Read Michaelmas for Free Online Page A

his vocation. He used it as infre-quently as possible, but he was not going to let Domino have the last word on this topic.
    "Wait one," he said while he chose his words.
    Time was when men of Horse Watson's profession typic-ally never slept sober, and died with their livers eroded. It must have been fun to watch the literate swashbucklers make fools of themselves in the frontier saloons, indulging in horse-whippings and shoot-outs with rival journalists and their partisans. But who stopped to think what it was to have the power of words and publication, to discover that an entire town and territory would judge, condemn, act, reprieve, and glorify because of something you had slugged together the night before? Because of something you had hand-set into type, smudging your fingertips with metal poisons that inexorably began their journey through your bloodstream? For the sake of the power, you turned your liver and kidneys into spongy, irascible masses; you tainted the tissue of your brain with heavy metal ions until it became a house haunted by stumbling visions. Alcohol would temporarily overcome the effect. So you became an alcoholic, and purchased sanity one day at a time, and made a spectacle of yourself. It was neither funny nor tragic in the end —it was simply a fact of life that oper-ated less slowly on the mediocre, because the mediocre could turn themselves off and go to sleep whether they had done the night's job to their own satisfaction or not.
    Time was, too, when men of Horse Watson's profession had to seek out gory death because that was all their bosses were willing to either deplore or endorse, depending on management policy. But let no man tell you it's possible to live like that and not pay. The occupational disease was martinis for the ones that needed a cushion, and, for the very good ones, cancer. For good and bad in proportional measure there was also the great funny plague of the latter half of the century—nervous bowels and irritated stomachs. Who could see anything but humour in a man gulping down tincture of opium and shifting uneasily in his studio seat, his mind concerned with thoughts of fistula and surgery, his mind determinedly not preoccupied with intestinal resections and where that could lead? Loss of dignity is after all one of the basics to a good punchy gag.
    And time was when men of Horse Watson's profession were set free by the tube, the satellites, and finally the holo-gram. Now all Horse Watson had to do to pick and choose among contending employers was to make sure that his personal popularity with the little folks in the allocated apartment remained higher than most. It was a shame he knew no better way to do this than to be honest. A strong young head full of good voodoo could make mincemeat out of a man like that.
    Men like Horse Watson were being cut down quickly. It was one of the nervous staples of recent shop gossip, and that, too, was having its effect on the scarier old heads. They came apart like spring-wound clocks when the tough young graduates with their 1965 birth certificates popped out of college with a major in Communications and a pair of minors in Psychology and Politics, and a thirty thousand new dollar tuition-loan note at the bank.
    Michaelmas said to Domino: "He knows he shouldn't say things like that. He knows some of it doesn't make sense. He trusts me, and he thinks of me as one of his own kind. He's apologizing for slipping away and leaving me with one less colleague. If you can see that, you can see that if you think kindly of him, you're being less hard on yourself. He doesn't realize he's casting aspersions on our work. He doesn't know what we do. He thinks it's all his own fault. Now please be still for a while." He massaged the bridge of his nose. He did not look at Campion. He was having a split-second fear that if he did, the man might open one eye and wink at him.

Four
    It was truer than ever that airports look the same all over the world. But