John Brunner – Jagged Orbit

Somehow, though, despite hours of restlessness during the night which he had intended to devote to the quesof Diablo, Flamen had wound up without any plan of action for today. After the formalities, there was a long interval of silence which made Prior visibly anxHe had just cleared his throat and seemed about to utter some scrap of Smalltalk, when Flamen decided-almost to his own surprise-that he wasn’t going to bother about being diplomatic.

“Well!” he said, looking Diablo straight in the face. “I guess it fits your impression of blank society, doesn’t it, to find yourself here as the result of a bribe?”

Prior’s jaw dropped. Flamen turned on him a smile as sweet as honey. “Freeze it, Lionel,” he said. “I’m not in the right mood to be polite today, I’m afraid. I have agreed to take a bribe, and I’m feeling ashamed of myself.”

“But someone of Mr. Diablo’s known talent in the field-”

“Oh, sure! I respect his work tremendously. I also respect his well-known impatience with hypocrisy and doubletalk. I wish I was half as consistent.”

“I’m looking to you to learn how to give up being consistent,” Diablo muttered. “There’s no consistency in what’s happened to me these past forty-eight hours. Sure, go ahead and call me a bribe-it’s something of a privilege, I guess, to be treated as the price which can buy something from you.”

Who’d have thought it? I’m on the right track, Flamen told himself, pleased.

“So let’s skip all the pretense!” he exclaimed. “I’ll give you the bald facts why I agreed to having you sent here, shall I? We’re getting interference on our show and the Holocosmic engineers say they can’t eliminate it. I think there must be a good reason why not-it never affects any other transmission from their studios. I need the resources to stand up and argue with them, which means computer time in amounts I couldn’t ordinarily afford. So I made a bargain-or rather Lionel did, but I’m in total agreement with him on it.”

Diablo gave a thoughtful nod. “I see. It’s all fallen very patly, hasn’t it? Bustafedrel needed to find me a slot fast for fear of recriminations, you had a problem which needed Federal help, and here I am. So continue.”

Flamen hesitated. “I don’t mean to undervalue you-” he began, but Diablo raised a hand to forestall the rest.

“Friend, I don’t care what you say, or anyone else right now. I been so undervalued yesterday. You catch me?”

“I certainly agree with that!” Prior said hastily. “I mean, I told Voigt straight out: this man’s worth a couple of army corps!”

“So what’s an army corps worth these days?” Diablo snapped.

There was a further uneasy pause. Eventually Flasaid, “Nonetheless I am being impolite. I’m sorry. It’s partly lack of sleep, and partly having had the MorLenigo thing under my nose yesterday and thinking it was absurd. Say, what do you think of them letting him in?”

They’re out of their skulls,” Diablo shrugged. “But in that area they don’t have a monopoly.”

“No, it’s clear that Mayor Black also finally mislaid his marbles,” Flamen concurred. “Throwing you out, particularly on the say-so of an Afrikaner, is kind of like cutting your wrists to see the pretty red blood flow.”

“Expect me to contradict you? I’m not modest. Also I think I’m a better melanist than he is, and since you said you don’t approve of hypocrisy, I might as well lay it on record that I don’t plan to turn my coat and get even. If you were hoping I’d turn up with a pack of pre-canned slanders to undermine Mayor Black or Lenor whoever, you were wrong. I said I wanted the letof the Blackbury contract adhered to. It’s been done. That’s fair. So you can have any of what I’m carrying which I’d have used over my own beams if I hadn’t been thrown out of Blackbury. I don’t like blanks in general so most of what I have is anti-blank. If you’re honest enough to use it, I can get along with you. All of it, of course, is the truth.”

From the corner of his eye Flamen saw that Prior was goggling like a hooked fish, clearly horrified at the way the conversation was going. But for his part, he welit. There was something about Diablo’s aggresmanner which reminded him of his own younger self, and at the same time drew his attention to changes since then which had proceeded so slowly and gradually that he had never felt a discontinuity. It was like-yes, it was like having been lounging in a skimmer on a bright warm day, idly watching the clouds and enjoythe sun and the breeze, and suddenly waking up to the fact that you had an appointment an hour ago in a city five hundred miles distant in the wrong direction.

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