There was a short silence. Jogajong spoke stiffly to end it.
“That is hardly the attitude I’d have expected from an American officer!”
“I’m not an American officer. They gave me a rank because it was a convenient way of blackmailing me into behaving myself. As ‘Lieutenant’ Hogan I can be arrested and tried secretly by court-martial if I don’t do as I’m told. Apart from that I’m a very dull, ordinary kind of codder with one natural aptitude and one that’s been trained on me by means I never dreamed were possible. My natural aptitude eventually bored me, but my taught one makes me hate the sight of myself.”
“In my country,” Jogajong said, “a man who thinks like you goes voluntarily to join his ancestors. Or used to in the old days. Now, the usurper Solukarta has copied your Christian habits and closed that way of escape. Which is a reason why we have so many muckers, I think.”
“Possibly.” In the old days of a month ago, Donald might have been intrigued by that suggestion; now he let it pass. “But I’m not at the suicide level yet. I can at least comfort myself with the idea that whatever I’ve done I’ve helped to nail a lie, and I’m coming to think that lying is among the worst of all human failings. Next to actual killing. And experience has made us almost equally good at both of them.”
“I have killed many people and seen many more killed on my orders,” Jogajong said. “It is what must be paid to buy what we want.”
“What we’ve been told we want, by liars more skilled than ourselves.”
Jogajong’s face froze into a scowl. “I’m sorry, Mr. Hogan,” he said, rising. “I see little point in continuing this conversation.”
“That makes two of us,” Donald agreed, and turned his back.
* * *
And the next day was much the same except that, as the nurse had warned, Sugaiguntung passed into delirium for several hours. Donald sat beside him in the cave, listening to ramblings in Yatakangi whose hypnotic effect kept driving him off into musings of his own and sometimes into sleep. However, in the evening one of the fisherfolk from Gongilung risked his life and brought some of the necessary drug from a pharmacy there, and the delirium was over by the time Donald found he was ready for sleep.
Also the next day was like the first.
* * *
So was the next.
tracking with closeups (27)
RECIPE FOR A MUCKER
Philip Peterson had been at home all evening on his own, brooding. His mother had been invited to a party of the sort that … well, in her view that sort of party was unsuitable for her son because he wasn’t yet blasé and hardened like his old mother. Instead he held a small private party of his own, starting with three whistlers and going on to the reefer-box. It took a while for the lift of the pot to work through the bringdown of the alcohol, but the two fighting together gave him rather a pleasant feeling, as though he too were about to fight, or make love, or something of equal importance.
At about eleven poppa-momma he called a girl he knew but she wasn’t in. After that he played some of his favourite zock recordings, the kind Sasha preferred not to hear while she was in the apt, and danced by himself around the room.
He began to feel lethargic, and he didn’t want that, so he took one of Sasha’s Wakup pills from the store she kept in the drawer at the head of her bed which she fondly believed he didn’t know about, but all the pill did was prevent him from going to sleep, not make him feel lively. He put the lights out and sat down in a chair and played over the zock recordings again. They showed up much better in the dark and he could practically feel himself being drawn into them. His clothes began to get in his way so he took them off and strewed them around, walking a repetitious ellipse on the carpet. Eventually he grew hungry and went to see what there was that he could dial for and chose one of his favourites, cold roast ribs of real beef with salad, which he mainly selected when Sasha was out.
(Later they drew attention to the “very underdone” code he had dialled and said learned things about masculinity symbols.)
He was sitting by himself slicing the meat and spearing the salad at about five past three anti-matter when the main entrance tell-tale showed that someone had used the Watch-&-Ward Inc. key coded to this apt. He got up and turned off the recording he was watching and went and stood over by the door.
The light from the corridor outside, when the door was opened, showed him Sasha giggly with her dress down around her waist and those fine plump curved rounded breasts exposed to the eager mouth of the stranger with her to whom she was saying sssh and wait a minute and do be quiet we don’t want to wake my son.
He reached out as the door was closed but before the light was turned on and used the knife he had been cutting his meat with to slash away the rest of Sasha’s clothes. The material divided with a soft cry and the skin down her back from below her right shoulder-blade to her buttocks divided with a scream. Light. The stranger, still straightening from the adoring obeisance he was performing at the altar of her ripe mature womanhood, said something about holding it, what the—?
Philip said, “What are you doing to my mother my mother my mother?” and at each repetition gestured with his right hand, which happened to be holding the very sharp steak-knife. On the third repetition the stranger turned his eyes up in their sockets and bubbled and lay down on the floor with both arms folded over the stab-wounds in his belly.
A high, shrill voice was ringing from wall to ceiling to wall. Philip turned off his ears and used his eyes now they were becoming adjusted to the light again. Standing near the door there was a rather beautiful woman, not quite as young as she once was, but almost naked except for some rags she was clutching to her. Irresistibly attracted, he approached her, letting fall the thing his hand happened to be grasping at the time, and when she dodged his lips and insisted on keeping her own mouth wide in that ugly expression he forced it shut with his fingers. After a little while she stopped resisting and let him do what he wanted, which he did with a great deal of enthusiasm because somebody somewhere else a long time ago had kept on stopping him from doing it on some wholly ridiculous grounds about being too young darling. Of course I’m not too young. Here I am doing it aren’t I?
But she wasn’t very exciting after the first time so he went and looked for a partner with a bit more energy and he got a coloured shiggy who happened to be in the elevator car and didn’t scream quite loudly enough and he was trying to persuade her white roomie whose apt she had been carrying the key for when someone who happened to be passing spotted him shoving her in through the door and the fuzzy-wuzzies fused him when he came out to look for the next one but that was too late.
context (26)
TO MYSELF ON THE OCCASION OF MY TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
I made me in a sterile hospital.
I’m sure the act, like me, was neat and clean.
Blood, pain, or mess? I frankly don’t recall.
I anyhow preferred to shift the scene
And went to school to learn what I approve.
Later I got a job and earned some cash
And found a girl. Together we make love.
One day, I guess, I’ll turn myself to ash
But that’s a thought on which I don’t much dwell.
To make quite certain I shall like me, I
Strictly observe injunctions that I read:
I scrub my skin to take away its smell,