Algis Budrys: Michaelmas

“It’s not necessary to be such a country boy with me, Horse.”

Watson waved his hands. “Nah! Nah, look, we were green as grass, and so was the world. Man, is it wrong to miss being young and sure of yourself? I don’t think so, Larry. I think if I didn’t miss it, the last good part of me would be all crusted over and cracking in the middle. But whatever happened to big ideological militancy, anyway? All we’ve got left now is these tired agrarian reformer bandidos hiding in the Andes, screaming Peking’s gone soft on imperialismo and abandoned 'em, and stealing chickens. I wonder if old Joe Stalin ever figured his last apostle would be somebody named Juan Schmidt-Garcia with a case of BO that would fell a tree?”

“Yes, the world is quite different now from the way I found it in my young manhood,” Michaelmas said. Looking at the slump of Watson’s mouth, he spoke the words with a certain sympathy. “Now most of the world’s violence is individual, and petty.”

Watson snorted softly. “Like that thing in New York where that freak was sneaking in on his neighbours and killing them for their apartment space. Nuts and kooks; little grubby nuts. Good for two minutes on one day. Not that you should measure death that way, God rest the souls of the innocent. But you know what I mean. Look. Look, we’re in a funny racket, all of a sudden. You figure you’re gonna spend your life making things real for the little folks in the parlour, you know? Here’s the big stuff coming at you, people; better duck. Here’s the condition of the world. You don’t like it? Get up and change it.”

“Yes,” Michaelmas said. “We showed them the big things, and that made the small things smaller. More tolerable. Less significant.”

Watson nodded. “Maybe. Maybe. You’re saying the shit was there all along. But I got to tell you, when we showed em a gut-shot farmer drowning in a rice paddy, it was because it meant something in Waukegan. It said, 'Today your way of life was made more safe. Or less. But you show 'em the same guy today, and it’s about a jealous husband or some clown wants to inherit his buffalo. And you know it’s not going to get any bigger than that.”

“It’s cowboys and Indians again,” Watson said. “Stories for children. It doesn’t mean a thing to Waukegan, except the guy’s dying, and he’s dying the way they do in the holo dramas, so he’s as real as the next actor. They judge his goddamn performance, for Christ’s sake, and if he’s convincing, then maybe it was important. It makes you sick to think he’s not interesting if he’s quiet about it. Man, so little of it’s real any more; they’ve got no idea what can happen to them. They don’t want an idea. You remember that quote Alvin Moscow got from the plane crash survivor? We would all be a little kinder to each other.That is what you and I should be all about.”

“Man, who knows what’s real any more, and who feels it? You run your fingers over a selector and the only action that looks right to you is something they did in a studio with prefigured angles, stop motion, the best lighting, and all that stuff. Even your occasional Moroccan school-teacher hung over a slow fire three days ago can’t compete with that stuff. It’s not like he was a Commie that was going to corrupt the morals of Mason City, or even that he was a Peace Corps volunteer that crossed some Leninist infiltrator. It’s just some poor slob that told the kids something that’s not in the Quran, and somebody took exception to it. Man, you can get the same thing in Tennessee; what’s so great about that? Is that gonna make you rush out and join some crusade to stop that kind of stuff? Is that gonna touch your life at all? Is that gonna make you hear the marching band?”

“It might cause you to sip your wine more slowly.”

“Okay. Yeah, But you know damned well the big stories now are some guy dying by inches inside because he can’t make his taxes and who, where, has the half million that disappeared out of the transit bill? I mean that’s all right, and it’s necessary, and even after your third pop or your third stick, it’ll get through to you, kind of, if Melvin Watson or L. G. Michaelmas, begging your pardon, Larry, pushes it at you in some way that makes you feel like you’re paying attention. But nobody dies for anything any more, you know? They all the only on account of, just like holo people, and half the time these days we just pass along a lot of dung from the lobby boys and the government boys and the image gurus like our friend the Herr Doktor.”

“My God, Larry, we’re just on a fertilizer run here. UNAC’s just a bunch of people jockeying to get by, just like in any widget monopoly or thingumbob cartel in the world. When Norwood went, who cried at UNAC? All you heard was the haemorrhage shot 'round the world. So they shook out some expandable patsies and then they were right in there pitching again, talking about the increased effect on the goal attainment curve and all that other vocabulary they have to kiss it and make it well with. Scared green for the appropriation; scared to death they picked the wrong voodoo in school. But they’re safe. They’d be sick if they realized it, but the whole world’s like they are even if it would turn their stomachs to believe it.”

“Christ, yes, they’re safe. It’s fat, fat, fat in the world, and bucks coming out of everybody’s ears; spend it quickly, before the damn economy does what it did in the seventies and we have to redesign whole industries to get rich again. Smart isn’t Can you do it, is it good to do? Smart is Can you make 'em believe what you’re doing is real? And real is Can you get financing for it? ”

Michaelmas sat very still, sharing Watson’s angle of blind vision down the aisle and being careful not to do anything distracting. He had learned long ago never to stop anyone.

Watson was unstoppable. “Norwood’s up there breathing and feeling in that megabuck beauty shop of Limberg’s and suspecting there’s a God who loves him. I know Norwood— hell, so do you. Nice kid, but ten years from now he’ll be endorsing a brand of phone. The point is, right now he’s on that mountaintop with all that glory ringing in him, but that doesn’t make him real to his bosses and it doesn’t make him real to the little folks in the parlour. What makes him real is Limberg says he’s real and Limberg’s got not one but two good voodoo certificates. Christ on a crutch, I’ve got half a mind to kill Norwood all over again—on the air, Larry, live from beautiful Switzerland, ladies and gentlemen, phut splat in glorious hexacolor 3D, and let him be real all over every God-damned dining-table in the world. Ten years from now, he’d thank me for it.”

Michaelmas sat quiet.

Watson swung his head up and grinned suddenly, to show he was kidding about any part that Michaelmas might object to. But he could not hold the expression very long. His eyes wandered, and he jerked his head towards Campion. “He really asleep?”

Michaelmas followed his glance. “I believe so. I don’t think he’d relax his mouth like that if he weren’t.”

“You catch on.” Watson looked nakedly into Michaelmas’s face with the horrid invulnerability of the broken. “I don’t have any legs left,” he explained. “Not leg legs— inside legs. Sawed 'em off myself. So I took in a fast young runner. Hungry, but very hot and a lot of voodoo in his head. Watch out for him, Larry. He’s the meanest person I’ve ever met in my life. Surely no men will be born after him. My gift to the big time. Any day now he’s going to tell me I can go home to the 'sixties. Galatea’s revenge. And I’ll believe him.”

Michaelmas couldn’t be quite certain of how his own face looked. In his ear, Domino had been telling him : “As you can imagine, I’m getting all three sets of pulse and respiration data from your area, so there’s considerable garbling. But my evaluation is that Campion hasn’t surrendered consciousness for a moment.”