Your area awaits you, naturally; you have not been ignored.”
Mekkis retorted with huge irony, “And what bale is left for me?” No doubt a worthless scrap of a bale, the dregs. He experienced through the union of the Group Mind the collective sardonic amusement of the Common, directed at him; they enjoyed his frustration and impotence. “Name me that bale,” he said, and prepared to endure it, whatever it consisted of, however ignoble.
“The bale,” the Chief Elector informed him gleefully, “arranged for your management, is the Bale of Tennessee.”
“Allow me to consult my reference material,” Mekkis said, and, by telepathic communication, established contact with his librarian at his residence. A moment later there visually appeared within his brain a full description, itemization and map of the bale. And evaluation thereof.
Mekkis fainted dead away.
The next he knew he lay supine in the general chamber of Major Cardinal Zency’s residence; he had been transported to the home of his friend to recover his wits.
“We tried to prepare you,” Zency said, coiled nearby solicitously. “A little splash of brigwater and laut? It’ll clear your head.”
“The pnagdruls,” Mekkis swore thickly.
“Well, you’ll live many more years. Eventually—” “A lifetime of work.” He managed to raise the fore-portion of his body and steady himself. “I won’t go. I’ll resign from public service.”
“Then you can never again—”
“I don’t want ever again to enter the Common. I’ll live out my life on a satellite. Alone.” He felt rotten. As if he had been stepped on by one of the clumsy enormous bi-pedal lower life forms. “Please. Give me something to lap.”
Presently an obliging staff member of Zency’s domicile placed an ornate, chaste dish before him; he lapped dully, blindly, as Zency watched with concern.
“There are,” he said presently, “unpacified Negroes in that bale. And hordes of Chipua and Chawkta Indians holed up there in the mountains. It’s the bung-hole of the conquered realms. And they know it; that’s why they gave it to me. It’s deliberate !” He hissed with wrath, totally ineffectual wrath. “More brigwater.” He beckoned to a miserably inferior species of household servant. It approached.
“Perhaps,” Major Cardinal Zency said tactfully, “it’s a compliment. The one bale which requires genuine work. the sole area our military failed to neutralize. Now they’ve given up, turned it over to you. No one else wants to handle it; it’s too tough.” At that Mekkis stirred. The idea, although it smacked of self-serving rationalization, roused him slightly. Had he thought of it himself he would have been forced on ethical grounds to dismiss it. But
Zency, whom he respected, had advanced it; that took the onus from it. But even so he did not want the task. If the military had failed, how could he succeed? Distortedly he recalled news reports about the Neeg partisans in the mountains of Tennessee, their fanatical and skillful leader, Percy X, who had eluded all the homotropic destruct devices programmed with him in mind. He could imagine himself confronted by Percy X, in addition to the demand from the Council that, as in all other bales, he carry out the customary program: destroy the local structure of government and create an overall puppet monarch.
“Tell them,” he said to the Major Cardinal, “that I’m sick; I swallowed too large a gork egg and it’s stuck along my digestive tract somewhere. I’ll be lucky if I don’t burst—you know, the way Cpogrb did last year when he consumed—what was it?— four gork eggs at a single sitting: What a sight; pieces of him turned up all over the dining room.” Memory warmed him momentarily, memory of a fine Common-mind get-together, a fusion for gaiety and pleasure, without the compulsion of duty emanating from the core of the polyencephalic mind, the Electors of the Bench and the powerful entities of the clock side of the hall.
“Look at it this way,” the Major Cardinal said. “If you succeed you’ll make your military predecessor look like a fool—will make the whole military faction look like fools, in fact.”
“That’s true,” Mekkis said slowly. A plan had found its way into his mind. Tennessee was at present a hodgepodge of more or less autonomous feudal entities, each centered around some plantation owner or merchant prince, a condition which had resulted from the collapse of Earth’s central government. It would be Mekkis’ task to select one of these tiny tyrants and elevate him to sovereignty over the entire bale, above all his jealous compeers. No easy task, that; no matter whom he picked there would be objections, even hatred, from the others. But what if he picked Percy X? Who else would be more grateful for the authority and thus more docile a puppet? Naturally the merchant princes would cluck frantically, but they would no matter who was chosen; this way perhaps the Neegs and Indians could be pacified and the rulership decided all in one swift act.
“That’s true,” Mekkis said again, this time with a note of hope in his voice. There was no longer any question of backing out.
Certainly the prophet on his staff had been right; there had lain something to be wary of directly in his path today. And he had squirmed directly into it, head-on. As usual.
And, as usual, he saw a solution—to his advantage.
II
The hotel room, second-rate, dirty and delapidated as it was, managed to cackle in a senile but penetrating voice, “Mr. Paying Guest, do not attempt to leave without settling your bill at the desk downstairs.”
Anyhow, Joan Hiashi reflected, it doesn’t have an artificial Southern accent built into its circuit, even down this far in Swenesgard, Tennessee. “I was,” she said with a toss of her head, “merely looking out the window. You don’t keep yourself too clean, do you?”
“At the miniscule rates charged for me Well, that certainly was true. And the hotel still accepted the old UN currency, recalled by the occupation authorities throughout most of the planet. But news of the mandatory currency-redemption evidently hadn’t reached the bale of Tennessee. And that was good, because about all she had brought with her was the familiar, now wrinkled and worn UN bills, plus her pre-war credit cards, a whole pack of them, for whatever they might be worth here.
And, in addition, her head hurt. The fresh air from outside did nothing to help it; in fact, if anything the
air made it worse because it was the stale and flaccid wind of an unfamiliar, inconsiderate foreign area. She had never been in the bale of Tennessee before but she knew how, during the war, it had unglued itself from the national identity, decaying intq a self- contained and dreary little state cryptic to Northerners such as herself. And yet, because of her business, she had to be here.
To the autonomic articulation circuit of the hotel room—feeble, of some crude pre-war design—she said, “What can you tell me about the local ethnic folk singers?”
“What’s that, Mr. Paying Guest? Repeat your query.”
She had already, told it several times that she was a “Miss,” not a “Mister,” but it was, it seemed, pro grammed to use only one form of address. Firmly, she said, “This area, the south in general, has for a century and a half produced the finest native jazz and ballad singers in the entire country. Buell Kazee, for instance, came from Grinder’s Switch, not far from here. Bascom Lamar Lunsford, the greatest of them all, came from South Hirkey Creek, North Carolina. Uncle Dave Macon—”
“A dime.”
“What?”
“If you’re going to interrogate or pontificate you just insert a UN silver dime in the appropriate slot mounted handily at eye-level slightly to your left.” Joan Hiashi said, “You don’t recognize any of the names, do you?”
Reluctantly the seedy, deteriorating hotel room admitted, “No.”
“One of the first true jazz recordings,” Joan said, sitting down on the crooked, narrow bed and opening her purse, “was grooved by the Brunswick Company in 1927. The Reverend Edward Claybum singing True Religion. That was one hundred and twenty years ago.” She took out a pack of Nirvana filter-tip marihuana cigarettes and lit one. They were not the best, but since they were manufactured by the company for which she worked she got them free. “I know,” she continued, after a pause for holding the smoke deep in her lungs, “that other more
