Free The Jagged Orbit by John Brunner Page A

tell you. It's not the sort of trick anyone will pull on me twice. There was another mackero after her—a poacher. Bought a few bugs, planted them, got the evidence, came around one day and said if I didn't dissolve my contract with Mikki he'd sell me for a five-stretch because she was only fifteen." Jaw-muscles lumping at the bitter recollection caused ripples in his dark beard, the artificial flock faithfully parodying the movement of the natural hairs. "He wasn't interested in bedding her. He didn't care for girls."
    "And . . ." Lyla swallowed hard, "And could he have done what he threatened?"
    "Sure he could. But I'm not apologizing. By age fifteen Mikki knew more about that side of life than most people do by age fifty! The bastard's still using some of the publicity material I compiled for her. You must have seen it—her brother at nine, her uncle at twelve? It's all true."
    "And that was okay, huh? But you at fifteen wasn't?"
    Dan drew a deep breath, his face etched with a scowl like the traces of a heavy truck in soft ground. "Darl, if you can't answer that, you'll never get the measure of this planet of ours. Come on, they're waiting for us upstairs."
    "I guess it was naïve of me," she agreed meekly, and complied.

TWENTY-NINE IT IS ONE THING TO TALK GLIBLY ABOUT THE DETERMINISM OF HISTORY BUT ANOTHER THING ALTOGETHER TO FIND ONESELF CAUGHT UP IN HISTORIC FORCES LIKE A DEAD LEAF ON THE GALE
     
    As the sun tilted away from the zenith, so the sustaining anger leaked away from Pedro Diablo's mind, and he was suddenly brought face to face with an appalling truth.
    It's not hate. It's terror.
    He looked at his own dark-skinned hand and watched it shaking, detachedly, because he could not really accept that a trembling due to fear had its origins in the mind that he Pedro Diablo was used to occupying. He was a maker of fear, not a victim of it.
    Here I am. How? Why?
    The reasons were as many-layered as a constructional sandwich of industrial plastics. Superficially one might say—but what was the good of superficialities? The Diablo reputation was founded on the ability to look far deeper into any given situation than most people could manage without a computer handy to consult. An atavistic talent, on a par with being able to multiply six-figure numbers in the head because it was too much trouble to go find the log-tables, but in a context like Blackbury very damned useful indeed.
    Out here, in the open so to speak ... ?
    He shook his head. It was no good trying to guess about his personal future. He could draw analogies with people in similar predicaments in the past—mainly in the far past—but nothing more. He could for example compare himself to a Jewish physicist thrown out of Nazi Germany, or one of the South African intellectuals deported during more recent crises by the Afrikaners, but it didn't help. Until this very morning he had been a loyal, cooperative, and indeed an admired and respected proponent of the ideals which Blackbury stood for. To be kicked out on the say-so not of one of the resident knee geneticists but of some stinking foreign honky—that was just too much for his mind to digest.
    His hands folded into fists so abruptly there was a faint clapping sound. For an instant his mind had been dominated by lust for revenge. He was a master propagandist; his work at the insignificant Blackbury vu-station had had repercussions far beyond the range of the antennae, being rebroadcast by half a score of black-owned, black-financed satellite relays. With his long-term intimate knowledge of the private lives of Mayor Black and his counterparts elsewhere, he could make the whole notion of Negro enclaves into a bad joke. It would take a week.
    But the desire was fading as rapidly as it had come. To turn his coat was beyond his powers of adaptation. Right now he almost regretted having been so dogmatic with the Federal rep who had been compelled to carry him out of black jurisdiction. Better, surely, to