However, after a hundred years he learned better and went home.7
continuity (29)
I BEG TO REPORT
The doctor in charge of Donald wanted to keep him in the hospital overnight. It took him an hour’s arguing and the threat of reporting to his agency that he had been incarcerated before they reluctantly sent him back to his hotel in an official car, with escort. By now, scores of reports based on rumour must have been circulated telling how Sugaiguntung had been rescued from the mucker; Engrelay Satelserv might well have had the story from Deirdre Kwa-Loop. He didn’t care. On the first day of his mission he had succeeded more completely than those who sent him—let alone he himself—could ever have dreamed. What counted was not getting the story on the beam, but his discovery that the man on whom the whole Yatakangi optimisation programme pivoted was afraid as much of its possible success as of its probable failure.
For fear that his identity and rôle in saving Sugaiguntung might have become widely known, he insisted on being sent up to his room by a back route avoiding the main lobby. They found a baggage elevator and no one saw him except an incurious porter. Having got rid of his escort, he made sure that the door between his room and Bronwen’s was bolted on his side, and opened his communikit.
One of its circuits could be adjusted to detect bugging devices. He found one sunk in the wooden surround of the closet. Not caring about subtlety, he played the flame of his pocket lighter on it for a minute or so. A cautious reporter, he reasoned, would be expected to want to keep his exclusive stories to himself. There was also a tap on the phone, but that he didn’t worry about; it was inactive except when the instrument was in use.
Effortfully, he composed two messages, one in writing, to be read over the phone, the other whispered into the hidden device which would impose it, scrambled, as a parasite modulation on the phone signal. The former badly recounted that a mucker had attacked Sugaiguntung and he had dealt with him. The latter said that if anybody cared the scientist was riper than a plum and ought to be picked.
He put in for a call to the nearest available relay satellite and was told he would have to wait. He waited. Eventually the connection was made and he sent the double message. While he was thus occupied he heard Bronwen’s door open and shut and the door between the rooms was tried, very gently.
The job done, he shut off the phone and put the communikit away. They had fed him at the hospital before letting him go; he wasn’t hungry. He thought about a drink or a joint, and lacked the enthusiasm. He undressed and climbed into bed.
Lying in the dark, ambushing him, was a young man with his throat bleeding a river.
In a short while he got up. There was a rim of light around the door to Bronwen’s room. He unbolted it and pushed it open. She was sitting on the bed, naked, in the full lotus posture, as composed as if she had been waiting for him.
“Forgive me,” she said. “I was very rude to you earlier.” She began to unfold her limbs like a flower opening its petals to the sun. “You must have sensed that you were needed.”
Donald shook his head blankly. By now she was off the bed and approaching him with a slight sway of her hips.
“Is it true what I’ve been told—that you saved Dr. Sugaiguntung from a mucker?”
“Yes, that’s true.”
“You sensed that you were needed for that, didn’t you? It was why you left me all of a sudden. You have the power we call”—he didn’t catch the word, which was long and assonantal, more likely to be Sanskrit than modern Hindi.
“No,” Donald said. Standing unclothed in the middle of the floor, he began to shake. He had thought it very hot tonight, but he was chilled to his marrow, shivering and shivering. “No,” he said again. “The only power I have is the power to kill, and I don’t want it. It makes me terribly afraid.” His teeth came together after the last word and started to chatter.
“It is always like this when you are used as the channel for a divine force,” Bronwen said, as though she had spent her entire life studying the question. “It overloads the body and mind. But you are lucky. It could have burned you out.”
Not burned, frozen. Wouldn’t it have been better if the mucker had killed Sugaiguntung, perhaps me too? What am I going to make him do?
But that had passed out of his control.
Bronwen was reaching up with professional detachment to place her palm on the crown of his head. After that she touched him lightly on the forehead, throat, heart, navel, pubis and coccyx: the seven chakras. She said, “The force has gone from your belly to your head. You are thinking of things that never happened. Let me draw it back.”
She dropped gracefully on one knee and addressed his body with her mouth.
* * *
Eventually the phone’s buzz, which at first he did not recognise, it being shriller and shorter than its counterpart at home, dug him from the sleep into which Bronwen’s violent love-making had driven him. He clambered out of bed and stumbled into his own room, hand groping for the switch.
Muzzy, he looked at the instrument blurred in darkness and waited for the screen to light. It was long moments before he realised there was none, and he should have said something to indicate the connection had been made.
“Uh—Hogan,” he muttered.
“Delahanty!” an excited voice exclaimed. “Congratulations, Hogan! Engrelay Satelserv never expected anything like this big a story!”
“Christ, was that all you wanted to say? It’s two-thirty anti-matter here.”
“Yes, I realise that. Sorry. But I thought you deserved to be told at once how delighted we are. Of course, what you filed will require some editing, but…”
He paused. Donald waited passively for him to finish.
“You got that? I said it’ll require editing!”
Oh. Donald made a long arm and picked up his communikit, setting it alongside the phone. There would be a message coming through blipped and scrambled, which the machine would play back afterwards in comprehensible English. But things like the code phrases he had been taught seemed childish and irrelevant in the wake of the mucker’s death.
“I catch,” he said. “Sorry. I’m exhausted.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” Delahanty said. “Taking on a mucker—it’s incredible! And of course it was a complete beat for us because the day’s official releases haven’t included it. Gone to top level for a decision, probably. All we had was a third-hand rumour before your story hit. We’re playing it for all it’s worth—and you will be too, naturally.”
“I asked for a private interview,” Donald said absently.
“Excellent! Make sure you get film, too—our regular stringer will set that up for you, I’m certain.” He wandered off into a welter of fulsome praise until eventually he cut the circuit.
Relieved, Donald altered the controls of the communikit and listened to the clear-language version it had automatically deciphered from the incoming signal.
Delahanty’s voice, reduced to bare recognisability by the frequency-chopping effect of the blip process, said, “Hogan, I took it straight to Washington to be computed and the verdict is that he must be got out as fast as possible. There’s never been a whisper of disaffection concerning him before, and he might change his mind.
“Get him to Jogajong’s camp. We run a submarine courier service up the Shongao Strait—that’s the way we got Jogajong himself in and out. Aquabandit activity is maximal at the moment, but it’ll drop back in a few days.
“We’re relying on you. There’ll be medals in it if you fancy them. Good luck—and by the way! If you can handle a mucker, the experts say, you can handle anything.”
The thin whisper died away. Donald sat in the darkness staring at nothing, thinking about Sugaiguntung and maybe having to kidnap him and getting him across the Strait to the jungle cove where Jogajong was lying low under the very noses of those who most dearly wanted to put him to death, then escaping by submarine with Chinese hunter-killers in pursuit …