As he turned the next page it disintegrated, showering him with flakes of yellowing paper. He cursed it and thrust it into his seat’s disposall tube.
The take-off warning followed immediately, and he had to wait to tackle the second paper until the upward leg of their ballistic orbit had been entered.
This time, there was an entire page devoted to material on the subject of optimisation: one beam agency story from Gongilung reporting that voluntary funds were being raised in outlying islands so that doctors and nurses could go to the capital for training under Sugaiguntung, and about a dozen reporting reaction in other countries. There were several hints that public opinion was ranged against the verdict of the experts. When it came to a Minister of the Cuban government being booed at a Castro Day rally …
Donald frowned. Somehow these news items suggested a deeper pattern, but his head was aching again and he could not concentrate. The Mark I version of himself would have turned the problem out to graze in his subconscious, but now he did not have the patience. Instead of mulling the question over, he stuffed the paper down the disposall and switched on the condensed-news programme the purser had provided.
On the miniature screen set into the back of the seat ahead he saw a series of short visual clips with earphone commentary. He studied them with what attention he could manage. He happened to have struck into the cycle at a point just before the sports news, and had to wait out four minutes’ worth before the bulletin cycled back to the station identification and began to repeat. And then he discovered he was watching a programme compiled by the staff of the same paper he had just thrown away, containing almost exclusively the same stories.
Annoyed, he reached out to switch off. At the same moment the picture quality deteriorated, and a sign appeared to say that because of increasing distance from Ellay there would be a change to a satellite-based service. Hoping that the airline might use one of the field leaders like Engrelay Satelserv, he stayed his hand.
Correct. The familiar figures of Mr. & Mrs. Everywhere took shape almost at once. Obviously this was a special signal for passengers in transit; it used only back views and the environment was the interior of an express identical to this. It had never occurred to him before, but it was logical that having secured maximum viewer-identification by selling so many personalised sets with homimage attachment the company would not wish to remind people actually going to some of the exotic places where Mr. & Mrs. Everywhere kept dropping in that in fact the couple were only models.
The purser had set his screen for a Caucasian version of the signal, and that was momentarily unfamiliar. On moving in with Norman he had accepted the latter’s offer of a TV just about to be discarded in favour of a newer model, and never bothered to alter the Afram standard to which it was set, so he was accustomed to seeing Mr. Everywhere as an Afram and his wife as one of Norman’s typical Scandahoovian shiggies. Here now he was getting the “white stocky young mature” version of the man, and it jarred.
He was annoyed with himself for feeling so concerned about something which was, after all, a commercial figment more appropriate to his former life. From now on Donald Hogan was going to make news, not watch it.
As though the programmers had read his mind, his own face appeared on the screen.
He thought it was an illusion until the commentary corrected the impression. “Donald Hogan!” said the small voice directly into his ears. “Engrelay Satelserv’s newest man on the spot!”
Whereinole did they dredge up these clips? There was a younger Donald Hogan on a New York street, then gazing up at distant mountains—that was a Sun Valley vacation five years ago—and then, more familiar, boarding the express he had taken a few days ago from New York to California.
“Specially retained by Engrelay Satelserv, life-time expert in genetics and heredity Donald Hogan is bound on your behalf to Yatakang!”
Clips of a Gongilung street-scene, a fishing-prau chugging between islands on a noisy reaction-pump, a crowd massing in a handsome square.
“Yatakang, focus of planet-wide interest! Programme your autoshout for the name of Donald Hogan, whose dispatches from Gongilung will be featured in our bulletins from tomorrow on!”
Donald was stunned. They must be making a sensaysh out of it, to sacrifice so much time from even their ten-minute condensed-news cycle! His Mark II confidence evaporated. Euphoric from his recent eptification, he had thought he was a new person, immeasurably better equipped to affect the world. But the implications of that expensive plug stabbed deep into his mind. If State were willing to go to these lengths to maintain his cover identity, that meant he was only the visible tip of a scheme involving perhaps thousands of people. State just didn’t issue fiats to a powerful corporation like English Language Relay Satellite Service without good reason.
Meaningless phrases drifted up, dissociated, and presented themselves to his awareness, all seeming to have relevance to his situation and yet not cohering.
My name is Legion.
I fear the Greeks, even bearing gifts.
The sins of the fathers shall be visited on the children.
Say can you look into the seeds of time?
Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships, And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Struggling to make sense of these fragments, he finally arrived at what his subconscious might be trying to convey.
The prize, these days, is not in finding a beautiful mistress. It’s in having presentable prodgies. Helen the unattainable is in the womb, and every mother dreams of bearing her. Now her whereabouts is known. She lives in Yatakang and I’ve been sent in search of her, ordered to bring her back or say her beauty is a lie—if necessary to make it a lie, with vitriol. Odysseus the cunning lurked inside the belly of the horse and the Trojans breached the wall and took it in while Laocoön and his sons were killed by snakes. A snake is cramped around my forehead and if it squeezes any tighter it will crack my skull.
When the purser next passed, he said, “Get me something for a headache, will you?”
He knew that was the right medicine to ask for, yet it also seemed he should have asked for a cure for bellyache, because everything was confused: the men in the belly of the wooden horse waiting to be born and wreak destruction, and the pain of parturition, and Athena was born of the head of Zeus, and Time ate his children, as though he were not only in the wooden horse of the express but was it about to deliver the city to its enemy and its enemy to the city, a spiralling wild-rose branch of pain with every thorn a spiky image pricking him into other times and other places.
Ahead, the walls. Approaching them, the helpless stupid Odysseus of the twenty-first century, who must also be Odin blind in one eye so as not to let his right hand know what his left was doing. Odinzeus, wielder of thunderbolts, how could he aim correctly without parallax? “No individual has the whole picture, or even enough of it to make trustworthy judgments on his own initiative.” Shalmaneser, master of infinite knowledge, lead me through the valley of the shadow of death and I shall fear no evil …
The purser brought a white capsule and he gulped it down.