The Watusi king shook his head sadly. “Alas, impossible to gratify you, Dr. Shima. We are out on strike protesting management’s use of P.L.O. guards for security. They are not genuinely black, despite all P.L.O. claims. It will probably last another three months, and we are preparing for bloodshed. So sorry. Now come and join our feast.”
Shima waved queasily. “So sorry, but I have no appetite for long pig today.”
The Watusi lowered his voice conspiratorially. “Please do not disillusion our other guests, doctor, but we would not demean the KKK by roasting a mere Honk. We’re celebrating with a delicacy far more rare and expensive.”
“Than a man? My God! What?”
“A gorilla.”
Opsday! Opsday! Opsday! And in the Church of All Atheists they were crowning Christ “King of Fools” while the organ thundered sardonically. It was live, not a recording, Gretchen noted with surprise. There was a raving maniac on the organ bench, feet pounding the pedal bass, hands mangling the four keyboard manuals, and he was singing, groaning and growling a running continuo to his Satanic music.
She couldn’t appraise his class or status from his Ops rags, but he seemed to be an Iroquois Indian from his face and head. Swarthy complexion. Jutting nose. Wide, thin lips. Heavy ears. And a shaven skull, with the exception of a stiff black crest running from brow to nape.
“All he needs is a war bonnet,” she thought as she stole into the loft for a closer look.
Evidently he had wide side-vision. “What the hell are you doing here? Opbless.”
“Opbless,” Gretchen called over the roar of the organ. “I came to cool a scandal I created in the church the other day.”
“Oh. R. Like wow. You’re the bije babe who sang Orff’s Catulli Carmina. Forget it. The church has. Got a credit line of your own?”
“Credit?”
“Stay with it, babe. Credit. I.D. Name.”
“Oh. Gretchen Nunn. You?”
“Manitou-Win-Na-Mis-Ma-Bago.”
“Wh-what?”
“In your language means, He-Who-Charms-Manitou-Out-of-Sky.”
“You’re an Indian?”
“Most of me.”
“Like Opbless and wow and what do I call you? Mannie? Mr. Bago?”
“Hell no. That don’t go down. Call me Finkel.”
“Finkel!”
“R on. Scriabin Finkel.”
“The Right to Life” ballet of unborn children was being danced by twenty naked midgets in the Equal Rights maternity hospital. Each of them was connected to the tip of a phallic maypole by an umbilical cord, and all were mewing a fetal chorus to the muted orchestral accompaniment conducted by a savage Cossack who snarled at Shima in B-flat minor, “Get the hell out of the act, dude. Opbless.”
“Opbless. Sorry. Don’t mean to intrude. I’m just looking for someone in charge.”
“I’m in charge.”
“I want to apologize for the fuss I kicked up the other day, and square it.”
“Oh. R. You’re the joker that said he got banged by the elephant?”
“Yes.”
“Got a name?”
“Shima. Blaise Shima. Yours?”
“Aurora.”
“What?”
“Yeah. I was named after the battleship that backed the Red Revolution. R. Apology accepted. No hard feelings and Opbless. Now get the hell out, Shima. We’ve got to transpose, and these clowns can’t hack it.”
“Guff thanks, Mr… What do I call you? Aurora? Orry?”
“Hell no. It’s Finkel. Scriabin Finkel.”
“What? Then you wrote that great Glacial Army anthem, ‘Where You Beez…’ I’m impressed.”
“We all did, turkey— A-MINOR, YOU GODDAM BUMS! A-MINOR! The whole Finkel stable.”
They call the fine debris of jewelry manufacture “findings.” Workshop floors absorb a dusting of precious stone and precious metal residues in the course of a year, and on Opsday the Strøget throws open its workshops to an eager multitude equipped with brooms, dustpans-and-brushes, and containers. To this date of writing it is not yet known whether any of the scavengers has ever profited by his recovery of “findings” dust.
It was inevitable that as Gretchen walked the Strøget, apologizing to and punching checks for the proprietors whose displays she had smashed—the luxury trade is never in the forgiving business—it was inevitable that she should recognize a familiar bod in the mob of panting, sweeping scavengers; Yenta Calienta, armed with a battery vacuum cleaner. Yenta was spending as much time protecting the machine from resentful broom-wielders as she was sucking up dust.
Damn if half of them weren’t in peanut drag, complete with monocle and top hat. The advertising manager was in costume, too, but that didn’t prevent him from accepting Shima’s apology and check. Then he conducted Shima to an enormous transparent top hat filled with a magenta hellbrew. It was three times the size of the bronze hat which Blaise and Gretchen had stolen. The advertising manager pointed proudly.
“A square yard of Demerara rum. Fifty gallons of grenadine. Juice of one hundred reconstituted lemons. Fifty pounds of confetti sugar. One thousand maraschino cherries. Planter’s Punch. Help yourself, doctor. Enjoy. Opbless.”
He waddled off. Shima looked at the awesome top hat doubtfully, then shrugged and mounted the scaffolding leading to the ten-foot-high brim. He received a frosted earthenware mug and was told to take it home as a gift. He took his place on line and spoke to the tall, vivid young woman ahead of him. She held a stained mug in her hand.
“Opbless. I see you’ve tried this punch before. How is it?”
She turned and raked him with clever eyes. “Opbless. This is my fifth time around.”
“Is it that good?”
“It doesn’t matter. This firm is one of my clients. It’s my job to flatter them.”
She scooped up a mugful of punch and made way for Shima. As he bent over the rim to fill his mug, he was suddenly seized by the ankles and upended.
“You son of a bitch! This’ll pay you back for the Therpool!”
He was plunged, head foremost, into the Planter’s Punch, joining rum, grenadine, lemon juice, sugar, and a thousand cherries. She held her grip on his ankles while he thrashed and strangled. Just as he was on the verge of losing consciousness, his ankles were released. He managed to flip and upend. There she was at the hatbrim, glaring down at him while she struggled with the advertising manager.
“Wasn’t me in the Therpool, lady,” Shima gasped.
“The hell it wasn’t! I’d know you anywhere.”
“But Guff thanks anyway, lady. You’ve solved my insulation problem. Opbless.”
When the exhausted Gretchen at last got back to her apartment, she found a few of her staff there, holding the fort. Their Ops Week clothes were so stylishly bedraggled that she had to smile. Shima? No sign of him. “Has anything happened?” she wondered. “Has he gone on the attack-escape again?” But a messenger just delivered this tape from Shima. “From his penthouse?” No, from the Precinct Complex. “Oh God! The idiot is in trouble.” But her fingers did not tremble as she switched on.
I’m taping this to you, Gretchen love, because I’m completely wiped. I can’t face another human being; not even you.
I encountered an event, a Golem coda, when I was squaring it for that stolen top hat, which clued me into the modus operandus for your sensory tests. A bathysphere. It’s already equipped with communications, life-support systems and power—which were some of the problems of complete insulation—and at ocean depths nothing external can penetrate except maybe some slight radiation from the earth’s mantle, and maybe a stray neutrino or two.
So I went over to the Oceanography Center to beg the loan of a bathysphere from Lucy Leuz, an old buddy from M.I.T. That’s Friedrich Humboldt Leuz, Ph.D. and DODO, in caps. Not the extinct bird; Director of Drogh Operations. I know he has a baby bathysphere.
They were celebrating the advent of Ops Week with a raw fish festival, using their aquarium surplus for
the feast. Gretchen, you haven’t known guilt until you’ve had an Alaska king crab look you in the eye while you’re breaking off one of its legs. Anyway, Lucy gave me an Opbless and the go-ahead, so we’re all set for tomorrow—and we’d better be—because I know now that Ind’dni is right. Time is of the essence. I think you’ll agree by the time I’m finished.
Then I went to the Glacial Army H.Q., thinking you might be there cooling your Pagliacci rap. You weren’t so I settled up for you, and those saints are real greedy. They were mounting a hysterical revival to counter the Ops Week debut—Naturally the Army hates the false goddess Ops and her dirty, rotten, sinful Opalia.
There must have been a thousand there, led by another clown from the Scriabin Finkel stable, a crazed Cockney calling herself Sabrina Finkel. They were howling “Where You Beez…” and spasming with the jerks, smashing things, rolling over and fainting in ecstasies. The fervor was terrifying; they acted like a lynch mob. A girl took refuge behind me and I couldn’t blame her for being frightened. I was, too.
“You look like a gent, even in that filthy coverall,” she said. (I was blotched with Planter’s Punch, which I’ll explain another time.) “Will you for Jesus sake get me the hell out of here. This is sick.”
“Where’s the geek what brung you?”
“Don’t Op-talk me. I know you’re a gent. He’s fainted dead away with his head through a throne.”
So we left the fête choreatique, grabbed transport, and set out for my Oasis. She sat in her corner and I sat in mine. Neither of us said anything. She was sulky; I was pooped. But when we got to the Oasis, I had to go through the motions of the gent. I offered her the choice of keeping the transport and going on to wherever it was, me paying, or coming up to the penthouse for a drink.
“Baby, do I ever need a drink,” she said. “That damn Army is desert dry. R. But no hots.”
“For Christ’s sake!” I was disgusted. “Who d’you think I am, Casanova? So come on. I’m freezing.”
We went up to the penthouse. I started a fire in the lounge and she watched me fussing with the kindling.
“You’ve got cherries sticking inside your collar,” she said. “Did you know?”
“I should have guessed. I had a run-in with a bowl of Planter’s Punch.”
She wandered around, exploring. “Gee, I’ve never been in a high-class place like this before. You sure got class. I knew it, even in that dirty coverall with those crazy cherries sticking to your neck.”
“I’m a walking whisky sour,” I said. “So come have your drink, and we’ll figure out how to get you home-free through the Guff.”
We sat at the fire and drank. She was a redhead with exquisite skin but was no looker by any stretch of charity. She talked, but not about getting home. She had a kind of naïve, prattling charm. She worked for the Glacial Army, job unspecified, but it sounded like running errands. She enjoyed reporting the secret sins of their saints.
Suddenly she said, “I’ve got to call Philly.”
“Philly who?”
“Philadelphia. It’s where I live with my folks.”
“You don’t have to call. The pneumo’ll shoot you there in twenty minutes.”
“I know that. I have to tell them I’m not coming home tonight.”
Which was all I needed. “The phone’s out of order,” I said.
“Don’t guff,” she said. “What kind of rip do you think I am? I wouldn’t lay a call on you.”
“You really should go home, Miz—” I still didn’t know her name.
“I’m staying. Don’t worry, it won’t hurt. This is first Opsday, and I’m going to start your Ops Week for you, touch earth.”
“The phone’s in the bedroom.”
“I know, and it works. I tried it. I’ll call from the public CB down in the lobby. I don’t want to take anything off you, dude, except your clothes. Maybe you don’t know there are girls like me. Maybe you’ll find out, touch earth.”
She left. I sat at the fire, trying to figure out how I’d gotten into this tsimmis and how in hell I was going to get out of it without hurting feelings. No attack-escape; I just prayed. There was a knock on the door.
“It’s open,” I called.
The door opened. It was Ind’dni. My prayers were answered. There is a God.
“Bless you, Subadar,” I said.
“Alas, I have no pleasant greeting for you, Dr. Shima.”
“Is it a bust, I hope?”
“Please to come downstairs, doctor.”
“I’ll go quietly, but I—”
“Come, please.”
So I come please. Ind’dni was silent and despairing. I was completely bewildered. In the lobby, the hommy squad stood around the glass CB booth. There were spectators staring; some vomiting. The glass door was shut tight. A body’d been jammed into the booth, head down, the veins torn open, and she’d drowned in her own blood to begin my carnival for me.
16
They were out at sea aboard the nuclear trawler, Drogh III, far beyond the sight of land and the stench of the Corridor. The derrick boom was swung to starboard, and the winch was slowly releasing the heavy multi-cable as the bathysphere containing Gretchen Nunn descended. Inside, she was entwined and embroidered with electrode contacts.
Doctors Blaise (Shim) Shima and Friedrich Humboldt (Lucy) Leuz were in the control cabin which resembled the flight deck of a spacecraft; four walls of illuminated readout panels, dials, and projection screens.
Lucy Leuz was power gone to fat. Not tall, enormously bulky, with arms and legs as big around as a girl’s waist. A bathtub could barely contain him plus five gallons of water. Oddly enough, his voice was completely out of character with the menace of his bulk; soft and sweet, the vowels curiously inflected with umlauts. “True” was “Trew.” “Moon” was “Mewn.”
“She deep enough, Lucy?” Shima asked.
Leuz was concentrating on the depth dial. “Almost. Patience, Shim baby. Patience. Got your sensory program set?”
“Uh-huh. All five ready and counting.”
“Five? Five senses? I thought you said that Subadar Ind’dni told you—”
“To hell with what he said. I’m testing everything; sight, sound, touch, taste, smell. They learned us to take nothing for granted at Tech. Remember?”
“Painfully. Are her electrode contacts secure, but I mean really?”
“She’ll never shake ‘em off.”
“And she knows the scam? She won’t panic when you jolt her?”
“She’s been briefed. She knows. Don’t worry… Gretchen’s got a cool that could start another ice age.”
“R.” Leuz pressed a stud. “We stop the descent here. Two hundred fathoms.”
“Thank heaven it’s a calm sea.”
“Down two hundred fathoms your girl wouldn’t know if a typhoon was blowing upstairs.”
“The fun you DODO dudes have.”
“You want to signal her that you’re starting, Shim?”
“No, that’s not in the program. She’s on her own, down in the deep blue yonder.”
“It’s the deep black yonder, where she is. The girl is about as insulated as she’ll ever be.”
Shima nodded, threw a switch, and Gretchen’s total State of the Body flashed onto a projection screen.
“Whatever in the cockeyed world is that, Shim?”
“Metabolic readout, Lucy. Pulse. Temperature. Respiration. Tension. Tone. Etcetera. Etcetera.”
“In decimal? Decimal! Talk about old-fashioned!”
“Yeah. It’s an antique program I pulled out of the software library at CCC. It was the easiest and quickest to convert to these tests. Any self-respecting computer will translate the decimal into modern binary, if I need it.”
“Was the old original a sensory test program? Like how and why customers smell CCC perfumes?”
“Hell, no! It was probabilities for n-tuplets worked out for Sales. But you write a classy program, Lucy, and its algorithms can be adapted to
anything. You know that. Snips and snails and puppydog tails, and such are computers made of.”
“The fun you science mavins have.”
“Oh, a science, am I? And what are you, pray, Doctor Friedrich Humboldt Leuz?”
“I, sir, whatever your name is, am an Untersee Forschungsreisende… And what’s more, I can spell it.”
“And a hearty Sieg Heil to you. I’m going to hit her with sound now. Got to find out if her hearing is secondhand, too. Ind’dni said that might be important. He didn’t say why…”
Shima examined the readout of Gretchen’s sound-responses with perplexity. At last Leuz inquired, “Got a problem?”
“It’s the damnedest thing,” Shima said slowly. “She can hear all right, but she has a very low quantity threshold. In other words, she can hear, say, distant thunder, but not thunder cracking overhead. She can hear a canary whisper, but not a bull sea-lion roar. That’s a complete switch on your run-of-the-mill deafness.”
“Fascinating. You know, Shim, Miz Nunn might be a new evolutionary quantum jump.”
“Oh?”
“The crux of survival for a species is adaptability. What knocked off the extincts? Inability to roll with the punches of change.”
“No argument.”
“Our environment has been changing drastically,” Leuz continued. “One of them is the battering of our senses by sights and sounds beyond endurance, which is why we have so many crazies in Bedlam-Rx. Thousands and thousands who’ve rejected an impossible reality.” Leuz meditated. “Maybe they’re the sanes and we’re the crazies to put up with it.”
“And Gretchen? Is she rejecting?”
“No, she’s adapting. Mother Nature is always pushing species toward the primal pinnacle, and that includes Man. Regrettably, you and I are far below that pinnacle.”
“Careful with your slander, Lucy. I’m taping everything that goes on here.”
“Mother Nature, with her glorious improvisation, is trying to generate an advanced species of Man through a freaky adaptation to our changing environment. Another push toward the primal pinnacle… and that’s your girl, Gretchen Nunn. She’s rolling with the punches of degenerating sights and sounds.”
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