.
‘No,’ Obsier told him. ‘And I guess that will be my last trip to SupraBurgh. In a way I’m glad of it. I don’t like it up there.’
‘Did you get any offers out of them?’
‘Not one. They’re not interested.’
‘Is it because they don’t use ipse holo up there?’
‘That’s true, they don’t, but I don’t think that’s it. They must have all the technical data available. We could get it built ourselves, perhaps, if they’d fund it. They’re just not interested. They don’t want to know us down here.’
‘It’s hard to understand. If an offer like that was made to any of the syn bosses they’d grab it like an alligator grabbing meat.’
‘Their system is different from ours. They’re not democratic, and not oligarchic. They have some sort of elitist social structure. They act as though we don’t exist …’
Mettick shrugged. ‘We act as though they don’t exist … You know why I think they won’t play? They’re afraid of the syn. Do you think that’s right?’
Obsier placed his papers in a desk drawer. ‘Maybe. It’s more likely that they have an agreement with them: no interference in each other’s pitch. But it’s more than that, too. There’s a difference in mentality we could never cross. It was a mistake to think we could.’
‘Yes, I suppose so.’ Mettick was reflective for a moment. ‘Well, we’d better tell Karnak.’
They went through a door into an inner office where the campaign team was working. Girls with tabulators were feeding in data for the prediction polls. If Karnak could gain this second ward in the imminent local election he would be riding high.
Mettick paused by the supervisor’s desk. ‘Is the Man in?’
She nodded. Mettick knocked on a door and they entered. Karnak was surrounded by his aides, hard at it as usual.
Karnak was the epitome of the tireless, hard-working politician. When he wasn’t actively campaigning he was busy on some side project, as now: trying to analyse the syn – the vast business syndicate whose bosses ruled UnderMegapolis by reason of holding all the seats on the Magisterial Council. To gain such a seat for himself – to be a magister – and break the syn’s monopoly was his life’s ambition.
A small holo screen was reeling off a list of the properties owned by one of the syn tycoons, Sinatra. Momentarily Obsier let his eye run through the exotic language of present-day business: Intricative Products; Non-Linear Machinations Composited; Stylic Access Services; Up-SupraBurgh Road Mercantile; Andromatic Enterprises; Andromatic On-Return Hook-Up … and on and on.
Karnak killed the holo and turned to face the newcomers. Straight away Obsier could feel the man’s charisma. The force of it struck him anew every time he came into Karnak’s presence, like an enveloping field of magnetism. That magnetism was a necessary prerequisite: all the magisters had it.
‘I’m sorry,’ Obsier said immediately. ‘SupraBurgh won’t finance an ipse holo set-up.’
Karnak took the news as a great man should. He paced the room, his long-jawed, handsome features briefly turned inward in concentration. ‘Okay, so that avenue is closed,’ he said firmly. ‘We shall just have to find another way.’
He stopped in front of the campaign charts that covered one wall. ‘I’m confident we’re going to win this ward. That will give me the right to contest the supercity general election in a month’s time.’
He swung round to face them again. ‘But let
’s not kid ourselves: ipse holo is the key to success on a supercity scale. We can do quite a lot with ordinary holo in a ward election, because it can be backed up with personal appearances. But in a population of a hundred million, where holocom is of the essence –’ He made a gesture. ‘Just imagine me coming over like a shadow and Sinatra or Lancaster sitting right there in the room, with all the spiel they’re able to put over.’
There was a short silence. ‘If we sank all our assets maybe we could come up with the needed amount, though I doubt it,’ one of the aides said tentatively. ‘But we’d be really out on a limb.’
Karnak nodded.
‘It isn’t just that,’ Mettick injected. ‘There’s the technical data too. I’ve done some research in the library. It isn’t all there: the syn has kept some of it private. Which means that businesses capable of artifactoring ipse equipment are all synowned, too.’
Another of the aides slapped his fist in his palm. ‘They’ve really got it sewn up,’ he said savagely.
‘It’s getting so they’re sewing everything up,’ said the aide who had first spoken. The rate of absorption of businesses taken over by the syndicate – brought into syn, in the jargon – was one of the things Karnak’s team liked to grouse about.
‘Right: this is what we’ll do,’ said Karnak, cutting into their talk like a hand cutting through smoke. Their attention snapped on to him: the Man had made a Decision.
‘We’ll make an election issue of it, starting as of right now,’ he told them. ‘The syn has a monopoly of ipse holo. That’s undemocratic – it should be available to all magisterial candidates. We’ll push the idea that the owners of ipse equipment should lease it, or even loan it, to anyone on the elective list. Wrap it up in a package – the ever-increasing hold the syn is having on our lives, the stricture on routes to the top in our society, and so forth. But press it hard.’
‘Hmm.’ An aide nodded thoughtfully. ‘The syn’s reply will be that we are trying to subvert the plutocratic principle – anybody not successful enough to have their own ipse apparatus doesn’t deserve to have it, dig? But it will definitely put them on the defensive. They might even have to let us use their ipse to avoid looking mean and brutish. It’s good, K, it’s good.’ He nodded again, enthusiastically.
Barrington Bayley SF Gateway Omnibus: The Soul of the Robot, The Knights of the Limits, The Fall of Chronopolis Page 38
