Royce touched a gentle hand to her thigh. “Sorry,” he said lamely.
“Sorry?” Carlotta snapped. “What do you have to be sorry about? You got off, didn’t you, bucko?”
Royce jerked his hand away. “Up yours, too!” he said. “You weren’t exactly synced into pleasing me either, you know!”
“I wanted you to eat my honey.”
“Well, that just didn’t happen to be what—wait a minute! Eat your honey? What in the fucking hell is that? That’s straight out of some effing Femocrat dictionary!”
Bowb a bumbler! Carlotta thought. So it is. So it bloody well is. She turned on a soft yellow light and they lay there on the bed glaring at each other.
“What the hell is going on, Royce?” Carlotta said, trying to control the tone of her voice, reaching for sanity.
Royce grimaced. The angry lines on his face softened somewhat. “Speaking as your bucko, I’d say that you’re becoming a narcissistic selfish bitch who can’t get it off because you can’t sync your body behind any real feeling for me…”
“What! You egotistical effing—”
Royce held up his hand for peace and smiled ruefully at her. “But speaking professionally,” he said, “I think we’re both suffering from the same strange new brand of media cafard that’s infected the whole planet.”
“Media cafard?” Carlotta said. “What do you mean, media cafard?” Media cafard was a sardonic pseudo-medical term for plug-in overload, a condition where someone had been plugged into the net for so long that they stopped relating to ground-level reality. What the hell did media cafard have to do with this crummy lay?
“Well, call it reverse media cafard with a moebius twist,” Royce said. “Tell me, Carlotta, what was going through your head while we were trying to make love, if you can call it that?”
“Great grunting godzillas!” Carlotta muttered. “Were you reading my mind?”
Royce shrugged. “Just my own,” he said.
“You, too?”
“Uh-huh.”
“But this is ridiculous!” Carlotta said. “We love each other. We’ve been together for years. We’re Pacificans, we’re the masters of the media. And you’re telling me that a lot of stupid, primitive off-worlder slok is capable of getting inside our heads and screwing up our love life?”
“I have to tell you? Quality of the product has nothing to do with it; what we’re dealing with here is white-out media overload. The Femocrats have been pounding the idea that men are primitive selfish beasts into every woman’s head. It may not get to you on an intellectual level, but the images get graven into the subconscious by sheer force of repetition. Some ancient Terran dictator called it the theory of the Big Lie. Shout a lie into people’s ears long enough and loud enough and they’ll eventually start acting on it, no matter how outrageous it is. And he didn’t even have primitive television to work with!”
It’s true, Carlotta thought. And the Transcendental Scientists are doing the same damned thing. Femocrat-fomented women are trying to cut your balls off by denying you an Institute, buckos! Your wong is your weapon, so use it, boys, Goddamn, it’s even come between Royce and me!
Carlotta bounced off the bed and began pacing the bedroom in small circles. “We’ve got to stop this, Royce!” she said. “We’ve got to stop it now, before the whole planet ends up in the psycho ward, you and me included.”
Royce got up and started pacing with her. “But how?” he said.
“I don’t know,” Carlotta said, “but we’ve got to think of something. Let’s go get some air.”
But what? she wondered as they walked down the hall to the veranda. Both sides have gone beyond subtle media blitzes into straightforward political campaigning. It’s the Pink and Blue War with no holds barred, and emotionally it’s a real war between the sexes already. She grimaced. The only way to make things worse would be to force immediate votes on the issues, which would be so close that the losing party just might not accept it in a democratic spirit, and then constitutional government itself might start to crumble…
Outside on the deck, the air was warm and moist on her bare skin. Traceries of cloud fleeced across the starry sky. Waves lapped the shore, painting the waterline with ephemeral translucent foam. The whole bloody business seemed so ridiculous out here in the tranquil world of sea and sky. Royce’s naked body gleamed silver in the starlight. Just me and my bucko, Carlotta thought, that’s the way it’s supposed to be. Why can’t they leave us alone? Why can’t we make them leave us alone?
“You know, the Femocrat ship is almost repaired,” Royce said, sinking down in a bongowood chair and looking out to sea. “We could try to squeeze an expulsion vote through, and if you made it a vote of confidence in yourself…”
“Leaving what?” Carlotta said, sitting down beside him. “Ten million women convinced they’d been power-tripped by men and howling for my blood? Look at the reverse—if we squeezed through a vote to expel Transcendental Science, ten million men would be convinced that Pacifican women had bitten off their balls.”
Royce nodded. “I did playfully threaten Falkenstein with the third alternative,” he said.
“Third alternative?”
“Kick both their asses out.”
“But I thought you were convinced we had to have Transcendental Science…?”
Royce shrugged. “I was…I am…I was only torturing him a little. Besides, if we combined the issues, we’d never even get it to the floor. Still…”
“Still what?”
“Still it did manage to terrify him…”
Suddenly something began to tease at the edge of Carlotta’s consciousness. The Femocrats wanted one thing, the Transcendental Scientists another, and one good definition of political compromise was something that displeased both sides in equal measure…
“They’re both pushing hard for quick conclusive votes, aren’t they?” she said slowly.
Royce nodded. “I’d give it two weeks at the outside before you’re handed a Parliamentary petition demanding votes,” he said.
“Coitus interruptus…” Carlotta muttered.
Royce looked at her narrowly. “Is something percolating in that Machiavellian brain of yours?”
“Maybe…” Carlotta said. “I mean, what we’re faced with is two media blitzes and political campaigns building to a quick showdown…”
“So?”
“So what if we screw up the timetable?”
Royce fingered his lower lip. “What are you getting at?”
“Try a sexual metaphor,” Carlotta said. “Men and women fucking madly, harder and harder, the energy building to an orgasm…well, what happens to that energy level if orgasm is delayed by, oh, say six months?”
“Oh-ho!” Royce exclaimed. “Either it drops to a lower sustainable level or they fuck themselves into exhaustion before anything conclusive happens.”
“Right,” Carlotta said. “The Femocrats and the Transcendental Scientists simply couldn’t keep up this level of hysteria if everyone knew that the conclusive votes were six months off. If they tried, everyone on both sides would see that they were gibbering maniacs in a month or two.”
Royce stood up and began pacing the veranda. “Very sharp,” he said. “We could call it the Madigan Plan. Postpone the final vote on the Institute for six months. Let the Femocrats do their damndest in the meantime. Yeah, they’d have to tone it down for the long haul.”
“Do you think we could get it through Parliament?”
Royce stood by her chair and touched a hand to her shoulder. He grinned. “Are you kidding, babe?” he said. “The Delegates would fall all over themselves to vote for anything that would prevent a showdown at this point. Oh, they’d buy it all right. There’s just one thing…”
“What’s that?” Carlotta asked uneasily.
“I think we should let an Institute of Transcendental Science function in the meantime.”
“What?” Carlotta shouted, bolting to her feet. “No way! They’d j
ust use it to build a bigger political base, what they’ve done in the Cords writ large.”
“But it would make it a matter of put up or shut up,” Royce insisted. “Right now, they’re promising us the universe on a golden platter. Let an Institute function for six months, and we’ll know how much of it is real and how much is so much jellybelly oil.”
He sat back down again and stared up at the stars. Carlotta knew what was running through his mind. Despite everything, he was still hooked on the Faustian grandeur of Transcendental Science; he still refused to give that fantasy up.
“We do have our own scientists,” she said. “Someday we’ll be able to develop everything Transcendental Science has on our own.”
“Sure,” Royce said. “A century from now. Two centuries…three…Even if it were true, imagine what a boost we’d get from just six months of an Institute here…”
“It’d be political suicide,” Carlotta said coldly. “Let them set it up in the Cords, and we’ll end up with a chauvinistic mano elite. Put it in Gotham, and it’d be a center of political troublemaking. Stick it in Thule, where the natural student body is, and we’d have a cancer at the heart of our economy.”
“If we don’t allow an Institute to function during the trial period, the men of this planet won’t buy any Madigan Plan,” Royce said. “The Femocrats would be allowed total freedom to do their thing, but the Transcendental Scientists wouldn’t. It’d never get through Parliament.”
“Meaning you won’t support it wholeheartedly!” Carlotta snapped, slamming her bottom down into the chair beside him.
Royce looked at her belligerently. “If you insist on putting it on that level—yes!”
They sat there in stony silence, Royce looking up at the damnable stars, his jaw set in a hard line of resolution, Carlotta not deigning to look at him, her eyes mesmerized by the wavelets nibbling at the sandy shoreline.
Rugo waddled out onto the veranda, whonking a happy greeting that they both ignored. The bumbler stood between their chairs. He nuzzled Carlotta’s thigh with his beak. “I’m not in the mood, Rugo,” she grunted, pulling away. The bumbler reached up and rubbed his feathery head against Royce’s shoulder. “Cut it out, Jocko,” Royce snapped irritably.
Rugo looked at Carlotta, then at Royce, then at Carlotta again. If he had had hips and hands, he would have put his hands on his hips indignantly as he squawked his wounded outrage. “Whonk-ka-whonk ka-whonkity whonk!”
“Shut up, will you, Rugo!” Royce snapped.
“Whonk, whonk, ka-whonk, whonk, whonk!” The bumbler’s feathers ruffled angrily as he harangued them.
“Will you stop yelling at us like a goddamn godzilla!” Carlotta shouted.
Chastened, Rugo finally subsided. But Royce’s face broke into a great grin. “Godzillas!” he said, rubbing Rugo’s head. “Jocko, you’re a genius!”
“Huh?”
Royce broke into wild whooping laughter. “Godzillaland!” he finally managed to say. “Let them set up their goddamn Institute in effing Godzillaland! Can you see it?”
Now Carlotta started laughing. Festering jungle where the temperature never fell below 110 degrees. Giant godzillas rampaging through the trees, bellowing their endless threats day and night. And the crazy whackers who actually liked living there! Oh, it was delicious! Let Falkenstein try to build himself a political base among those maniacs! Two thousand kilometers from anywhere! It’ll turn the whole thing into a planetary joke.
She got up and hugged Royce. “Godzillaland it is!” she giggled. “The Transcendental Institute of Godzillaland!”
“Then we’ve got ourselves a Madigan Plan?”
“We sure do!” Carlotta said. “Godzilla-brained faschochauvinist Fausts!” she laughed. She broke up entirely. She began stomping crazily around the veranda, grunting and bellowing like a godzilla. After a moment, Royce joined her, and they stood there, rolling their eyes, bellowing, and flailing their forearms at each other, until they collapsed into laughter into each other’s arms.
“Whonk-ka-whonk? Whonkity whonkity whonk?” Rugo stood there cocking his head from one side to the other, quite certain that they had both gone insane.
“Good, perfect, we’ll run it as is tonight,” Royce Lindblad said, turning off the comscreen and punching up the latest depth-poll figures from the Parliamentary computer. Forty percent of the population were now against the Institute, overwhelmingly female; 42 percent were in favor of expelling the Femocrats, almost all male; 87 percent wanted an immediate vote on both issues. Logically, the figures were all bad, and seemed to predict a disastrous and crushing defeat for the Madigan Plan.
But Royce’s gut-feeling went against the logic of the polls. For now at last the Ministry of Media was about to take an active political role in the conflict. For too long these effing off-worlders had used the net for their own purposes, while the Ministry of Media itself was hamstrung by the Constitution into serving as their unwitting allies, acting as the guardian of free media access while unable to function politically.
But now these bastards were going to get a lesson in how Pacificans could use the net for Pacifican political purposes. Which was why the current depth-poll figures didn’t mean a damned thing. Starting tonight, the very media blitz techniques that had worked so well for Transcendental Science and the Femocrats would be used as weapons against them.
The tape that Larry Cristensen had produced to announce the Madigan Plan was a minor masterpiece. Open with choice cuts from the most rabid straight propaganda that the Femocrats and Transcendental Scientists had pumped out lately, edited into a building montage of total craziness, while slowly building up the sound level of dubbed-in mob noises to an animal roar. Then bits of their silliest entertainment tapes flash across the straight propaganda cuts as a laugh-track begins to white-out the mob-roar with gross guffaws and giggling hysteria. Then, a hard cut to just Carlotta, explaining the Madigan Plan as the voice of sweet reason. Finally a quick series of endorsements of the Madigan Plan from already-committed Delegates, carefully balanced between male and female.
Royce grinned. He got up and walked to the window of his Ministry office. He wondered how the Femocrats and the Transcendental Scientists would react to the Madigan Plan. If I were either of them, I’d keep my big mouth shut, he thought. If both sides lie low, the Madigan Plan will sail through without affecting the political balance. But if either side opposes it, we and the other side will come down on them like a sixty-ton godzilla. Of course, the best of all possible worlds would have the Femocrats alone oppose the Madigan Plan. Then it passes over their dead political bodies, but the vote would be close enough so that Falkenstein might be willing to offer some real concessions for our support.
And that’s what you really want, isn’t it? he thought. An Institute without the Pink and Blue War, under effective Pacifican control, Transcendental Science without the Transcendental Scientists. And who knows? What might we do with a six-month trial period? How would they select their student body? How long would it really take for trained Pacifican scientists to acquire enough knowledge of the Transcendental Sciences to function independently?
Royce returned to his net console. Might not a small bending of mortality solve the whole problem once the Madigan Plan was passed? A little espionage? Isn’t Falkenstein really asking for it…?
He plugged into Harrison Winterfelt, the Minister of Science, on a secure scrambled comcircuit. “I want you to prepare a little list for me, Hari,” he said. “Physicists, biologists, pharmacologists, electronics experts, the whole scientific spectrum. Good competent people in every scientific area.”
Winterfelt’s craggy, wrinkled face screwed up in owlish confusion. “You want twenty volumes of Who’s Who in Pacifican Science, Royce? What for?”
“Use the Parliamentary computer to narrow it down through a set of parameters,” Royce said.
“What parameters?”
“No senior people,” Royce said. “No previous or present gov connection
s. None of them politically active in Pacificans for the Institute. Eidetic memories would be nice but not essential. And when you’ve got a list, run psych checks on them. I want only strong, apolitical, technically oriented personalities—in other words, people who would be most resistant to all forms of mind control.”
Winterfelt cocked an inquisitive eyebrow. “What the hell is this for, Royce?” he asked.
“I’m not sure yet,” Royce said. “Call it a contingency plan. I’m not telling you any more than you need to know because I want the tightest possible security maintained on this. You do likewise. Involve only enough people to get the job done, break it down so no one knows what the total project is but you and me, and don’t talk to anyone but me about it.”
“Not even Carlotta?”
Royce paused, sensing that he was about to cross some vaguely defined personal Rubicon. “Not even Carlotta,” he finally said. “Because it would be political suicide for her to have known should word of this ever leak. Because there’s one more parameter…”
“What now?” Winterfelt asked uneasily.
“The final list must be all male,” Royce said.
Winterfelt whistled. Comprehension began to dawn in his large eyes. “Now I see what you’re getting at,” he said.
“Well, don’t even tell me, Hari,” Royce said, unplugging from the circuit. He leaned back in his lounger and gazed out the window at the setting sun.
Pacifica is going to retain control of its own destiny, and the off-worlders had just better watch their own asses, he thought. The Madigan Plan was going to pass, and that was part of it, exiling the Institute to Godzillaland would be another part, and the active intervention of the Ministry of Media yet another. Espionage might very well enter the equation, too, before all this was over.
At this moment in time, the situation was full of imponderables. How would the Femocrats and Falkenstein react to the Madigan Plan? How would Institute students be chosen? How much could Carlotta be told, and when?
A World Between Page 19
