The Sheep Look Up
Page 5
“This is what we’re giving away,” Decimus would say. “Not steak or chicken or big fat Idaho potatoes. This is made from”—and it could be algae, or yeast, or grass clippings, or on one occasion, incredibly, sawmill wastes. “See how you like it, and think of those who have only such shit to be grateful for!”
But that had been a long time ago.
Around the back of the store she found a half-empty parking lot. There was a door marked Employees Only. She found it barred from inside. Nearby, though, was a reeded-glass window. She could make out blurred images if she leaned close to the panes. Inside, red forms changing to white as the Santa Clauses stripped off their suits and padding.
She listened, hoping to discern Austin’s voice.
“In a bad way, aren’t you, pal? Ah, leave him be! Well, just don’t cough on me, I have kids at home and all the time doctor’s bills. Don’t we all?”
And so on. Some of them went through a door at the back of the room and noise of running water indicated showers. A man in a dark suit appeared and shouted, “Easy with that water! There’s a shortage!”
“Shortage hell.” Husky, consumptive; the voice might belong to the man who hadn’t been able to shout. Louder, he added, “Is it hot?”
“Shit, of course not!” someone called back. “Tepid!”
“In that case give me my pay and I’ll go. The doc warned me not to get chilled. So I won’t be wasting your precious water, okay?”
“Don’t blame me.” With a sigh. “I don’t make the rules around here.”
In the dusk none of the men noticed Peg as they headed toward their cars. Five got into three vehicles. The last traced a line of smoke across the lot—liable to be arrested, him. The sixth man didn’t make for a car.
“Austin!” Peg said in a low voice.
He didn’t break stride and scarcely looked around. “The girl reporter!” he said. “Finally decided to throw me to the wolves?”
“What?” She fell in beside him, matching step for step the well-remembered paces that were too long for a man of his height, an average five-ten. Making the muscles do penance came naturally when Austin Train was around.
“You mean you’re not here on business?” His tone was tinged with sarcasm.
She prevaricated, pointing to her right beyond the lot; it was going to be hard to hear herself speak the news she had brought. “My car’s that way. Can I give you a lift? It is a Hailey!”
“Ah. The precepts are being kept, hm? Steam is cleaner than gas! No, thanks. I walk. Have you forgotten?”
She caught his hand and forced him to turn and face her. Looking at him, she found little change revealed by the poor light, apart from his having shaved off the beard he’d worn during his period of notoriety. The high cheekbones were the same, the curiously arched eyebrows, almost semicircular, the thin sour lips ... Though maybe his sparse brown hair had receded a trifle. It had been nearly three years.
His mouth parodied a smile: a tilt of a few degrees at one corner. Abruptly furious, determined to wipe away his complacency, she burst out, “I came to tell you Decimus is dead!”
And he said, “Yes. I know.”
All those hours of searching, without food or rest, aware that every moment increased the likelihood of losing her job—gone to waste? Peg said weakly, “But it only happened this morning ...”
“I’m sorry.” His look of mockery softened. “You loved him, didn’t you? Okay, I’ll come to your car.”
Mechanically she walked on; now, for a change, he matched her strides, though it was perceptibly frustrating to his energetic frame. Nothing more was said until they reached the spot where she had left the little Hailey under the harsh beams of a mercury-vapor light.
“I wonder if I did love him,” she said suddenly.
“You were the person who thought she didn’t know how, weren’t you? But you must have. Coming in search of me like this is proof of it. It can’t have been easy.”
“No, it wasn’t.” The finger whose nail she had torn was still tender; she had trouble guiding her key into the lock.
“Funny,” Austin said, looking at the car.
“What is?”
“People thinking of steam as being clean. My grandmother lived in a house backing on a railroad. Couldn’t hang out laundry for fear of smuts. I grew up thinking of steam as filthy.”
“Sermon time?” Peg snapped, reaching to open the passenger door. “And you called Train, come to that!”
“A stale joke,” he said, getting in. “Train as in powder train. A very old name. Originally it meant a trap or snare.”
“Yes, you told me. I’m sorry. Next time I want to try and get one of these Freon-vapor cars ... Oh, shit! I’m rambling. Do you—do you mind if I have a cigarette?”
“No.”
“You mean yes.”
“I mean no. You need a tranquilizer, and tobacco isn’t the most dangerous kind.” He half turned in the narrow seat. “Peg, you went to a lot of trouble. I do appreciate it.”
“Then why do I get a welcome about as warm as someone carrying plague?” Fumbling in her purse. “How did you hear, anyway?”
“He had a meet with me this morning. When he didn’t show I made inquiries.”
“Shit, I should have guessed.”
“But he didn’t come just to see me. He has a sister working in LA, you know, and there’s some family problem he wanted to sort out.”
“No, I don’t know. He never told me he had a sister!” With a vicious jab at the dashboard lighter.
“They quarreled. Hadn’t met for years ... Peg, I really am sorry! It’s—well, it’s the nature of your job that makes me react badly. I lived in the spotlight for a long time, you know, and I just couldn’t stand it any more once I realized what they were doing to me: using me to prove they cared about the world when in fact they didn’t give a fart. After me the deluge! So I generated my smoke-screen and disappeared. But if things go on the way they’ve been going lately ...”
He spread his hands. They were the first things that had suggested to Peg she might learn to like him, thorny though he was, because they were fractionally overlarge for his body, the sort of hands nature might have reserved for a sculptor or a pianist, and despite being thick-knuckled they were somehow beautiful. “Well, if one reporter knows how to find me, another may, and eventually it may be the fuzz.”
“Are you really afraid of being arrested?”
“Do you think I shouldn’t be? Don’t you know what happened right on Wilshire this morning?”
“Yes, but you don’t organize their demonstrations!” The lighter clicked out; her hand shook so much she could barely guide it to the cigarette.
“True. But I wrote their bible and their creed, and if I were put on oath I couldn’t deny that I meant every last word.”
“I should hope not,” she muttered, letting go a ragged puff of gray smoke. The taste, though, wasn’t soothing but irritating, because she’d stood on that corner for more than half an hour without her filtermask. After a second unpleasant drag she stubbed it.
“How old are you, Austin?”
“What?”
“How old are you is what I said. I’m twenty-eight and it’s a matter of public record. The president of the United States is sixty-six. The chairman of the Supreme Court is sixty-two. My editor is fifty-one. Decimus was thirty last September.”
“And he’s dead.”
“Yes. Christ, what a waste!” Peg stared blankly through the windshield. Approaching with grunts and snorts was one of the eight-ton crane-trucks used to collect automobiles without legal filters. This one had trapped exotic prey; a Fiat and a Karmann-Ghia were clamped on its chain-hung magnet.
“Nearly forty,” Austin murmured.
“Aries, aren’t you?”
“Yes, provided you’re asking as a joke.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Well, I could say anything. There are over two hundred of me, you know.”
“You mean no one saw it coming in his horoscope?”
“Oh, you’re inhuman! Why the hell don’t you get out? You hate cars!”
And a fraction of a second later: “No, I didn’t mean that! Don’t go!”
He hadn’t moved. Another pause.
“Any idea who did it?” she said at length.
“You’re sure it was—ah—done?”
“Must have been! Mustn’t it?”
“I guess so.” Austin drew his rounded eyebrows together, not looking at her, but she could see sidelong how they formed a child’s sketch for a sea gull. (How long before there were kids who didn’t know what a gull was?) “Well, I can imagine a lot of people being glad to see him go. Did you check out the police?”
“I was about to when I decided to find you instead. I thought it ought to be you who broke the news to Zena.”
“It was. Or rather, I called the wat and made sure she’d hear it first from someone she knew.”
“Those poor kids!”
“Better off than some,” Austin reminded her. Which was true, it being dogmatic Trainite policy never to bear your own as long as there were orphans to be fostered.
“I guess so ...” Peg passed a tired hand over her face. “I wish I’d realized I was wasting my time! Now I don’t know if the news has made the papers, or the TV, or anything.” She rolled the car away from the curb at last. “Where to?” she added.
“Straight ahead about ten blocks. Worried about losing your job, Peg?”
“More thinking why don’t I quit right now.”
He hesitated. “Maybe it would be a good idea if you stuck with it.”
“Why? Because you want someone in the media on your side? Don’t give me that. Thanks to Prexy just about everyone is—except the owners.”
“I wasn’t thinking of that. More that you might give me—well, the occasional warning.”
“You are afraid, aren’t you?” She halted for a red light. “Okay, if I can. And if the job lasts ... Who’s going to take over from Decimus?”
“I don’t know. I’m not in charge of anything.”
“Sorry. It’s fatally easy to fall into the notion that you are, what with people saying ‘Trainite’ all the time. I do try and remember to say ‘commensalist,’ but everyone shortens that to ‘commie’ and it’s generally a quick way to start a fist-fight ... Does it worry you, having your name taken in vain?”
“What the hell do you think I’m scared of?” He uttered a short harsh laugh. “It gives me goose-bumps!”
“Obviously not because of the wats. Because of demonstrations like this morning’s?”
“Them? No! They annoy people, but they do no real harm. Create a lot of publicity, provide a few object lessons for the bastards who are wrecking the planet for commercial gain ... And they allow the demonstrators to feel they’re being constructive. No, the kind of thing I have in mind is this. Suppose someone decides a whole city is offending against the biosphere, and pulls the plug on a nuclear bomb?”
“You think they might? That’d be crazy!”
“Isn’t the moral of the twentieth century that we are crazy?” Austin sighed. “Worse still, if it did happen, any proof of the insanity of the guy who did it—or guys: the collective bit is becoming more popular, you noticed?—the evidence, anyway, would be burned up. Along with everything else for miles around.”
She didn’t know what to say to that.
Two blocks further on, he tapped her arm. “Here!”
“What?” Peg stared at her surroundings. This was a desolate, down-at-the-heels area, partly razed for redevelopment, the rest struggling along in a vampiric half-life. A few young blacks were passing a furtive joint in the porchway of a bankrupt store; otherwise no one was visible.
“Oh, don’t worry about me,” Austin said. “I told you: there are over two hundred of me.”
“Yes. I didn’t understand.”
“People tend not to. But it’s literal. You keep seeing references in the underground press. There are at least that many people who decided to call themselves Austin Train after I disappeared—half in California, the rest scattered across the country. I don’t know whether to love them or hate them. But I guess they keep the heat off me.”
“Sunshades.”
“Okay, sunshades. But you shouldn’t make remarks like that, Peg. It dates you. When did you last see somebody carrying a parasol?”
He made to get out of the car. Peg checked him.
“What do you call yourself? No one told me.”
One foot on the road, Austin chuckled. “Didn’t they say you should ask for Fred Smith? Well, thanks for the ride. And by the way!”
“Yes?”
“If anything goes wrong, you can rely on Zena. You know that, don’t you? You can always find sanctuary at the wat.”
BADMIXTURE
Certain types of medication, chiefly tranquilizers, must not be taken by someone who has also recently eaten cheese or chocolate.
RELIEF
All of a sudden it felt like a different world. There was an end to the endless succession of round white-rimmed hopeful eyes in dark faces, to the offering of handleless cups and empty cans and greedy dishes and the pale palms of those who were too apathetic even to collect a spent shell-case by way of a container, because everything they had once owned had been snatched from them and they couldn’t believe it was worth investing precious energy in acquiring something else. And there was still a whole heap, at least a kilo, in the carton she’d been distributing from, and more cartons were stacked against the wall behind her, and more yet, incredibly many more, were being unloaded down a slide from the dark overshadowing shape of the ancient VC-10 which had somehow been set down on the improvised landing strip.
Disbelieving, Lucy Ramage brushed back a strand of fair hair from her eyes and turned to examine a segment of the peculiar substance she had been measuring out by the flaring acetylene lamp hung from a pole at the end of the trestle table.
It had a name. A trade name, no doubt properly registered. “Bamberley Nutripon.” The bit she had chosen was about as long as her little finger, cream-colored and of the consistency of stale Cheddar cheese. According to the instructions on every carton it was best to boil it because that made more of the starch digestible, or triturate it in water to make a dough, then fry it in small cakes or bake it on an iron griddle.
That, though, was for later: the elaboration, the cuisine bit. What counted right now was that it could be eaten as it was, and for the first time since she came here four mortal months ago she need not feel guilty about enjoying a balanced meal in her comfortable quarters tonight, because everyone who could be found had been given enough to fill the belly. She had seen them come to the table one by one and gape at the vast quantities they were allotted: ex-soldiers shy of an arm or leg; old men with cataracts filming their eyes; mothers with little children who struggled to make their babies mumble the food because they had starved past the point at which they forgot even how to cry.
And one in particular, there in front of me, when her mother tried to rouse and feed her ...
Oh, God! No, there can’t be a god. At least none that I want to believe in. I won’t accept a god who’d let a mother find her baby dead on her hip when there was food in her hand that might have saved it!
Blackness—of sky, ground, human skins—crowded in on her and built an Africa-wide torture chamber in her head.
A helpful grip enfolded her arm as she felt herself sway and a quiet voice spoke in good English.
“You have been overdoing things, I suspect, Miss Ramage!”
She blinked. It was the nice major, Hippolyte Obou, who had been educated at the Sorbonne and was reputedly no older than her own age of twenty-four. He was extremely handsome, if one discounted the tribal scars striping his cheeks, and
had always appeared to maintain a detached view of the war.
Which was more than could be said for General Kaika ...
But she wasn’t here to take sides or criticize. She was here to pick up pieces and patch them together. And although there had been moments when it seemed the job was impossible, everyone had been fed today, food was left over for tomorrow, and another consignment was promised immediately after the new year.
A different world.
“You will come to my office for a pick-you-up,” the major said; he didn’t make it a question. “Then I will ride you back to your accommodation in my jeep.”
“There’s no need to—”
But he brushed her words aside, taking her arm again, this time with a touch of gallantry. “Ah, it is little to do for someone who has brought such a Christmas present! This way, please.”
“The office,” a mere hut of planks and clay, had been one of the many headquarters of the invaders’ district commander. Fighting had continued at Noshri a week after the official armistice. Right across one wall was stitched the line of holes left by a salvo of fifty-caliber machine-gun slugs. Opposite, the corresponding line of marks had two gaps in it where the slugs had been stopped before they crossed the little room. Lucy tried not to look in that direction, because she had had to tend the obstacles.
It was terribly hot, even this long after sunset. The air was saturated with moisture. She had thought about going half-naked like the local girls, and come close to that climax. Her formal nurse’s uniform had vanished within days of her arrival. Her neat new aprons had been ripped into emergency bandages, then her dresses, her caps, and even the legs of her jeans one desperate day. For weeks now she had gone about in what was left of them, threads dangling above her knees, and shirts lacking so many buttons she had to knot the tails in front. At least, though, they were regularly washed by the girl Maua—not local, some sort of camp-follower—acting as her personal maid. Never having had a servant in her life, she had at first rebelled at being given one, and still was not reconciled to the idea; however, others of the UN team had pointed out that the girl was unskilled and by taking routine tasks off her could free Lucy to make maximum use of her own training.