“Mr. Bercovici—”
She didn’t wait Hurrying down the hall, legs going like pistons, bare feet hitting the spongy floor, thwunk thwunk thwunk. Trim flat rump: no buttocks at all, so far as he could tell, merely a termination, like a cat’s hindquarters. He was upset. Bercovici was the one who had interviewed him at the Rehab Center, all smiles and sincerity, thinning blond hair, pudgy cheeks. Don’t worry, Mr. Macy, I’ll be looking after you personally during your difficult transition back to daily life. Bercovici was his lifeline. Without looking back, the black girl called out, “Mr. Bercovici’s been transferred to the Addis Ababa office.”
“But I spoke to him only ten days ago, Miss Loftus!”
She halted. Momentary blaze of the eyes. “Loftus is quite sufficient,” she said. Then the expression softened. Perhaps remembering she was dealing with a convalescent. “Sometimes transfers happen rapidly here. But Mr. Fredericks has your full dossier. He’s aware of the problems.”
Mr. Fredericks had a long cavernous office, rounded and womby, from the sloping ceiling of which dangled hundreds of soft pink globes, breast-shaped; a tiny light was mounted in each nipple. He was a small dapper man with a moist handshake. Macy received from him a sweet sad embarrassed smile, the kind one gives a man who has had a couple of limbs or perhaps his genitals amputated to check the metastasis of some new lightning cancer. “So glad you’ve come, Mr. Macy. Paul, may I make it? And call me Stilton. We’re all informal here. A wonderful opportunity for you in this organization.” Eyes going to Macy’s Rehab badge, then away, then back, as though he couldn’t refrain from staring at it. The stigmata of healing.
“Show you around,” Fredericks was saying. “Get to know everybody. The options here are tremendous: the whole world of modern data-intake at your service. We’ll start you slowly, feed you into the news in ninety-second slices, first, then, as you pick up real ease at it, we’ll nudge you into the front line.”
Good evening, ladies and chentlemen, this is Pavel Nathanielovitch Macy coming to you from the Kremlin on the eve of the long-awaited summit.
The rear wall of Frederick’s office vanished as though it had been annihilated by some wandering mass of antimatter, and Macy found himself staring into an immense stupefying abyss, a dark well hundreds of feet across and perhaps infinitely deep. A great many golden specks floated freely in that bowl of nothingness. He was so awestruck by the unexpected sight that he lost a chunk of Fredericks’ commentary, but picked up on it in time to hear, “You see, we have thousands, literally thousands of free-ranging hovereye cameras posted in every spot throughout the world where news is likely to break. Their normal altitude is eighty to a hundred feet, but of course we can raise or lower them on command. You can think of them simply as passive observers hanging everywhere overhead, little self-contained self-propelled passive observers, sitting up there soaking in a full range of audio and visual information and holding it all on twenty-four-hour tape-scanning drums. Those of us here at Manhattan North Headquarters can tap in on any of these inputs as needed. For instance, if I want to get some idea of what’s doing at the Sterility Day parade in Trafalgar Square—” he touched a small blue button in a broad console on his desk, and up out of the darkness one of the golden specks came zooming, halting in midair just beyond the place where the wall of Fredericks’ office had been. “What we have here,” Fredericks explained, “is the slave-servo counterpart of the hovereye camera that’s hanging above that parade right now. I simply induce an output—here, we get a visual”Macy saw gesticulating women waving banners and setting off flares—“and here we get the audio.” Raucous screams, the chanting of slogans.
Macy hadn’t heard of Sterility Day before. The world becomes terribly strange when you spend four years out of circulation.
“If we want any of this for the next newscast, you see, we just pump the signal into a recorder and set it up for editing—and meanwhile the hovereye is still up there, soaking it all in, relaying on demand. Gathering the news is no frigging chore at all when you have ten thousand of these lovely little motherfuckers working for you all over the place.” A nervous giggle. “Sometimes our language gets a little rough around here. You stop noticing it after a while.” One doesn’t speak crude Anglo-Saxon to a man who wears the badge of his trauma on his lapel, is that it?
Fredericks had him by the arm. “Time to meet your new colleagues,” he was saying. “I want to fill you in completely. You’re going to love it working here.”
Out of the office. The rear wall mysteriously restoring itself as they leave, the dark well of the hovereyes vanishing once more. Down the humid fallopian passageways. Doors opening. Neat, well-groomed executives everywhere, all of them getting up to greet him. Some of them speaking exceptionally loudly and clearly, as if they thought a man who had had his troubles might find it difficult to understand what they said. Long-legged girls flashing the promise of ecstasy. Some of them looking a trifle scared; maybe they were hip to the evil deeds of his former self. Macy was aware of what crimes the previous user of his body had committed, and sometimes they scared him a little, too.
“In here,” Fredericks said. Into a bright, gaudy room, twice the size of Fredericks’ office. “I’d like you to meet the chief of daytime news, Paul. One hell of a guy. Harold Griswold, and he’s some beautiful son of a bitch. Harold, here’s our new man, Paul Macy. Number six on the late news. Bercovici told you the story, right? Right He’s going to fit in here perfectly.”
Griswold stood up, a slow and complex process, and smiled. Macy smiled. His facial muscles were beginning to ache from all the smiling he had done in the last hour and a half. One doesn’t smile much at a Rehab Center. He shook the hand of the chief of daytime news. Griswold was implausibly tall, slabjawed, perhaps fifty years old, obviously a man of great prestige; he reminded Macy somehow of George Washington. He wore a bright-blue tank suit, an earwatch, and an elaborate breastplate of several kinds of exotic polished Woods. His office was like a museum annex, with works of art everywhere: shaped paintings, crystallines, talk-spikes, programmed resonances. A million-dollar collection. In the corner, to the right of Griswold’s kidney-shaped desk, stood a striking psycho-sculpture, a figure of an old woman. Macy, who had been glancing from piece to piece by way of an implied compliment to Griswold, lurched forward at the sight of the last work, coughed, grabbed the edge of the desk to steady himself. He felt as though he had been clubbed at the back of the neck. Instantly friendly hands clutched at him. “Are you all right? What’s the trouble, fella?” Macy fought off dizziness. He straightened and shook himself free of the propping hands.
“I don’t know what hit me,” he muttered. “Just as I looked at that sculpture in the corner—”
“The Hamlin over there?” Griswold asked. “One of my favorites. A gift from my first wife, ten years back, when Hamlin was still an unknown—”
“If you don’t mind—some cold water—”
Two gulps. Another cup. Three gulps. Carefully averting his eyes from the figure of the old woman. The Hamlin over there. The sleek smooth network men frowning at him, then erasing the frowns the instant he noticed. Everyone so solicitous. “Forgive me,” he said. “You know, it’s only my first day on the outside. The strain, the tension.”
“Of course. The tension.” Griswold.
“The strain. We understand.” Fredericks.