Michaelmas Read Online Free PDF Page B

case of BO that would fell a tree?"
    "Yes, the world is quite different now from the way I found it in my young manhood,"
    Michaelmas said. Looking at the slump of Watson's mouth, he spoke the words with a certain sympathy. "Now most of the world's violence is individual, and petty."
    Watson snorted softly. "Like that thing in New York where that freak was sneaking in on his neighbours and killing them for their apartment space. Nuts and kooks; little grubby nuts. Good for two minutes on one day. Not that you should measure death that way, God rest the souls of the innocent. But you know what I mean. Look. Look, we're in a funny racket, all of a sudden. You figure you're gonna spend your life making things real for the little folks in the parlour, you know?
    Here's the big stuff coming at you, people; better duck. Here's the condition of the world. You don't like it? Get up and change it."
    "Yes," Michaelmas said. "We showed them the big things, and that made the small things smaller. More tolerable. Less significant."
    Watson nodded. "Maybe. Maybe. You're saying the shit was there all along. But I got to tell you, when we showed 'em a gut-shot farmer drowning in a rice paddy, it was because it meant something in Waukegan. It said, 'Today your way of life was made more safe. Or less.' But you show 'em the same guy today, and it's about a jealous husband or some clown wants to inherit his buffalo. And you know it's not going to get any bigger than that.
    "It's cowboys and Indians again," Watson said. "Stories for children. It doesn't mean a thing to Waukegan, except the guy's dying, and he's dying the way they do in the holo dramas, so he's as real as the next actor. They judge his goddamn performance, for Christ's sake, and if he's con-vincing, then maybe it was important. It makes you sick to think he's not interesting if he's quiet about it. Man, so little of it's real any more; they've got no idea what can happen to them.
    They don't want an idea. You remem-ber that quote Alvin Moscow got from the plane crash survivor? 'We would all be a little kinder to each other.' That is what you and I should be all about.
    "Man, who knows what's real any more, and who feels it? You run your fingers over a selector and the only action that looks right to you is something they did in a studio with prefigured angles, stop motion, the best lighting, and all that stuff. Even your occasional Moroccan school-teacher hung over a slow fire three days ago can't compete with that stuff. It's not like he was a Commie that was going to corrupt the morals of Mason City, or even that he was a Peace Corps volunteer that crossed some Leninist infiltrator. It's just some poor slob that told the kids something that's not in the Quran, and somebody took exception to it. Man, you can get the same thing in Tennessee; what's so great about that? Is that gonna make you rush out and join some crusade to stop that kind of stuff? Is that gonna touch your life at all? Is that gonna make you hear the marching band?"

    "It might cause you to sip your wine more slowly."
    "Okay. Yeah, But you know damned well the big stories now are some guy dying by inches inside because he can't make his taxes and who, where, has the half million that disappeared out of the transit bill? I mean that's all right, and it's necessary, and even after your third pop or your third stick, it'll get through to you, kind of, if Melvin Watson or L. G. Michaelmas, begging your pardon, Larry, pushes it at you in some way that makes you feel like you're paying attention. But nobody dies for anything any more, you know? They all the only on account of, just like holo people, and half the time these days we just pass along a lot of dung from the lobby boys and the government boys and the image gurus like our friend the Herr Doktor.
    "My God, Larry, we're just on a fertilizer run here. UNAC's just a bunch of people jockeying to get by, just like in any widget monopoly or thingumbob cartel in the