Lonely, perspiring in the cruel summer sunlight, he found his eyes settling once more on the signs adjacent to the main guardpost. They said: blackbury, formerly BROWNBURY.
One of them also said (but this was not part of the original wording, only a scrawled addition in hard-gloss paint): Honky dont let the sun shin on you head it make you an easy target.
“Talk about a Red Queen’s Race,” Matthew Flamen said moodily, dialing a drink from the liquor console in his compulsorily well-appointed office deep in the Etch-mark Undertower.
“What?” The round face of Lionel Prior, which had apone moment earlier in the lifesize comweb screen, stared at him blankly. Prior was Flamen’s manager, agent, chief confidant and universal dogsbody. He was also his brother-in-law, but that was the least important part of their relationship.
“Lewis Carroll,” Flamen said. “Running as hard as you can and only managing to stay in the same place.”
“You mean it’s from a book?”
“Sure it’s from a book. Don’t tell me-don’t tell me!” Flamen raised a weary hand; finding it had picked up the waiting drink on its way, he sipped. “You don’t read books because they contaminate the purity of your apto the medium. One of these days it’s going to dawn on you that it also makes you ignorant and ill-eduWhat the-?”
In the middle of his last utterance, Prior had disapand a swirl of multicolored blobs now filled the screen, accompanied by a very faint but disturbing howl as of a mad dog lost in fog far off across a haunted marsh.
On the wall of the duplex penthouse home of Michaela Baxendale, nineteen-year-old sensaysh-still; only just still; it had been a long run since age fifteen-a large automatic meter displayed a swinging needle which this morning had edged into the red zone of the dial. Time for another spell of work.
Cursing, she walked naked around the eleven rooms into which the current party had spread, kicking as many bodies as she could into wakefulness, ordering them to drag out the ones which were completely inert. Having dialed the robots to clear away the broken furniture and the soiled rugs and fetch some new ones, she started gathering up the material that came to hand. There was a satch filter in the comweb slot which routed advertising circulars directly to the sewers, but one item had evaded it: yet another stern letter from the city sanitation authorcomplaining about the lack of toilets in the apt. She’d had them taken out and enjoyed watching them crash forty-five stories to the street.
She re-composed her standard reply: “I was picked out of the gutter, wasn’t I? You can’t expect me to lose my gutter habits overnight!” It had been a clincher four years ago when Dan Kazer launched her upwards topenthouse level. It made a mess of things, but what the hell? There were always more things. Besides, some troubledome out in Omaha was compiling a thesis on the significance of bodily effluents in the later works of Michaela Baxendale. It wouldn’t be fair to undermine him.
Along with the letter, then: a 1979 Johannesburg phone directory, a pre-pseudorganic edition of The Golden Bough, a Krafft-Ebing which retained the original Latin passages-that would do. She spliced chunks of them together and by nightfall the meter on the wall was healthily back into the green.
Prior’s picture came back and he was scowling. “That settles it!” he fumed. “Don’t we have enough trouble alwithout our own comweb right here in the Etchgoing into some crazy orbit?”
“You want to talk without being interrupted, darl,” Flamen said wearily, “you just shift your butt over here. Hell, you’re only the other side of that wall!” Not that that invitation was likely to be very well received, he glossed silently. Prior was a totally different personality from himself, with strong neo-puritan leanings, and his commitment to the principle of keeping a spoolpigeon show on the beams seemed to be rooted not so much in an abstract dislike of hypocrisy-which was what Flaliked to think of as his own standpoint-as in a wish to improve the mask of proper social behavior, the imcoffin to hide the corruption within. Hence he kept his distance, dealt with people by choice via a comscreen, feeling face to face contact a waste of the fawhich financial success had brought to him. It made him a perfect buffer in negotiations between MatFlamen Inc. and the Holocosmic directorate, but sometimes it became ridiculous.