by Sandy Nathan
“You may be able to help more.” He looked at her hand, working away in the pocket. He could see light coming from the opening in the coat’s seam.
“I’m glad you’re here, but don’t try to cuddle up with me.”
“I no try cuddle up.”
“Yes, you did. You did something when I was falling asleep. I could see your people in my mind. They’re gold, aren’t they?” She ducked her head, indicating he was right. “I saw them. They want something from me. They can’t have it. Don’t think you can make me fall in love with you. That’s what you were doing in the car, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. But you no like me. I no try more. I love my mother, no you.” She fumed while tears welled in her eyes.
“Well, we’re all set,” he said. “You love your mother, and I’m in love with my mother.”
“OK.” She looked over her shoulder toward the house. Henry was calling for them. “We go to house.”
“Not yet. There’s one more thing. Take off your shoes.”
She didn’t understand, but when he started undoing the laces, ripping at them, she understood very well. “No!” She pulled at his hands. “No! They say no!”
He stopped when he saw that she was really upset.
“The people on your planet say you have to leave them on?”
She nodded.
“OK. Don’t worry about it. I just wanted to know what your feet look like. I’ve seen dancers’ feet. They look awful. All that grace and beauty, and their feet look like Frankenstein’s monster’s.”
He lowered his voice and leaned closer. “I’ve got some pictures of what Chinese girls’ feet used to look like. A long time ago, they bent their feet in half and then tied them so they were about four inches long. That was supposed to look sexy. Without the bindings, they look horrible.” He made an expression of disgust.
“So I won’t say your feet are ugly or anything, because I’ve seen worse. It’s OK.”
She clutched her foot with one hand. “Is OK?”
“Yeah. Maybe your people told you not to show a human your feet because we’d do something like shoot you.”
Eliana looked at the gun. “Shoot me?”
“No. Let’s forget it. We’ll go back. You can wear those ratty shoes in my mother’s ballroom. Everything’s cool. Forget it.”
But she’d changed her mind. “My people say you no like me if I show feet. But you no like me now.” The girl sat back on the bench. Slowly, she stretched one leg out on the bench. A beautiful dancer’s leg, with perfect proportions and muscles like silken granite. Keeping her eyes on him, she untied the pointe shoe’s laces, and then pulled the laces off, tracing diagonals around her leg. Her eyes were on his when she pulled off her slipper and the sock under it.
His eyes bulged. “Oh, wow, Ellie! You really are from outer space!” The top part of her foot looked like a human foot, but where her toes should be—the problematical area for anyone dancing en pointe— was a neat little hoof.
He lifted her foot and leg off the bench, marveling at it. “Wow. That is so adaptive.”
She said, “Dancer,” pointing to herself proudly.
“You sure are. Can I take the other one off?”
She nodded, and put both feet across his legs. He carefully removed the shoe and then the stocking. He caressed her feet and fascinating little hooves. His hands moved up and down her insteps, along her arches, touching the tops of her feet where they became hooves. Moving over her heels. He stroked her ankles and ran his hands over her calves.
Shaking, he said, “I think we’d better get back. They’ll be wondering where we are.” He felt drunk. He didn’t know that girls could make you feel drunk.
“Leave your shoes here. No one will say anything about your feet at the house, I promise. Let’s go back.”
He got up and marched away from the bench.
“Gun,” she said.
“What?”
“Gun. You forget.”
“Oh yeah. I forgot.” He picked it up and walked next to her. How could he get his hands back on her feet?
Her feet and legs tingled where he’d touched her. He was all she could think about. She wanted him to touch her. And she wanted to dance.
26
Lincoln Charles stood at the edge of the cylinder of light thrown from the ceiling. His commandos and secret service men had oozed out the door, scarcely needing to be dismissed. The metal rotunda enclosed him and Tsar Yuri. Linc wasn’t too afraid, because he figured his commando suit would protect him from anything a dead man could dish out.
His heart pounded with excitement. Finally he got to do something besides sign bills and say words his writers gave him. He crept forward and addressed the figure. When he moved, it turned to face him.
“Hello, Tsar Yuri!” Linc carefully examined Tsar Yuri, or whatever that was. Electricity crackled above, forming a pulsing web that spiraled from the ceiling to the figure’s head. Yuri stood on an illumined disk about four feet wide, in the center of the room’s metal floor.
Linc knew what “Yuri” was—a hologram. His scientists had shown them their versions of what he was seeing. They weren’t this good, but Linc knew the other man was an electronic apparition that couldn’t get out of the glowing circle on the floor.
“Gee, you look great.” He smiled broadly, aware that Yuri probably couldn’t see him behind his bulletproof helmet, but wanting to appear friendly. “It’s great to meet you. You’re the guy who brought the Great Peace. I want to thank you on behalf of the American people!”
“You are”—the voice paused as though being fed his name— “President of the United States Lincoln Charles. Please talk to me, President Charles. Tell me what is important to you.” Another pause. “Tell me your dreams...”
Linc smiled. The great liberator cared about people. “Well, Yuri— I may call you that?” The hologram nodded. “I’ve devoted my life to happiness. I want to help as many people as I can achieve their full potential. I’m concerned about self-esteem, motivation, making the best out of any situation—”
“That is enough,” Yuri said. “Do you feel that everything is all right? Even now?”
“Well, shoot, Yuri, everything’s OK for us, isn’t it? For you and me, Ron and Martha. For everyone down here in the shelter. We’re just fine and will be, no matter what. I’m not worrying about a thing. Besides, maybe there’s a way out... we’ll have a chat and figure things—”
“Enough.” Yuri cut him off. Linc heard noise coming from outside the room where his guards were waiting, then silence.
“What’s going on?”
The hologram stood smiling, apparently looking at the doorway.
“Linc! Linc! Are you all right?” It was Ron’s voice, his chief of staff, coming through speakers.
“Everything’s OK, Ron.” Linc heard his own voice answer.
“The door locked and sealed itself. We can’t get in.”
“I’m not worrying about a thing. We’re OK down here.”
The hologram, or maybe a huge computer, had recorded his voice and was replaying it to Ron and the guys, making them think he was safe!
“Are you sure?”
“Ron, I’ll make the best of any situation. There’s a way out.”
“We’ll be here, sir.”
“We’ll have a chat and figure things out.”
“OK, sir. We’re here.”
The hologram looked at him, its true malignancy apparent. “Do you feel safe now, Mr. President? Are you happy?”
“Now look here!” Linc sputtered.
“SHUT UP. I’m not going to hurt you. We are going to have a talk. Then I will let you go.” Linc was relieved to hear that. “You will never be the same after this chat. In fact, you may take your own life.” The creature—it seemed more alive than anything Linc could imagine–—laughed, the sound ricocheting off the metal walls.
“You are here because you have failed.” The voice was deep, reverberating through Linc’s consc
iousness. “You would not see me if you had succeeded... the minute your scientists disarmed the nuclear devices, I would have self-destructed. But you couldn’t disarm anything.
“Tomorrow morning, your world will cease to exist. The atomics will detonate and the real Great Peace will begin. My peace—death.”
Before Linc could object, Yuri spoke again. A sound of popping electricity and grating metal accompanied his voice.
“You thought I got rid of the atomic weapons, didn’t you?” The hologram stared at him as though it could see him. Linc nodded vigorously. “No one can get rid of them; their waste lasts forever. I hid them, and set them to kill everyone on Earth.” Linc’s jaw dropped.
“How could I do this? Easy. Your technology is horse piss compared to mine. Your technical people and your computers could have saved you, but you outlawed them.”
Linc was appalled. He had worked his whole life to increase people’s self-esteem and now he was being manhandled by a really nasty—
He shook at the next blast of words.
“You think of me like children. ‘Good Tsar Yuri will take care of us.’ You think I am a nice guy. I have never been a nice guy!” the image screamed. The sound echoed round the room and electric sparks flashed from the ceiling. “I am not good Tsar Yuri. And you and your people are not lovely children who deserve protection and love. You don’t deserve anything, you piece of shit.
“You believed whatever nonsense I programmed you to believe. The Great Peace! There hasn’t been peace since the Second Revolution. You do boom-boom war, not my kind of war.” Linc strained to understand.
“You don’t know what a boom-boom war is? It’s one you fight with guns and missiles. Boom-boom has decimated your countryside. You maintain the illusion of peace because you didn’t destroy your major cities. Why? I didn’t allow you. It’s part of my plan.
“Tomorrow, I’ll blow up the planet!” The hologram raised its arms in triumph. “That’s my kind of war! Everyone dies!”
Linc wanted to say something, but his helmet muffled his voice. He didn’t want to take it off now.
“Take off your helmet, idiot. Talk to dear Tsar Yuri. Do you think your pitiful armor will protect you? I can melt this room.” The figure laughed.
Yuri’s laughter was worse than his voice; it turned Linc’s stomach. Linc pulled off his helmet and set it on the floor beside him. He wasn’t going to let Yuri push him around. “We have had some defensive military engagements. The peace hasn’t been perfect—”
“Don’t you look at your budgets? Don’t you know how much you spend fighting, Mr. Commander in Chief?”
Linc sputtered. He didn’t really understand the budget that much, but his guys told him everything was great.
“You believe your own lies,” Yuri bellowed. “I lied to you. I set you up. But you were too stupid to question anything. Even now, you can’t ask me a decent question.”
Linc thought hard. “OK, what about the Bloodless Revolution? Everyone says you took over most of the earth with no bloodshed.”
“Blood washed the streets. For miles around Moscow, the bodies of my enemies swung from scaffolds. All over the world, crows feasted on the dead. No one opposed me when I was done—anyone who would try was dead.”
Linc quailed. That did make sense. History had shown that you couldn’t pop out one leader and put in one you liked better in a couple of months. If you tried, you might get something worse. He looked at the massive figure, which appeared to be 100 percent alive and staring directly at him.
It spoke: “Shall I tell you what I see when I look at you? I can see you, you know. I don’t know what”—that slight pause that said a name was being inserted into his programming occurred again— “President Lincoln Charles looks like, but I know what kind of fool you are. You are tall and good-looking. Your people picked you because you make them feel safe and secure.”
Linc started to shake. Maybe he wasn’t the smartest president in the world, but he wasn’t what Yuri implied. Linc’s mouth opened and closed, but he couldn’t say anything.
A banging noise from the hall interrupted them. “Linc? It’s Ron. We’re breaking in. Can you hear me?” They must have been using a battering ram; the rotunda reverberated with the blows.
“Ron. I’m fine. We’re having a chat. We’re OK.” Linc heard his own voice saying stupid pleasantries. He wasn’t OK; he was in a terrible place with an electronic maniac and didn’t know how to get out.
“Ron! Ron! Everybody! I’m not OK. Get me out of here,” he shouted. “I’m in danger! Help me! Help!”
The blue lights in the hologram’s eyes twinkled. “They can’t hear you. But shut up or I’ll blow up the White House.”
Linc paled. “You can do that?”
“If I can blow up the world, I can blow up this palace of excess.” Yuri waved his arms, indicating the room they were in. “Would you like to see me do it?”
“No! No! I believe you!”
“Then I will say what I brought you here to hear,” the terrible voice continued. “When I took over the world, I looked around and thought, ‘I know they’re stupid now, but what if I gave them a thousand years to develop?’”
“A thousand years?” Linc whispered.
“Oh, you didn’t know,” the Tsar’s voice soothed. “Yes, my friend. It’s been a thousand years since the glorious Second Revolution. It’s not 2197—it’s 3199. You’ve had more than a thousand years to prove yourselves. But I knew how it would end at the beginning.
“I thought, ‘Will they make a good society once they’re freed of the fear of atomic war? Will all society benefit from prosperity, or will the fat, sucking owners take it all and leave the workers living like slaves?’” He laughed, a sound like drowning cats. “If I gave you a thousand years, would you have a moral shift so that you cared about what was worth caring about—your fellow humans—and not every stupid other thing?
“I knew that you would fail. I knew that you’d have a huge military. Oh, you’d call them police and have them rounding up people. There’ll be a danger you have to fight. A peril. You’d be engaged in continuous warfare that you didn’t talk about, except as a pretext to pry more money out of the pathetic, whining taxpayers.
“And you’d feed the population with nonstop movies. Games. Shopping. You’d have bigger and bigger malls, and you’ll walk around them like rats, buying and hoarding. The people would gobble it down as fast as you could shovel it to them, mindless grubs eating their way through shit.
“Yes? Yes? This is true, isn’t it?”
Linc nodded; he couldn’t think to do anything else. He didn’t think his culture was so bad. He liked movies. If some people had more than the others, they’d worked for it. People were not equal, as the Constitution said. Or was it the Declaration of Independence?
“You have camps where you lock the people who speak against the stupidity of your lives. You call them subversives and revolutionaries, and you do whatever you want to them—don’t you? DON’T YOU? ANSWER ME!”
“We do have detention centers for people who don’t fit in. We have to have them to keep the peace.”
Yuri chuckled. “Oh, yes. Have you been to these camps? Have you seen what they do on your orders?”
“Well, yes. I’ve visited several of them. They were sort of like scout camp when I was a kid.” Maybe he hadn’t seen the worst ones, but what he’d seen wasn’t so bad. His Secretary of Public Stability said they had to have them to stop the plots. “If there’s anything wrong, we can fix them, I promise,” he begged.
“You have had a thousand years to fix them, President Lincoln Charles. You and your advisers have reasons for the way things are. Just like you have reasons for your salaries and lifetime benefits and the luxurious resorts they call presidential retreats. Your children spend their days playing video games, taking drugs, and fucking each other. And so do you.
“You call it the Great Peace, but twenty miles outside your cities is a wasteland run by
vigilantes.
“I knew you’d take what I gave you—AND FUCK IT UP.”
Linc couldn’t stand any more. “How can you say that? We tried!”
“TRIED? YOU AVOIDED EVERY UNPLEASANT TRUTH. YOU LIVED LIKE MORONS.”
Linc cowered, but kept plugging. “If you loved us, you would have kept us in line and taught us.”
Yuri’s laughter roared around the metal room. “I never loved you. I knew you too well! If you hadn’t destroyed your brightest people, I never would have come out.
“But here I am—with you and with the other rulers of the world in places like this—telling you that you’ve lost.” Linc’s eyes bulged. “Yes, right now, I am talking to the current tsar of Russia and to all the pathetic presidents and prime ministers of your world—telling them what I am telling you.
“You may think I’m a hard man. I am a hard man. I’m also a dead man.
“What does your plight matter to me? I’m dead.” That horrible laugh resounded. “As long as nuclear weapons have existed, everyone has known that one day, a madman would blow up the planet.
“I am that man. I’m doing it tomorrow morning.”
With an electric crackle, Yuri’s powerful figure compressed, becoming a line of light running from the ceiling to the floor. It disappeared with a snap. Lincoln Charles stood staring at the space where the Great Tsar had been. He picked up his helmet, put it under his arm, and walked to the doorway.
“Hail to the Chief” began to play and the lights along the ceiling directed him out. He stood in the doorway as it opened wide. Light flooded him and the guards outside.
“Linc, are you OK?” Ron asked.
27
Jeremy and Eliana walked around the mansion to the lawn in the back. He didn’t clutch her arm the way he had before. He was afraid to touch her again. He felt as though a computer ten times as powerful as anything he’d used had booted up inside him, and he didn’t know how to control it.
He leaned forward and marched along frowning, the way he did when he was working something out in his lab. She ducked her head forward under his and looked up at him.