Algis Budrys - Michaelmas

Finally, Clementine dabbed under her eyes with the tips of her fingers and began delving into her purse. She said: “Ah. Ah, Laurent, nevertheless,” more soberly now, “this afternoon there’s been something I could have stopped. You’ll see it tonight and say, Here something was done that she could surely have interrupted, if she weren’t so professional. ” She opened her compact and touched her cheeks with a powder pad. She looked up and sideward at Michaelmas. “But it is not professional of me to say so. We have shocked Luis.”

The camera operator’s lip twitched. He continued to stare out his window with his jaw in his palm. “I do not listen to private conversations,” he said correctly. “Especially not about quick-witted people who instruct in technique to something they call crew .”

Michaelmas grinned. “Viva Luis,” he said softly. He put his hand on Clementine’s wrist and said: “Whatever was done — do you think it serves the truth?”

“Oh, the truth, yes,” Clementine said.

“She means it,” Domino said. “She’s a little elevated, but simple outrage would account for that. There’s no stab of guilt.”

“Yes, her pulse didn’t change,” Michaelmas said to him, bending over Clementine’s hand to make his farewell. He said to her: “Ah, well, then, whatever else there is, is bearable. I had best sit down somewhere now.” Campion would be back down here in a minute, ready to discuss what was to be done as soon as they landed. “Au revoir”

“Certainement.”

“Daugerd checked his phone early,” Domino said. “It’s a terrible day for fishing; pouring rain. He’s returned Hanrassy’s call; she had something that needs his professional appraisal. He’s running his bass boat down to the Bagnell Dam town landing to meet that plane of hers. Bass boats are fast. His ETA at her property will be something like seven-forty her time — about half an hour after you deplane at Cité d’Afrique.”

Michaelmas touched his lips to the back of Clementine’s hand, feeling the fragility of the bones, and moved up the aisle. Campion watched him warily.

“Sincere, you say,” Michaelmas said to Domino as he dropped into a seat. “Norwood.”

“Absolutely. I wish I had that man’s conscience.”

“Do you suppose,” Michaelmas ventured, “that something is bringing in people from a parallel world? Eh?” He stared out the window, his jaw in his palm, as the coast slid below them. The Mediterranean was not blue but green like any other water, and the margins of the coast were so rumpled into yellow shallows and bars that on this surfless day it was almost impossible to decide whether they would fall on land or water. “You know the theory? Every world event produces alternative outcomes? There is a world in which John Wilkes Booth missed and Andrew Johnson was never President, so there was much less early clamour for threatening Nixon with impeachment? So he didn’t name Jerry Ford, but someone else, instead? The point being that Lincoln never knew he was dead, and Ford never dreamed he’d been President.”

“I know that concept,” Domino said shortly. “It’s sheer anthropomorphism.”

“Hmm. I suppose. Yet he is sincere, you tell me.”

“Hold his hand.”

Michaelmas smiled off-center. “He’s dead.”

“How?”

The landing warnings came on. Michaelmas adjusted his seat and his belt.

“I don’t know, friend… I don’t know,” he mused. He continued to stare out the window as the plane settled lower with its various auxiliaries whining and thumping. The wings extended their flaps and edge-fences in great sooty pinions; coronal discharges flickered among the spiny de-perturbance rakes. “I don’t know… but then, if God had really intended Man to think, He would have given him brains, I suppose.”

“Oh, wow,” Domino said.

They swept in over the folded hills that protected Cité d’Afrique from serious launch pad errors at Star Control. To Michaelmas’s right, the UNAC complex was a rigid arrangement pile-driven into the desert; booster sheds, pads, fuel dumps, guidance bunkers, and the single prismatic tower where UNAC staff dwelled and sported and took the elevators down or up to their offices or the lobby. The structures seemed isolated: menhirs erected on a plain once green, now the peculiar lichenous shade of scrubby desert, very much like the earliest television colour pictures of the Moon. These were connected to each other by animal trails which were in fact service roads, bound to the hills by the highway cutting straight for Cite d’Afrique, and except for that white and sparsely travelled lifeline, adrift — probably clockwise, like the continent itself. Beyond it there was only a browning toward sand and a chasming toward sky, and Saint-Exupery flying, flying, straining his ears to filter out the sound of the slipstream in his guy wires, listening only to the increasingly harsh sound of engine valves labouring under a deficiency of lubricating oil, wiping his goggles impatiently and peering over the side of the cockpit for signs of life.

Michaelmas looked down at his quiescent hands.

Now they were over the hills, and then the ground dropped sharply. Cite d’Afrique opened before them. The sunlight upon it was like the scimitars of Allah. It was all a tumble of shahmat boards down there: white north surfaces, all other sides energy-absorbent black, metallized glass lancing reflections back at catcher panels, louvers, shadow banners, clash of metal chimes, street cries, robed men like knights, limousine horns, foreigners moving diagonally, the bazaar smell newly settled into recently wet mortar but not quite yet victorious over aldehydes outbaking from the plastics, and Konstantinos Cikoumas, Michaelmas saw him as a tall, cadaverous, round-eyed, open-mouthed man in a six-hundred-dollar suit and a grocer’s apron with a screwdriver in its bib pocket. He did not see where Cikoumas was or what he was doing at the moment, and he could not guess what the man thought.

They had made Cite d’Afrique in no longer than it takes to pull UN out of New York and decree a new city. Not as old as the youngest of sheikhs, it was the new cosmopolitan centre. Its language was French because the men with hawk faces knew French as the diplomatic and banking language of the world, but it was not a French city, and its interests were not confined to those of Africa. It was, the UN expected, a harbinger of a new world. Eloquent men had ventured to say that only by making a place totally divorced from nationalistic pressures could the United Nations function as required, and so they had moved here.

Michaelmas asked Domino : “What’s the situation at the terminal?”

“There’s a fair amount of journalist activity. They have themselves set up at the UNAC gate. You hired the best local crew, and they know the ropes, so they’re situated at a good angle. EVM has a local man there to shoot backup footage of Norwood debarking. Then there are UNAC people at the gate, of course, to welcome Norwood, although none of them are very high up the ladder, and there are curious members of the public — mostly UN personnel and diplomats who got early word Norwood was coming in by this route. And so forth.”

“Very good. Uh, we may be calling upon your Don’t Touch circuit some time along in there.”

“Oh, really?” Domino said.

“Yes. I believe I have taken an instructive lesson from the Ecole Psychologique of Marseilles. Other topic: Do you have a scan on where Konstantinos Cikoumas lives?”

“Certainly. A nice modern apartment with a view of the sea. Nothing exceptional in it. Nothing like the stuff planted all over Star Control. But then, why should they risk Kosta’s ever being tied to any exotic machinery that might accidentally be found in the vicinity? He and his brother are honest merchants, after all, and who’s to ever say different ? Kristiades called him this afternoon, by the way. At about the time we left Berne. A routine talk concerning almonds. It doesn’t yield to cryptanalysis. But the fact of the call itself may be his way of saying Norwood’s en route, meaning there’ll be plenty of press to cover any accidents to Papashvilly.”