Algis Budrys: Michaelmas

“What’s Tass doing?”

“They’re not releasing it at all. They’ve been on the phone to Pravda and Berne. Pravda is holding space on tomorrow’s page three, and Tass’s man in Berne is having just as much luck as the AP. He’s predicting to his chief that Limberg will throw a full-scale news conference soon; says it’s not in character for the old man not to follow up after this teaser. I agree.”

“Yes. What are the networks doing?”

“They’ve reacted sharply but are waiting on the wire services for details. The entertainment networks are having voice-over breaks with slides of Berne, the Oberland, or almost any snowy mountain scene; they’re reading the bulletin quickly, and then going to promos for their affiliated news channels. But the news is tending to montages of stock shuttle-shot footage over stock visuals of the Jungfrau and the Finsteraarhorn. No one has any more data.”

“All right, I think we can let you handle all that. I’d say Dr. Limberg has dropped his bombshell and retreated to a previously prepared position to wait out the night. The next place to go is UNAC. What have you got?” Michaelmas’s fingers made contact with the guitar strings. The piped music cut off. In the silence, the guitar hummed to his touch. He paid it no heed, clasping it to him but not addressing himself to it.

“Star Control has decided not to permit statement at any installation until an official statement has been prepared and released from there. They are circulating two drafts among their directors. One draft is an expression of surprise and delight, and the other, of course, is an expression of regret at false hopes that have upset the decorum of the world’s grief for Colonel Norwood. They’ll release nothing until they have authenticated word from Berne. A UNAC executive plane is clearing Naples for Berne at the moment with Ossip Sakal aboard; he was vacationing there. The flight has not been announced to the press.”

“Star Control’s engineering staff has memoed all offices reiterating its original June evaluation that Norwood’s vehicle was totally destroyed and nothing got clear. Obviously, UNAC people are being knocked out of bed everywhere to review their records.”

Michaelmas’s hands plucked and pressed absently at the guitar. Odd notes and phrases swelled out of the soundbox. Hints of melody grouped themselves out of the disconnected beats and vanished before anything much happened to them.

The hectoring voice of the machine went on. “Star Control has had a telephone call from Limberg’s sanatorium. The calling party was identified as Norwood on voice, appearance, and conversational content. He substantiated the Limberg statement. He was then ordered to keep mum until Sakal and some staff people from Naples have reached him. All UNAC spaceflight installations and offices were then sequestered by Star Control, as previously indicated, and the fact of the call from Norwood to UNAC has not been made available to the press.”

“You’ve been busy.” A particularly fortunate series of accidents issued from the guitar. Michaelmas blinked down at it in pleasure and surprise. But now it had distracted him, so he let it fall softly against the lounge behind him.

He stood up and put his hands deep in his pockets, his shoulders bowed and stiff. He drifted slowly towards the window and looked out along Manhattan Island.

Norwood’s miracle — Norwood’s and Limberg’s miracle — was well on its way towards being a fact, and truth was the least of the things that made it so. Michaelmas absently touched the telephone in his breast pocket, silent only because of Domino’s secretarial function.

He knew he lived in a world laced by mute sound clamouring to be heard, by pictures prepared to become instant simulacra. Above him — constantly above him and all the world —the relay stations were throbbing with myriad bits of news and inconsequence that flashed from ground station to station, night and day, from one orbit to another, from synchronous orbit to horizon scanner and up to the suprasynchs that orbited the Earth-Moon system, until the diagram of all these reflecting angles and pyramids of communication made the earth and her sister the binary centre of a great faceted globe resembling nothing so much as Buckminster Fuller’s heart’s desire.

Around him, from the height of the tallest structure and at times to the depths of the sea, a denser, less elegant, more frantic network shot its arrows from every sort of transmitter to every sort of receiver, and from every transceiver back again. There was not a place in the world where a picture-maker could not warm to life and intelligence, if its operator had any of either quality, if Aunt Martha were not asleep, if one’s mistress were not elsewhere, if the assistant buyer for United Merchants were not busy on another of his channels. Or, more and more often, there were the waterfall chimes of machines responding to machines, of systems reacting to controls, and only ultimately of controls translating from human voice for their machines.

What a universe of chitterings, Laurent Michaelmas thought. What a cheeping basketry was woven for the world. He thought of Domino, who had begun as a device for talking to his wife without charge. It leaks, he thought wryly. But it doesn’t matter if it leaks. The container is so complex it enwraps its own drains. It leaks into itself.

He thought of Nils Hannes Limberg, whose clinic served the severely traumatized of half the world, its free schedule quietly known to be adapted to ability to pay. Rather well known, as of course it had to be. Nils Hannes Limberg, proprietor not only of a massive image of rectitude and research, but also of the more spacious wing of his sanatorium, with its refurbishment and dermal tissue and revitalization of muscle tone in the great and public. A crusty old man in a shabby suit, bluntly tolerating the gratitude in first wives of shipping cartel owners, grumpily declaring: “I never watch it,” when asked if he felt special pride in the long-running élan of Dusty Haverman. “Warbirds of Time? A start of a series? Ah, he is the leading player in an entertainment! No, I never realized that — on my tables, you know, they do not speak lines.”

It was approximately ten minutes since Nils Hannes Limberg, who was a gaunt old man full of liver spots and blue veins, had spoken to the Reuters man in whatever language was most convenient for them. And now 2,000,000,000 waking people had had the opportunity to know what he had said, with more due to awaken to it. No one knew how many computers knew what he had said; no one knew how many microliths strained with it, how many teleprinters shook with it. Who in his right mind would say that something which had spat through so many electron valves, had shaken the hearts of so many junction-junction couplings, so many laser jewels, so many cans of carbon fluids —so many lowly carbon granules, for that matter — was not a colossal factor in the day?

Somewhere in those two billions, torture and ecstasy could be traced directly to those particular vibrations of a speaker cone, to that special dance of electrons through focusing lens and electrostat. Good spirits and bad had been let loose within the systems of those who had heard the news and then left on previous errands, which were now done differently from the way they might have been. The prices of a thousand things went up; everyone’s dollar shrank, but the dollars of some were multiplied. Women cried, and intended loves went unconsummated. Women smiled, and strangers met. Men thrilled, and who knows what happens when a man thrills? Laurent Michaelmas looked out his window, with only a million people or so in his direct line of vision, and the fine hairs were standing up on his arms.