The Jagged Orbit by John Brunner Read Free Book Online Page B

improbable phenomena developed in an age of tight corsets and strict social etiquette into a desperate, irrational yearning for direct contact between individuals. Yes?"
    A girl in the front row, whose name he knew to be Alice Clover because it was on the illuminated reference board before him but whose face he was completely ignorant of because at every class since the beginning of the year she had kept her street yash on, had raised her hand.
    "Do you mean that it's irrational to pay attention to pythonesses?"
    Conroy hesitated, looking over the array of students and taking especial note of the girls. About a quarter of them were in street yashes, like Alice who had just spoken; the remainder wore a fantastic galaxy of costumes ranging from a height-of-last-year-fashion over-suit with inflated bosom and buttocks to a waist-length orange wig and a pair of shabby Nix.
    "Who am I to define what's rational?" he said wearily. "I mean no more and no less than I say. You comp it out for yourselves."

EIGHTEENTHE DRAWBACKS OF AN INVENTION INTENDED FOR A RATIONAL SPECIES
     
    Seeing Reedeth awaiting her at the point where this and another corridor joined, Ariadne Spoelstra would have liked to turn around and go back. Currently her planned program for the relationship between them was at the stage where physical proximity was being discouraged—and that, of course, was why he had chosen to waylay her. "Lying in ambush" was the term that sprang most readily to her mind; the bastions of the Ginsberg were conducive to imagery of snares and pitfalls, traps and gins.
    But she was on a pediflow, and—like so many of the devices which twenty-first century ingenuity had made available to mankind—that was something which seemed to have been destined for an altogether more rational species than the one she belonged to. It did not afford the opportunity to change one's mind. Once riding it, one was compelled to stay with it until it reached the quiescent area at an intersection and the monomolecular flow level on the upper surface eddied out into a random pattern equating to stillness. There was no going back, only continuing to one's starting point by a different route.
    In the course of the ten years they'd been in use, how many affairs had been conditioned by the direction the pediflow happened to take outside one's office or apt? How many acquaintanceships, how many marriages . . . ? How many perfect lifetime partners had been on the flow heading the other way?
    Stifling that train of thought with an almost physical effort, she composed herself for the properly curt nod and the unmistakably formal smile which were appropriate to the down-phase of the cycle of their intimacy. Reedeth, however, was clearly not in a mood to abide by other people's rules. She had to suffer him to kiss her, though she did manage to avert her mouth.
    "Finally!" he exclaimed. "I've been wanting to talk with you, and—"
    "I've been on call all morning," she countered frigidly.
    "Sorry, but that isn't true. You put up a Class Two interdiction at ten-ten, according to my desketary, and it wasn't lifted until a few minutes ago. Hmmm?" He cocked one eyebrow and looked parentally reproachful.
    Bastard! But the gamble had failed. She had hoped the dialogue might go:
    "Yes, but I wanted to say this personally!"
    In which case she would have answered, "What's the good of having a comweb system if you won't use it?"
    And walked briskly on, having gained a major point.
    Instead of which she'd been caught in a downright lie. She sought the least damaging escape route, like a chessplayer trying to reconstruct a weak attack to provide emergency protection for the king.
    "Well, if it was really important you could have overridden, and if it wasn't why come bothering me now?"
    "That's just it," Reedeth shrugged. "I don't know if it's important or not—that's what I wanted to ask you. This pythoness you've engaged for this afternoon: who is she, anyway, and what's the