Siemens sipped his Scotch as he listened. “So what have you got—psychohistory, like that sci-fi writer?” he asked. “You can figure out which butterfly to watch—maybe clip its wings?”
“No, that was von Neuman’s mistake. He thought computers would make weather control possible. Any system so sensitive, would be that much easier to control. Asimov’s psychohistory was like that, sculpting the course of thousands of years with elegant adjustments.” Martell was pacing along the windows. He stopped, shook his head. “It won’t work. The lesson of chaos theory is that you cannot get a total, perfect description of such a system, that you couldn’t make calculations accurate enough to project changes, anyway.”
“Stan, you’re going round in circles.” Siemens frowned darkly. “You say you’ve predicted disasters, then you tell me predictions are impossible.”
Martell stood facing the glass, staring at his reflection. “I want you to know the limits of our technique. It’s not some crystal ball. We can’t tell you where there are going to be riots five years from today, or what day war is going to break out between Zambia and Mozambique, any more than we can tell you where tornadoes are going to strike.”
“So what can you say—and who is ‘we’?”
“Chaos and catastrophe, damnation and ruin.” Martell spun around, propped his foot on an Italian leather chair. “We—the core group within Synergetics; you might call us the Planners—we can see the large, like climatic shift, and the short-term, like tomorrow’s high and low. We can see structures lurking in the haze of uncertainty, catastrophic transitions that suck in world-lines. Patterns: the fractal mathematics underlying chaos is full of shapes that recur at different scales. Even when we can’t predict them, we can recognize them as they start, and know we’re in for a hell of a ride.”
“And these disasters you see?”
Martell sat down facing Siemens. “Rick, you’ve been in the military since Vietnam. Why even think about politics, now?”
Siemens stared at him for a moment before answering. “Frustration, anger. Politicians are frittering away everything I was fighting for. Crime and poverty, riots, a moribund economy; people don’t give a damn about education or work. We’re not a superpower anymore, we’re not competitive—we’re hardly even a nation, just a collection of squabbling tribes.”
“That’s why we’re interested in you. You understand the problems. Your New Cities work with the Guard is one of the few positive steps in the last decade. But it’s not enough. We’re headed for either total collapse—starvation, plague, and riots—or a police state.” And Siemens’s Guard looked to be the new Gestapo; he didn’t understand the tiger he was riding.
“Your math paints it grimmer than my intuition, but we’re singing from the same hymnbook.”
“That’s just for starters,” Martell said, shaking his head. “On top of that, war. Too many old grudges, too few resources. Russians, Chinese, Germans, Japanese, the Islamic Federation—and us on the sidelines, wishing the world would go away. I can’t say who’ll start it, or who’ll be on which side, but everybody will get sucked in. And nukes will be used.”
“Balderdash, Stan. The cold war is over, Armageddon has been canceled.”
“Rick, too many countries have the bomb, too many crazies have fingers on the button. The stability is gone, the threat still here. You know how much of the old Soviet arsenal is unaccounted for.”
Siemens nodded grudgingly. “Still, what do you want from me? A figurehead, a mouthpiece for your analytical solutions?”
“Hell, no,” Martell said. “If you were weak enough for us to dominate, you wouldn’t do any good. To have any chance at all, we’ve got to have stronger leadership than we’ve had in decades.” A small part of the plan, but true enough, and it played to Siemens’s ego. “We want someone in power who will listen to us. The decisions would be youfs.”
“If history is the kind of clockwork that you can predict, how can any one man, any leader make a difference?”
“No, no!” Martell leaned forward. “History is not clockwork. Most human affairs are chaotic, and the actions of an individual can make an enormous, unpredictable difference. One man, Gorbachev, brought down a huge imperial power, and destroyed its ideology. But individuals work within institutions, subject to social forces. Those structures and forces have coalesced to form iron bars. All the outcomes are disasters.”
Martell paused, looked down to see that he was holding his fists clinched in front of him. He opened his palms, beseeching, and went on. “The pork-barrel politics of congress, the bureaucracy, the entrenched interests mesh together to strangle initiative. There’s no room for leadership, and a true leader couldn’t get elected anyway. But… understanding those forces and interactions, we can navigate the shoals, get you into office where you can make a difference.”
“A senator doesn’t have that much power.”
Martell laughed. “Rick, if we can’t get you to the White House inside of six years, we might as well pack up and go home.”
God, she was beautiful.
Siemens thrashed in the bed, sweating like a pig. A drink? Hell, that was halt the problem.
And she was the rest. Amazing, she bowled him over. Even after hearing her voice from Martell’s damn computer, he’d still been blown away.
Totally unprepared—like the first time. The stack of letters when he got back from Nam made him think of her as a kid sister. She’d been in junior high when she first wrote. Reading four years of letters at once, it was hard to keep things straight, to see the woman she’d grown into.
He should never have written back.
Then there she stood, on the porch of that old house back of the co-op. Grinning, holding up her arm with the POW bracelet, his name on it.
Walking next to her, an arm around her. More intimate than sex with some women.
How did she do it? She still had the knack, he’d seen that tonight. Close, sensual pressure, but effortless. Like she was following his lead in a dance, like she could read his mind, their bodies were one.
And in bed…
One night only, and he’d never found the like again.
Did Matsuto know his wife was sleeping with his boss? Sure. If it was that obvious to Siemens after a few minutes seeing them together, her husband had to know.
Siemens rolled over again, chilled now.
Senator Siemens. It had a ring to it, yes. Maybe President Siemens some day. Martell could pull it off if anyone could. He saw the demons at the gate, when most of the country was frothing at the mouth about the wrong tilings.
“Come to work, come to work, it is better to work than to sleep.”
Martell woke painfully, reality grinding in on him with the whining chant of his alarm. Damn Siemens, for suggesting such an early breakfast. Damn him twice, for suckering him into putting away so much liquor.
The smell of coffee greeted him in the guest apartment Siemens had accepted, and led him back to the kitchen. Siemens wasn’t there, but a tuneless whistling floated down the hall. The scene on the counter cheered Martell. A towel held the shattered remains of an aspirin bottle, with a hammer next to it. The neck of the bottle was intact, with the childproof cap firmly attached.
“Morning, Stan,” Siemens said, coming down the hall. He wore a knee-length English smoking jacket out of Sherlock Holmes: “Grab a cup of joe, have a seat. What’s the agenda?”