legends all say the same thing. Look, Harry, aside from you, everyone tries to use me. They want me to spy on their wives to see if they have been laying with someone else. Or they want me to find hubby's mistress.
Or I get invited to their cocktail parties so that I can perform parlor tricks for a batch of drunks. The world made me cynical, Harry. And it keeps me that way. So, if we're both wise, we'll just sit back and get rich off my cynicism. Maybe if a psychiatrist made me happy-go-lucky and at peace with myself, my talent would disappear."
Before he could reply, I left. When I closed the door behind me, they were wheeling Child down the corridor.
His empty eyes stared fixedly at the softly colored ceiling.
Outside, the snow was still falling. Fairy gowns. Crystal tears. Sugar from a celestial cake. I tried to come up with all the pretty metaphors I could, maybe to prove I'm not so cynical after all.
I slid into the hovercar, tipped the Marine as he slid out the other side. I drove into the street, taking the small curb too fast. White clouds whooshed up behind me and obscured the AC building and everything else I put behind me.
The book lay at my side, the dust jacket face down because it had her picture on it. I didn't want to see amber hair and smooth lips imitating a bow. It was a picture that disgusted me. And intrigued me. I couldn't understand the latter, so I pretended to more of the former than I felt.
I turned on the radio and listened to the dull voice of the newscaster casting his tidbits on the airwave waters with a voice uniformly pleasant whether the topic was a cure for cancer or the death of hundreds in a plane crash. "Peking announced late today that it had developed a weapon equal to the Spheres of Plague launched yesterday by the Western Alliance " (Pa-changa, changa, sissss, sisss pa-changa, the Latin music of another station added in unconscious sardonic wit) " According to Asian sources, the Chinese weapon is a series of platforms " (Sa-baba, sa-baba, po-po-pachanga) " above Earth's atmosphere, capable of launching rockets containing a virulent mutant strain of leprosy which can be distributed across seventeenmile-wide swaths of territory " (Hemorrhoids really can be dealt with in less than an hour at the Painless Clinic on the West Side, another station assured me, though it faded out before it would tell me how much less than an hour and just how painless.) " Members of the New Maoism said today that they had assurances from "
I turned it off.
No news is good news. Or, as the general populace of that glorious year was wont to say: All news is bad news.
It seemed like that. The threat of war was so heavy on the world that Atlas must certainly have had a terrible backache. The 1980s and 1990s, with their general climate of peace and good will made these last fourteen years of tense brinksmanship all the more agonizing by comparison. That was why the young peace criers were so militant. They had never really known the years of peace, and they lived with the conviction that those in power had always been men of guns and destruction. Perhaps, if they had been old enough to have experienced peace before the cold war, their fiery idealism might have been metamorphosed into despair, as with the rest of us. I was very young in the last of the pre-war years, but I had been reading since before I was two and spoke four languages by the age of four. I was aware even then. It makes the present chaos more maddening.
Besides the threat of plague, there was the super-nuclear accident in Arizona which had claimed thirty-seven thousand lives, a number too large to carry emotion with it.
And there were the Anderson Spoors which had riddled half a state with disease before the Bio-Chem Warfare people had been able to check their own stray experiment.
And, of course, there were the twisted
Or I get invited to their cocktail parties so that I can perform parlor tricks for a batch of drunks. The world made me cynical, Harry. And it keeps me that way. So, if we're both wise, we'll just sit back and get rich off my cynicism. Maybe if a psychiatrist made me happy-go-lucky and at peace with myself, my talent would disappear."
Before he could reply, I left. When I closed the door behind me, they were wheeling Child down the corridor.
His empty eyes stared fixedly at the softly colored ceiling.
Outside, the snow was still falling. Fairy gowns. Crystal tears. Sugar from a celestial cake. I tried to come up with all the pretty metaphors I could, maybe to prove I'm not so cynical after all.
I slid into the hovercar, tipped the Marine as he slid out the other side. I drove into the street, taking the small curb too fast. White clouds whooshed up behind me and obscured the AC building and everything else I put behind me.
The book lay at my side, the dust jacket face down because it had her picture on it. I didn't want to see amber hair and smooth lips imitating a bow. It was a picture that disgusted me. And intrigued me. I couldn't understand the latter, so I pretended to more of the former than I felt.
I turned on the radio and listened to the dull voice of the newscaster casting his tidbits on the airwave waters with a voice uniformly pleasant whether the topic was a cure for cancer or the death of hundreds in a plane crash. "Peking announced late today that it had developed a weapon equal to the Spheres of Plague launched yesterday by the Western Alliance " (Pa-changa, changa, sissss, sisss pa-changa, the Latin music of another station added in unconscious sardonic wit) " According to Asian sources, the Chinese weapon is a series of platforms " (Sa-baba, sa-baba, po-po-pachanga) " above Earth's atmosphere, capable of launching rockets containing a virulent mutant strain of leprosy which can be distributed across seventeenmile-wide swaths of territory " (Hemorrhoids really can be dealt with in less than an hour at the Painless Clinic on the West Side, another station assured me, though it faded out before it would tell me how much less than an hour and just how painless.) " Members of the New Maoism said today that they had assurances from "
I turned it off.
No news is good news. Or, as the general populace of that glorious year was wont to say: All news is bad news.
It seemed like that. The threat of war was so heavy on the world that Atlas must certainly have had a terrible backache. The 1980s and 1990s, with their general climate of peace and good will made these last fourteen years of tense brinksmanship all the more agonizing by comparison. That was why the young peace criers were so militant. They had never really known the years of peace, and they lived with the conviction that those in power had always been men of guns and destruction. Perhaps, if they had been old enough to have experienced peace before the cold war, their fiery idealism might have been metamorphosed into despair, as with the rest of us. I was very young in the last of the pre-war years, but I had been reading since before I was two and spoke four languages by the age of four. I was aware even then. It makes the present chaos more maddening.
Besides the threat of plague, there was the super-nuclear accident in Arizona which had claimed thirty-seven thousand lives, a number too large to carry emotion with it.
And there were the Anderson Spoors which had riddled half a state with disease before the Bio-Chem Warfare people had been able to check their own stray experiment.
And, of course, there were the twisted
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