Country better than most adult trappers.
Earlier, Childe had taken Sandy's hand to lead her into dusk-shadowed garden furrows, to show her sister why they must not drive away the coyote that skulked near the garden. Sandy could not afford a fence and placed rabbit snares among the young crops — but there were far more rabbits than snares.
'Coyote's the best trap,' Childe had insisted, pronouncing it 'ky-oat' in Sandy's own Wild Country lingo.
She proved her contention with the tracks left by rabbit and coyote.
Now, half-watching the ancient cartoons on Mexico's XEPN holovision, Sandy directed her thoughts from the hapless animated coyote on holo to the shrewd mangy specimen which, she admitted, did patrol her garden. Were the rabbits innocent through their ignorance of guilt? Was ignorance of the law, in fact, the very truest defense? Well, — not when the coyote's justice was like the government's. Sandy had been too young to remember the more liberal prewar form of justice. She knew that she preferred Wild Country and the barter system over the kind of regulation imposed to the North. Any system that would take Childe away to a Mormon orphanage was one Sandy intended to avoid — and so Sandy Grange's personal combat against Streamlined America had begun as flight; South from the few tentacles of officialdom, from her home in Sutton County. Too many acquaintances there would have helped take Childe away
'for her own good', and those Sandy trusted had all been taken by the war. Their father, dead of radiation sickness; their mother, shotgunned by bandits; Sandy's friend, Ted Quantrill, perhaps dead on some Asian battlefield.
On balance, Sandy preferred to live on her land, bought with contraband she had found. Increasingly she lived with books: The Way Things Work; Five Acres and Independence; Baby and Child Care', Twain and Doyle, Traven and Dostoyevsky; and of course the poetry, Benton and Reiss, Neruda, Durrell, and the bits she wrote in her daily journal. Language, she decided, could be a luxury that paid for itself.
Presently, Sandy placed the sleeping Childe on their bed, unplugged the holo, took her journal from the high shelf of valuables and sat cross-legged with the Lectroped's lamp to illumine the pages. Sandy's journal was no longer the product of indifferent grammar multiplied by creative spelling. Her books, her teachers, tutored her daily. Not that isolation and spare time for books could entirely explain Sandy's astonishing grasp of language; it may have been a genetic gift.
Between her twelfth and fourteenth birthdays Sandy knew a verbal blossoming, a becoming, that she could not explain. To call it a sea change would be to ravage a metaphor; for Sandy had never seen a body of salt water larger than a pot of soup. All right, then: demonstrably a South Texas ' land change; a broken prairie change. A Wild Country change.
Sandy's journal, 16 May
Replanted tomatoes from coldframes. Popcorn & peppers flourishing. Childe is wiser than I in ecology, for however sad his harmonies, that coyote is my garden sentry!
Thoughts on holo: it furnishes more lies than laughter. Surely no announcer can love language, the way they all butcher it. I hear so many castoff holo phrases when in town. No wonder I sorrow for the users. It must show in my face, and I cannot afford to be haughty. N.B.: ck. 'haughty' vs. 'haut'. French? Latin?
Childe's expertise in tracking brought me a queasy moment at dusk. Why? I have seen enough violence to harden me— or have I?
Childe reads animal signatures, crossing, doubling back;A fable of flight from cruel attack. Ebony droplets end one track— For, in moonlight, blood is black.
CHAPTER 8
The holo image of Eve Simpson, once a buxom child star and now IEE's director of media research, was familiar to millions; a sultry-voiced pneumatic package and, by remote means, frequent FBN interviewer of important people. Few, including those interviewed, would have recognized the hundred kilos of Eve's real flesh which had swollen with her clout.
The public Eve, interviews and all, was an electronically-managed image. The private Eve was bloated, brilliant, willful, and in some ways unmanageable.
Boren Mills had lusted first for her famous body, enjoyed it less as he wallowed in it more, and had finally turned toward still younger, less pillowy embraces. But by that time Mills knew the inner Eve, her mind incisive as a microtome, as voracious for media techniques as she was for sex. Mills's intellectual arrogance was tempered by the knowledge that Eve Simpson's subtleties rivaled his own. By now each knew the others uses. And abuses.
'You're going too far,' Eve snapped, thumbing the fax sheet Mills had carried to her condominium-sized office.
'Don't tell me the system can't handle a message uniquely tailored to each household,' Mills wagged a finger in warning. 'I've channeled too much money into your media research and read too many progress reports.' It was such hot stuff that Mills had insisted on the electronic programs being stored in a government-controlled underground vault. There, it would not be pilferable by some industrial spy.
But Eve snorted, setting off ripples in the flesh at her throat. She had the trick of switching from the nasally sensuous to imperious tones without pause. 'Not the electronics, goddammit, I'm talking about viewer reaction. Boren, you're asking for a level of message control that assumes viewers will never compare videotapes,
Mills reflected on the lifetime appointments of media commissioners and waved the objection away. 'Not that the Indys could do anything about it,' he said.
'Legally? No, your risks aren't legal; they're charismatic.' In media research, 'charisma' no longer referred strictly to people. Any message that approached overwhelming credibility was said to be charismatic. Eve was working on it. 'As long as John Q. talks to his neighbor, you'll get some coalition of fruitcakes who'll call FBN's credibility on the carpet. Even if you cleaned up your act afterward, it'd be bye-bye charisma — and bye-bye to some network ad accounts for FBN. Is that what you want?'
Mills, sitting on an arm of Eve's ample couch, sighed and retrieved the fax sheet. 'So the problem is still word-of-mouth,' he mused. 'Which means we work harder to alienate the bastards from one another.'
'Divide and conquer,' Eve chuckled. 'Welcome to media theory. Nice to know my chief exec is still capable of an intuitive leap.'
Sharply: 'Don't patronize me, Eve. Papa spank.'
'What would urns do,' she cooed, sapphire insets winking in her fingernails as she reached out to knead the calf of his leg; 'tie me down like old times? A wittle domestic westwaint for baby?'
He shifted his leg away. 'How about lifting your pass to the synthesizer lab? Would that be enough restraint for you?'
A shrug; the sausagelike fingers flirted in the air. 'Go ahead, bugfucker, then you'd need someone else to deal maintenance doses to your bloody Chinese slaveys.'
'Someone easier to dear with than you are, my dear,' said Mills, and let his threat lapse. 'By the way: Young's protocol people expect us to put in an appearance when he presents those S & R citations in Santa Fe. Formal, of course.'
'A politician after my own heart,' she murmured, 'parading his hit teams as saviors and reaping public applause for it.'
'I don't know if the rover bunch will be there,' he said, well aware that a man licensed to kill embodied raw potency to Eve Simpson.
'You know how I hate public display,' she said, and Mills knew it was self-display she meant. 'Will we be screened?'
'Not from the Prez, but they'll split-screen the dais to make the Secret Service happy. Nobody will see you — us — except Young and a few others like, oh, Lon Salter. You can ogle the beefcake all you like,' he said wryly.
'It's not window-shopping I like; it's trying things on.'
