Earthsong

by Suzette Haden Elgin

  The Vice President thought his chief might throw up. He looked like he was going to throw up. But it didn’t happen. The President swallowed hard, and he drew a long deep breath in the silence. And then he said, in a voice that trembled, “I have just one condition.”

  “Tell me,” said Zlerigeau.

  “This person … this Joe Fall Guy, with no wife and no kids … he doesn’t get the death penalty. He gets life with no parole. Or he gets the back wards at St. Elizabeth’s, with no parole, and enough drugs to keep his mouth shut forever. I don’t care. But he doesn’t die.”

  “Mr. Dellwilder … Mr. President … that’s a very serious mistake. It leaves loose ends, sir—it would be so much better to just remove the man. Look … when the United States goes to war, it has to kill people. This is no different. This is the war for peace and security, sir. This is the war to keep the whole solar system from falling apart. However much the colonies claim to despise Earth one and all, if Earth fell apart they would suffer trauma difficult to repair. Without Earth to hate, they’d fight each other, you know—we all know that’s what would happen, and it has to be prevented. It’s a just war, Mr. President, and the death of Joe Fall Guy is just an unavoidable side effect.”

  “No,” said the President. “I mean it. No.”

  “Then I’m sorry to have to tell you,” said Zlerigeau, “that I will have to go back to the office and create a Plan B where Joe Fall Guy trips and falls off a balcony at St. Elizabeth’s. Accidentally.”

  Zlerigeau leaned back in his chair with his arms folded behind his head, and he looked at the wall to give Dellwilder some space. The President sat staring at him, rubbing his cheeks with both hands, his eyes bitter and despairing, while the other two men waited. The Vice President could hear a bird singing outside the safepod window … it was saying “A-F-Of-L! A-F-Of-L!” The Vice President knew that bird; it had a mate whose song sounded exactly like water going down a drain.

  “Get out of here,” the President said at last, and he shoved his chair back from the table and got up and went to look out the window. He had both hands clasped behind his back in the classic pose of the man on whose head the crown has grown too heavy. “Get out of here,” he said again, dully. “Go do your filthy work … for which I, the Almighty forgive me, am entirely responsible. But get out. I don’t want to look at you anymore tonight.”

  And he added, “Actually I don’t want to look at either of you ever again, as long as I live. But I have to, don’t I?”

  “Yes, Mr. President, you do,” Zlerigeau answered, on his way out the door; he didn’t take it personally.

  As for the Vice President, he didn’t say anything; after the agent was gone, he left, too, in silence. He was deeply hurt. Deeply. It was true that he had killed Miss Brown, but like Zlerigeau had said, it was no different from a soldier killing an enemy in wartime. He had done it to save the President, and to save the country, and to save all the civilized worlds. The fact that he’d made a little mistake didn’t change any of that. It seemed to him that Dellwilder owed him—not “the office,” by damn, but him, personally!—a little more respect than just being thrown out harshly into the dreary afternoon.

  He left. Oh, yes, he left. But he would remember this. And God willing, the day would come when he could make Dellwilder pay, too.

  When Jay told him about it, Benny just sat there, staring at him, for a long minute and a half. Until Zlerigeau said, “I know, Benny. But so help me God and all the attending angels, I am telling you the truth. It happened just like I said.”

  “Aw, hell,” Benny said. “Nah.”

  “Yes. Just like I said.”

  “Jay,” said Benny, “the fate of the free universe is in the hands of these two dipshits. Isn’t that the way they tell it?”

  “Well … they leave out the ‘dipshit’ part; they say, ‘in the hands of these two great and noble statesmen.’ But yeah; sure. In their capable hands.”

  “How come we’re still alive? How come the worlds still stay in their orbits? How come anything works?”

  Zlerigeau chuckled. “God loves us, Benny,” he said. “That’s the only possible answer.”

  “The President lays his secretary on the damn Oval Office rug, in broad daylight. The President tells the Veep, that little boy who can’t find the utility alone, about his adventure. The Veep proceeds to kill the secretary, all by himself, using his magic potion for high muckamucks. With Marthajean Brown’s best nightgown on her wrong side out, so he gets caught. And I’m supposed to believe all this.”

  “That’s how it started.”

  “And then … and then, the decision is to go out and handpick a fellow just a tad too close to figuring out something it would be very inconvenient for the public to know, and charge him with the Veep’s murder. That part I understand.”

  “Right. That was next.”

  “And then, out of nowhere at all, Cleo St. Andrews, famous lady guitar picker—”

  “Guitarist, Benny. Guitarist.”

  “All right—Cleo St. Andrews, famous lady guitarist—sashays into the front office of the federal lockup and announces that she can’t live with the guilt of seeing an innocent man pay for her crime and insists that she killed Marthajean Brown!”

  “That’s it. You’ve got it. Stop right there.”

  “Awww …” Benny said again.

  “So help me.”

  “Jay, it sounds like an effing opera.”

  “You know about opera, Benny?”

  “I do. How could I go around posing as an unemployed multiversity prof if I didn’t?”

  “It often happens that life imitates art, you see. And this is one of those times.”

  “Sweet saints on a stick.”

  “I know, Benny. And maybe it will make you feel just a little bit better to know that I told the two gentlemen exactly how pathetic all this is, and how they fit into the picture. The idea being to convince them not to do anything else, or repeat any of what they’ve already done. It may not hold them, Benedict, but I did make the effort.”

  “And now they want you to clean this up. With the assistance of your stable of minions.”

  “If we would be so kind, yes.”

  Benedict Mondorro leaned forward in the desk’s guest slot, suddenly serious. “Jay, suppose just for a minute we forget how unspeakably stupid this whole thing is. Tell me what you think is going on.”

  “I don’t know what’s going on. I wish I did.”

  “Give me your best guess.”

  “Well … what I don’t think is going on is that Miss St. Andrews is acting on her own.”

  “Okay. And?”

  “If I could believe she was on her own, just one of those confessor nuts that turns up looking for publicity after any crime that makes the newspapes, this would be easy. Nobody knows about her yet. We’d just take her out, bury the story, and hang Joe Fall Guy. Figuratively speaking. But if she was on her own, there’s no way she could know the things she knows. And since that’s true, we don’t know how many dominoes there are stacked up behind her, Benny. We delete her, up steps the next, belly to the bar … delete that one, it happens again. People would get very suspicious, very fast. The lid would blow off. We can’t afford to test those waters—we have to assume that Cleo St. Andrews is part of something bigger.” He sighed. “A plot to bring down the government and destabilize the inhabited universe, for example.”

  “Jay …”

  “Yeah?”

  “While you’re lecturing, would you please explain how it happens that the President and Vice President of the United States are always incompetent? I mean, lo these past two or three centuries? How can that be?”

  “Give it a little thought, Benny. Would anybody with a brain be willing to take either of those jobs? Think about it.”

  “There was John Mark Leverance.”

  “Yeah. That’s once. But he didn’t understand how things worked, Benny. He thought Presidents were allowed to fix things. He didn�
�t last long.”

  Benny thought about it, and then he nodded his head. “Okay. What else have we got?”

  “Nothing else. We don’t know anything … at all … about what brings St. Andrews into this. But she knows too much, Benny. Lots and lots of stuff that didn’t appear—and never will appear—in the newspapes, or on the threedies.”

  Benny frowned at him. “There couldn’t have been much else, Zlerigeau,” he said slowly. “The murder wasn’t that complicated.”

  “I don’t mean she only knew things about the murder,” the other man said quietly. “No. She knew about the little incident on the Oval Office carpet, Benny.” Benny’s mouth puckered, like he was going to whistle, and then instead he blew one little puff after another of astonished breath.

  “You see, Benny. That’s the problem. How could she know?”

  “Maybe the Vice President told her?”

  “Benny, the man is a pane of glass. If he’d told anybody, I would know. And the President sure as hell didn’t tell her.”

  “Maybe Miss Brown told her?”

  “Maybe. If I could be sure of that, like I said, this would be easy. But we have a pretty good account of everything Marthajean Brown said and did after the shenanigans … and there’s not a lot of time to be accounted for. She could have called somebody, but we find no record of that anyplace. Like anybody in government, she thinks her computer is secure; like anybody in government, the agency knows every breath she draws. There was no call.”

  “Maybe she saw St. Andrews in the hall at the White House, or on the street, and said, ‘Hey, Cleo, the President just deflowered me … or whatever … and I’m going home to cry!’”

  “Maybe. Like I said. But we’ve accounted for the movements of both women, and we don’t find them in the same place in that time period. If they’d run into each other anywhere, Benny, I think we’d know.”

  “It could have been just a few seconds, Jay—it could have happened.”

  “I can’t afford to take a chance on it, Benny. There’s no evidence of any contact, of any kind. So I have to think that maybe somebody put Marthajean up to this, and I have to think that there may be a whole platoon of people who know all about it. Which leads to the obvious and inconvenient conclusion: we can’t afford to just get rid of St. Andrews.”

  “Is that her real name? St. Andrews, I mean?”

  “No. Her name was … wait a minute, let me check the file. Oh, yeah. She began her life as Alice Mary Brown. No relation to Marthajean Brown.”

  “You sure of that last part?”

  “We’re sure. Marthajean Brown was a Kumeyaay Indian; Alice Mary Brown is Cherokee. And no relation.”

  “Both of them Indians, though?”

  “Benny, there are millions of Indians. We’re both Anglos, you and I—does that mean anything?” “No. But it has to be checked out.”

  “We checked it. By the time St. Andrews had been booked for fifteen minutes—with the effing booking officer bleating, ‘But a woman wouldn’t have put on Miss Brown’s nightgown wrong side out either!’—we’d run her through every computer on the planet, and cross-checked for contact with Marthajean Brown. You’ve got to remember, friend—Miss Brown was the President’s personal secretary. We already knew everything about Miss Brown from the day she hatched, or she wouldn’t have been able to hold that position. I even know what brand of underwear she wore, and how many pairs she had. Those two never saw each other, never met. They might have turned up at the same diplomatic cocktail party once in a while, that kind of thing, but they didn’t know one another. Not in childhood; not later.”

  Benny didn’t say anything. He had his own methods for checking things out, and they weren’t the government’s ways. That was one of the reasons they needed him.

  “You’ll find all the relevant files on your computer, Benny,” said Zlerigeau. “Anything else you need?”

  Benny shook his head. And then he said wistfully, “Oh, hell … oh, for the good old days. When everybody that wouldn’t play nice could just be politely persuaded to ship out to the colonies.”

  “Mmhmm.”

  “It must have been wonderful. No crime. No poverty. No wars. No trouble, Jay, unless you decided of your own free will to settle on a planet dedicated to your particular favorite variety of trouble. It must have been paradise.”

  “Maybe so, Benny. But it’s over. There’s not one world out there that’s not running over with the unfortunate products of human mating. Some of them lovely people, certainly. About half of them miserable. About a fourth of them miserable enough to take it out on the rest of us. Paradise was nice while it lasted … maybe … I go by what I see on the threedies. Now it’s long gone, and there’s nowhere left to go. Not anymore.”

  The two men sat there together, in the kind of silence that’s not empty because it has the thoughts of two longtime friends to fill it.

  Finally, Benny sighed and said, “Okay, Jay. Tomorrow soon enough?”

  “Sorry, Benny. Fate of the universe, and all that.”

  “I see. Right now. I suppose we have to start with Cleo St. Andrews Alice Mary Brown.”

  “Yes. We start with the lady, Benny.”

  “Damn women … Talk about the good old days! You know what I want back? I want the days when all the ladies were legally minors and they didn’t open their mouths till a man gave them permission!”

  Zlerigau grinned at him—they were in complete agreement on that issue. But he didn’t mention that; he didn’t have to, because Benny already knew how he felt.

  “Like I said, Benny … we start with the lady.”

  Benedict Mondorro wasn’t one of your elegant glamourboy secret agents with the private label on his whiskey and the handmade suits and all that crap. Mondorro came from ordinary people, and he was proud to keep their ways; even with the unemployed professor cover, he stayed a common man. But he was one of the best—maybe the best. It wasn’t easy work. In the 2400s, when secret agents were about half machine … all high ceramics and fibers and virus metals, so they were damn near invulnerable to ordinary problems, it was maybe easier … it must have been easier. It wasn’t like that anymore.

  There wasn’t enough money now to do it for all agents, and it was hard to do it for some and not for others; that was one reason, and it was valid. But the real reason was techsickness. The human beings of Earth, having had a chance to learn what a taste for machines can do—and coming painfully up out of the Icehouse Effect those machines created, with only a third of the population left—had acquired a taste for doing without machines whenever possible. Not to go back to living primitive; only the Primmoes, the fanatics, went that far. But Terrans tried hard to keep the techlevel down. Benedict was strictly biological except where he’d actually been repaired.

  And he didn’t have anything against women. He’d married one once, and he still had her at home. Her name was Annalaura, and what got to Benedict about her was this face she had. He’d known that the face wasn’t really important in a woman; it’s the body that matters, and the behavior. But there’d been something about her face he couldn’t get out of his mind. Annalaura looked out at you with great huge eyes like a little kid’s eyes, through clouds of dark brown hair, like she was hiding in there. The first time he saw her, all he wanted to do was get both hands deep into that hair, and kind of wind it all around him; he wanted to hide in there with her. It looked warm in there, and safe. And he’d found himself unable to do without her. She was older now, and her face was soon going to need its third set of cosmetic injections, but the eyes and the hair had not changed. Except that the hair was longer; Benny had never let her cut the hair. No, he firmly believed that it had been an error to give women adult status again, but he was tolerant about them.

  Sometimes they had advantages men would have liked to have—like the way they had survived the Icehouse Effect, all that fat under their skin bringing them sailing through it while the men died like pathetic flies all around them. It seemed
to Mondorro that that couldn’t have been chance; it had to have meant something. It was, he thought, a warning of some kind. Maybe a warning to be kinder to the women. They could have let all of the men die except for a few specimens kept at stud, and they had not done that; they had, in fact, worked doggedly to save as many as possible, often at considerable sacrifice to themselves. He kept that in mind; and he did try.

  But he hated it when he had to deal with them while he was working. Everything took five times as long. You ask a man a question, you just get the answer, and it takes maybe two minutes. You ask a woman a question, your hair grows while she goes around and around and around … eventually she answers, if you know what you’re doing, but it takes forever. He and Jay would try to shove St. Andrews down the path at a reasonable pace … they would ask her only the absolute minimum number of questions and they would encourage her to be brief, so they could get on with it. And still it would take them forever to get through the crap to the information they needed.

  But she had an excuse. The excuse of being a woman. The President and the Vice President—they had no excuses.

  THE TRANCER IS TIRED …

  WHAT’S ON THE SOAPS?

  Being a child, on Birog, is not easy. Miktok Fitzgerald is aware of this. She is the first to admit that she dreams … of winning a Goldenpurse … of moving her family to one of the high-security condoroids. Like any other normal person, she would like to live in luxury inside high walls, with a staff of robots making damn sure life is gracious. Miktok would even settle for a two-bedroom apartpod, one of the ones on the top floor, that have a balcony fashioned from the building’s roof; she has slept in a livingroom wall-niche so many years. A real bed, in a room that was hers alone … she would settle for that, and be grateful.