And then he had to fight his hangover.
The maid Estelle came silently to him at nine with a remedy of some sort, a pill fizzing in a glass of water. Apparently it was the routine after-party treatment in the
Turpin household. Five minutes later he felt a little better. He sat up in bed, sipping the coffee that she had also brought, and used the remote-control to turn down the TV. She had switched it on, without asking him, as she went out. He’d already noticed that these extraordinary people didn’t seem to feel that a room was habitable unless either bland music or a TV image were included in the decor.
He postponed consideration of his self-revelation to Danty, because, on the one hand, the subject was too complex to analyze while he was hung over, and on the other, although he felt the sky had fallen on him he had not yet been hauled away to a cell.
Of course, by his standards this room could have done duty for one; it was larger by a bare meter in each direction than the bed . . . though there were closets built into the wall.
He shook his head incredulously. Two hundred thousand dollars That was what his briefing said Turpin had had to pay for this-this rabbit-hutch And his was only in the medium range. The most expensive apartments here had two extra rooms and a party-hall that didn’t have to be shared, and set the buyer back twice as much. But you didn’t aspire to that unless you were on the Energetics General Board or of staff rank in the armed forces. In this particular tower, Sheklov knew, the penthouse belonged to a four-star Air Force general.
How did a nation get into a mess like this?
So far he hadn’t managed to explore this one city, let alone the surrounding country, but he had been thoroughly stuffed with data, and against the throbbing of his head he fought to organize what he recalled into some sort of relevance to his situation. Lots of glib catch-phrases came to mind, for example: “Human beings are subject to forces so ingrained in their thinking as to render them incapable of detached evaluation of their own behavior.”
Yery helpful. In other words: “All we learn from history”-or psychology, or anthropology, or ethnology-“is that we learn nothing from history”-or psychology, or . . .
Yes.
Still, these people had learned how to make a first-rate anti-hangover pill. He was already able to look directly at the brightly sunlit window of the room without narrowing
his eyes. No doubt of it, Lakonia offered some lovely views-those towers like a solemn crazy forest, the sparkling lake, the redwoods in the distance which, force grown or not, were splendid trees, rivaling anything he had seen in Siberia.
And their Chief Executive (nominal ruler) had been carried out, dead drunk, from the room adjacent . . .
Bewildered, he shook his head. It had to be an -illusion You couldn’t possibly run a country this way
Liar, his conscience said. It’s being done. So you can.
At which point his more orthodox attitudes overcame him: Yes, but look at the trouble it causes everyone else
He heaved an enormous sigh, told himself the hangover pill was perfect, superb, terrific, and finally managed to whip the crazy ringing nonsense inside his skull into some sort of pattern. It was a dismayingly random pattern-a mental counterpart of decadent non-representational art -but it had some expressionist overtones he found comforting because they indicated that he was at last beginning to feel, instead of just perceiving, the functionality of the extraordinary society he was visiting.
To begin with, this is NOT the Eastern Roman Empire. The hell with how many parallels you can drawl (Who am 1? Oh, that’s not hard to define. I’m the discontented mercenary within the gates, who has taken sufficient pay In coin stamped with the Emperor’s head-or rather, with the heads of Emperors, because they change their rulers like the weather!-to lie Indolent on the triclinium and open his mouth to the food offered by a domestic whore. Male or female.) POWI
A stab of pain lanced his forehead over his left eye; the hangover pill wasn’t, obviously, a hundred per cent efficient. He gulped more coffee and wondered wistfully what would have become of America if it had socialized cannabis instead of alcohol.