First Citizen (50 page)

Mike Alcott and the FSF picked them up inside of four hours. And then, will full warnings, I sent two ICBMs—but with warheads of only about five megatons each—against Newcastle and Kiel, small cities on the eastern borders of both countries. Prevailing winds took the clouds away from their main population centers. I could afford to ignore the protests of the Norwegians and Poles. The United States doesn’t need NATO as a buffer zone anyway, not in Europe, not anymore.

“Don’t Tread On Me.” For the next twenty years or so, I shall let the Third World rot in the first circle of Economic Hell. Let the little dictators and the flea-bite guerrillas feed on each other. Let the Russian Bloc pick its teeth on Africa and the Middle East. When I am ready to reenter the geopolitical situation, it will be ready for me.

The Second American Civil War caused some 63,000 fatalities, most of them combatants, not civilians. Compared to the population at large, some 430 million, that’s an absurdly small casualty count. Most people hardly knew it when the fighting was going on. We conducted the war like a game of
go
, with blocks and traps, instead of pitched battles. Or have I explained this already? Anyway. … No reason for the media to call me a butcher. We fought a
clean
war.

After a leader reaches a certain level of dominance or prominence, his followers
want
him to succeed and will obey him if he is only halfway credible. After all, as every stage comic learns: The audience wants to laugh. The enemies of that success are not the random grumblers in the audience. No, they are those near-equals, the would-be leaders who stand in the wings and wait to rush onstage. They are the ones any leader must watch for and deal with.

I’ve had my share. Carlotta would not leave well enough alone. Ever the plotter. Ever the politician. Two years ago, she tried to stage a coup with nothing more than a handsome young FSF general. He wasn’t even from the winning side.

How to deal with them? Well, one way is, a leader can use the would-be equals as scapegoat— targets to draw the attention of his own grumblers and strengthen loyalty to himself. I found evidence that Carlotta and her champion had sold secrets to Russian Bloc agents. The timing coincided nicely. I hanged them for that.

Another technique is to draw the dissidents’ followers to his cause, deflating the competition and using them as a source of converts. It is better to absorb than to defeat. … I guess that’s Takusan Matsu speaking.

Unfortunately, Carlotta didn’t have any followers. Or not enough to use. So I hung them all.

Another plot surfaced last year, led by the governor of New York. He tried to persuade the farming States of Vermont and New Hampshire to secede with him. Just like that. Walk out of the Union. He must have been crazy. Now
there,
I could appeal to his followers and to the industrial belt in that northern tier he tried to tempt into sedition. I made even stronger supporters out of them. My nephew, who kept his Maine seat in the ’26 elections, was most helpful there.

Yes, Gabriel is shaping up nicely. I send good reports on him to Clary, who has settled in Minnesota, up near Rainy Lake. She likes to be near the border with her beloved Canadians. However, for her own protection, I keep a watch on the house. Who knows what might happen? Especially if there’s a raid.

Gabe, as I was saying, is shaping up. He’s learning the ropes in Congress. Learning to work the flock. A good sheepdog knows how to keep on its flank: when to nip, when to bark, and when just to show his snout.

They
are
sheep, of course. But there are one or two who think they know more than is good for them. Fair faces concealing slippery secrets. You can see it when they rise to speak. Too mush gesture. Too much graciousness toward the Speaker’s chair. And then the content of what they say sorts out more like criticism and sedition. Wolves on their bellies, trying to bleat like sheep.

He’s in my will, of course, Gabe is. My only kin. I can leave him nothing but money. My military strength, the old Gentlemen Volunteer units, has been disbanded and absorbed into the FSF. And the political power he will have to build for himself; he’s already started that. But money will be enough. There would be something like $130 billion, with a B, if I were to die tomorrow. That’s enough for any boy.

Tomorrow. At first I accepted the Speakership for ten years. On the installment plan, as it were. But the situation is still too unsettled for that. We need to bind in the weak ones, the waverers, with a gesture. Tomorrow, Mike Alcott will move that Congress vote me the chair for life. A small correction of an earlier mistake, he will say. But they will read the message correctly. Yes, they will.

Alcott troubles me. Because
he
is troubled. He was here this morning.

“Gran, we move too fast,” he was saying. “Some of these developmental programs and reforms …”

“The nation needs decisive action,” I told him. “We are in an era of reconstruction. We must rebuild those economic strengths that pertained in the years before—”

“But the people got used to the laissez-faire, to running things themselves,” he interrupted me. He never used to interrupt me, not even in private. “When you tie them to these contracts and monopolies—and now the craft laws—you go too far. They resent it. I hear talk of taking this to the Supreme Court. And Justice Renfrew encourages it.”

“My Court will support me.”

“Not when you’re trying to create guild associations for most of the technical and professional jobs, with regulated entry and hereditary sponsorships. That’s—that’s medieval.”

“Only as a temporary measure. Until we get the cashflow up to pre-’15 levels. Then we can declare a free state, and let them shift—”

“It’s purely un-American, Gran. I can’t even keep our hard-core two hundred in line on this. I’ve got maybe
six
votes in my pocket right now. And I have to tell you frankly, mine is not one of them.”

That was too much!

“Traitor! You traitor,” I hissed at him. His face froze up. And instantly I regretted it. “Ahhh, Mike … And I thought you understood so well—what we were trying to accomplish.”

“I understand what you want,” he said stiffly. “It’s the means we disagree on. May I go now, sir? There are committee meetings to attend.”

I should have kept him, soothed him some more. But he seemed anxious to leave, and I let him.

That grumbling, the “resentment” Alcott mentioned. … The ratings, of course, have been lower than I’d like to see. But when I am Speaker for Life, the little resentments will fade. The people and the Congress will see the sense of what we are doing.

And now, gentlemen—and lady—if you will excuse me, we have a country to run. … One last question?

I would tell them: A man can’t choose the era he’s born into, but he can choose how to conduct himself in that era. Look at my own career. Not a promising time, the late twentieth century, and yet I built a personal fortune, obtained political power, fought and won a bitter war—and now will lead a sick nation in its reconstruction.

What century would I have preferred? That’s easy. The eighteenth, of course. Revolutionary America. Such a time of creativity! A whole nation being built from scratch, with the whole world of political and moral principles to choose from. I can think of one or two improvements I could have …

Well, enough of the personal. Time’s awasting.

Epilogue

Michael Alcott: Tu Mortuus

To begin with, it wasn’t the normal pattern.

Usually, by 10:30 in the morning, the committees are in session and if there is to be a debate or vote in the full House, the members move in quickly, most of them late. If they have something to discuss out of session, they gather in the office buildings or bunch up in the tunnels. The New Rotunda, that hideous, cold, deco-marble fish-bowl with its stupid fountain, is just for tourists. But this morning, they were standing in knots under the glass of the Dome when I crossed. Should have rung bells in my head, but it didn’t.

For one thing, the mix was wrong. The Connecticut Kids were there, Jasper Bruce and Caspar Long, talking with a clutch of California congressmen they had been killing in debate since January. Everyone knew they were Corbin’s new pets, late converts to the cause. We all assumed they were just trying too hard, going for their legislative spurs when they should have been content to carry spears for a year more. But here they were chatting and laughing. I actually saw one slap a back like old pals. Strange.

Off to one side, shuffling from one foot to the other, was the New York Crowd. This was the closest thing we had to a Loyal Opposition, if you didn’t count the Coahuila Cluster. The NYC was muttering among itself and studying the toes of its collective shoes with great interest, when it wasn’t stealing glances at the Kids’ group. Suspicious.

But I was in too much of a hurry, being late myself, to put all this together. It just shook itself out later, afterwards.

Others were there in twos and threes, a total of about eighty or ninety people in the Rotunda. In that space, it was a mob. I was pushing through from the east doors, actually elbowing my way at one point, when the knot I was pushing against suddenly surged west, opening a way for me. That was when Corbin came in from the other set of doors.

How could I see, if the place was so mobbed? You’d know if you had ever been in the New Rotunda. The floor is dished by a series of shallow steps, concentric rings of them on an awkward spacing of one, two, and a plateau. They make normal walking almost impossible and you can’t do a straight line across the place. The steps force you to angle down toward the huge fountain, that dumb crystal-kink creation that drips and oozes water.

Now, to get to the House chamber, Corbin was crossing diagonally, next to the fountain. And the Connecticut Kids with their newfound friends were waiting for him there.

“Granny!” That’s how Bruce greeted Corbin. He wasn’t shouting, although I heard it distinctly. The Rotunda was suddenly that quiet. He raised his hand, as if waving, and then I saw the flash. Light from high in the Dome, reflecting off what was in Brace’s hand.

Of course it was a glass dagger. Nothing else would get through the metal detectors. We should have been doing body pats, but, with no incidents, people quickly get tired of the inconvenience.

I don’t think Corbin even saw the dagger. He stopped to say something to Jasper Bruce. And for some reason, Bruce left his hand up high, kept his big smile long past the moment of greeting, and still did not strike.

That was for Casper Long, who had edged around behind Gran and raised his own glass dagger. He brought it down crookedly, only catching Corbin on the shoulder blade.

I’ve studied the body with the doctors and seen how shallow that first scratch was.

Corbin did not even turn. By that time he
must
have seen the dagger in Bruce’s hand. And Bruce still did not strike for about two more seconds. Enough time for Gran to take him apart.

People say the conspirators rushed him, buried him with their bodies, all stabbing at once. But those people were not there to see. It didn’t happen like that.

People say the bit about Corbin being a black belt was all media peep or the figment of a copywriter’s imagination. But I had gone through basic training and hand-to-hand with him, back when we first formed the Gentlemen Volunteers. And hadn’t I seen him out there on the rooftop at dawn, in Las Vegas and Houston both, doing his karate exercises, the slow moves and the fast? He was a killer with his feet. But here … He could have broken a twig like Jasper Bruce without working up a sweat—and then used pieces of him to whip that mob into a corner.

And Corbin wasn’t too old, either, as some people say. I had been in the gym with him just two weeks before. Older, yes, and aren’t we all? Yet he could still do fifty pushups without gasping. I saw that with my own eyes.

But people are right when they say Corbin did not fight back. Bruce had plenty of time to plant his knife. He must have been going for the neck, something cute with the carotid, but he botched it. The strike went wide and caught Gran on the point of his shoulder. Must have been right on a nerve, because I could see the pain register on his face.

Corbin said something to Bruce. I didn’t hear what it was and anyone standing close enough to hear had already fled for his life. But Corbin said it with a look of real sadness. That I could see.

It gave time for Casper Long to put in a really serious blow. Which he did, the one that staggered Corbin, turning his body around one bent knee.

Then the mob moved in. Most of them were unarmed, until someone put a foot through the Rotunda’s curtain wall and people began picking up and passing around the glass shards. They must have cut their hands on them, mingling their blood with Granny’s when they stabbed.

I stood alone to one side, about the only person there who wasn’t part of the conspiracy. Either that, or there were dozens of bystanders who joined in on impulse. I thought they would turn and finish me off, too. But they didn’t

Like robots running down, after the first flurry of blows and the blood, they slowed up, stood around, some looking at the body, some looking away. Then they moved out, some running but most walking. Until the Rotunda was almost empty.

Corbin lay on his back, half in the fountain, with the water dripping across his face and his open eyes. It washed away the blood that still seeped from the gashes and the water got pinker and pinker. I wanted to go and close his eyes, but I could not make my feet move.

They have killed him, killed the General. It was a mob murder, but Bruce and Long clearly started it. I testify to that.

So, why doesn’t somebody find them? No one can disappear without a trace. Not anymore. Not with the cybernet checking credits and reservations every time you turn around. So, let’s track them down! Bring them back! Punish them for conspiracy and murder!

Or doesn’t anyone care?

About the Author

Thomas T. Thomas is a writer with a career spanning forty years in book editing, technical writing, public relations, and popular fiction writing. Among his various careers, he has worked at a university press, a tradebook publisher, an engineering and construction company, a public utility, an oil refinery, a pharmaceutical company, and a supplier of biotechnology instruments and reagents. He published eight novels and collaborations in science fiction through Baen Books and is now working on more general and speculative fiction. When he’s not working and writing, he may be out riding his motorcycle, practicing karate, or wargaming with friends. Catch up with him at www.thomastthomas.com.