Nathans stopped at a display of groomed rosebushes nearly exploding with roses. An Enforcer guarded the hedge and watched closely as Nathans bent to smell one of the blooms. The plants had been boosted to produce dozens more flowers than they normally would; the roots would burn out, exhausted, in only a few years, yet it would be a spectacular flash of glory. But someone always had to pull out the weeds to let the flowers grow.
Nathans fervently considered this to be the next step in the evolution of mankind, a societal evolution to hone mental capabilities and to selectively breed out those who had no imagination, no personal drive, no powers of reason. Nathans thought it was a grand and subtle plan, for the ultimate benefit of Homo sapiens. Perhaps it seemed harsh, but he believed a more humane solution would have far more destructive consequences.
Subversive groups like the Cremators undermined his power, threw obstacles in the path of this social plan. Involuntarily his fingers clenched, and Nathans almost grasped one of the thorny stems of the boosted rosebush. Carefully he stood up again, smiled at the Enforcer, and made himself walk casually away. Nathans managed to control his frustrated anger, fighting down the urge to stretch out his foot and trip someone.
The Cremators baffled him. He had the greatest resources available in the entire Metroplex, probably in the world, and still there had never been a successful attempt by the Enforcers, or Resurrection, Inc., to locate a single member of the group. Nathans could not understand how anyone could manage to elude his intensive demands for information, but the Cremators had done their cover-up work better than anyone could have conceived.
He could not deny that certain pre-Servants had vanished without a trace, or that the public rumors about the Cremators had not been generated by the rumor division of the Enforcers Guild. But not only did the Cremators steal his potential Servants away—even worse, they increased the public fear and paranoia about Servants in general. Nathans was helpless, and furious that he was helpless.
He strolled along, passive, so in tune with the organism of the crowd that he rarely even bumped elbows with another person. Nathans pushed through a knot of congestion where five street vendors had set up their rickety tables. He stopped to look, perhaps to chat. It always pleased him to see that some of the blues used their spare time to make and create things.
He paused pensively in front of a jeweler’s stall. In several trays were various rings, pendants, earrings, studs, buckles, all made from polished and skillfully modified debris: scrap metal, acrylic-coated paper, wood splinters suspended in colored resins. One of the pendants in the glittering, unarranged chaos caught his eye—a neo-Satanist star-in-pentagram made from twisted copper wire and epoxied onto a wafer-thin disk of porcelain.
Nathans reached forward to pick it up, carefully inspecting the work with a bemused expression on his face. While keeping an eye on everything else that happened at her table, the craftswoman dickered heatedly with another customer about an inexpensive clip-on nose stud. Nathans studied her carefully as he appeared to consider the pendant, still keeping his face in the shadow of his hat brim.
The jewelry vendor had long brown hair braided with a rainbow of different-colored ribbons, like the striking plumage of an extinct bird. She had strung herself with a tangled mass of jewelry, most of which seemed to be her own creations. The woman’s face was wide, not very attractive; she had a few pimples, a few freckles, a few moles. But she had a pretty smile, and she actually wore a tie-dyed T-shirt, harking back to the wave of hippie nostalgia that had swept the Metroplex a few years before.
Giving up on the other sale, she plucked the nose stud from the dissatisfied customer’s fingers and abruptly turned away from him to face Nathans. “Like that one?”
“Yes I do. It’s very interesting,” he said, sounding complimentary but uncertain. It was all a game; they both knew it.
“Are you a neo-Satanist, then?”
“Are you?” Nathans answered quickly, taking her off guard.
“No. I don’t go for that sort of stuff,” she said without vehemence, careful not to scare off a prospective customer. “But it’s okay, I mean. We’re all different, right?”
“Then why do you make a pendant like this, if you’re not part of the religion?”
She shrugged, flipping one of her braids back. “I try to do lots of different things. And I have to make what the market demands, or else why bother sitting out here quibbling prices all day long? There’s a lot of interest in this stuff. That’ll be my third one sold today—if, of course, you decide to buy it.”
Nathans appreciated her frankness. He and Stromgaard and Vincent had formed neo-Satanism with a consciously mischievous intent, as a simple joke at first and then an appallingly real joke as the stupid blues ate it up. If someone was foolish enough to be taken in by such a ridiculous and absurd religion, if someone would freely give money and fanatical energy to something that was such an apparent sham, then didn’t that person deserve to be defrauded, a disgrace to the human race?
“Of course I’ll take it,” he answered the jeweler. “But you’ll have to wrap it up for me, please.” Before she could quote him a price, Nathans removed his Net card and swept it through her reader, transferring money from one of his fictitious sources into the woman’s home account. The jeweler handed him the pendant in a white paper bag taken from a fast-food center. She nodded at the fair, but not overly generous, price he had credited her.
“Good enough. Thanks for not haggling!” she said. “It’s such a pain in the ass.”
Nathans tucked the bag inside the denim jacket. “Have a nice day.”
He walked off again past the line of vendors, paying little attention to the flower sellers, the caricature artists, the middle-aged man selling cookies. Looking, smelling, experiencing, sensing the instincts of the mass mind of the public, he could almost feel his mental batteries charging.
Nathans particularly liked the singers, especially those who had written their own songs. A new style of mournful street spontaneity had grown popular, called the “blues’ blues.” A man and his sister sat together on a blanket, loudly singing improvised words to the music from a Tchaikovsky tape. Nathans stood listening while the others paused and then moved in. He quickly slid his Net card through the singers’ reader, giving them a small donation. They didn’t break their refrain to thank him, and that pleased him even more.
He walked again, looping around slowly, not anxious to return to Resurrection, Inc. Today he didn’t really feel up to going past Soapbox Derby, though he never tired of listening to the people ranting there. Sure, most of the invective predictably attacked Resurrection, but Nathans felt gratified to see the people thinking at least, planning ways to change the world order. If they kept it up, they might actually succeed in raising their own social consciousness. Otherwise, they would be doing nothing more than assembling furniture, cleaning rooms, lifting boxes, and washing dishes, not thinking of anything beyond their own paycheck.
Out of curiosity, with a faint predatory smile on his face, Nathans slowly came up behind one of the wandering blues. The man’s sluggish movements and dead lack of expression clearly tagged him for what he was. Feeling the game build slowly, Nathans shadowed him, not trying to hide his movements but somewhat appalled (yet not really surprised) when the blue didn’t even realize he was being followed.
As they moved on, Nathans began to grow almost nauseated by the man’s aimless course, his dejected stance. Nathans wanted to shout, to shake the man and insist that his life didn’t have to be like this—was he a machine that without a mechanical job he was lost? Didn’t humanity have the power to think, letting a man occupy himself with great things instead of trivial “busy” jobs?
Nathans narrowed his eyes, fixing his stare at the back of the man’s head. It was going to be difficult for his own subtle revolution to come about, his own important alteration of society, his vision of the bright and optimistic future. Nothing could happen until most of these pathetic people went away.
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