“This will shock some of you but I don’t know anything about wine,” she said. “You’re right, Frank. I just wanted a drink to reward myself for being in such a good position, for being in the best position of all of you.”
ElderGoth poured herself a glass of wine and drank it quickly, holding up a hand to let the others know she was about to say something. When the glass was empty she said, “Don’t ask me if it’s good. I don’t care. It gets me drunk. Drink, all of you, we need it.”
June spoke. “Toby and the Systems crews can live without the rest of us. She would actually be better off without the rest of us. They’re the best organized. Their vulnerability, though, is that Toby has never spread her authority among them. So that if we removed Toby, we could replace her with someone who would not try to elevate Systems above the rest of us. So it isn’t in Toby’s interest to be the rebel. We have more cause than ever to stand together, against everyone. ElderGoth, do you see?”
“I do.”
“We want to maintain our privilege,” said June. “That’s what I’m here for. That’s why a Mythology Committee, even a committee of one person, was established during our rehab, in anticipation of the end of our resources. People will kill for food. If the committees fight, they’ll produce leaders from among the people on our teams who we already trust, and they’ll challenge each of us. And if they get rid of us, the factions among the factions will split, and they’ll destroy whatever chance the people at this table have to continue not just leading but living. You’ve seen me apart from you all. You’ve wondered about my long silences, my meaningless games, and the mystery of June Moulton that I develop and improve. I didn’t understand all of it about myself until this table was set. Chief, what did you plan to tell us tonight? Were you going to tell us about Vayler and how you want to punish him?”
“Pour yourselves a sip of wine from each bottle and tell me what you think.”
Ten minutes passed as the committee heads tasted the wines.
Frank resisted because he expected that this was a trick. Toby Tyler was first to rap a knuckle on each bottle when she was done with them all. “Good, bad, better, okay, okay, best. Okay, Chief, am I right or wrong?”
“Anyone else? ElderGoth?”
“I think this one is the best.” And she tapped Toby’s fourth choice.
“All of the bottles are the same,” said Chief. “Same wine, same year. That was the only way to conduct a fair test. It’s French, Gigondas, close to Burgundy. The wine was considered a good but not a particularly great wine, it cost seventy dollars a bottle five years ago, and it’s aged. But it wouldn’t cost a thousand dollars if the world hadn’t changed. It would be a hundred, maybe. My point is that it was good enough for you to like, but not good enough to be so distinctive that someone might get a perfect score. I wanted to see if any of you were strong enough to resist the temptation to see difference because you were expecting it. So, the question is: what do we do with Vayler Monokeefe, who didn’t keep track of the things in this world that all of us need, to sustain the paradise we’ve made out of the dust, but, worse than that, knowing that we were in trouble, kept a reserve for himself? ElderGoth, would you answer?”
ElderGoth asked, “Why me first?”
“Because you have the most limited perspective of the committee heads. You don’t have power over a large team. So, what should we do with Vayler?”
“Hang him in public.”
“So, there’s the first sentiment. Kill him. That’s one. Next, Frank Sinatra, from the needs of Security, what should we do with Vayler?”
“Until I know the real situation with how much we have left, I can’t recommend any action.”
“Fair enough,” said Chief.
ElderGoth raised her hand to speak. “I could have said the same thing.”
“You didn’t. June?”
“Not ready to answer.”
“Toby Tyler, what does Systems think we should do?”
“Systems is only interested in what is practical, not political. Systems needs to see things as they’re happening without taking our own emotional reactions into consideration. So, we’re facing a shortage. We want the water and electricity to flow. We don’t want downtown to get dark at night. We don’t want the motors that control the Fence gates to freeze up because they have no power. Lock stuck open, lock stuck closed, bad news either way. So Systems wants to roll back protection of the periphery systems to the essential points. That is, Systems wants help from Security to protect the main electrical switching stations and the main valves and pumps that control the water, and leave the rest of the grid under enough supervision to warn us if it’s damaged. We don’t fight for everything. We fight for what we can’t afford to lose.”
June stood up and walked from the table, adjusting her shawl.
Chief called to her. “June, we need everyone.”
She walked to the telescopes and stood up on the low stone wall just beyond them.
Toby Tyler said, “She doesn’t have to support us. She just can’t publically disagree with it or argue with you.”
“She never does that,” said Chief.
June liked to hear them talk about her as though she couldn’t make sense of their words, like a cat or someone who was deaf. June remembered more than the other committee heads about the days following the first recognized symptoms. She was one of the earliest to get sick and, as the mistress of Erin’s father, she was given special treatment at the same time as Erin. Erin hadn’t known who June was to her father, and now June only knew of the love affair because when she went into rehab, Erin’s father had left her a loving letter with his picture, reminding her of who he was to her. It wasn’t clear from the letter if he had already separated from his wife or if his wife had walked out on him or if she had lost her mind to NK3. June found the house that had been hers, on a steep street in an area of older small houses close to downtown, and, when she went back to it after rehab, recognized nobody in any of the pictures except, sort of, herself. Her computer at home did not need a password to open the files and in a subfolder called Taxes 2016 she found a photograph of herself naked on a bed with Erin’s father, tangled together on red sheets, the phone with the camera in it pointed at the mirrored ceiling. They were smiling, just a couple of buddies. June had not taken a lover since rehab, because she had no desire for someone else’s body and over the four years came to see that she was still in love with the married president of Warner Bros.
Her house was filled with screenplays, none with her name on them, and a few movie posters, also none with her name on them. It seemed from the clues that she’d been some kind of film executive at the studio, although possibly in marketing, not in production. She had never married, or if she had been married, that had been in another house and years earlier to someone who left no traces. Perhaps she had deleted that husband the way the Korean weapon snipped all the old human connections for a variation on the same reason.
Something tied the scripts and movie posters to her appointment as mythologist, but no one could explain it to her. The myths she read about had no attachment to the world anymore. Churches with Jesus writhing on the cross or churches with empty crosses, synagogues with scrolls in elaborate closets on the pulpit, Scientology halls, a few mosques, houses with Wiccan shrines, all of this difference in religion told her that nobody preaching about God or religion knew what they were doing, that the effective leaders of those religions shared the secret of religion, that it was arbitrary. All the religions of the past had failed to save anyone. None of them continued and none of their symbols had yet drawn anyone in the world back to the worship chambers with renewed or revived faith in the symbols of the god of each dead domain. Her Silent Voice—a distant entity that as for most First Wavers rarely had anything to tell her and sometimes went weeks without a sound—returned to an old argument between them: “It won’t work anymore. T
hat’s why you were chosen, because you didn’t believe in it then.”
“What did I believe in?”
“You believed in the movies.”
“But I don’t like movies.”
“Not anymore, but you used to.”
“But that doesn’t answer my question.”
“The Founders had the idea that the world needed a new myth to control the Drifters. That the old churches would be filled with people worshipping a new set of gods, and this was meant to control them. Center Camp had no use for a unifying mythology, since mythologies mask the legend of a crime and once the DMV was established and a screening process established, half the story was all anyone needed to hear. Mythology gives pleasant answers to the basic questions of human curiosity, and among the attributes missing from humanity after NK3 is curiosity. You could tell the First Wave the truth about who the Drifters were and what we owe them, and no one would care. They won’t feel shocked or guilty when they know who the Drifters really are.”
“We don’t talk about that,” said June. “And you shouldn’t talk about it either. Right now, I need to know, now, as things are starting to fall apart, what if anything I’m supposed to do to fulfill the mission that was assigned to me during my rehab. I stand here at the edge of the terrace to make them think I have insights too brutal to share, and that whatever I do say is really just a way to give shape to things that can’t be experienced by anyone but me.”
“Yes, that is your role. You’re doing what you’re supposed to do. If all that remains of myth’s traditional power is the suggestion of enigma, keep standing here and impressing upon the world that you know something they don’t. The only knowledge that matters is that, first, you know the depth of your own ignorance, and second, you have sympathy for everyone else’s confusion. Exploit it if you have to, betray them if you have to, but start with sympathy. Everyone isn’t as full of life as you, June Moulton. I know you want to tell me you’re lonely, but you know what I say to that. I say you have what you always wanted. You’re living in his house, watching over his daughter.”
“But I don’t remember him.”
“The astronauts in the space station were weightless, but still in the sphere of gravity’s influence. The connection is invisible and insensible to the weightless astronauts, but even so, there’s an orbit. So it is with you and Erin’s father.”
“The astronauts are dead.”
“And the heads of committee need your opinion on what to do about Vayler.”
The Silent Voice was gone and June, familiar with the Voice’s habits of visitation, didn’t expect to hear from her again for two months. Usually little changed between visits from her Silent Voice. But she knew that change was going to be all the fashion now, since what was usual had only lasted for about two and a half years, and all the experience that felt like a vast continent, experience and memory filling up the available space, was really just a tiny island in time.
So, to keep the theater of her franchise, she returned to her seat and poured another glass of wine. She held the stem in her fingers, lightly, without lifting the glass or drinking the wine.
“In the way the world used to be, there was a mythology of history, call it legend, and the mythology of festivals, the scripts for the rituals of the festivals, call it magic. Inside the Fence we live for the festival. The Woman talks about the festivals. She says we don’t have gods and we don’t have heroes. The tortured man on the cross, man or god, if he died for our sins, those sins belong to the past. He’s nothing to us. The Buddha with his eyes half closed, we’ve seen the shrines, we’ve seen the statues in the gardens, but who is he to us? Why are his eyes like that? What does he not want to see? We woke up to the world as it is and were given the life we share, the community we share. We know that people prayed to them, but we don’t know prayer. I mean we know the words but no one who says those words to God has ever heard God talk back. And God is not the Silent Voice.”
“Anything that gives us, those of us in Center Camp, time to prepare ourselves for the end of the Founders’ gifts and to protect ourselves from everyone else, late Verified Second Wavers, Drifters and Driftettes, if that’s what it comes to, is what we have to do, because we’re all Drifters now. So it’s essential that we don’t punish Vayler, that we keep him as head of Inventory, with discreet supervision by Security. You can’t punish him. The story we tell has to be about a mistake, a simple accounting mistake. We get out the word that Vayler went back over the books and everything is fine.”
Sinatra asked, “How much can we say is left, how many years of food?”
“Twenty-five years. The bigger the lie, the more time it buys us.”
“Thank you, June Moulton. I know you work for the community. So do we all.”
“We work for ourselves, Chief,” said June Moulton. “The rest is myth. And don’t expect everyone to believe it. The end of the endless food supply is real, and justifies panic.”
Chief thanked June. “Frank Sinatra, please go across the street and bring Vayler back. And we need an extra chair at this table.”
ElderGoth raised a hand, “I still don’t know how we’re not going to starve to death.”
“I do,” said Chief.
Frank Sinatra, Vayler Monokeefe, Hopper
Vayler Monokeefe—stretched out on a living room couch, resting before the final part of his life began—began to cry when he saw the head of Security walking up the path to his prison. He’d never seen Sinatra kill anyone but others had and they said he never changed expression from his usual deliberate stare. Monokeefe rolled to his feet as Go Bruins let Sinatra in. When the door opened, Monokeefe’s attention went to a man at Chief’s door. He was in hospital clothes, with an Inventory requisitions clipboard in his hands, talking to Redwings. Sinatra closed the door and faced Vayler.
“Well, Vayler, so here we are and I have to say I’m sorry to be in this position.”
“What position is that, Frank?”
“A position of judgment. A position of punishment. A position of disruption not of my choosing.”
“Do you often choose disruption, Frank? I didn’t know that.”
“You have to be strategic, not tactical, Vayler. Do you know the difference?”
“I don’t, Frank. Tell me.”
“Tactics win battles. Strategies win wars.”
“That’s a wise thought, Frank.”
“I don’t think you understand it.”
“I’m not so good, Frank. I’m sorry I let everyone down.” Vayler looked past Frank at the man with the clipboard. He wished he were just a man with a clipboard.
“What have you learned from this?”
“Not to keep secrets.”
“Everyone has secrets, Vayler. Is that all you learned from lying to your friends and stealing from them?”
“I don’t think I know what I’ve learned and I don’t expect to have the time to figure all of that out and then fix the things I’ve broken.”
“You’ll have the time, Vayler. Your days are numbered but not over. Come to Chief’s house. We want to talk to you.”
Across the street, Redwings looked at Hopper’s inventory lists. “And you want to take inventory in Chief’s supply closets?”
“That’s what I was told to do,” said Hopper.
“Get out of Frank’s way,” said Redwings, pulling Hopper aside to let Sinatra and Vayler through.
Sinatra looked at Hopper, trying to place him.
Redwings said, “He’s from the hospital, Frank. He’s checking supplies.”
Vayler wanted to say that if Hopper was working for Inventory, he’d never seen him before, but this would probably come back to him as an example of his own inability to manage the Inventory Committee after three years of active consciousness. And then the implications of a house-to-house inventory in Center Camp meant that no accou
nting under Vayler’s supervision could be trusted. He expected a bad death.
When Frank Sinatra brought Vayler to the terrace, Redwings called for Royce Hall to show Hopper around the house. Hall wanted to watch the meeting and pointed Hopper toward the garage. “We don’t keep many supplies here,” he said to Hopper. “But I know we could use more toilet paper and hand soap.”
Hopper left the kitchen and walked through the house. In Palm Springs the house where the Teacher kept him was one level, shaped like a squared-off U, with a swimming pool in the center. Chief’s house was three stories with a large central hall. The house wasn’t clean like the house in Palm Springs. There were dirty boot prints on the marble tiles. There was dust on the glass that covered some of the art. Hopper only noticed this because the Teacher’s house was clean and no one was allowed to wear shoes inside.
He found the Pippi Longstocking room on the second floor overlooking the meeting on the terrace. Pictures of a little girl with flying red pigtails were on everything, from the wallpaper to the sheets. She was even on the curtains. Hopper opened the curtains just enough to see the committee heads around the table. He closed the curtains and lay down on the bed.
“Vayler,” said Chief. “I could hang you now. Or I could send you to the desert, but that’s not going to help us. It’s not true that we’re running out of food, and you know it. Don’t you?”
“No, Chief. We’re running out of food.”
“We’re not. This rumor has gone wild because you made a mistake, didn’t you?”
“Not a math mistake.”
“Vayler, try to follow what I’m hinting at. Didn’t you make a counting error? If it was deliberate, we’d have to kill you. So, I’m asking you: what is the mistake?”
“I overlooked twenty Costcos and fifty Walmarts, and underestimated the size of the cattle herd in Bakersfield.”
“All you had to do was count some cows, Vayler.”
“They move around. Most of them look the same.”
“So we have enough for how many years?”
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