Dean Ing
Single Combat
PART 1: SEARCH & RESCUE
CHAPTER 1
The reverend Ora McCarty faced the wall in the most sacrosanct office of International Entertainment and Electronics and watched a holo image of himself sing an old inspirationaclass="underline" 'Rocky Mountain High'. It had aired — or so McCarty believed — during his Sunday morning program. From the corner of his eye McCarty could see the expression on the face of IEE Chairman Boren Mills. It was, in Ora McCarty's jargon, nervous-makin'.
The holovised McCarty strummed a last chord on a sequined guitar, held the last note, then winked from existence as Mills keyed his hand-terminal. "Hey, you cut off my finish," McCarty said affably.
"Call me a music-lover," Boren Mills replied in soft derision. "But don't tell me you didn't know that song is on the prohibited list."
McCarty turned to face the smaller Mills. "Aw, that's for Mormons! That song don't tempt people to take drugs, no matter what they think in Salt Lake—"
"Do I have to remind you who subsidizes your gentile services?" Boren Mills snapped, his bright dark eyes flashing under heavy brows. "If the church is liberal enough to support a mildly heretical preacher, the least you can do is exercise judgment with your material."
"Censor myself, you mean," McCarty grumbled. "Seems to me, you LDS folks—"
"Correction! I'm a Congregationalist, Ora. Never, ever, link me with the Latter-Day Saints."
"Well…" McCarty's half-smile suggested that he was buying a polite fiction, "… those LDS folks are happy with my mission just so long as it's mainly country-western entertainment that don't take issue with anything they want said."
"Entertainment is my middle name," said Mills with deliberate symbolism. IEE's middle name was 'entertainment', and whatever board members twice his age might prefer, thirtyish Boren Mills was IEE.
"Entertainment's what I gave my holo audience," McCarty nodded.
"Not with 'Rocky Mountain High," Mills rejoined, the receding vee of his widow's peak moving side-to-side in negation. "Your monitor has his orders. Since my last name is 'Electronics', what your holo audience got was 'In The Fourth Year of Zion'."
"The hell they did."
"The hell they didn't," Mills replied easily.
"I don't even know that piece," McCarty insisted, then formed a silent 'oh' of sudden enlightenment. Ora McCarty was still essentially a twentieth-century man in 2002 AD, coping with the technology of war-ravaged, Streamlined America. At times that coping was slow, and sullen. "You faked me."
"Regenerated you," Mills shrugged the implied correction. "Don't worry; thanks to us you never looked better or sounded half so good. Want to see what you really sang?" The Mills hand, small and exquisitely manicured, held the wireless terminal, thumb poised.
McCarty shook his head quickly, both hands up in dismay. "Now that's an abomination, Mr. Mills. And what's worse it makes me break a sweat to see a me that isn't me." To stress his rejection, McCarty turned his back on the holo wall and faced rooftops of Ogden, Utah outside the smoke-tinted glass panel. The giddy height of the IEE tower yielded a unique view; no other commercial structure in Ogden was permitted such an imposing skyward reach. McCarty supposed it had something to do with the microwave translators built into the temple-like spire. Even in architecture, IEE suggested its sympathy with the reigning Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints. Now that a Mormon administration directed the rebuilding of an America whittled down by ravages of the Sinolnd War, McCarty could condone such corporate cozening as good conservative business practice. He let his eyes roam past the city to salt flats shimmering in late spring heat, to the tepid Great Salt Lake beyond, so impossibly blue in the sun as to seem artificial.
As artificial, for instance, as his rendition of a song he'd never sung, or as his effectiveness as a man of God, when image-generating modules could replace him right down to the wrinkles in his shirt. Squinting against a glint of sunlight from the too-blue lake: "I wonder when they'll start fakin' the news," McCarty said.
"Oh, — I suppose someone will try it sooner or later," said Mills, but McCarty did not notice the subtle twitch that passed for a smile. "You can't imagine how much it cost FBN to regenerate your little ditty." It was, of course, very cheap. "If it happens again, you'll pay the tab. Try to curb your paranoid fantasies, Ora; as long as we maintain control of FBN Holovision, we won't often squander big money regenerating events."
Not once did Mills lie outright; as usual, his lies were chiefly implicit.
Reluctantly, McCarty faced Mills. "I guess the world isn't as simple as I'd like," he sighed, fashioning a shrug that ingratiated him to audiences; awkward, gangling, suggestive of a reticent mind in the big rawboned body. "I appreciate your takin' your own time on this, Mr. Mills. A lot of men wouldn't bother."
"A lot of men don't succeed," Mills replied evenly, with a light touch at McCarty's elbow, steering him to the door. Boren Mills was one of those compact models that did not seem diminished when standing among taller men. With a forefinger he indicated the needlepoint legend framed behind his rosewood desk: SURPRISE IS A DIRTY WORD. "See that your programming people check your scripts from now on. We can do without any more surprises on the Ora McCarty Devotional Hour."
"That goes without saying," McCarty murmured.
"Nothing goes without saying," Mills replied. "That's the essence of written contracts. Read the prohibited list, Ora."
Damn the man, thought McCarty, and tried to respond lightly as he stood in the doorway: "You've made me a believer, Mr. Mills. If I lost network support by stickin' a burr under the LDS's saddle blanket, I'd wind up so far out in the sticks you couldn't find me with a Search & Rescue team."
"Nicely put," Mills grinned, and terminated the interview. Mills was still chuckling to himself as he returned to his desk, knowing that McCarty could not fully appreciate his own jest. If the federally-funded Search & Rescue ever did seek the reverend Ora McCarty, McCarty would not survive that search.
CHAPTER 2
Ted Quantrill was not yet twenty-one, Marbrye Sanger was twenty-four; and their entwined communion was as old as humankind. Their Search & Rescue uniforms lay near, boot-tips aligned with unconscious military precision. Had the lovers stood erect there would not have been a centimeter's difference in their heights, for the long taper of her questing fingers was repeated in the span of her arms, the extraordinary length of her legs. Yet many men would have been reluctant, viewing her naked splendor, to seek her embrace. Those long limbs revealed the muscles of an athlete, the physical equal of the youth who shared her delight. Only in the upper body could his sinew overmatch hers.
Presently she smiled for him, her eyes heavy-lidded through an errant lock of chestnut hair, and arched against him as she felt his thrusts quicken. At his faint moan she pressed a forefinger against his open mouth, now grinning, teasing him, then reaching down with her other hand to milk his masculinity. At the same moment she made her eyes wide, her mouth a tiny V of innocence, brows elevated as if to ask, 'who, me'?
Gritting his teeth, laughing softly through the pulses of his own climax, he nodded back a silent, 'yes you'.
You, you and I, we together. They lay, mouths open to silence their breathing, her roan-flecked eyes interlocked with the startling green of his own.
Then he rolled slightly to one side, brought his right hand up, said in sign-talk: " I died. You?"
She would not lie to him about the little things. Signing in the bastard dialect they had learned while still in Army Intelligence: No. Doesn't matter. Love to watch you."