Mansard

Charlie Mansard lay flat on his back on the king-size bed, staring at Lynette working out on the La Lanne unit. She was bent forward in what he thought of as the doggy position, and all she had on was a pair of net stockings. Her eyes were closed, and her body was covered in a fine sheen of sweat. He had called Lynette earlier in the hope that a little sexplay might help to slow down the army of ideas that insisted on marching about in his head. But after three bottles of champagne, a doomer apiece, and some rather inconclusive dalliance, he still felt strange, in what he could describe only as a state of counter-excitement. His imagination simply would not quit; it also would not focus. He could not lose himself in Lynette's accommodating body, and he could not get drunk. Even when he admitted that he was physically exhausted and settled for the role of the passive voyeur, he could not concentrate on her moving flesh for any protracted period. His mind refused to stop jumping, and his whirling thoughts carried him along from one random point to the next.

His single consolation was that Lynette probably did not mind. Apart from anything else, Lynette was paid very well not to mind. Right at that moment, he was using her as a piece of living pornography, and he was not even able to give her his full attention. Still, she did not complain. Over the years they had maintained their strange relationship, he had given Lynette a great deal of money to tolerate his foibles and mood shifts. There were times when he felt almost paternal toward her. Back in the old days, before Faithful and his jackals had grabbed power, she probably would have been a lawyer, perhaps an actress, at least a corporate executive. Now all those options, with the exception of that of the actress, had gone. She had to settle for being the plaything of an alcoholic but highly paid sky designer. The worse condemnation of the times was that a woman in New York, alone and without money, could have done a great deal worse. He paid for her apartment; and he gave her ample pocket money. At the very least, she had time to read, to listen to music; she even had time to think, something that made him very envious now and then.

He had also given her one other thing that also explained why Lynette complained so little about what he did. He had had her fitted with illegal DNI plugs and set her up with a connection for bootlegged Japanese software. At that moment, as she pumped the La Lanne unit and sweated, she was jacked into one of the lastest erofeeds to be smuggled out of Tokyo. She was somewhere else, in some erotic wonderland of endorphins and microcurrents.

He had to admit that the sight of her bare buttocks, making frenzied coital movements as she half-consciously interacted with the machine, was close to arousing the beast in him. However, each time he was almost ready to get up and make a move, he became distracted. The last couple of days had produced more than enough to distract him.

Ron Cableman had turned out to be a smooth, third-generation Washington sharpie. He belonged in the Faithful White House. His daddy had survived the plot and counterplot of the last days of the Reagan administration, and his grandaddy had played poker with Richard Nixon. They had started drinking at the Skylounge, had a late lunch at 21, and from there they had gone downtown to Ruskin's. Cableman had matched Mansard drink for drink. As the happy hour had started to grow maudlin, Cableman had offered to call a couple of girls that he knew. Man-said had declined. He was fairly faithful to Lynette, although he did spend the rest of the evening wondering what if. Along the way, it had transpired that Larry Faithful was planning a major spectacular. Although it was not stated as such, the president and those around him thought that the country needed a major diversion. It had been decided that Larry Faithful would declare a special public holiday. In one month's time, there would be a Day of National Reconciliation. To mark the occasion, he would hold a special service at Liberty Island. The plan for the grand finale and crowning glory was to have four of Mansard's giant holograms moving up the Hudson. They wanted him to use the Four Horsemen again.

"Plus we want you to do the other figures from Revelations – the Beast, the Whore of Babylon, and Jesus himself, the Lamb of God. Storming up the river and terrifying the hell out of the sinners. It'll be on all the networks, plus it'll go out on satellite so it can be holostructured in all the major cities."

Mansard had put down his scotch and looked at Ron Cableman in blank amazement. "It's impossible. There's no way that my people could pull something like that together in the time."

Cableman had smiled blandly. "It'll be a rush job, but all of the country's resources will be at your disposal."

Mansard had firmly shaken his head. "That's the trouble, Ron. The country doesn't have the resources. The skywalker we put up last Sunday used state-of-the-art Japanese hardware that's subject to the full prohibitions of the embargo. The projectors themselves are close to impossible. I think we had all that there are on this side of the Pacific. And don't ask me how we got them. You wouldn't like the answer."

Cableman had laughed. "Listen, Charles, I'm pretty sure that the U.S. Government is quite capable of getting you a bunch of Sony DL-70s. I don't think we'd need to go through Chile, either."

Mansard had looked at him with considerably more respect. Ron Cableman had done his homework.

"Could you get me thirty of them?"

"I expect so."

"In two weeks?"

"If necessary."

"Then it might just be possible, if the money was right and everything else fell into place. I'm not saying I'll do it, but in theory…"

Cableman had raised an amused eyebrow. "This is the government, the price is always right."

"I'd also need a lot of trained, experienced riggers."

"We could get them from the military."

"I want good people."

"Believe it or not, there are people in the military who know what they're doing."

Mansard continued to put up objections, but he knew in his heart that he was going to try for the job. Cableman knew it, too. Another part of his homework had told him that Mansard had the kind of ego that would not be able to turn down a challenge of this size.

The program on the La Lanne unit had changed, and Lynette was doing a slow sinuous stretch. Mansard watched her for a while, then thoughtfully got up from the bed. He looked around the penthouse suite as if he had not seen it in days. The place was a mess. He had been working and sleeping there for weeks. A debris of beer cans, empty bottles, and Styrofoam food containers was beginning to bury the more permanent clutter of accumulated junk and toys with which he liked to surround himself. It was all mixed in with the professional litter of plans and drawings and scale models of work in progress. The six-foot thirteenth-century Buddha of which he was so proud seemed to be contemplating a slob's nirvana. The mess was his own fault. He was too paranoid to allow the cleaning people in to do their work. He had to get a grip on himself. The luxury squalor was verging on the disgusting and would probably soon be a health hazard. It was time to get it cleaned – or to move.

He stepped over a pile of foreign newspapers and magazines, mostly banned, which one day he would get around to reading, and gazed out the wraparound window that took up most of two walls. He flattened his hands on the curved expanse of glass and peered into the night. A steady rain was falling on the city. To the south and west, in the twenties and thirties, there were deep pools of darkness where power had yet to be restored. If this was the legacy of just one of his figures, what chaos would four of them create? There was little or no remorse riding his train of thought. Charlie Mansard had no illusions about himself. He would go on creating the biggest possible optical images for as long as they would let him and whatever the consequences.