Sudden uncontrollable rage took possession of her. She stormed back to the Lar’s shrine and seized it by its protuberant ears. It was a Model YJK, the most suitable in the non-customized range for a pythoness or other similar talent. according to the accompanysales leaflets. In form it resembled a crouching fen-nee, the big-eared desert fox.
“Luck and good fortune!” she said between her teeth. “Liar liar liar rotten liar!” At each word she gave the idol a vicious twist between her hands, hoping somewould snap off, but the tough flexible plastic merely sprang back into shape; only the tail assumed a limp question-mark curve.
“In that case-” she said, and strode over to their one openable window. Flinging it up, she started to hurl the Lar the thirty-plus meters to the street below, and instantly a beam lanced out of darkness and cracked the lintel, showering her with dust and concrete chips.
Gasping, clutching the Lar to her like a child, she dropped to the floor. For long moments all she was aware of was the muscle-tension and foul taste of her own terror, and the huge thumping beat of her heart. Her mind’s eye was filled with the picture of herself lying on the windowsill, as she might have fallen had the laser’s alignment been accurate, with a seared line across her breasts.
Eventually she recovered enough self-possession to think of putting out the light, closing the window-very cautiously, from the side at arm’s length-and replacing the Lar in its niche, distantly aware that if she had inthrown it away there would have been a hell of a fight with Dan. The seven-day appro was up toand if they couldn’t return it they would be billed two thousand tealeaves.
Then, standing well back in shadow, she peered out of the window to see what was going on. A side-effect of joylets was to reduce auditory sensitivity; she had to strain through a kind of muffling mental blanket to perceive faint exterior sounds, but now she was paying attention what she heard took on a familiar pattern that would ordinarily have put her instantly on the alert. Barely discernible chanting and drumming, as though one were suddenly to notice the circulation of the city-monster like an amplified human pulse; a screaming child, maybe caught on the street between police barriers, parents too frightened to come out looking for it; once long ago when she was about fourteen she had heard a sober middle-class couple, friends of her mother’s, quietly discussing during a riot in which one of their own sons had been stranded whether they should have another of their own were he to be found dead, or whether they were too old, and better advised to adopt.
The voice of the novice Gottschalk rang out in memory, offering them-what was it?-“guns for a mere sixty-three with maker’s warranty.” She clenched her fists in blind frustration. Another of their damnable promotions, presumably! It was the regular Gottschalk technique: select an area where sales were below average, saturate it with rumors until someone’s temper reached the breakpoint and the inevitable division occurred into blank and kneeblank, and then the following day take adof people’s frayed nerves to sell guns, grenades and mines.
But a droning from overhead disturbed her train of thought, and she dropped below the windowsill to peer upwards. She saw a police gunship hovering under its rotors, and realized that this wasn’t any mere Gottschalk promotion. That was one of the big ships, capable of leveling whole city blocks. She’d seen them do it on news-tapes-
News! They’d acquired a vuset, hadn’t they? Furious now at her own forgetfulness, she headed for it, turned back to blank out the windows-that sniper was too damned trigger-happy for comfort and might well fire on the reflection from the screen even if she turned it away from the window-and traced the cord along the floor until she found the leech. When she clipped it to the wall the set hummed to life.
On the Holocosmic channel: advertising. It was well into prime time by now, of course. Advertising on Global-advertising on Ninge, NY-NJ-advertising on Pan-Can. What was that? An unmarked setting, between Pan-Can the big Canadian fixed-antenna relay poised at twenty thousand meters not in orbit but on a mono-molecular cable and the adjacent channel allotted to Quebe‡ois French-language programs. Something had lit the screen which shouldn’t have been there.