First Citizen (34 page)

“Can you hear us? This is exactly what they want. We’re cutting each other to pieces before the sun is even down.”

“What do you mean?”

“We are just a holding pattern for them. Not meant to hold together very long, either. We’re supposed to spend our time figuring ways to fuck each other over in public while they, in private, work out who’s going to grab the power McCanlis let drop. I repeat my question: How long do we have?”

In Pollock’s face, I could see the awareness focusing in and shifting to a higher plane.

“How secure is this room?”

I laughed. “I’ve got four white-noise generators and an radio interfrequency scrambler running right now. The window surfaces are vibration-damped to mask any modulation from our voices and distorted to discourage telescope-toting lip readers. The subframes in these walls are fitted with random vibrators, also to mask voice modulation. Once a week my people—the ones I trust completely—burn every exposed surface here with hard gamma. I have taps and warblers, activated on a voltage drop, on every wire and pipe going into this wing of the building. If anyone knows what we’re saying, they’re using Tarot cards.”

Pollock almost looked impressed. “We can have all the time we want,” he said, “if we act right away.”

“If we tried anything serious, they would block us in committee, wouldn’t they?”

“Pick the two top contenders,” he said.

“Akers of Georgia and Walton of California.”

“Good choices.” He did look impressed. “We’ll have them killed.”

“How do you plan to arrange that? I mean, cleanly?”

“Those people you trust …”

“They’re just security forces, soldiers, not Mafia bullies—” I waited a two-count then added, “—or MIS assassins.”

“Then we do it politically,” he sailed on, missing my jibe.

“How?”

And he told me.

Two days later, standing together at the Speaker’s Rostrum, Pollock and I heard Triss of Arizona, a very junior congresswoman and another certified dummy, prefer charges of espionage and treason against Akers and Walton. The substance of the charges was that as chairman and ranking minority member, respectively, of the International Strategy Subcommittee, they had sold maps linking the locations of ballistic missile silos with radio abort codes. The deal was supposedly made with the Russians through contacts in Baja. Ms. Triss produced consular documents forwarding the papers and naming their sources.

Were the documents genuine? Certainly the letterhead and language were. So, incidentally, were the abort codes—as of about nine months previously. Did it matter? The affair might have ended right there, with the disgrace, if not the actual impeachment, of Messrs. Akers and Walton. The score would then have been Dummies two, Elders nothing. But we wanted more.

The specifications that Triss filed also contained twenty-five John Does and twenty-five Jane Does, listed variously as accomplices and informants. We didn’t have to advertise them, just let the fact be known—and hint that the Does were all congressmen and -women—as the House assembled an investigative committee. We made sure that panel was packed with our fellow Dummies. Meanwhile, other Dummies led the speculation on who might fill those fifty pairs of shoes we’d put on display.

You’ve seen those action-adventure movies where the hero is suspended over the side of a boat, or maybe over a swimming pool, with a dozen triangular fins circling and criss-crossing beneath his toes. To get out of the jam, he pricks his finger and lets two drops of blood fall. That excites the sharks into a feeding frenzy. The water boils, the foam turns pink, and soon there are no more sharks.

The sharks were thick where we were swimming. All we had to do was nick the two of them, Akers and Walton. Because Ms. Triss was recognized by all players as a Dummy, the other contenders took her charges as the signal for the grand melee to begin. Assertions and defamations flew around our heads, with the occasional crash and clatter of an actual resignation or recall vote. And, because we were supposed to be Dummies, too, Pollock and I were never touched. Within two months, all of the Elders were bloodied beyond redemption. There was a new order in the House and the Special Executive’s
prima facie
standing was accepted as real.

Finally, because the House investigating committee never actually called for an impeachment, the original evidence of espionage was never examined in any rigorous way. It disappeared soon after. Pollock had arranged the whole charade. Now I was impressed.

It was about this time, and no doubt related to my sudden prominence, that my sister sent her son to me. Clary and I had drifted apart over the years. She had married badly—a burned-out computer software wizard named Ossing—but divorced well; before it was over, she had produced this one boy. I think the responsibility frightened her. Keeping a pile of cash intact through the Money Warp of the ’90s was an impossible task. Raising a child in any American village big enough to support a closet-sized pot farm and a pusher was another impossible task. Clary understood that, if she stayed, she was going to lose one or the other. So she went.

She used her settlement to buy 900 acres of dairy farm along the Salmon River outside Truro in Nova Scotia. If she wouldn’t lose the boy to corruption, she would lose him to yokeldom. I think he knew no books or music but what she had brought with her, and Clary had a rampaging taste for detective mysteries of all vintages and the
Jefferson Starship
as the rhythmic emblem of a childhood she never had in the 1980s. Gabriel Ossing grew up knowing other children by rumor only and from a few withering mentions out of Dashiell Hammett. I’m told he had many fights when he finally was sent to the county school at Bible Hill. The boy was quiet and strange.

After he finished high school, and before starting a college course in law or medicine, Clary wanted him to see something of the world. Becoming a congressional page would broaden him, she thought, and with my new position of power I could arrange it immediately.

So now Gabriel stood before me in Baltimore, having been brought up to our top-floor living quarters in the Commerce Exchange by the doorman, who was also on my security payroll and claimed he saw a resemblance right away. The boy was tall and big in the shoulders, pushing out of the sleeves of his wool-tweed jacket and the cuffs of his gabardine pants. Both had frayed spots with the ticks of darning across them. His shoes were heavy and square, like something out of
Ulysses
or the Irish bogs.

His face was unmoving as an old dog’s, but his eyes followed me quickly enough across the room, as I hunted in my Empire desk and various cupboards for the letters he had said his mother had sent. The eyes followed me—that is, when they weren’t tracking Carlotta, who was deep in an electric book and not really aware of us.

“Are you sure she sent them here?” I finally asked. “Clary hasn’t been heard from for ten or a dozen years. And you don’t have any paper from her, do you?’’

“No. She said you would know me. … Uncle Jim.” He said
that
as if trying it out for size. I was “Jay” to Clary then and “Gran” to my intimates now; from where or from whom would he have gotten
Jim?

“Well, no matter. The letter’s gone—if it ever was.” I dimly remembered letters about him, from sometime in the recent past. And the rural delivery services occasionally lost personal correspondence, especially from a backwater like the Maritimes.

“Do you
want
to be a page?”

“If that’s what Mother wants.” He said this in a neutral voice.

“It’s a tough school, I’m told. Not the loving family you’re used to, nor the polite society you might imagine Baltimore to be. The page system has other knives than steel ones to torture you with, if you’re slow-witted there, and I won’t be able to defend you. That’s the first thing they will look for and the last they’ll get.”

“I understand.” Spoken like a soldier about to go on a suicide mission.

“Then, I’ll see what I can do. Do you have a place to stay?”

“No, I just came from the shuttle depot.”

Carlotta, who had heard more than I thought, looked up and said, “Front room, Gran.”

“Of course,” I answered quickly, “you can stay with us until you get on your feet and move in with new friends of your own.” He nodded once and flapped his arms in a kind of vestigial bow. Then Carlotta took him off to find someone from the upstairs staff who could make up the bed for him. All things considered, she was smooth at acting motherly.

I suppose, at one time, the congressional pages existed to do actual work for the representatives and senators, like little butlers or clerks, before electronics and automata took over those duties. And at one period, the page system was a breeding ground for democratic idealists: Children with good marks in school, vaguely political ambitions, and good political connections could see the workings of government in action. But by 2015, that was pretty much a dream of the past.

Pages were the substructure of our political system. Like Fagin, each congressman sent his little spies to listen and learn and report back all they heard. In the hallways, public lavatories, and cloakrooms, these children—some of them arrested teenagers in their thirties—operated an intelligence market where rumors and facts were sold like hog futures. Some truths had the ring of pure gold, others the clank of brass. A quick-witted child would try out a piece of intelligence, testing the waters for his or her master, before the item would be spoken aloud by the grown-ups in their offices.

To give you just one example, the page circuit had been a-twitter with the rumor of a proposal for the Special Executive—and my name, among others, had floated on it—at least ten days before the act that made Pollock and Cawley and me.

Few congressmen loved, and not everyone even tolerated, the pages. “Poison-toads” was the name that stuck with them for as long as I was in government. The new representatives from Mexico picked up the flavor of that and called them
los escorpiónes.

It was a hard mother who would willingly send her son into that life. But Clary was a realist. If Gabe could survive there, he would prosper anywhere. However, I doubted this boy with the cow dung still showing in the cracks of his shoes would survive. Admittedly, the idea of having a blood relation on the circuit intrigued me. For one thing, he’d be a perfect tool for disinformation. For another, I could pick over his brain to learn both what he was sure to hear and what he was sure
not
to but which could be read from the stub ends of other conversations. Oh yes, I’ve sent spies into dangerous territory before. And lost a few, too.

Chapter 17

Granville James Corbin: Impeachment in the House

Pollock, Cawley, and I managed to hold the Special Executive together for almost three years. How we did it would make a study in social dynamics: We feared and distrusted the rest of Congress and all of the country more than we feared and distrusted each other. Like the forces working on the nucleus of an atom or at the core of a sun, the energies pushing the center inward balanced those trying to pull it apart.

But don’t think the process was stable or static. If we were an atom, it was more fragile than uranium. If we were a sun, it was a wildly pulsing variable star.

“If that ninny proposes his inventory of aquifers one more time, I will strangle him with his own lolling tongue.” Pollock said this calmly, even judiciously. But I could tell he was furious: We were at lunch and he was buttering a piece of bread as he spoke, working the grease well into the knuckle of his thumb. The ninny, of course, was Senator Cawley, our third—and most often absent—member.

Pollock was kidding about the strangling. Sudden and unexplained disappearances were rumored to be his specialty.

“Well …” Here I was, taking Cawley’s side just to keep us in balance. “He does have a lot of support from the Farm Belt, and they’re drawing brine as far north as Missouri, you know. The latest report on Lake Superior shows the pH drifting below 5.5. If water isn’t a problem this year, it will be in another ten.”

“Then it will be someone else’s problem—certainly not Cawley’s, because he will be long dead by then.”

I raised my hands, let them settle to the tablecloth. “Hear him out, for a change. What can one study cost?”

“It’s not the study, it’s the conclusions he’s pushing for. You know the horse he’s riding—a freshwater economy to replace the energy matrix we’ve built. Cawley wants a string of solar generators driving water crackers and pumping plants that will feed a nationwide network of pipelines. ‘Fuel free and fresh,’ he chants. Yes, and at a cost of something over two terabucks. I say, let the farmers bid for wastewater as they always have. It’s a natural check on the grain market.”

I kept quiet at that point and concentrated on picking the chickpeas out of my salad. The Federal government could certainly afford Cawley’s water scheme, especially if it were amortized over twenty or thirty years. Hallowed Hell, the take on Mississippi tariffs alone was at least a quarter of a trillion dollars a year. But Pollock’s last argument was the real one with him: A nationwide water system would upset other markets and ripple through the whole economy. It worried Pollock—me too, to tell the truth—not knowing who would profit and who would lose in the shakeout. And government is the art of deciding whose pocket gets picked, whose gets fluffed.

As the Special Executive found its equilibrium in those first months, this became our
modus vivendi:
One to make a proposal and the other two to stamp on it—a natural system of checks and balances. The only area that united us early in our career of government was the general rebellion.

Up until now, policies for dealing with the problem had been decided on a local level. Police forces had tried to contain the insurrection in the cities with the techniques of crowd control. They were opposing automatic weapons and mortars with rubber bullets and fire hoses. That’s because the nation’s political philosophy, patched together during half a century of civil rights marches and usually nonviolent protest, dictated that the police protect the civil rights of armed guerrillas as much as those of bystanders. By now the police were losing badly.