And in an age when people were far too preoccupied with their own business for even the most savory scandal and gossip to attract their attention.
Definitely a Red Queens Race, he told himself. And I’m running short of breath.
Eugene Voigt didn’t go quite so far as to turn off his Screen, but he did disconnect his ears after the first minute or so of the eager-beaver’s diatribe. They were an excellent design, by far the best he had ever worn, and he liked the location of the silence trigger particuit was concealed under the drooping eaves of his moustache and could be inconspicuously activated by a mere touch of the tongue. Besides, it was offered as a regular feature instead of as a customized option. It would be worth sticking with this brand for a while-at least until rival manufacturers overtook it. And it was hard to discern what room was left for improvements short of direct sub-dermal implantation.
The eager-beaver (his name was irrelevant but he held a resonantly-titled post in the lower echelons of the PCC) kept talking for a full quarter of an hour, but Voigt had realized what he was going to say within the first few seconds and none of the phrases he caught by idle lip-reading contradicted his first guesstimate. When the tirade finally subsided he said, “Forget it. It won’t work.”
“But Holocosmic clearly intends to-”
“You won’t make it stick,” Voigt told him firmly. “You won’t make anything stick. The subject of communicaon this planet of ours, is dead.”
It was hot outside; it was much hotter inside because the lighting was old-fashioned and there had to be a hell of a lot of it. Pedro Diablo’s dark skin shone with perspiration. But his white teeth shone even brighter. He was enjoying himself.
“One final time!” he coaxed. “I swear they’re going to lap this up in Conakry and Lumumbaville!”
The actress playing King Leopold of the Belgians sighed and replaced her pale, effeminate, beardless whole-head mask, then trotted obediently across the studio floor to her place for the scene, her bottom wagas she went. Down to her waist she was wearing a full-dress military uniform jacket, the breast ablaze with orders and decorations, but her steatopygous butwere concealed by nothing more than a sort of docked horsetail of grass-stems. It was a great image, especially for areas where there was strong Muslim inand the concomitant view prevailed that women had no souls.
“Got those fetters ready?” Diablo called to the props man. “Remember I want them to break a sight easier this time than they did last! Bad associations if they take longer than five seconds-out of time-scale with the rest of the show. What the hell?”
He stopped dead in the very middle of the floor, on his way back to the control bubble, and realized that there were two armed macoots facing him.
“The Mayor wants to see you,” the one on the right said. His tall plastic mask-black-grounded, but with slashes of red, yellow and brown on the cheeks-made his voice resonate eerily.
“Tell him to wait!” Diablo snapped. There were very few people in Blackbury who could say that sort of thing to a macoot, but he’d been doing it for years. “I’m right in the middle of a show-can’t you see?”
The second macoot drew a casual smoking line on the floor with a low-powered beam from his laser. “He said now, white trash. You coming on foot, or as butcher’s meat?”
“What did you call me?” Furious, Diablo took half a pace forward, then canceled the movement as the laser’s muzzle jerked upward significantly. Those guns were the legacy of Anthony Gottschalk’s last visit; he’d recentcanned a show about them-in which for obvious proreasons they were reported as having been deright here in the city-and he had no illusions about the effect of concentrating two hundred fifty watts in a space no larger than the tip of a sewing-needle.
There was an eternal pause. Eventually he said, “Okay. O-kay. But I sure hope he doesn’t hang me up too long.” And he added to his cast and technicians as he moved towards the door, “See you back here after lunch, you-all!”