by Jim Stark
The grandson of Randall Whiteside and son of Michael Whiteside had listened to all this with his face fairly pasted to the window. He turned and looked at her narrow head ... with the narrow mind inside, he groused inwardly. He very pointedly did not look at the settings on her Sniffer. He looked right into her brown eyes, eyes that were trying to look innocent, ordinary, unmalicious.
"You know perfectly well that my family owns the majority interest in Whiteside Tech,” he said bitterly. There was a “beep"—he was exaggerating just a little, but clearly didn't realize that, consciously—his family owned the controlling interest, which was not quite the same thing. “Our company patented the LieDeck way back in two thousand and fourteen,” he bulldozed on, “almost two decades ago, but here we are, you and me, sitting side by side on a plane, and you have a LieDeck and I don't! And if I did have one, you'd have to arrest me, and the freakin’ WDA could even impose the freakin’ death penalty to teach me my place! So don't talk to me about what a freakin’ gem you are, okay?"
Lilly let it go. It was always smart to let hostile civilians get their licks in early, she knew from her training and experience. That way they felt better for a while, and it made things easier for her when the time came to draw the line.
Chapter 2
EYEBALL
Tuesday, February 8, 2033—1:30 p.m.
A man with the self-ascribed codename “Eyeball” was sitting in a darkened room, with the curtains drawn tightly. He was doing what he did every day, staring intently at the lit-up screen of a wall mounted MIU, his Master Interface Unit, the SuperNet device that brought the world into his head. Eyeball wasn't just surfing; he was hunting. The MIU was his periscope, the World Democratic Authority his foe, and the LieDeck his torpedo.
"The following is a special bulletin from the Netnews service of CBS,” said the voice of an announcer. Then a male reporter came on screen, speaking from a very white room filled with milling, mumbling people. His name, Elwood Harding, was printed across the bottom of the screen.
"It was learned a short time ago that Lester Connolly, the fiery leader of USLUC, was rushed here by ambulance this morning,” Harding said. “I'm here inside the Washington D.C. General Hospital, awaiting the official statement from Dr. MacInnis, the Chief of Surgery. Of course in recent months, the U.S. LieDeck Unbanning Committee has been increasingly strident in its..."
Eyeball leaned forward and began to perspire. This was the first he had heard of this breaking story, and he'd been at his MIU for the past hour. Why didn't they mention this earlier? he snarled internally. They probably did, he chastised himself, while I was in the bathroom or surfing elsewhere. He reached under the arm of his plush chair and flipped the concealed button that activated his forbidden LieDeck. He left his hand resting there because he always used the pin mode of signaling, never the beeper. All precautions were wise in his world. No perception was paranoid.
He watched every minute movement as a doctor, with his surgical mask still draped around his neck, approached the cluster of microphones and cleared his throat. This guy is exhausted, thought Eyeball ... and he's not accustomed to the limelight ... or he's under pressure ... or he's scared.
My name is Dr. MacInnis. At eleven fifteen this morning, Lester Connolly was admitted with flu-like symptoms and severe pain in his lower left arm. By eleven thirty-five a.m., we had diagnosed his illness as necrotizing fasciitis, the so-called flesh-eating disease, which can sometimes result from a severe streptococcus A infection. In the moments just before we put Mr. Connolly under anesthetic, he authorized us to do whatever was necessary to save his life. At approximately eleven fifty a.m., we amputated his left arm at the shoulder. His heart stopped once, and we had a lot of difficulty stabilizing his condition, which is why we waited for a while before making this announcement. He is now in Intensive Care, in critical but stable condition. The next forty-eight hours will probably determine whether or not we were able to catch it in time. We promise to keep you informed of any important developments. Sorry, but I've been advised not to take questions at this time.
Jesus! Eyeball said to himself. That's pretty fucking convenient ... for the WDA.
When the doctor and his media minders refused to back down on the “no questions” issue, the reporter—Elwood Harding—took over again. “Earlier today,” he said into the camera lens, “WDA chief Sheena Kalhoun pre-recorded a statement from her New York office to express the response of the world body. Her instructions were that it was not to be Netcast until after an official statement had been made by the hospital. Here is what Ms. Kalhoun had to say."
I have just been informed that Mr. Lester Connolly, the head of the U.S. LieDeck Unbanning Committee, has been diagnosed with—uh—necrotizing fasciitis. Even though Mr. Connolly regarded the WDA as his enemy, we regard Mr. Connolly as a man of integrity, a man who fights for what he believes in, which is perhaps the highest political virtue in the global democracy. At a difficult moment like this, our political differences should be put aside. We ask his family and friends to accept our sympathy and our wishes for a speedy recovery.
Bullshit, Eyeball said to himself as he froze Sheena Kalhoun's Maggie-Thatcheresque face on the screen and studied its lines for micro-signals of deception or guilt. His hidden LieDeck had indicated a lie immediately after Kalhoun uttered the word “integrity.” Only one lie, and a fairly innocent one at that, but that whole thing was a big old load of crap. Sympathy my ass!
In fact, when he thought about it, the word “sympathy” was usually used when the person had died. And there was something else about Kalhoun's statement that made Eyeball feel queasy, even if he couldn't put his finger on it. He always archived what he was watching, so he scrolled back to the start and watched the whole thing again. There it was, right in the second sentence! She said “regarded,” he noticed. She used ... the past tense. Why not use the present tense, and say that Lester Connolly “regards” the WDA as his enemy? He went through the statement once more. The other key verbs are all in the present tense—"fights” and “believes"—the way one would talk about someone who is alive. So ... was it just a slip of the tongue when she said “regarded"? A slip of a writer's pen, perhaps? Or does it indicate something more serious, more telling?
Eyeball couldn't decide if he was on to something important or not. It might have been an honest mistake, a minor grammatical anomaly, but he resolved to keep a close watch on the Connolly situation as it developed. Lester Connolly was a modern-day hero to millions of people, including Eyeball.
Chapter 3
BUMMER
Tuesday, February 8, 2033—1:40 p.m.
Randy climbed into the back of the waiting limo and sighed. It irritated him a lot that his father hadn't sent the corporate jet to pick him up in Miami, even though that would have been a shameless and unnecessary wad of air pollution, just the kind of extravagance the Netmedia loved to point fingers at. “Sure, his family is fabulously wealthy,” they would wail, “but that's no reason to flaunt it, or to callously disregard the interests of the planet and the species as a whole.” Randy knew these facts of 21st-century life, of course, but ... well, there were times when “knowing” something just didn't cut it. At least I don't have to take a freakin’ taxi all the way over to l'état de Québec, he thought as he slammed the door on a fierce Canadian winter.
It was a fifteen-minute trip from the airport to the outer edge of the Canadian capital, half an hour to get through Ottawa, and another fifteen minutes to go through Customs and crawl across the Champlain Bridge to the Québec-side city of Gatineau. Then it was thirty-five minutes or so along Highway 148, through hibernating farmland, to the little town of Quyon. The last leg was a two-minute jaunt north off Highway 148 to the great stone mansion where he had been raised—he and his sister, and his father and his sisters before him, and his grandfather and his siblings before that. I should get there by three thirty, he calculated.
"Going home” wasn't like in the movies for Randy. The warmt
h of the hearth and the rambunctious hugs of the 20th century seemed to have been displaced by a cool cordiality, a diplomatic politesse, an unsigned social contract to let sleeping dogs lie and to stay well clear of any and all issues that were likely never to get resolved. His father, Michael, was all business—bored with it the last few years, and yet cow-eyed disbelieving that his only son wanted to be a professional golfer. His mother Becky was the consummate coper, but her life didn't seem to involve Randy's father that much any more, except on the surface. They're more like cohabitants of convenience than lovers or parents, he thought. And his sister Venice ... well, she's got the hots for Evolution, he mused, raising his eyebrows in a tiny private act of dismay. The glass divider between the driver's compartment and the back was down, so he leaned over and glanced in the rearview mirror to make certain the chauffeur's eyes were on the road, that the chauffeur wasn't catching any physical signals of his thoughts as he sat sullenly and silently in the back.
The skyline of Ottawa could be seen in the distance now, and Randy wondered if he missed that, or indeed if anyone ever felt nostalgic about places any more. The SuperNet made every place “across-the-street” now. At the University of Miami, whenever he was asked, he always said he was “from Ottawa—actually a bit northwest, in the state of Québec,” pronouncing it “Kwuhbeck, like a Yankee, rather than the correct “Kaybeck."
It was complicated, telling Americans about the “where” of things up home. They always assumed you had to be from a city, or nearby, even though cities were shrinking as people the world over fled with their Netbased work to a quieter rural life. Americans understood “state” to mean “as in Tennessee or California.” It was way too much bother to explain about the odd status of “associate statehood” that the French-speaking former province of Québec had finally wrested from the ROC—meaning the “Rest-Of-Canada,” as the Anglophone parts had been nicknamed.
It wasn't that Americans couldn't understand ... just that they couldn't care less. The smaller the world got, the bigger the United States seemed to become, in the minds of its nationals, anyway. Maybe it was because the WDA was based there, the way the UN had been before the Revolution. Next time I'm asked, Randy said to himself, I'm going to say “a couple of miles north of Quyon,” just to see what kind of goofy looks I get. The USA is the only country in the world that hasn't adopted metric, and Americans can't even find Québec without pulling out their Sniffers and hopping on the Net.
In any event, Ottawa had never been his home—never felt like it, and never would. He was a Québécois, and proud of it. Now, he realized, even the estate didn't feel much like home. It was where his folks lived, where his sister Venice still lived—at least for now—and where a bunch of his “stuff” collected dust. It was a place he could go where the hassles were bearable. And the temptations there were non-existent, at least in winter (there was a private nine-hole golf course and a practice range on the estate to gobble up his days when and as he was “home").
Randy watched the snow-covered road ahead and wondered what kinds of people were in the cabs and private cars that whizzed by in the passing lane of the autoroute. A Whiteside limo never exceeded the speed limit—everyone else did. They got places to go, people to see, deals to sign, lovers to maul, reasons upon reasons. Me ... I just can't fucking putt. Bummer.
He re-activated his Sniffer—it had been turned off on the plane, as required by world law. The device instantly emitted a low hum, his selected ringtone for a call that had been awaiting his return to connectivity. He asked the driver's forbearance as he buzzed up the darkened glass partition—he wanted to take the Netcall in private, even if it was only his dad or mom saying: “Welcome home."
He withdrew the small Whiteside-produced device from his jacket pocket, and the small screen simply read “Lucky.” It was his very dear friend and sometimes tingle-mate, Yolanda Dees—and that made him smile. She'd chosen the nickname Lucky for herself because she worked for USLUC, and she hated her real name. Randy pressed the “face” button.
"Yo ... landa,” he teased, even before her image appeared on the screen. “To what do I owe—."
"Lester almost died,” she blurted out.
"What!"
"He's okay though. He's in the Washington General—critical but stable, and they said—"
"What happened?"
Lucky wasn't crying, but Randy could tell that she recently had been. She passed on what information she had about their leader, which was little more than had been given out on the Netnews. “We can't get anything more,” she said breathlessly. “The National Council called an emergency meeting for tomorrow to deal with the crisis ... and it's on the warm! All the regional reps are flying in. They're scared to meet over the Net. I don't know what to think, Randy. Everybody here is in shock."
Randy stared out the limo window at the whitened world that glided by. He couldn't shake the image of Lester's severed arm tied to the mast of a log-boom tug, giving the WDA the stiff middle finger, like in that 20th-century film, Sometimes a Great Notion. “Crisis” was the right word. A leader is only a leader, he thought, but if we were to lose Lester—Christ, he's the founder, the last great crusader, the heart and soul of the thing!
"You want me to come down to D.C., Lucky?"
"No way!” she said. “I mean—uh—yes, on a personal level, but ... well, if he dies, what if people suspect he was assassinated? God knows what could happen! Best if you stay up in Québec until the situation clarifies.” She pronounced it “Kaybeck."
Randy knew she was right, but for a few precious seconds, his feelings had soared at the prospect of missing out on the perennial awkwardness of home, of turning the limo around and heading back to the airport. He also liked the thought that he could be part of the USLUC “in-crowd” during this crisis, not to mention the pleasure of spending a few delicious days with Lucky.
And he knew why she was right, too. Long gone were the days of book depositories and magic bullets. In the last ten years, charismatic leaders of effective dissident groups had a strange habit of coming down with dread diseases. And every time it happened, someone would resurrect the tired ghost of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. A KGB agent in the former USSR had attempted to assassinate him (unsuccessfully) by stabbing him with a poisoned needle in a cathedral, in 1971. Popular wisdom had it that the WDA vigorously protected the right of all world citizens to protest to their hearts’ content ... as long as they didn't succeed! USLUC had recently reached the point where there was real hope of an eventual victory ... and now this!
"I really hate it when you're right,” he said, dully. “Keep me informed about what's happening down there, eh?"
"Will do,” said Lucky as she signed off.
Randy froze her image on the tiny black-and-white screen of his Sniffer. Her face was more strained than he had ever seen it before. It lacked the congenital effervescence that had attracted his attention when he first visited USLUC headquarters and donated his first hundred thousand dollars, a year ago, in 2032. It had taken him three months to get over wanting to own her, or marry her—to have her all to himself, anyway. It embarrassed him to realize that he was caught up replaying their lustful nights in his mind, instead of being profoundly overwhelmed by the terrible state of Lester Connolly's health, but ... well, he couldn't influence Lester's situation, and he would have to wait along with everyone else to see where events led. For now, he had to sit like a lump in the back of a limousine and imagine how this thing would play at the estate, at home.
Chapter 4
WRONG HANDS
Tuesday, February 8, 2033—3:30 p.m.
Lilly was slight, with a pencil nose that grew visibly pinker whenever it had to feed on an Arctic air mass. “Thin as a yard of pumpwater,” her Grandma Petrosian often used to say, about her body, before and after she was all grown up. Lilly felt skinnier than usual in the polar wilds of west Québec. She didn't own proper clothes for weather this insane, just some ankle-high rain boots she'd used occas
ionally in Florida, a black knee-length trench coat and a pair of kid leather driving gloves she'd received for Christmas years ago and never before used. It was all woefully inadequate.
Her exhalations billowed in front of her as she waited for the cab driver to unload her bags. Mouth breathing seemed the only realistic option in this inhospitable country. She wished she could wipe her nose, but digging out a tissue meant taking her hands out of her coat pockets, taking off her gloves and rummaging around in her purse (actually a large handbag) for ten or fifteen seconds—not smart at minus thirty degrees Celsius—minus twenty Fahrenheit. The idle thought crossed her mind that she could draw her coat sleeve across, like a kid would do without a second thought, but Evolutionary eyes were surely watching from darkened windows, she imagined. I better wait until I get inside.
Lilly found herself calculating how often this shivering and sniffling routine would likely recur in the course of her new job. It's worth it, I guess, she thought as her locked aluminum equipment case was plunked too roughly onto the packed snow of the parking lot. If I do well here, I'll get posted somewhere normal, somewhere south, way south.
She looked at the faded front of the old motel. Set back to the left was a double-decker block of twenty rooms, attached at a cockeyed angle to the motel office and the restaurant by an enclosed passage perhaps forty feet long. Those rooms were for paying guests, she knew from perusing the Netfiles on Victor-E. The makeshift passageway was an obvious add-on.