The hotel room said, “I am dealing, then, with a personality?”
“You might say that. I have an audience of twenty million. And the Bureau of Cultural Control has honored me with an award for the best musical series of the year.”
“Then,” the hotel room said sagely, “you can afford a dime.”
She paid the mechanism its dime.
“As a matter of fact,” the hotel room said, spurred into life by the coin, “I have at an earlier occasion composed a ballad of my own. I sing in the style of Doc Boggs. The ballad is called—”
“Hotel rooms,” Joan said, “even run-down ones, are not ethnic.”
She could have sworn she heard the old hotel room sigh. It was strange. But in fact these machines had become old and worn-out, had begun making mistakes; therefore they began to seem almost human.
In irritation she punched at its off stud and the garrulous construct wheezed into inactivity. Leaving her, mercifully, to plan her next step.
The Tennessee hills—controlled by the feral and uncooperative bands of Neeg-parts; if they wouldn’t do business with the Burgers and the plantations nor with the Ganymedian occupation authority, on what basis could she approach them? Through her reputation? Even the broken and corroding old hotel room, built probably back in ’99, had wanted to get into the act. It was reasonable, then, to suppose that Percy X, too, would like to reach a larger audience. Everyone, after all, had an ego.
It was too bad, she reflected, that she couldn’t paint herself coffee-color, call herself a Neeg and temporarily, for her own purposes, join them—not as a prying white potentially hostile visitor but as a new recruit.
She eyed herself critically in the cracked and yellowed mirror.
The Japanese blood was rather dilute, unfortunately. It gave her chitin-like black hair and eyes to match and a small, delicate body but very little else. Perhaps she could pass for an Indian. There were Indians among the Neeg-parts, she had heard. But no, she thought sadly; there’s no use kidding myself: Tm white. And white, to these descendants of the cult of Black Muslims, is white. I’ll just have to play it by ear, she decided.
From her luggage she took a pair of clinging but warm powder blue nylon coveralls. Sexy but tasteful, and in the latest fashion. She had observed some of the clothing worn by women in this out-of-the-way bale, but even for the sake of protective coloration $he could not bring herself to wear such museum pieces. It seemed that the unisexual mode, standard for at least fifty years in the outside world, had not as yet penetrated to Tennessee. This might well be the only spot left in the world where women’s clothing differed from men’s.
At the aud-phone dangling by only a few of its screws from the wall of the room she dialed the code number of the local taxi service. And then sat waiting, with her recording gear piled beside her, for the ionocraft cab to appear.
Tm still thinking, Paul Rivers told himself early that morning. He then heaved a wistful sigh and rolled over to give his belly the same opportunity to acquire a sunburn as his back had had. Here I lie, surrounded by the silent flesh of my fellow human beings, he said to himself with a trace of bitterness, and my mind goes nattering on, as if I were back at the university lecturing to some slightly dense class of undergraduates. My body is here but my mind -perhaps, students, the central problem of man is that he is never where he is, but always where he is going or where he has come from. Thus, when I am alone I am not really alone. And when I am with someone I am not really with them.
How, he asked himself almost angrily, do I get my mind to shut its big energetic mouth?
While lying face up Paul Rivers had kept his eyes closed to protect himself against the brightness of the sun, seeing nothing but the redness of that light, it being still uncomfortably bright as it filtered through his eyelids in lurid, vague, oozing patterns. Now his face turned away from the sun, he felt safe in opening his eyes.
The first sight that greeted his disgusted vision consisted of an empty tranquilizer bottle half-buried in the sand. Smell of salt-sea breeze, too; refreshing tang in the aroma of putrid seaweed and expired fish. Listen: the breathing rush of waves, endless birth, growth and death that means nothing. Distant shouts and laughter of the supposedly enlightened and innocent, but actually groggy and drugged; this done by the lethal occupying authority. Taste while you can, he commanded himself, that healthy sand in your mouth; feel it crunch and grind in your teeth. Experience that delightful tickle of sand fleas walking on your baking backside! This, he told himself sternly, is real living.
He was, however, unable to prevent himself from reading, instead, the label on the bottle. I am, he had to admit, my own most hopeless case.
A shadow fell upon the still-life of the tranquilizer bottle in the nearby sand and Paul Rivers glanced up. Slowly. He couldn’t place the face; the nipples, however, were familiar. Ah, he now remembered. It was Miss Holly Something-or-Other, the Vice-President of the local chapter of the Sexual Freedom Society.Perhaps in order to avoid the appearance of complete nudity she wore a pair of horn-rimmed, oval-lensed sunglasses. She must be in her late teens or early twenties, he thought vaguely. A little too young for me, possibly, but still—
Tall and tawny, with Earth-mother brown hair falling loosely to the small of her back, Miss Holly stood over him with a gentle smile on her full, unlipsticked lips and met his gaze with half-closed, fearless eyes. Miss Holly was, he decided, the only good argument he had yet come across for the principles of the Sexual Freedom Society, but she was, simply in being as she was, a very persuasive, if not conclusive, one. Without a word she knelt, leaned over and kissed him lightly on the cheek.
Her gesture of greeting completed, she wet her lips with her tongue and spoke. “Vidphone call for you, Doctor Rivers.” He noticed for the first time that she was holding in her palm a cigarette package-sized vidphone. How can this be? he thought. Nobody but the central office knows where I am, and they wouldn’t bother me on my vacation. Puzzled, he took the vidphone and focused his eyes on the tiny screen. It was, indeed, the home office; he recognized the image as his immediate superior, Dr. Martin Choate. Because of the 3-D and color Dr. Choate looked like some sort of underworld elf peering up out of an imprisoning box.
“Hello, elf,” Paul Rivers said.
“How’s that?” Dr. Choate said, mildly startled. “Now, Rivers, you know I wouldn’t disturb you if it wasn’t important.”
“Yes?” Paul Rivers said patiently, in the encouraging voice he had developed from long practice in getting reluctant talkers to come to the point.
“I have a patient for you,” Dr. Choate said, and stopped again, searching for words.
“Who is it?”
Dr. Choate cleared his throat, smiled weakly and said, “The human race.”
Dingy, with scaling enamel, once bright green but now the color of mold, the tattered ionocraft taxi settled into the locking frame at the window of Joan Hiashi’s elderly hotel room. “Make it snappy,” it said officiously, as if it had urgent business in this collapsing environment, this meager plantation of a state once a portion of a great national union. “My meter,” it added, “is already on.” The thing, in its inadequate way, was making a routine attempt to intimidate her. And she did not precisely enjoy that.