He leans back and looks at the Earth some more. If you count the moon, he’s seen three worlds from orbit close up, and there are just fourteen other people alive who can say that.
I suppose if you haven’t seen it for yourself, if all you have are the photos, and if you don’t look too closely or pay much attention, then after a while this must get dull
. Exploration goes on, of course … there are permanent robot stations orbiting everything from Mercury out to Saturn, and one on the way for Uranus, and there are robot ground installations all over the Jovian moons and a robot dirigible cruising the skies of Titan. You can even buy continuous tape from some of their cameras, so that you can sit in your living room and climb the side of Olympus Mons, or make a deep-dive orbit of Jupiter.
There are not enough people around who can explain why that is not the same.
The sun is just coming up on the Western Pacific, which means it’s probably lighting the ocean surface half a kilometer up from Carla; she usually takes
MyBoat
down below when she sleeps, or when she wants to concentrate on some academic project and let the autopilot steer.
Maybe he’ll call her again … no, not a good thing to do, he called last time and it’s her turn, and she’ll probably call in a few days anyway.
He grins and swallows another bite. What he has going with Carla is a complicated dance devoted mostly to making sure they don’t get together on any permanent basis anymore. Look at them both, living in steel cocoons a long way from the rest of humanity … mating eagles is probably easier.
So, the space program is still being taken over by robots, the only person he really likes is another hermit-in-a-can, and he’s soaking up enough
rads, what with eating in here all the time, that they’ll probably ground him for a while when he gets back and put him on preventive anticancer drugs. He’s really the last of his kind, and the old planet rolling around below him has about seven and one-half billion people who don’t understand him. Last week he was interviewed on Dance Channel—he still has the XV jack from the Mars Expedition—and when he got the program back he didn’t recognize his own experiences from their editing.
The most exciting thing he got to do this month was set a methane plume on fire, at the request of UNSOO.
On the other hand, the food is still good—way better than what it was on the way to Mars—and you can’t beat the view. Probably worth continuing to live and work, he decides. He puts his mouth up to one of the monitors, lets loose a grand, gut-ripping belch, redolent of chicken liver and raw onion, grins broadly, and goes back to the telescope for the afternoon’s work.
What have you gotten yourself into this time, Brittany Lynn?
Brittany Lynn Hardshaw, President of the United States, remembers that when she was little, her father used to ask that about once a day, and normally the answer was something like “the old motor oil in the bam,” or “an open can of house paint.” It’s eight-thirty in the morning and she’s looking at the confidential report from NOAA that Harris Diem left for her last night, and wondering if she can trust it at all.
The trouble is, she’s spent a long time getting the government under control, with Diem as her right hand … and now she’s not sure there’s anyone left who’s likely to tell her the truth. And this time that’s what she needs.
She gets up and walks to a window, looking out on Pennsylvania Avenue. When they rebuilt after the Flash, they closed the whole area to vehicle traffic, nominally for environmental reasons and actually to make it that much tougher to bring a nuke close to the New White House or Capitol and repeat the decapitation shot.
The other part of the Flash, the bomb that went off sixty miles above Kansas City, wouldn’t have much effect this time; everything everywhere is in Faraday cages, and all signal is on fibrop.
But the center of government is permanently vulnerable, Hardshaw thinks.
We’re made out of meat. We have to be in contact with many thousands of people.
The street before her is jammed with pedestrians, most with briefcases, scurrying about like ants. If three of them had parts for a cram bomb, they could wipe out the Federal government this morning, and no one would
stop them. Maybe if they did it again, this time they would announce who they were, or at least explain why they did it.
In her mind’s eye Hardshaw sees Washington rise from the swamps, go down in the flames set by the British troops a few years later, rise again to bustle and pulse when President Lincoln looked out of the house that once stood here, shrink back into a sleepy backwater before growing again, explode into a great city during depression, war, and cold war, deteriorate into a slum until the Flash, rise from the nuclear catastrophe … .
Into a provincial capital for the UN, she admits to herself. Not that she blames her predecessors, and she hopes that the two who are still living don’t blame her.
She thinks,
I am looking forward to retirement.
It’s been a long time since she was a dirty-faced kid living in a mobile home on a dirt road in the mountains of Idaho, next to the log house it took her father six years to finish—not unusual for a man who worked part time and drank full time. It’s been a long time since she was a white trash student at a third-rate university, and even since her upset victory to become Idaho Attorney General … .
All right, President Grandma, let’s not write our memoirs just yet.
She’s only ten months from retirement, anyway.
Wonder if XV will even cover the election?
There’s no longer much at stake in being the President of the United States. The Republicans are running a Hawaiian nonentity, the guy Hardshaw picked for Commerce; the Democrats are running yet another governor of New York, this time the first black woman; and the United Left is running TBA—a slate of electors who will pick a President if enough of them win.
Back to work, Brittany Lynn, now.
She remembers how her father used to say “now”—the word implied an oncoming spanking.
That association, at last, draws her attention back to the job. Liu, the UN’s Ambassador to the U.S., also likes to start off on a scare note. This time it was a threat that there was sentiment in the General Assembly to further disarm the independent national forces, down to a ten-percent-of-UN level. She knew that wasn’t what they were after, but when it sprang it was almost as bad.
They want NOAA, NASA, the Department of Energy, the scientific branches of EPA … the list goes on and on. All the usual reasons—better coordination and more equitable sharing of global resources—and all the usual promises about all the information remaining equally accessible and all the employees receiving just the same pay and benefits. Nothing to complain about there … .
Except that if Hardshaw goes for it, when the SecGen says something is happening out there in the global environment, she won’t have the
foggiest idea whether or not he’s telling the truth. And the major area in which the UN has been restricting national sovereignty, for the past twenty years, has been in global environmental questions.
She can even see it in Rivera’s lights, when she tries; UNESCO and its many spinoffs don’t supply the quality of information that he needs, and he ends up acquiring it mainly from the scientific agencies of the Big Five.
And if you were the SecGen, Brittany Lynn, you’d have to wonder all the time if maybe something was being put over on you, or something was being hidden.
But she isn’t the SecGen, and it’s not her lookout. She stretches, smooths her skirt, picks up the phone, and tells them to get Harris Diem and bring him in—she knows he’s been at his desk for at least an hour by now.
The irony of it all, she thinks, is that in her seven years of struggle with the UN she’s been forced to make the Federal government speak with just one voice, made it a better implement for governing than the country has ever had before—and she has, now, even less real authority than the Presidents between Jackson and Lincoln.
And the deeper irony is that as she has extended her authority, she has diminished her ability to get the truth, instead of what people think she wants to hear. This document on her desk is the result of that, and she’s too smart not to see the chickens returning to roost.
She can’t tell what the people at NOAA think the release of so much methane will do, because they were trying to tell her whatever would make things go smoothly for NOAA.
And just this once, she wants the truth.
If you’re going to get all worked up about what’s true and what’s not, you’re never gonna be President like I’m grooming you for, Brittany Lynn,
her father used to say, once she’d gotten old enough to start to catch him out in all those lies—the lost Spanish city somewhere in the Hoodoo River gorge, the aliens he had met on the road to Sand Point, Bigfoot, that the house would be beautiful when it was finished, and he was going to stop drinking for his little girl.
This job isn’t quite the fun she might have hoped for, back then, but it still beats hell out of spending her life behind a cash register at a McDonald’s in Boise. She was just kind of wondering, for a minute there, by how much?
The soft chime tells her Harris is on his way in. She composes herself, goes back to the desk, flips the report open to a random page. When he comes in, she skips the greeting and starts with, “Harris, you greasy old hack, why in hell did you hand me a report that doesn’t say anything?”
“Because, boss,” he says, setting down his briefcase and leaning across the desk at her, “we don’t know anything.”
They laugh because they have been friends for twenty years. Nothing is funny but each is glad the other is here.
Yeats fussed about things falling apart and the center not being able to hold. What really happened was that the center ceased to exist altogether.
It fell into nonexistence gradually, in the kind of grim retreat and perpetual compromise that marked the last two centuries of Rome.
Eisenstein found out that all you had to do was cut from the thing to the face that seemed to be seeing it, take the pieces of the story and put them together with a simple splice, and it would stick together just as if some Dickensian narrator had said “And so, dear reader …”; the storyteller was no longer at the center of the story.
Einstein found out that you could pick any old place to be the center.
Gertrude Stein found out that the more times rose was rose, the less it had to do with anything pink and sweet-smelling, and the freer it was to be like Bums’s luve, or like every other rose.
RAND Corporation demonstrated that in the event of a nuclear war, a state without a head cannot be decapitated, and gray corporate gnomes transformed into the playful sprites of the nets.
Hitler, Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill tried to rebuild the center, but to do it they had to let radios into everyone’s house, and there is no point in being Pope if you’ve got to touch the beggars personally; the increased contact of the center with the periphery only hastened its dissolution.
The old centralized Communist Party was so ineffective at opposing the Korean War that many Americans didn’t know there was a war, but thirty thousand mimeographs and two thousand college radio stations carried the struggle against the Vietnam War into the farthest corners of the country, and while the reporters from the centralized broadcasting services interviewed the supposed heads of the supposedly national supposed organizations, the ground shifted under them. By 1980, the slogan was “Think Globally, Act Locally,” and few were bothering with the global part. Even the Department of Defense came up with AirLand Battle, which you might call cooperative local-action violence.
By 2028, things have gone farther. The center is wherever you are standing.
When Harris Diem gets done talking to the President, he’s tired, and it’s still early in the morning. Another ten-minute conversation, another major chunk of history, he thinks to himself. The hardest thing about his memoirs is going to be explaining to people that it really happened that way, all the time—you walked into Brittany Lynn Hardshaw’s office, she asked you six questions, and you suddenly had orders to change all of American history.
Assuming it works.
He thinks about it, rubbing his temples at his desk, rolling and stretching his neck. He will need a reliable fall guy, and there’s hardly a better one than Henry Pauliss. He’ll need to make elaborate arrangements to covertly monitor about forty completely loyal NOAA people. That’s not a problem either.
He needs to go spend some time in his basement. He hasn’t in weeks … .
Time for it tonight if he wants to. Interesting phrase, “wants to.” If his house burned down tomorrow and everything hidden down there were destroyed, he would probably weep with relief … until that buzzing started at the base of his skull, and there was no relief possible for that.
He can hear it now, like a doorbell in a dream: no hallway ever leads to the door, and you know that when you open the door something will kill you … and you cannot do anything except endlessly search the halls for the door, so that you can open it.