“Have you changed your mind? Have you decided that Directive 51 trumps the Constitution, too?”
He isn’t pulling off the et-tu-Brute/must you betray me with a kiss act nearly as well as he thinks he is. Crap, now he’s little old lost King Lear asking me to prove I love him the most.
She forced her voice to stay low and even. “Graham, we threw Shaunsen out for suppressing a journalist. Now you’ve done it—the same one that Cam jailed—and you’ve all had the excellent reason that the country needed to be secure, so the leader needed to be secure, and after all this was just going to be temporary, and all that. I’m still in the intel loop. I know you’re slowly moving troops forward, a station at a time, along the transcontinental rail lines, and Cam’s doing the same thing from the other side; you’re both deliberately running the risk of having American troops killing other American troops to establish who gets control of Jesus Junction, South Dakota. We’ve already had a skirmish between the Army and the Marines. Cam is turning the Southeast into one big Army base—”
“And I’ve sent letters of protest—”
“And you’re turning the Northwest into one big social services bureau or maybe high school. You’re both trying to nail down your pet things before the new government can make any decisions, sending every signal that they’ll have to abide by the decisions you’ve pre-made for them. But they’ll be elected, unlike either of you, and they should make the decisions. That’s how it works. The people are going to pick them to do what the people think should be done—not to carry out either of your sets of expert professional plans. That is, if you and Cam even permit the elections, and I’m seriously doubting either of you will.”
Graham looked like he’d been shoved backward against the wall and was trying to breathe. Well, good. Maybe I can hang out with Chris Manckiewicz in his cell.
After a moment, Weisbrod took off his glasses and cleaned them with a little glass atomizer and flannel rag from his desktop. “I suppose that I can see how it can look that way to you. From where I sit—”
“You’re sitting in the most comfortable—not to mention ego-stroking—job you’ve ever sat in. That gives you a great number of things, but perspective won’t be one of them.”
He set his freshly cleaned glasses down, blinking at her; it was one of his old manipulate-the-student tricks, and she wondered if he’d forgotten that he’d admitted to her that, since he wore bifocals, when he did that he did not see the other person more clearly but only as a blur. Finally, softly, he said, “Suppose that I were to try—fallible as I am, and subject to my own opinion and judgment—but suppose I were to just try to achieve a regularly elected, fully empowered government twenty-three months from now. Imagining that is my goal, what do you think I should do about Arnie Yang’s constant backdoor communication with the… with the other caretaker’s part of the government? What do you think I should do about the polarization and sense of struggle that is building daily?
“You don’t want me to try to bring Athens under our control. You don’t seem to be advocating that we surrender to them. And although ‘unite in favor of the elected government that will replace you both’ is a very nice sentiment in the long run, I don’t see that it tells me what to do this week. So let me put it squarely in your court. What should I do about the present circumstances?”
“Start with what you’re doing. Send Arnie and me to Pueblo, and give wholehearted support to the experiment, and if Cam is letting you have all those home-built radars, thank him and ask him for all the data he gets.” She leaned forward. “Expand my mission to the GPO in Pueblo, call it something like the Reconstruction Information Development Center, some broad title that lets us throw our weight behind everything that can re-unite the country, and put us in charge of getting every kind of information the country needs and getting it to everyone who needs it by every means we can. Support us as much as you can and challenge the boys in Athens to give us even more support, but let us have our independence from both of you.”
She had been surprised about her anger at Graham before, but she was double-surprised by her enthusiasm for an idea she had only thought of that moment.
He put his glasses on again, and said, “More beer for me. Do you want more juice? Pineapple again? Or I’m saving a couple small bottles of orange.”
“Whichever you’d rather give me. I take it we’re going to talk about the possibility of setting up what I have in mind for Pueblo rather than you pressing a button and bringing in people to straitjacket me and take me out the back way.”
“Yes we are.” He handed her another can of pineapple juice, opened a beer for himself, and said, “You’re behind the times, by the way. If I wanted you arrested and taken out privately, there’s no bell-and-buzzer system for me to use—too hard to maintain it. I’ve got a concealed string to a bell downstairs under my desk.”
She held the can of juice up in salute. “Modern times.”
“Modern times. May we get back to good old soulless technology as soon as we can.” They both drank reverently, savoring the remnants of the old civilization. “Actually I like what you’re proposing, but the name’s got to change—that acronym would pronounce like ridick, which would be an invitation for puns on ridiculous. We’ll call it the RRC, the Reconstruction Research Center—now there’s a golden expression, that’ll let you do anything. Anyway, a third power in the middle of the continent—one that has people’s loyalty but not an army—could be an honest broker we could call in for misunderstandings, and not only do a lot of good, but do it in a way that caused people to attribute it to the Federal government—basically build up a reserve of good will for that elected government in 2027. It would tend to keep Athens honest, and I’m sure they’d say it will help to keep Olympia honest. Maybe in the long run, it would be easier for both this government, and the Athens government, to gradually cede influence to it. I see many advantages. Futorologically—”
“Now that’s an awful word.”
“It was inevitable once we let futurology be coined.” The oil lamp was suddenly leaping high, casting bright flashes of red and yellow on his pale skin, and as he leaned forward and dimmed it, the swift-falling shadows cut deeply into his face until he seemed a million years old. She wondered whether any part of the effect was deliberate. “Look, here’s the thing. Given a real choice, the human race will rebuild technological civilization; the knowledge is widely distributed and people know they want it. But the way Daybreak has hit us, very likely there won’t be anyone left alive who really remembers our world by the time they’re anywhere near being able to make it over again. And besides the biotes are alive and the nanoswarm might as well be; we can’t exterminate them any more than we ever could cockroaches or rats. The new world will live with them all the time, one way or another.