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Charlie wavered but did not quite abandon his hostile stare. “You have no allies. Sir.”

“Are you banking on that?” There was no response.

“Tell them I’m aware of what’s happening,” the President said. “That’s your task, Charlie. Tell General Chafee and General Weismann and that Pentagon cabal that their plans have been under scrutiny in this office for quite a while. Tell him they can’t get what they want without a great deal of bloodshed.” The President focused on the Secretary of Defense—caught his eyes and held them. “You’ve served this country faithfully for most of your life. Do you really want to plunge it into civil war? Do you really want to be the next Jefferson Davis—and go down the same way?”

The Secretary of Defense opened his mouth and closed it.

“Tell General Chafee—” This was the hardest part. “Tell him negotiation is not out of the question. But violence will be met with violence. And Charlie?”

“Sir?”

“Thank you for your time.”

* * *

The Secret Service contingent had been doubled in the halls of the White House. The President wondered if that was a good idea. Too many unfamiliar faces about. It was a risk in itself. And it created an atmosphere of crisis—but perhaps that was unavoidable. He thought of Lincoln arriving in disguise for his inauguration, sharpshooters stationed around the Capitol dome. Times were bad, but times had been worse. Though, it was true, times had never been stranger.

Much of what he had said to Charlie Boyle was bluff, and the generals would know it; but it might be enough to cast doubt in certain quarters. It was a delay he was after here, not a resolution. The next few days were vital. It would be tragic if internecine squabbles such as this one caused unnecessary bloodshed, because those lives… well, they would be unrecoverable.

If it came to that, the President had decided he would issue the necessary orders and surrender his office, minimizing losses. But there were those who would fight on, for the best of reasons; and fighting, they would die; and dead, they would not be resurrected.

The crises we administer, the President thought, are never the ones we expect.

He did not consider himself a man especially well-equipped to administer this one. His career had been enormously successful but in every other respect ordinary. Scion of a New England political family, groomed from childhood for public service, he had graduated from Harvard with a law degree, reliable connections, and enough ambition to light up a city block. But it was an ambition hoarded; he was not impatient. He had moved through the ranks of the Democratic Party with grace, made more friends than enemies. He had run for public office first in his home state, defeating an incumbent Republican so decisively that the Party seriously began to consider his presidential mettle. And still he bided his time. He cultivated acquaintances in the Party hierarchy and among the baronial eminences of oil, law, manufacturing.

He had lost the nomination by a narrow margin in one primary but won it handily four years later. Western oil interests had defected from the complacent Republicans that year, and the South, reeling from the flight of industry to Mexico, had come back into the Democratic fold. And at the level of the ballot box, perhaps personalities had something to do with it. The President was a large man, easy with a crowd, ebullient, humorous. His opponent had been lean to the point of emaciation, prim, and too easily confused. Television debates had amounted to a rout; the Republican campaign tried to withdraw from the last of the three.

There was no suspense on election night, only the pleasure of watching CNN commentators find new ways to repeat the basic datum, that a long Republican ascendancy over the White House had come to an end.

Then the Artifact had arrived in orbit and every other issue dissolved in the immediacies of that almost incomprehensible event. He had spent most of his time in office struggling with it. Ineffectually, of course. It was a crisis that couldn’t be addressed. Its secondary effects—the political instability, the sinking national morale—could. In that respect, he felt he had done some good. What an unexpected opportunity for a twentieth-century political figure: to do good. How Victorian. But he had grasped the unlikely nettle.

And there was still a chance to save some lives; and perhaps his interview with Charlie Boyle had helped. The next few days were critical. Well see, he thought.

Beyond that—

Well, it was a new world, wasn’t it?

He could feel the shape of the future, but only dimly. He suspected it did not contain a place for kings, conquerors, aristocrats; nor even parliaments, congresses, presidents.

* * *

Elizabeth was awake, reading a book as he entered the bedroom. She looked up sleepily. “How did it go?”

The President began to undress. “You know Charlie. Stiff-necked. A little dim. Self-preservation at all costs. But I think he’ll be more cautious now.”

“Is that good enough?”

He shrugged. “It’s good. It may not be enough.”

“Poor Charlie. He just doesn’t understand.”

“We’re privileged,” the President reminded his wife. “We were approached first. We’re among the few.” He had a curious thought. “The last aristocracy the world will see.”

“I suppose we are. But if we had Charlie, too, and General Chafee—”

“That will come. Though I wouldn’t count on Chafee. He strikes me as the type who might refuse.”

“I wish it would all happen faster.”

“It’s happening as fast as it can. I only hope that no one dies. Even the generals would come to regret that, I think.”

“They don’t realize what they’re fighting against. The death of Death.”

The President slipped into bed beside his wife. He had brought a slender intelligence document, this morning’s For The President Only, meaning to reread it—but what was the point? He took his wife’s hand and turned off the light.

When he married Elizabeth Bonner, she had been trim, attractive, connected to a powerful Eastern family. In the thirty years since, she had grown ebulliently fat. There had been jokes during the campaign—unkind jokes, cruel jokes. But Elizabeth had not seemed to mind—she did not deign to acknowledge such peccadilloes. And the President was only mildly perturbed. Perturbed because he loved her, not because he objected to her exuberant size. He understood the secret: She had gained weight as she had gained wisdom; it was the weight of their marriage, an alliance well-anchored and substantial.

The bedsheets were pleasingly cool. “The death of Death,’” he said. “That’s an odd thought.”

“But that’s what it is,” Elizabeth said.

The idea was comforting. And true, of course. Trust her to find the most succinct way of putting it.

And Death shall have no dominion. Was that the Bible? Tennyson? He couldn’t recall.

In any event, the President thought, the time has come.

Chapter 6

Fever

Matt was a doctor because he had been seduced by the idea of healing.

A dozen TV series and a handful of movies had convinced him that the heart of the practice of medicine was the act of healing. He managed to carry this fragile idea through med school, but it didn’t survive internship. His internship drove home the fact that a doctor’s purpose is bound up with death—its postponement, at best; its amelioration, often; its inevitability, always. Death was the gray eminence behind the caduceus. Healing was why people paid their doctors. Death was why they were afraid of them.