I only visited Fahzeed at his camp once. That was plenty. I never wanted to see again how that kind of confinement could transform a bright, well educated professor of meteorological science into a crotchety old fart with serious complaints about the wilted condition of the mess hall’s salad greens.
Well, if my father hadn’t crossed his fingers for all of us and taken that great jump into the American unknown when he did—why, that could have been me. Fighting to get the last bowl of Jell-O at supper, viewed with suspicion by my fellow inmates because I refused to join the improvised mosques they had set up, where the principal sermon subject was the iniquity of that Great Satan, the United States of America.
But I had, I was reminded, problems nearer at hand. What reminded me was MP Major Kressmer, tapping at my door—which was, of course, already open. I gave him the usual now-what frown.
“I’m just reporting that it’s all secure now, sir. What are your orders?”
“Feed them,” I said. “Keep them overnight. Around daybreak you can start releasing them, fifteen or twenty at a time.”
“Yes, sir,” he said, turning to go.
“Oh, and one more thing, Major,” I said. “Have de Blount brought up here.”
Up close, Billy was a lot taller and skinnier than I remembered him, and he had grown a fairly creditable beard. He walked in under his own power, the two MP escorts staying just outside the door until I waved them away. He took a seat without being invited, and leaned back to see what I was going to say. He didn’t look uneasy, not even uncomfortable, just patient.
“Hello, Billy,” I said. “Merry Christmas.” He didn’t respond to that, just looked a little more patient, so I got specific. “I’m just about to have my dinner sent up from the mess. It’ll be turkey, of course, with the usual trimmings and stuff.”
“Fine,” he said, dismissing the subject. “Is that why you had me brought up here?”
“Not really, no. Your father came to see me the other day.”
That made him grin. “Sure he did. He probably told you his Sunday attendance is down 50 percent, but it’s really nearer eighty.”
“He did say that, yes. It isn’t only your father’s church, though, is it? Father Alexius at St. Viator’s told me that they’ve cut out two of the three morning masses, and they’re running short of altar boys.”
He said reasonably, “What did they expect? Their people have been lied to all their lives. There isn’t any God, just some Experimenter that doesn’t give a damn what they do. There isn’t any Heaven, there isn’t any Hell. So now they understand that it doesn’t matter if you’re a good guy or a shitheel. You don’t get rewarded, and you don’t get punished, either. So Pop can’t scare them into showing up every Sunday any more. Can’t bribe them, either. Doesn’t have anything to bribe them with. So naturally they came to us, Ron. We’re giving them the truth.”
God knows I’m not a religious person, but he was getting under my skin. “But that’s not all religion is, Billy. What about morality?”
“Oh, now, Ron,” he said, “really. Do you honestly think it’s a sin worth going to hell for to eat pork or fail to bang your head on a rug six times a day? And I’m not even talking about the people who thought their God’s morality commanded them to murder as many unbelievers as they could, from the Crusaders to Hamas.”
“Besides that sort of thing,” I said. “I mean thou shalt not kill and thou shalt not steal and thou shalt not bear false witness.”
He gave the sort of look that one gives to a person who has made a legitimate debating point. It was the first time. He thought for a moment, and then he said, “You’re right about that, Ron, kind of. We’re going to have to give them some kind of commandments, aren’t we? As soon as I make them up. Now, what were you saying about turkey?”
That wasn’t the last time I saw Billy de Blount, just the last time that I was physically in the same room with him. That kind of close encounter didn’t happen again. Not even when he and his team of tame biochemists commandeered the Fort, because by then I was two or three thousand miles away, being reeducated in the Salt Lake Correctional Compound. (Yes. Same place. Different name but the same place that had held, among others, my cousin Fahzeed. I never did find out what became of Fahzeed, but I have a pretty good idea it wasn’t anything nice.)
I did see a lot of Billy de Blount in the Correctional Compound. Had no choice. We inmates were made to watch him on the TV whenever he was doing something important, like ordering another retaliatory strike against the Syrians or the Iraqis, or whoever. Or announcing the development of a new cannabis strain for, what did they say? Stress reduction and recreation? Or whatever. Billy wasn’t the president, exactly, or whatever the Experimenter people called the guy who did the kind of things that an elected president used to do. But he sure did get a lot of digital time.
Some of the people I knew were really surprised when the Experimenter groups got into politics. I wasn’t. Where else did they have to go?
I wasn’t surprised that they won pretty much every race they got into, either. The regular politicians were pretty much licked before they got started. The population was really shook up by then. They wanted to kick somebody’s ass for messing up their lives, and who was a better target than the old-style politicians? Who, you had to admit, by and large well deserved it, anyway.
What did surprise me about all the Experimenters having all that power, though, was what use they made of it. I would not have thought that they would finally have won the Islamist War, and I certainly didn’t expect them to win it the way they did.
First Intermediary Willis Wardman de Blount
I do my weekly TV address on Tuesdays. That’s the bottom of the week, when the animals need to be thrown some new bone to get them through to the weekend. Marta and Heinrich were prepping me for it when a page brought me another letter from my father.
I didn’t greet it with joy. It had been nearly a week since the last one, and I had almost begun to hope that he had given up on me. Or died. Or at least fallen into some kind of irreversible coma, but no such luck. What was left of the physical body he had been born with was still hanging on, and that old brain was still working away.”What’s that?” Marta asked, not taking her eyes off the tan she was mixing for my cheeks. Sometimes she forgets herself, but when I gave her a look she paled and fussed harder over the mixing palette.
She probably did know, when she sneaked a look at the folded paper. It was written in my father’s unmistakable crabbed hand. As well as everything else he has lost, he doesn’t have much in the way of vocal cords any more, so he can’t dictate like a normal person. That doesn’t keep him from being my most dependable correspondent. He doesn’t actually have a lot of choice about that, since he isn’t allowed to correspond with anybody else, just lucky me. I don’t usually read his letters. There’s no reason to, because they all say pretty much the same thing, so I just flame them and go on with whatever I’m doing. This time I said, “Give me a match.” Heinrich always has one, or something like it, because he’s smoking again. He listened to the bone I threw almost a year ago, when I informed the people that our scientists were pretty sure that by the end of the decade they’d be able to repair the alveoli that cigarette smoke damages. He went right out and picked up a carton of Old Golds—they say you can get them on any street corner, but I never thought it worthwhile to ban them entirely. Then he went shopping. God knows where, maybe some antique store. Anyway he got himself a solid gold cigarette lighter that still worked.