Algis Budrys - Michaelmas

Watson had been clenching at his stomach with one hand. Now he put his drink down and got up to go to the lavatory. Campion continued to half-lie in his seat, his expression slack and tender. Michaelmas sat smiling a little, quizzically.

Domino said with asperity: “Watson’s right about one thing. He can’t hack it any more. That was a classic maniacal farrago, and it boils down to his not being able to understand the world. It wasn’t necessary to count the contradictions after the first one.”

It was extremely difficult for Michaelmas to subvocalize well enough to activate his throat microphone without also making audible grunting sounds. He had never liked straining his body, and the equipment was implanted in him only because he needed it in his vocation. He used it as infrequently as possible, but he was not going to let Domino have the last word on this topic. “Wait one,” he said while he chose his words.

Time was when men of Horse Watson’s profession typically never slept sober, and died with their livers eroded. It must have been fun to watch the literate swashbucklers make fools of themselves in the frontier saloons, indulging in horse-whippings and shoot-outs with rival journalists and their partisans. But who stopped to think what it was to have the power of words and publication, to discover that an entire town and territory would judge, condemn, act, reprieve, and glorify because of something you had slugged together the night before? Because of something you had hand-set into type, smudging your fingertips with metal poisons that inexorably began their journey through your bloodstream? For the sake of the power, you turned your liver and kidneys into spongy, irascible masses; you tainted the tissue of your brain with heavy metal ions until it became a house haunted by stumbling visions. Alcohol would temporarily overcome the effect. So you became an alcoholic, and purchased sanity one day at a time, and made a spectacle of yourself. It was neither funny nor tragic in the end —it was simply a fact of life that operated less slowly on the mediocre, because the mediocre could turn themselves off and go to sleep whether they had done the night’s job to their own satisfaction or not.

Time was, too, when men of Horse Watson’s profession had to seek out gory death because that was all their bosses were willing to either deplore or endorse, depending on management policy. But let no man tell you it’s possible to live like that and not pay. The occupational disease was martinis for the ones that needed a cushion, and, for the very good ones, cancer. For good and bad in proportional measure there was also the great funny plague of the latter half of the century—nervous bowels and irritated stomachs. Who could see anything but humour in a man gulping down tincture of opium and shifting uneasily in his studio seat, his mind concerned with thoughts of fistula and surgery, his mind determinedly not preoccupied with intestinal resections and where that could lead? Loss of dignity is after all one of the basics to a good punchy gag.

And time was when men of Horse Watson’s profession were set free by the tube, the satellites, and finally the hologram. Now all Horse Watson had to do to pick and choose among contending employers was to make sure that his personal popularity with the little folks in the allocated apartment remained higher than most. It was a shame he knew no better way to do this than to be honest. A strong young head full of good voodoo could make mincemeat out of a man like that.

Men like Horse Watson were being cut down quickly. It was one of the nervous staples of recent shop gossip, and that, too, was having its effect on the scarier old heads. They came apart like spring-wound clocks when the tough young graduates with their 1965 birth certificates popped out of college with a major in Communications and a pair of minors in Psychology and Politics, and a thirty thousand new dollar tuition-loan note at the bank.

Michaelmas said to Domino: “He knows he shouldn’t say things like that. He knows some of it doesn’t make sense. He trusts me, and he thinks of me as one of his own kind. He’s apologizing for slipping away and leaving me with one less colleague. If you can see that, you can see that if you think kindly of him, you’re being less hard on yourself. He doesn’t realize he’s casting aspersions on our work. He doesn’t know what we do. He thinks it’s all his own fault. Now please be still for a while.” He massaged the bridge of his nose. He did not look at Campion. He was having a split-second fear that if he did, the man might open one eye and wink at him.

It was truer than ever that airports look the same all over the world. But not all airports are located in the Alps.

Michaelmas descended just behind Watson and Campion, into a batting of light reflected from every surface, into a cup of nose-searing cool washed brilliance whose horizon was white mountaintops higher than the clouds. The field was located high enough above the Aar, and far enough from the city itself, to touch him with the sight of the Old City on its neck of land in the acute bend of the river, looking as unreally arranged as a literal painting. It was with that thought, blinking, that he managed to locate himself in time, space, and beauty, and so consider that his soul had caught up with him.

There was a considerable commotion going on at the shuttle lounge debarking ramp. Movement out of the lounge had stopped. Watson had been right about any number of details : it was likely that half the journalists in Europe were on the scene, and there was a gesticulating, elbowing crowd of them there, many of them in berets and trenchcoats, displaying the freelance spirit.

Even the people with staff jobs had caught the infection either here or much earlier, and there was the usual jostling with intent to break directed at any loosely held piece of equipment. There was a bewildering variety of that — sound and video recorders both flat and stereo, film cameras, and old minicams as well as holograph recorders —as if every pawnbroker on the continent were smiling this morning. Most of the people down here had to be working on speculation. There weren’t enough media contracts or staff jobs in the world to support that mob, or, truth to tell, speculation markets either.

The current compromise pronunciation of his name seemed to be Mikkelmoss! and emerged most often from the gaggle of voices. Lenses glittering like an array of Assyrians, they tried to get to him in the lounge or cannily waited for him to ensnare himself among them. Michaelmas could feel himself blushing, his round cheeks hot under his crinkling eyes. He could not help smiling, either, as he discovered a staff cameraman for Watson’s client network actually shooting for a zoom close-up of him over Watson’s shoulder. It was Campion who raised his comm unit to block that shot; Watson had his head down and was working his way through the crowd with effective hips and shoulders.

The first man to get to Michaelmas —a wiry, shock-headed type with blue jaws, body odour, and an elaborate but obsolescent sound recorder—clutched a hand-rail, planted his feet to block passage fore and aft, and shot his microphone forward. “Is true dzey findet wreckidge Kolonel Norwoot’s racquet?” “What is your comment on that, sir, please?” came from a BBC man down on the ground beside the ramp with a shotgun microphone, an amplifier strapped over his mouth and phones on his ears. His camera was built into his helmet, exposure sensors flashing.

And so forth. Michaelmas made his way through them, working his way towards Customs and the cab rank, feeling a sudden burst of autumn chill as someone opened a door; smiling, making brief reasonable comments about his own lack of information. Domino was saying to him: “Remember, Mickeymouse—you are but a man.” As he cleared the fringes of the crowd, Domino also said : “You have a suite at the Excelsior and an eight a.m. appointment with your crew director. That is forty-eight minutes from… now.”