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“Secretary Pauli is too modest,” Martell said. “His office also oversees all elections in the state. A good man to know.”

“General, you served in the Gulf War,” said Pauli. “What do you think of the Saudis kicking out our troops last week?”

“Fools,” said Siemens, spitting the word. “They say our planes and soldiers were a provocation to the Islamic Federation, and that they’ll get along fine once we’re out of the way. Wait a year, and the Caliph will roll right over them.”

Martell kept quiet. His own projections put the even money on six months.

A few congressmen and oil barons later, Helen Matsuto strolled up. Her long red hair, tied with a silver filigree, fell across one shoulder of her deep blue gown. Martell kissed her cheek, then turned to Siemens. “Rick, you remember Helen, don’t you?”

“I did introduce you two, fool that I was. You’re as beautiful as I remember, Helen.” Siemens took her hand and nodded, almost a bow, then gave a start as he noticed her wedding ring. “Stan, you’ve been rude, to your wife and to me! Why didn’t we get together earlier?”

Martell, suddenly aware of his arm around Helen’s waist, stepped back awkwardly. “I’ll plead guilty to rudeness, Rick, but Helen is married to Tony Matsuto, my top mathematician.”

“I beg your pardon,” said Siemens. He raised an eyebrow, more inquisitive than apologetic.

Helen laughed. “Let’s sit down and talk about might-have-beens, Rick. And I’ll fill you in on twenty years of gossip.” She leaned back into Martell’s arm. “Stan’s a dear, but he’s impossible to live with. The word intensity scarcely begins to describe him.”

“He seemed comfortable enough on the ski slopes earlier.”

“In virtual? Maybe so. You should see him on the racquetball court. He plays racquetball like the Germans played World Warn.”

Martell felt a touch at his elbow. It was the drummer from the jazz group. “Get your clarinet, Stan. You were damn good that night in Dallas.”

“I’m three years out of practice, Jimbo.” Martell laughed as he steered the musician back toward the bandstand, but the pique must have shown on his face. Helen looked away pointedly, and Siemens’s gaze bored in. “I was good enough to play in public, Rick. Picked it up quickly, but topped out quickly, too. No spark, no hint of musical genius.”

“You can enjoy playing without genius,” said Helen.

“Damned if I’ll bust my butt to be mediocre.” This argument was a ritual. “There’s Speaker Harris. You should definitely meet him, the second most powerful official in Texas.”

Second most powerful?” asked Siemens. “I thought the lieutenant governor had more power than the speaker.”

“Yes, of course.” Martell waved at Harris. “Oh, you were thinking of the governor? Lord, no, he’s a distant third.”

Siemens strolled along the glass that formed one wall of Martell’s dimly lit study. In the day, it would reveal a panorama of the Texas hill country, San Marcos a few miles south and San Antonio in the distance. Even with the lights low, the wall was a mirror at night. The general reached the far wall and stopped in front of a large painting. “Is this a Dali? The style looks like him, but I don’t recognize the piece.”

Martell joined him. “The work of an amateur, imitating the master.” He reached up to touch the canvas, brushing the tips of his fingers against the waterfall in the upper left, the washerwomen by the stones in the foreground, the distant town at the river’s mouth. “Riverrun: the Washers at the Ford. Can you make out the invisible giant in the landscape?”

Siemens cocked his head to the side. “I’m impressed. I didn’t know you painted.”

“I don’t,” Martell said, suppressing an old irritation. “This piece took three years and far too much of my time.” And derivative as hell, for all that work.

Siemens waved at the photographs and drawings on the other walls. “Did you do the rest of these?”

“Mostly. I swiped that drawing of the LBJ library as the Parthenon; remind me to tell you the story some day.”

Martell had thought he kept the sourness out of his voice, but Siemens gazed at him with narrowed eyes.

“You’re too hard on yourself, Stan. You see this room as a reminder of your shortcomings, don’t you? You don’t have to be the best in the world at everything you do.”

“Sure.” Siemens’s insight was unnerving. Most visitors read the room backwards, as a boast of his talents. “Like you were satisfied to be a mediocre pilot.”

“I trained for thousands of hours before I could claim even mediocrity. You’re a world-class researcher, Stan. I know what a Citation Index is, and I know you wrote that stuff without slave-labor graduate students.”

“Ancient history.” Martell scowled. “I don’t write papers these days, I shuffle them.”

“Not the way I hear it. ‘The leadership of Oppenheimer, and the intuition of Niels Bohr.’ You didn’t develop Medea by shuffling paper. If you want a hobby, too, pick something and stick to it. Life isn’t all competition.” Siemens turned to the fireplace. “What about that stone carving?”

“That’s a Hindu agni, three centuries old.”

“That’s right, you were reading Eastern stuff back in college. You found something that matters to you?”

“I found beauty, and peace.” Martell shrugged. “And contradictions. Parts of it speak to me, though, in a way that nothing else ever has.”

Siemens dropped into a black leather chair. “Speak to me about the Senate. You proved you know the movers and shakers in Texas politics. What else have you got to say?”

The classic Siemens, switching tracks at full speed. “It’s not a question of knowing them, Rick. You could get in those doors without help.” Siemens nodded; that had been his point. “We can give you a network of favors and inside dirt going back decades. Dad was greasing palms and providing ‘volunteer’ campaign battalions before I was born. More lately, Synergetics’ hi-tech edge has made the difference in a lot of elections.”

Siemens leaned back in the chair, bushy eyebrows drawn low over narrowed eyes. “So… why me? And what’s in it for you?”

The payoff. Martell stood, gathering his thoughts, his eyes wandering again across Riverrun. The projections this week had been bloodier than ever. Japan practically admitted they were building nuclear weapons, and the Middle East marched relentlessly towards the chasm.

The only other prospect Martell’s Planners had found, the Urban Liberation Front leader, would be much harder to get into power. With Siemens, getting him out after the crisis might be the real challenge. Of course, they could sit back and do nothing, let the horrors unfold. Keep their own hands unbloodied, their own consciences clear.

How could inaction be the moral high ground? With hundreds of millions of lives at stake? Not to decide is to decide. OK, Siemens, you’re the one.

“General… Rick, why do you think we started the Argos project?”

Siemens raised one brow “To create an artificial intelligence, right?”

“No, that’s a side goal, almost a cover.” Martell leaned forward, reached out with both hands. “We wanted to leap-frog computing technology, to bring immense processing power to bear against problems too intractable to be attempted before.”

“Which are?” Siemens leaned his head to the side, waved a hand in invitation.

“Chaos. Catastrophe. The world going to hell in a handbasket.”

Martell sketched his techniques, and the concepts of chaos and Thom’s catastrophe theory. In fields from physics to geology, catastrophe meant a sudden shift in otherwise smooth behavior. A chaotic system was extremely sensitive to tiny differences in initial conditions. In a now-classic metaphor, the beat of a butterfly’s wing in Brazil could determine the weather a year later in Paris.