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Belgians sighed and replaced her pale, effeminate, beardless whole-head mask, then trotted obediently across the studio floor to her place for the scene, her bottom waggling as she went. Down to her waist she was wearing a full-dress military uniform jacket, the breast ablaze with orders and decorations, but her steatopygous buttocks were concealed by nothing more than a sort of docked horsetail of grass-stems. It was a great image, especially for areas where there was strong Muslim influence and the concomitant view prevailed that women had no souls.
    "Got those fetters ready?" Diablo called to the props man. "Remember I want them to break a sight easier this time than they did last! Bad associations if they take longer than five seconds—out of time-scale with the rest of the show. What the hell?"
    He stopped dead in the very middle of the floor, on his way back to the control bubble, and realized that there were two armed macoots facing him.
    "The Mayor wants to see you," the one on the right said. His tall plastic mask—black-grounded, but with slashes of red, yellow and brown on the cheeks—made his voice resonate eerily.
    "Tell him to wait!" Diablo snapped. There were very few people in Blackbury who could say that sort of thing to a macoot, but he'd been doing it for years. "I'm right in the middle of a show—can't you see?"
    The second macoot drew a casual smoking line on the floor with a low-powered beam from his laser. "He said now, white trash. You coming on foot, or as butcher's meat?"
    "What did you call me?" Furious, Diablo took half a pace forward, then canceled the movement as the laser's muzzle jerked upward significantly. Those guns were the legacy of Anthony Gottschalk's last visit; he'd recently canned a show about them—in which for obvious propaganda reasons they were reported as having been developed right here in the city—and he had no illusions about the effect of concentrating two hundred fifty watts in a space no larger than the tip of a sewing-needle.
    There was an eternal pause. Eventually he said, "Okay. O-kay. But I sure hope he doesn't hang me up too long." And he added to his cast and technicians as he moved towards the door, "See you back here after lunch, you-all!"
     
    Awaiting him at the studio entrance was a black official Voortrekker convertible, the Capetown-built skimmer-cum-groundcar which was the world's most expensive means of private transport. Mayor Black owned six of them personally, a matter about which Diablo had never been entirely happy despite the rationalization that the South Africans and the American knees were allegedly on the same side in the ultimate analysis; the argument smacked too much of the similar one which had justified the admission of Black Muslims to meetings of the Ku Klux Klan back in the last century. He scowled more deeply still as he was forced into the back seat of the Voortrekker by the macoots, who joined him, one on each side. The vehicle hummed off in the direction of the Mayor's palace, the way ahead being cleared by the remote override which put the stop lights to red on all the cross streets at the touch of a button on the dash.
    In spite of everything, Diablo sat with his mouth firmly shut. He had no idea what could have led up to this, but his best guess was that Mayor Black had got out of bed on the wrong side this morning. When he was in that sort of mood, he tended to enjoy re-asserting his authority over anyone who contributed to the economy of Blackbury, and Diablo certainly fell into that category. His canned vushows were among the city's chief sources of foreign exchange, quite apart from their propaganda value, and it had revolutionized their relationship with the American Federal authorities when they started to be able to pay their power and water taxes in hard currency like cedi and riyals.
    He made a mental note to trace the macoot who had publicly insulted him and make sure his future was blacker than his backside. It would