Oath of Fealty

by Larry Niven

  "Duck!" Lunan roared. He dropped to the belt and tried to sweep Cheryl's legs from under her. She danced back, laughing, fending him off. The rope caught her across the chest, and disintegrated. It was toilet paper.

  Lunan got up. "Swell. What if it was a real rope?"

  Cheryl was still laughing. "It can't be. The guards would stop them. Did you see anyone else duck?"

  He hadn't. He thought: Even Angelinos learn better. It can't be real rope. Security wouldn't let it be. Are they crazy or are they right?

  * * *

  Stevens drove the Imperial back toward City Hall. They passed through block after block of low, wood-frame houses, structurally sound (mostly) but usually in need of paint; houses that weren't really squalid, but were officially classed as sub-standard, and looked it.

  Some would call them slums, but MacLean Stevens resisted that. Watts and the surrounding areas had open space. There were a few apartments, but mostly there were single-unit houses and duplexes. Most of them had yards, some scattered with occasional blowing paper, some meticulously clean. A few of the yards were filthy, littered with discarded furniture and decaying mattresses, but those were exceptions.

  Not a slum, Stevens thought. Los Angeles doesn't really have slums. Not like Harlem, or- "What I needed to see you about was the Price Memorial Project," Clay said. "They say we need more tests. First the EPA. Now HUD. Mr. Stevens, my people need housing. This is a good project, an excellent project. It can turn that whole area around, if only they will let us build it! And we cannot continue testing and studying. We will soon lose our contractors. They say rightly that they cannot keep their equipment idle longer."

  "We saw the report," Stevens said. "The Mayor made a strong protest. I know it was strong, because I wrote it. I could show you the file if you like-"

  "I believe you," Clay said. "But protests don't hire people or build housing. We need that housing now! And the jobs. Jobs! You know what that means? Do you know what the unemployment rate is down here? What are the young people supposed to do? They have no jobs. There is no one to work for. The result is that they run in gangs, like that young man today-"

  "You saw the gang tattoos, then?" Stevens asked.

  Clay nodded slowly. "Yes, Mr. Stevens."

  They turned onto a main north-south thoroughfare. It was lined with bars and liquor stores, all looking like fortresses with iron grill window guards and steel cagework to cover the doors. At the corner stood a supermarket, one of a major chain. Stevens noticed the prices. At least 20 percent higher than in his neighborhood.

  They have to, he told himself. It costs more to do business. Insurance alone. And security against shoplifting, and-And the higher prices help keep people chained down to this miserable block.

  "Yes, I saw the gang symbols," Clay repeated.

  "Could they have a bearing on his actions this morning?"

  "I don't know," Clay admitted. "It's possible. Or he may have been high on something. Without jobs, without hope, they join gangs. They use drugs. They also steal. At the moment they steal from their neighbors. Someday the neighbors will have nothing worth stealing. Then they will come out and steal from your neighbors, and perhaps you will pay some attention-"

  That won't happen, Stevens thought. As long as welfare and food stamps and aid to dependent children and social security and all the other benefit programs pump in money, there'll be something to steal. And we already paid too much attention to Watts anyway. Every department of every government at every level is involved, and all those expensive people think they have to contribute to justify their salaries, and every contribution is another delay.

  "Reverend, I know how you feel, but what can I do? The federal government is putting up 84 percent of the cost, and their inspectors have to be satisfied that it's safe. After all, there was a chemical plant on that site."

  "Thirty years ago!"

  "Yes, but they might have buried some toxic wastes," Stevens said.

  "The Del Rio Company states that they did not."

  Stevens shrugged. "HUD won't take their word for it. They insist on taking their own soil samples and making their own tests." And for that matter, when did Ebenezer Clay start taking a corporation's word for anything?

  "The developer will quit while they are testing."

  "We'll find another one," Stevens said.

  "It took more than a year for Jacobsen and Myers to qualify," Clay said. "A new firm must start completely anew-" He sniffed and wrinkled his nose. "Or perhaps not? Perhaps that is the plan. To delay and delay until we can delay no longer, then obtain an emergency ruling relaxing the affirmative action program? And then a nice lily-white company will come-"

  "That won't happen," Stevens said wearily.

  "It has happened in the past."

  Mac Stevens had nothing to say to that. Of course Clay was right.

  "All we want is justice," Clay said.

  Justice, Stevens thought. A line from the hymnal ran through his head. "Thy justice like mountains, high soaring above, Thy clouds which are fountains of goodness and love." But what soared above off to the left was neither justice nor mountains. It was the blank wall of Todos Santos.

  "Does anybody really want justice?" Stevens asked. "If justice is getting what you deserve-"

  "A fair chance, that is all we want. Why can't we have it?"

  Because nobody gives a damn anymore, Stevens thought. Nobody but you and your friends, and you don't have many of those left. The glorious old days of the civil rights movement are gone, long gone and not many lament them.

  We did care, once. A lot of us did. But something happened. Maybe it was the sheer size of the problem. Or watching while everybody who could afford it ran to the suburbs and left the cities to drift, and complained about taxes going to the cities, and - Or maybe it was having to listen to my police explain why they'll only go into Watts in pairs with cocked shotguns and if the Mayor doesn't like it he can damned well police that precinct himself.

  People think they've done enough.

  What's enough? It isn't enough. If we'd done enough, we wouldn't have the problems- "I'll do my best to speed things up," Stevens said. "We'll call Washington."

  "Do you think that will help?"

  "It can't hurt." And probably can't help, although you never knew. The problem was that Washington didn't have to listen. They might, but they don't have to.

  He remembered the chanting crowd outside the alleyway. They demanded justice. And the Reverend Clay wants justice. Mr. Planchet wants justice. The Mayor wants them all kept happy, meaning I'm supposed to deliver what they want. Justice. Hell, I don't even know what it is.

  Not that it matters. We'll get Clay his development, but it won't bring justice to the ghetto. It'll just be another project.

  And whatever justice is, Jim Planchet doesn't want it. What Big Jim wants is vengeance.

  The northeast pillar had become another tree; but this was no Christmas tree. There was a glass-walled ballroom nestled in its topmost branches. In its sprawling, knotted roots was the red-lit entrance to Lucifer's, the gambling hail. Halfway up the thick trunk were three levels of Dream Masters, the gallery of fantasy art.

  Lunan stared, searching for old memories. "And there's a serpent gnawing at the roots, right?" he asked. "And an old one-eyed god comes to impale himself in order to learn the runes?"

  "We've got a hologram serpent. I don't think anybody's had the nerve to play Odin yet. Thomas, would you like to get a sculpted bust of yourself? Or a tattoo?"

  "Ah … why?"

  Cheryl laughed. "I'll show you." She led him to an outside elevator shaped like a rocket ship out of a 1930s Amazing: baroque fins guiding a pointed glass tube, glow of orange lights in rockets clustered underneath. "You should see this anyway."

  Fantasy art had come a long way since the art shows at early science fiction conventions. Dream Masters still displayed paintings: creatures foreign to Earth, and "artists' concepts" of interstellar spacecraft and struc
tures that would have dwarfed the Earth itself. But there were also window-sized holograms that looked out on alien worlds; a gun with a double stock, for use by something with two right arms; tiny landscapes for use as game boards in role-playing games, and dragons and trolls and elves for markers; ornately carved rings, cups, belt buckles.

  There were two small shops within Dream Masters itself.

  In the solid-photography shop Lunan sat with parallel bands of light and dark demarking his head and shoulders, while a score of photographs were taken from pre-set angles. "It's absolutely accurate," the clerk told him. "The markings guide the computer that guides the tools that carve the bust. We do have to add the eyes; they come out blank. And we can fiddle with the texture of the hair, and make the bust bigger or smaller." Lunan's bust would be the size of a fist, carved in synthetic malachite.

  The walls of the tattoo parlor were covered with designs. Line cartoons, very simple and very expressive. Slogans in ornate Gothic script. Photographs of astronomical scenery, suns and glowing interstellar gas clouds, tattooed on human backs; a white comet running down a suntanned arm.

  The tattooist was in her twenties, with wild black hair and somewhat protuberant eyes. She caught Lunan staring at a pair of photographs and said, "They were both from the Red Plush Onion."

  One was a color photo of a woman's ass - not bad, Lunan thought - with a cluster of vertical lines tattooed on one cheek. Product identification markings. The other, a puffy red giant star losing a stream of flame into the blue-white accretion disk around a black hole, tattooed across a black woman's chest.

  The tattooist had a vivid smile, and her eyes danced. Damn, they were almost hypnotic, almost too big for her face. Lunan said, "I didn't know the Onion ran to astronomy buffs."

  "You'd be surprised."

  Her voice was louder than Los Angeles traffic noises-absent here-and beneath the vivaciousness was a self-consciousness that the Saints eventually lost. Angelino. Lunan said, "You haven't been here long."

  She admitted it. She had moved in last April, right after making out her income tax form.

  "Where were you before? What were you doing?"

  "I lived in Westwood. And I did a little of everything … including a movie. They had me playing a zombie-" and she widened her eyes and grinned a death-rictus at him, so that Lunan recoiled even while he was laughing.

  "Are you glad you moved?"

  "Oh, I love it here. I was a little worried, you know, about making new friends, but it wasn't bad at all. There's the Commons; you can't help meeting people. And then, Saints seem to trust each other. As if just being here means you're okay. And I get plenty of customers."

  "Angelinos? And the Onion?"

  "No, mostly Saints. I think it's like ego plates: you know, personalized car license plates? Nobody wants to be exactly like everybody else. You'll see a lot of my designs floating around. that is, you would if you could make friends fast enough. I put some of them in fairly private places."

  "I've got one myself," Cheryl said demurely.

  There was a buzzing in Lunan's ear. "My master's voice," he said with genuine regret. "I've got to call in." As Cheryl led him to a guard station, Thomas Lunan wondered what could be so important that the City Editor would beep him.

  IX. THE FURIES

  White shall not neutralize the black, nor good Compensate bad in man, absolve him so: Life's business being just the terrible choice,

  -Robert Browning

  Tony Rand wasn't happy. For one thing, it was lunch time, but instead of eating he was standing in Art Bonner's office. "I found out how they did it," he said. "We've got maintenance people in those tunnels all the time. Security used to watch them, but that got too expensive, so we set up a system to have MILLIE track everyone in there and call Security only if something unusual happened." He shrugged. "So the kids fed MILLIE the right signals."

  "How about getting in to begin with?" Art Bonner asked.

  "Same thing. As far as the computer was concerned, one of our own work crews went in for unscheduled maintenance. Happens often enough. Art, it bugs me that someone can do that to MILLIE."

  "Bugs you, does it? Tony, how would you feel if you knew someone could fiddle with your memory?"

  Tony turned, startled. "Oh. I hadn't thought of that aspect."

  "I rather hope nobody else does. Don't mention it to Miss Churchward, okay? We'll have to work out some safeguards for MILLIE's memory. I'd say a man could make himself very wealthy by tampering with what MILLIE tells Barbara. And that's not the worst that could happen."

  Rand looked thoughtful. "I'll need a couple of specialists in programming. High-priced ones."

  "You'll have them. Now, in future I want everyone going into a critical area to check in with Security. At least be looked at," Bonner said. "It won't be as convenient, but we have to do something. Meanwhile, life goes on."

  "Maybe," Tony said.

  "You still worried about the carbon filament deliveries?"

  "Some. That condominium outfit's holding us up for more than Mead likes to pay."

  "Like it or not, we've got to keep expanding. He'll pay it," Bonner said. There was a low tone from his phone. Bonner lifted the instrument. "Excuse me, Tony. Yes, Dee?" He listened a moment. "Put him on. She says it's John Shapiro with something urgent."

  Bonner listened again. "He what? I don't believe it."

  "Who what?" Rand asked.

  Bonner ignored Tony's question. "That tears it," he told the telephone. "I guess we'd better have another strategy meeting. Ten minutes, in the board room."

  There were more people in the conference room this time. John Shapiro had brought a legal assistant, a big competent-looking woman dressed as conservatively as Shapiro was. Colonel Cross, dark suit, narrow club-striped tie, was flanked on either side by uniformed majors. Jim Bowen, Rand's administrative assistant. There were others Tony Rand knew only vaguely, people from Mead's section, an athletic young man whose main job seemed to be fetching coffee for Barbara Churchward. (Did he have other duties? Tony wondered. The way she dressed would be enough to drive most men nuts if they had to work closely with her, and she must know that.)

  They listened, some patiently, some not so, while Major Devins talked. "Who was going to stop him?" Devins asked. "Not any of our people. He's our boss, dammit. He went down to the subway lobby and caught a train. Nobody had orders to keep him inside."

  "Not your fault," Art Bonner said. "I should have told MILLIE to let me know where Pres was at all times."

  "How could you know he'd do something like this?" Shapiro asked. "Hardly anyone's fault."

  "He must be off his rocker," Frank Mead said. 'Why the hell would he turn himself in? Messes up all our plans, too."

  "That it does," Art Bonner said. "Johnny, what's next?"

  Shapiro looked more at ease: he had his vested suit and his briefcase. He spread his hands elaborately. "As I said last night, preliminary hearing. Whenever you want it. I can delay, or start next week, as you'd like."

  "Can you get Sanders out on bail?" Barbara Churchward asked.

  "I doubt it. Not in a capital case," Shapiro said.

  That shook all of them. "Capital case? Death penalty?" Mend asked.

  "It's possible. I doubt they can win an appeal, though," Shapiro said. "But Murder One is what Big Jim Planchet insists on, and he's got the clout to make it stick with the D.A.'s office. Besides, it looks better for the politicians if Sanders is in jail. Lets them look much tougher than if he were walking around free waiting for trial. Of course we ask for bail, and if it's turned down we appeal, but that all takes time."

  "And meanwhile one of our people is in their bucket," Mend said.

  "I am not sure I understand your position," Churchward said. "You don't like Sanders-"

  "What's that got to do with anything? He's ours," Mend protested. "We can talk over this damn fool stunt when he's out. Meantime, the Angelinos have one of our people, and I don't like it."

  "I
see. Art, why did he turn himself in?" Churchward asked.

  "Guilt. He wants absolution," Bonner said. "And you know, it's our fault. In all we said while he was here last night, we didn't really make it clear that we're behind him. We talked a lot about strategy and what we ought to be doing, but we didn't just flat out say 'You done good, Pres'."

  "You did," Tony Rand said. 'When you first came into his office."

  "I didn't make it strong enough," Bonner said. "And we should all have said it. Here in this conference room, with every one of us backing him up, and a parade of people to say the same thing this morning. My fault."