His mind wandered off down a side alley when she reached Madison. Perhaps the answer would be to get in touch with the IBM directorate and tell them there was somebody in the Ginsberg who displayed an abunbelievable gift for servicing complex autocircuitry?
No, that wasn’t the solution either. As well as hiring far too many neo-puritans, Inorganic Brain Manufacturers Inc. were notorious for having rid themselves of all their kneeblank employees, down to humble sales reps.
Could he become a Gottschalk? The arms traders were among the nation’s largest consumers of high-order automatics, and no doubt they would find knee rehandy in their dealings with the black enclaves.
On reflection, however, Reedeth doubted whether that would be suitable employment for Madison. His Army experiences had been successfully brought under control in his mind, but it was a matter of record that his period in combat had thrown him completely off his gyros, and who could say that exposure to close conwith modern armaments would not trigger a reof his trouble?
How convenient it would be, he thought, if Flamen were to take up the Madison case, make a grand fuss about the plight of a knee stuck in a hospital long after he had qualified for discharge. Come to think of it, it might be possible to leak the story to one of Flamen’s knee counterparts, who enjoyed far bigger audiences and what was more mainly overseas.
Reedeth brightened, and made a mental note to see if he could locate a tendril of the grapevine leading to, say, Pedro Diablo. It would have to be done discreetly, but properly handled it might very well result in somevolunteering to act as his legal guardian and enahim to get out at long last.
But there was no time now to follow that up. Lyla had completed her survey of the audience and returned to the edge of the mat they had spread out for her. She nodded at Dan, who was standing by with his repoised, and reached for the hip pocket of her Nix. Producing a small flat bottle which Reedeth only caught a glimpse of, she shook from it a little red capFlamen tongued the switchbar of his cameras to a closeup setting and captured her swallowing the pill.
Whatever it was. Reedeth hadn’t realized that pythonesses took anything to help them go into trance. Was that a commercial product, or something alchemihome-cooked from a cut-and-try formula? Once more he consulted his desketary, and this time what he learned made him stare at Lyla’s slender body in sheer incredulity.
For a moment or two she stood stiffly vertical, eyes closed. A heartbeat later she fell to the mat, writhing. Her back arched as though in orgasm. Spittle leaked from the corners of her mouth as she began to pant and gasp. Her hands contorted into claws and snatched at the air as though fighting off an invisible attacker-slash, slash!
The watchers, including Reedeth who had been prefor such an event because the desketary had told him about sibyl-pills, tensed in alarm. The girl’s muscles, contracting more violently than an epileptic’s, seemed likely to tear her apart at the joints; her breasts bobbed on her torso like a pair of buoys on a rough sea. Flamen was continuing to record, but from his expression it was plain he didn’t expect to be able to transmit this footage. If he tried, complaints from neo-puritans would almost certainly get him banned.
Only Dan Kazer stood by calmly, glancing every few seconds at the watch on his left wrist, his other hand holding the pause switch of his recorder. Flamen turned the cameras on him just in time to catch his look of expectancy as he let the switch go, and almost in the same instant Lyla’s eyes jarred open, two deep wells into the remotest regions of her subconscious mind. From her mouth emerged a dreadful loud forced voice, bariand masculine.
“Ghnothe safton!” she boomed.
“That’s not English,” Reedeth snapped at his desketary. “What is it-Hebrew?”
“Classical Greek with a Demotic accent,” said the desketary in a faintly patronizing tone; Reedeth had often wanted to get back at the smug bastard who had programmed the linguistic section of their data banks. “It’s the motto from the temple of the Delphic oracle and it means ‘know thyself.'”