And then the appalling, incredible thing happened. He continued, " 'Those who are full of desires for self-gratification, regarding paradise as their highest goal, and are engaged in many intricate scriptural rites just to secure pleasure and power as the result of their deeds for their future incarnations-' "
And Sheklov went on with it. He couldn't help it. He couldn't help it. Cold terror raged through him at every funeral-bell syllable that he muttered, but he heard his own voice, out of control, inexorably finishing the quotation.
“'Whose discrimination is stolen away by the love of power and pleasure and who are thus deeply attached therein, for such people it is impossible to obtain either firm conviction or God-consciousness.”'
Sweat crawled on his palms. The last time he had heard that truth, it had been in another language, in Banaras, and Donald Holtzer had never been to India.
That was his cover blown to bits.
.x. Later, he got extremely drunk. His cover as Holtzer. was proof against that-it had been tried to the limit during training sessions-and anyway the same thing was happening to a lot of other people. starting with Prexy, who fell down at about eleven-thirty and had to be discreetly removed. Then there was a curious blurred interlude involving two women who claimed the right to go to bed with Turpin because their husbands were necking with each other. He didn't follow the logic of that, but it came to blows, and one of them departed with a swollen eye that would call for her best cosmetic skills tomorrow.
Yet everyone was shaking Turpin's hand, or kissing his wife, or both, with enormous warmth, and saying, “Marvelous party, Dick You must come to our place very soon!”
What's the standard o1 a “good party”? The fact that no one was taken to the hospital?
Danty and Lora had disappeared early. Something about a night-ride? He wasn't sure, but he hoped . . .
Do I? He struggled to think through the alcoholic haze, and concluded that he hoped yes. If they were drunk enough to crash into a bridge on the superway, that would rescue him from his terror. In this country for a matter of hours, and already betrayed by his own stupidity! He felt as though he had exposed himself on the street, knowing there was a policeman within shouting distance.
Ultimately, a little before the last guests left at one o'clock, he found his way to the room he'd been allotted -normally Peter's-and screamed at a group of three men and two women using the bed. They went away, spitting at him, and he collapsed.
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.
Resuming: In that case, the hungry Huns at the gates of the Empire are-
“Oh, stop it!” he said aloud, and slapped his bare thigh. One didn't wear pajamas or night shorts here; according to his briefing, the mere possession of such garments was taken as proof of lack of confidence in one's ability to secure a partner for the night . . . of one sort or another. (He still didn't entirely believe the cover which, .Turpin had assured him, excused his overnight absence from home in order to collect a spy from the sea. The story was that Turpin now and then liked to sleep with a man, and because of his professional standing preferred to travel a long way from Lakonia to look for one. And never talked about where he had spent the night, and never asked what his wife had done while he was away.)
Did that brown-skinned “reb” Danty slip me a psychedelic drug last night? 1 feel as though . . .
But a glance at his watch, not removed because he'd been briefed concerning Americans' attitudes to time and knew he would be suspect if he were caught without a watch even while making love, confirmed that since he swallowed the first mouthful of his coffee only two minutes had gone by. The illusion that he had spent ages musing like this stemmed simply from the impression that he had been shouted at, non-stop, since he came ashore. He had met more people last night, for instance, in a shorter space of time, than ever before in his life, and digesting such a storm of information was like eating a nine-course banquet directly after fasting for a week. Mental eructations interrupted every argument he tried to think through to a conclusion.