wasn't anger now, merely a reaction to the air of tension that overhung the room.
I nodded, looked at Harry who had demanded to be there for this initial session. He was still nervous over the confrontation of the monsters. I tried not to mirror his unease. I turned back to Child and prepared myself for the assault upon his mental sanctity.
Stepping easily over the threshold, I fell through the blackness of his mind, flailing? ? and woke up to white faces with blurred black holes where the eyes should have been.
They mumbled things in their alien language, and they prodded me with cold instruments.
When my vision cleared, I could see it was a strange triumvirate: Harry, Morsfagen, and some unnamed physician who was taking my pulse and clucking his tongue against his cheek like someone had told him doctors were supposed to do when they couldn't think of anything intelligent to say.
'You all right, Sim?' Harry asked.
Morsfagen pushed my lawyer/agent/father-figure out of the way and thrust his bony face down at mine. I could see hairs crinkling out of his flared nostrils. There were flecks of spittle on his lips, as if he had been doing a lot of shouting in rage. The dark blue of his close-shaved whiskers seemed like needles waiting to thrust out of his tight pores.
'What happened? What's wrong? You don't get paid without results.'
'I wasn't prepared for what I found,' I said. 'Simple as that. No need for hysterics.'
'But you were yelling and screaming,' Harry protested, insinuating himself between the general and myself.
'Not to worry.'
'What did you find that you didn't expect?' Morsfagen asked. He was skeptical. I could have cared more, but not less.
'He hasn't any conscious mind. It's a vast pit, and I fell into it expecting solid ground. Evidently, all his thoughts, or a great many of them, come from what we would consider the subconscious.'
Morsfagen stood away. 'Then you can't reach him?'
'I didn't say that. Now that I know what's there and what isn't, I'll be all right.'
I struggled to a sitting position, reached out and stopped the room from swaying. The hex signs settled onto the walls where they belonged, and the light fixtures even stopped whirling in erratic circles from wall to wall. I looked at my watch with the picture of Elliot Gould on the face, calculated the time, assumed a properly bland expression, and said. 'That'll be roughly a hundred thousand poscreds. Put it on my earnings sheet, why don't you?'
He sputtered. He fumed. He roared. He glowered. He quoted the Government Rates for Employees. He quoted the Employer's Rights Act of 1986, paragraph two, subparagraph three. He fumed a bit more.
I watched, looking unshaken.
He pranced. He danced. He raved. He ranted. He demanded to know what I had done to earn any pay whatsoever. I didn't answer him. He finished ranting. Started fuming again. In the end, he put it down in the book and vouchered the payment before pounding on a table in utter frustration and then leaving the room with a warning to be on time the following day.
'Don't push your luck,' Harry advised me later.
'Not my luck, but my weight,' I said.
'He doesn't take to a subordinate position. He's a bastard.'
'I know. That's why I needle him.'
'When did the masochism arise?'
'Not masochism-my well-known God-syndrome. I was just passing one of my famous judgments.'
'Look,' he said, 'you can quit.'
'We both need the money. Especially me.'
'Maybe there are other things more important than money.'
Someone pushed us aside as equipment was trundled out of the hex-painted room.
'More important than money?'
'I've heard it said?'
'Not in this world. You've heard wrong. Nothing's more important when the creditors come. Nothing's more important when the choice is to live with cockroaches or in splendor.'
'Sometimes, I think you're too cynical,' he said, giving me one of those fatherly looks, something I inherited along with his last name.
'What else?' I asked, buttoning my greatcoat.
'It's all because of what they tried to do to you. You should forget that. Get out more. Meet people.'
'I have. I don't like them.'
'There's an old Irish legend which says-'
'Old Irish legends all say the same thing. Look, Harry, aside from you, everyone tries to use me. They want me to spy on their wives to see if they have been laying with someone else. Or they want me to find hubby's mistress.
Or I get invited to their cocktail parties so that I can perform parlor tricks for a batch of drunks. The world made me cynical, Harry. And it keeps me that way. So, if we're both wise, we'll just sit back and get rich off my cynicism. Maybe if a psychiatrist made me happy-go-lucky and at peace with myself, my talent would disappear.'
Before he could reply, I left. When I closed the door behind me, they were wheeling Child down the corridor.
His empty eyes stared fixedly at the softly colored ceiling.
Outside, the snow was still falling. Fairy gowns. Crystal tears. Sugar from a celestial cake. I tried to come up with all the pretty metaphors I could, maybe to prove I'm not so cynical after all.
I slid into the hovercar, tipped the Marine as he slid out the other side. I drove into the street, taking the small curb too fast. White clouds whooshed up behind me and obscured the AC building and everything else I put behind me.
The book lay at my side, the dust jacket face down because it had her picture on it. I didn't want to see amber hair and smooth lips imitating a bow. It was a picture that disgusted me. And intrigued me. I couldn't understand the latter, so I pretended to more of the former than I felt.
I turned on the radio and listened to the dull voice of the newscaster casting his tidbits on the airwave waters with a voice uniformly pleasant whether the topic was a cure for cancer or the death of hundreds in a plane crash. 'Peking announced late today that it had developed a weapon equal to the Spheres of Plague launched yesterday by the Western Alliance?' (Pa-changa, changa, sissss, sisss pa-changa, the Latin music of another station added in unconscious sardonic wit) '? According to Asian sources, the Chinese weapon is a series of platforms?' (Sa- baba, sa-baba, po-po-pachanga) '? above Earth's atmosphere, capable of launching rockets containing a virulent mutant strain of leprosy which can be distributed across seventeenmile-wide swaths of territory?' (Hemorrhoids really can be dealt with in less than an hour at the Painless Clinic on the West Side, another station assured me, though it faded out before it would tell me how much less than an hour and just how painless.) '? Members of the New Maoism said today that they had assurances from?'
I turned it off.
No news is good news. Or, as the general populace of that glorious year was wont to say: All news is bad news.
It seemed like that. The threat of war was so heavy on the world that Atlas must certainly have had a terrible backache. The 1980s and 1990s, with their general climate of peace and good will made these last fourteen years of tense brinksmanship all the more agonizing by comparison. That was why the young peace criers were so militant. They had never really known the years of peace, and they lived with the conviction that those in power had always been men of guns and destruction. Perhaps, if they had been old enough to have experienced peace before the cold war, their fiery idealism might have been metamorphosed into despair, as with the rest of us. I was very young in the last of the pre-war years, but I had been reading since before I was two and spoke four languages by the age of four. I was aware even then. It makes the present chaos more maddening.
Besides the threat of plague, there was the super-nuclear accident in Arizona which had claimed thirty-seven thousand lives, a number too large to carry emotion with it.
