The Simulacra

They made good time to Te

‘You mean,' Molly said, ‘we can't land at his place? We have to -- ‘

‘We hire a cab,' Nat Flieger said. ‘You know.'

‘I know,' Molly said. ‘I've read about them. And it's always a local rustic who acquaints you with the local gossip, all of which can be put in a gnat's eye.' She closed her book and rose to her feet. ‘Well, Nat, maybe you can find out from the cab driver what you want to know. About Kongrosian's secret basement of horrors.'

Jim Planck said huskily, ‘Miss Dondoldo -- ‘ He grimaced. ‘I think a lot of Leo but honest to god -- ‘

‘You can't stand me?' she inquired, raising her eyebrows.

‘Why, I wonder why, Mr Planck.'

‘Cut it out,' Nat said as he lugged his gear from the ‘copter and set it down on the damp ground. The air smelled of rain; it was heavy and clinging and he instinctively rebelled against it, against the i

Stepping gingerly from the ‘copter (she was wearing sandals) Molly said, ‘It smells fu

‘That's what it is,' Nat said as he helped Jim Planck with his gear.

‘Thanks,' Planck murmured. ‘I believe I got it, Nat. How long are we going to be up here?' He looked as if he wanted to re-enter the ‘copter and start right back; Nat saw on the man's face overt panic. ‘This area,' Planck said, ‘always makes me think of -- like in the kids' book about the three billygoats gruff. You know.' His voice grated. ‘Trolls.'

Molly stared at him and then sharply laughed.

A cab rolled up to greet them, but it was not driven by a local rustic; it was a twenty-year-old autonomic, with a mute self-guidance system. Presently they had their recording and personal equipment aboard and the auto-cab was rolling from the field, on its way to Richard Kongrosian's home, the address in the instruction-well of the cab acting as the tropism.

‘I wonder,' Molly said, watching the old-fashioned houses and stores of the town pass by, ‘what they do for entertainment up here?'

Nat said, ‘Maybe they come down to the ‘copter field and watch the outsiders who occasionally wander in.' Like us, he thought, seeing people along the sidewalk here and there glance up curiously.

We're the entertainment, he decided. There certainly did not appear to be much else; the town looked as it must have before the fracas of 1980; the stores had tinted glass and plastic fronts, now chipped and in disrepair beyond belief.

And, by a huge, abandoned, obsolete supermarket, he saw an empty parking lot: space for surface vehicles which no longer existed.

For a man of ability to live here, Nat decided, it must be a form of suicide. It could only be a subtle self-destructiveness that would cause Kongrosian to leave the vast and busy urban complex of Warsaw, one of the brightest centres of human activity and communication in the world, and come to this dismal, rain-drenched, decaying town. Or -- a form of penance. Could that be it? To punish himself for god knew what, perhaps something to do with his special-birth son ... assuming that what Molly said was correct.

He thought about Jim Planck's joke, the one about the psychokineticist Richard Kongrosian being in a pubtrans accident and growing hands. But Kongrosian had hands; he simply did not need to employ them in his music. Without them he would obtain more nuances of tonal colouring, more precise rhythms and phrasing. The entire somatic component was bypassed; the mind of the artist applied itself directly to the keyboard.

Do these people along these deteriorating streets know who lives among them? Nat wondered. Probably not. Probably Kongrosian keeps to himself, lives with his family and ignores the community. A recluse, and who wouldn't be, up here? And if they did know about Kongrosian they would be suspicious of him, because he was an artist and because he was also a Psi; it was a double burden to bear. No doubt in his concourse with these people -- when he bought at the local grocery store -- he eliminated his psychokinetic faculty and used his manual extremities like everyone else. Unless Kongrosian had even more courage than Nat realized ...

‘When I get to be a world famous artist,' Jim Planck said, ‘The first thing I'm going to do is move to a backwater boondock like this.' His voice was laden with sarcasm. ‘It'll be my reward.'

‘Yes,' Nat said, ‘it must be nice to be able to cash in on one's talent.' He spoke absently; ahead he saw a throng of people and his attention had turned that way. Ba

And yet wasn't this actually the most likely place for the Sons of Job to show themselves? This decadent region reeked of defeat; here lived those who had failed, Bes who held no real role in the system. The Sons of Job, like the Nazis of the past, fed on disappointment, on the disinherited. Yet these backwater towns which time had bypassed were the movement's authentic feeding-ground ... it should not have surprised him, then, to see this.

But these were not Germans; these were Americans.

It was a sobering thought. Because he could not dismiss the Sons of Job as a symptom of the ceaseless, unchanging derangement of the German mentality, that was too pat, too simple. These were his own people marching here today, his countrymen. It could have been him, too; if he were to lose his job with EME or suffer some crushing, humiliating social experience …

‘Look at them,' Molly said.

‘I am looking,' Nat answered.

‘And you're thinking, "It could be me." Right? Frankly I doubt if you have the guts to march in public in support of your convictions; in fact I doubt if you have any convictions. Look. There's Goltz.'

She was correct. Bertold Goltz, the Leader, was present here today. How oddly the man came and went; it was never possible to predict where and when he might pop up.

Perhaps Goltz had the use of von Lessinger's principle.

The use of time travel.

That would give Goltz, Nat reflected, a certain advantage over all the charismatic leaders of the past, in that it would make him more or less eternal. He could not in the customary fashion be killed. This would explain why the government had not crushed the movement; he had wondered about that, why Nicole tolerated it. She tolerated it because she had to.

Technically, Goltz could be murdered, but an earlier Goltz would simply move into the future and replace him; Goltz would go on, not ageing or changing, and the movement would ultimately benefit because they would have a leader who could be counted on not to go the way of Adolf Hitler: who would not develop paresis or any other degenerative disease.

Jim Planck, absorbed in the sight, murmured, ‘Handsome son-of-a-gun, isn't he?' He, too, seemed impressed. The man could have a career in the movies or TV, Nat reflected. Been that sort of entertainer, rather than the kind he was. Goltz had style. Tall, clouded-over in a sort of tense gloom ... and yet, Nat noticed, just a trifle too heavy. Goltz appeared to be in his mid-forties and the lea