First Citizen

by Thomas T. Thomas

  The sharks were thick where we were swimming. All we had to do was nick the two of them, Akers and Walton. Because Ms. Triss was recognized by all players as a Dummy, the other contenders took her charges as the signal for the grand melee to begin. Assertions and defamations flew around our heads, with the occasional crash and clatter of an actual resignation or recall vote. And, because we were supposed to be Dummies, too, Pollock and I were never touched. Within two months, all of the Elders were bloodied beyond redemption. There was a new order in the House and the Special Executive’s prima facie standing was accepted as real.

  Finally, because the House investigating committee never actually called for an impeachment, the original evidence of espionage was never examined in any rigorous way. It disappeared soon after. Pollock had arranged the whole charade. Now I was impressed.

  It was about this time, and no doubt related to my sudden prominence, that my sister sent her son to me. Clary and I had drifted apart over the years. She had married badly—a burned-out computer software wizard named Ossing—but divorced well; before it was over, she had produced this one boy. I think the responsibility frightened her. Keeping a pile of cash intact through the Money Warp of the ’90s was an impossible task. Raising a child in any American village big enough to support a closet-sized pot farm and a pusher was another impossible task. Clary understood that, if she stayed, she was going to lose one or the other. So she went.

  She used her settlement to buy 900 acres of dairy farm along the Salmon River outside Truro in Nova Scotia. If she wouldn’t lose the boy to corruption, she would lose him to yokeldom. I think he knew no books or music but what she had brought with her, and Clary had a rampaging taste for detective mysteries of all vintages and the Jefferson Starship as the rhythmic emblem of a childhood she never had in the 1980s. Gabriel Ossing grew up knowing other children by rumor only and from a few withering mentions out of Dashiell Hammett. I’m told he had many fights when he finally was sent to the county school at Bible Hill. The boy was quiet and strange.

  After he finished high school, and before starting a college course in law or medicine, Clary wanted him to see something of the world. Becoming a congressional page would broaden him, she thought, and with my new position of power I could arrange it immediately.

  So now Gabriel stood before me in Baltimore, having been brought up to our top-floor living quarters in the Commerce Exchange by the doorman, who was also on my security payroll and claimed he saw a resemblance right away. The boy was tall and big in the shoulders, pushing out of the sleeves of his wool-tweed jacket and the cuffs of his gabardine pants. Both had frayed spots with the ticks of darning across them. His shoes were heavy and square, like something out of Ulysses or the Irish bogs.

  His face was unmoving as an old dog’s, but his eyes followed me quickly enough across the room, as I hunted in my Empire desk and various cupboards for the letters he had said his mother had sent. The eyes followed me—that is, when they weren’t tracking Carlotta, who was deep in an electric book and not really aware of us.

  “Are you sure she sent them here?” I finally asked. “Clary hasn’t been heard from for ten or a dozen years. And you don’t have any paper from her, do you?’’

  “No. She said you would know me. … Uncle Jim.” He said that as if trying it out for size. I was “Jay” to Clary then and “Gran” to my intimates now; from where or from whom would he have gotten Jim?

  “Well, no matter. The letter’s gone—if it ever was.” I dimly remembered letters about him, from sometime in the recent past. And the rural delivery services occasionally lost personal correspondence, especially from a backwater like the Maritimes.

  “Do you want to be a page?”

  “If that’s what Mother wants.” He said this in a neutral voice.

  “It’s a tough school, I’m told. Not the loving family you’re used to, nor the polite society you might imagine Baltimore to be. The page system has other knives than steel ones to torture you with, if you’re slow-witted there, and I won’t be able to defend you. That’s the first thing they will look for and the last they’ll get.”

  “I understand.” Spoken like a soldier about to go on a suicide mission.

  “Then, I’ll see what I can do. Do you have a place to stay?”

  “No, I just came from the shuttle depot.”

  Carlotta, who had heard more than I thought, looked up and said, “Front room, Gran.”

  “Of course,” I answered quickly, “you can stay with us until you get on your feet and move in with new friends of your own.” He nodded once and flapped his arms in a kind of vestigial bow. Then Carlotta took him off to find someone from the upstairs staff who could make up the bed for him. All things considered, she was smooth at acting motherly.

  I suppose, at one time, the congressional pages existed to do actual work for the representatives and senators, like little butlers or clerks, before electronics and automata took over those duties. And at one period, the page system was a breeding ground for democratic idealists: Children with good marks in school, vaguely political ambitions, and good political connections could see the workings of government in action. But by 2015, that was pretty much a dream of the past.

  Pages were the substructure of our political system. Like Fagin, each congressman sent his little spies to listen and learn and report back all they heard. In the hallways, public lavatories, and cloakrooms, these children—some of them arrested teenagers in their thirties—operated an intelligence market where rumors and facts were sold like hog futures. Some truths had the ring of pure gold, others the clank of brass. A quick-witted child would try out a piece of intelligence, testing the waters for his or her master, before the item would be spoken aloud by the grown-ups in their offices.

  To give you just one example, the page circuit had been a-twitter with the rumor of a proposal for the Special Executive—and my name, among others, had floated on it—at least ten days before the act that made Pollock and Cawley and me.

  Few congressmen loved, and not everyone even tolerated, the pages. “Poison-toads” was the name that stuck with them for as long as I was in government. The new representatives from Mexico picked up the flavor of that and called them los escorpiónes.

  It was a hard mother who would willingly send her son into that life. But Clary was a realist. If Gabe could survive there, he would prosper anywhere. However, I doubted this boy with the cow dung still showing in the cracks of his shoes would survive. Admittedly, the idea of having a blood relation on the circuit intrigued me. For one thing, he’d be a perfect tool for disinformation. For another, I could pick over his brain to learn both what he was sure to hear and what he was sure not to but which could be read from the stub ends of other conversations. Oh yes, I’ve sent spies into dangerous territory before. And lost a few, too.

  Chapter 17

  Granville James Corbin: Impeachment in the House

  Pollock, Cawley, and I managed to hold the Special Executive together for almost three years. How we did it would make a study in social dynamics: We feared and distrusted the rest of Congress and all of the country more than we feared and distrusted each other. Like the forces working on the nucleus of an atom or at the core of a sun, the energies pushing the center inward balanced those trying to pull it apart.

  But don’t think the process was stable or static. If we were an atom, it was more fragile than uranium. If we were a sun, it was a wildly pulsing variable star.

  “If that ninny proposes his inventory of aquifers one more time, I will strangle him with his own lolling tongue.” Pollock said this calmly, even judiciously. But I could tell he was furious: We were at lunch and he was buttering a piece of bread as he spoke, working the grease well into the knuckle of his thumb. The ninny, of course, was Senator Cawley, our third—and most often absent—member.

  Pollock was kidding about the strangling. Sudden and unexplained disappearances were rumored to be his specialty.

  “Well …” Here I
was, taking Cawley’s side just to keep us in balance. “He does have a lot of support from the Farm Belt, and they’re drawing brine as far north as Missouri, you know. The latest report on Lake Superior shows the pH drifting below 5.5. If water isn’t a problem this year, it will be in another ten.”

  “Then it will be someone else’s problem—certainly not Cawley’s, because he will be long dead by then.”

  I raised my hands, let them settle to the tablecloth. “Hear him out, for a change. What can one study cost?”

  “It’s not the study, it’s the conclusions he’s pushing for. You know the horse he’s riding—a freshwater economy to replace the energy matrix we’ve built. Cawley wants a string of solar generators driving water crackers and pumping plants that will feed a nationwide network of pipelines. ‘Fuel free and fresh,’ he chants. Yes, and at a cost of something over two terabucks. I say, let the farmers bid for wastewater as they always have. It’s a natural check on the grain market.”

  I kept quiet at that point and concentrated on picking the chickpeas out of my salad. The Federal government could certainly afford Cawley’s water scheme, especially if it were amortized over twenty or thirty years. Hallowed Hell, the take on Mississippi tariffs alone was at least a quarter of a trillion dollars a year. But Pollock’s last argument was the real one with him: A nationwide water system would upset other markets and ripple through the whole economy. It worried Pollock—me too, to tell the truth—not knowing who would profit and who would lose in the shakeout. And government is the art of deciding whose pocket gets picked, whose gets fluffed.

  As the Special Executive found its equilibrium in those first months, this became our modus vivendi: One to make a proposal and the other two to stamp on it—a natural system of checks and balances. The only area that united us early in our career of government was the general rebellion.

  Up until now, policies for dealing with the problem had been decided on a local level. Police forces had tried to contain the insurrection in the cities with the techniques of crowd control. They were opposing automatic weapons and mortars with rubber bullets and fire hoses. That’s because the nation’s political philosophy, patched together during half a century of civil rights marches and usually nonviolent protest, dictated that the police protect the civil rights of armed guerrillas as much as those of bystanders. By now the police were losing badly.

  We took the text of our own response from a series of isolated incidents occurring in the late ’80s of the last century.

  In one case, a group of political activists—evidently sympathizers with the struggles of an African country named Symbio—had been tracked by the FBI to a small house in the Los Angeles suburbs. The group was “armed and dangerous.” Over the preceding two years, they had kidnapped a newspaper heiress and involved her in several bank robberies. In the final action, Federal agents and local police blockaded the house and provoked a shootout during the course of which the building caught fire. They made no attempt to put the fire out because, the police said, the outlaws inside the burning house were still shooting at them.

  A later incident, in Philadelphia, expanded on this example. The police were trying to evict a radical political group, which formed some kind of guerrilla community, or an extended family complete with small children from the tenement they were occupying. When a police helicopter dropped a dynamite bomb on the roof to discourage a sniper’s nest there, the roof started burning. The fire department claimed it could not fight the blaze properly because of shooting from that same rooftop. A whole neighborhood was burned out.

  Clearly, those in authority were free to use massive force so long as the people on the receiving end could be shown as the vicious and stubborn sort who preferred burning to death instead of surrendering. Of course, nothing was mentioned—in the police reports we could find, anyway— about the conditions into which the outlaws might have surrendered. One can realistically assume the choices were burn or get shot in the crossfire.

  The point remains: So long as we maintained the appearance of options, and publicly regretted the consequences, we could eradicate the insurrection with a minimum of political fallout. The American public does not really love a martyr.

  Pollock and Cawley were all for issuing tactical nukes and a fill-in-the-blanks news release to the local PD. Then they would stand back and wring their hands.

  I argued for a measure of subtlety. We should pick our targets for maximum lesson value, I said. Give the greater number of guerrillas a chance to lay aside their weapons and fade away. The words “surgical strike” even found their way into my argument.

  Cawley pursed his lips like he’d bitten into a lemon. “You think we’re going to make converts, Granny?”

  “Ah, no … But what you and Gordon are heading for is a slaughter. That’s a strategy for cattle. We’re dealing with people—supposedly the same ones this country is governed of, by, and for. If we can set an example with the hardest cases, the fellow travelers won’t stay to test it.”

  “But you’re missing the whole point,” Pollock said impatiently. “Our aim has to be elimination. Total suppression. We’re removing garbage—a business I think you have some familiarity with? You don’t clean up a city by letting the little scraps go with a stiff lesson, do you? We will, of course, seem to be offering them surrender and amnesty, but we cannot have anyone ‘running away to fight again another day.’ We don’t want to stop the riots; we want to win the country back.”

  “Too right!” Cawley crowed. So, in the end, I was overruled. Checks and balances, again.

  By emergency order, Congress created auxiliary units of the Gentlemen Volunteers with a charter for operations inside the country. It was a total break with precedent. Further, these units had no State affiliation or support; they were called simply “Federals.” It had an unpleasant ring to modern ears.

  Praising my exploits in Mexico, Pollock and Cawley offered me command of them. I declined, explaining that it was illegal for a general in the G.V.’s to accept a commission with more than one division at a time. This actually was the law, although most patron-generals were ignoring it by now. However, Pollock and Cawley accepted this argument and gave the appointment to a Pentagon planner named Willoughby. He was a programmer by training and a poodle by disposition. You have to work with what you’ve got.

  The new units were technically airmobile infantry, but for urban operations they would go in by troop transport. The combatants carried the new 440T nuclear grenades, which gave each man roughly the firepower of a main turret off the USS Missouri.

  Soldier’s joke of the time: What’s the only problem with a nuke grenade? Answer: Throwing it far enough!

  The launcher, which even the manuals called a powzooka, was ballistic. That is, instead of holding it level like a carbine, the G.V. trooper had to fire it up at an angle, like a thumper or a mortar. The only danger was in getting the angle too steep and having the shell come back down on top of him. An alarm system on the barrel was supposed to warn against this. But when the bullets are snap-cracking all around, who’s listening for that little E-flat buzzer?

  If you think I hated these things, you’re right.

  The new G.V. units went into their first action on the Loop in Chicago. The tactics were simple: feint and fall back, and when the rioters come out to play, plaster them. Not as elegant as the “Oops, look at the building burn” that was our model, but then, times change. For one thing, most of our buildings were fireproof.

  For another, these were not the baby political fronts which had sprung up in the last century, long on Marxist theory and short on firepower. These were nine-tenths street gangs who had been knocking over sporting goods stores for decades.

  And if you haven’t been in a gun exchange or sports shop lately, they’re worth a look. The hardware they sell is a lot closer to the jungles of Nicco than the deer country of Appalachia. It’s amazing how much camouflage clothing and high-velocity, speed-loading, anti-tumble ammo a hunter nee
ds for shooting woodchucks. A semi-automatic rifle with a filed-off cam seems to be de rigueur for deer, because they’re quick and you might miss ’em with the first shot. And cleaning game evidently requires a nine-inch sawback knife, balanced for throwing, with spikes on the guard. Just in case the carcass wakes up and decides to charge, I guess.

  Willoughby and his boys were up against a force that was better armed than any of the peasant brigades we fought in Mexico. And, like a nest of wasps on a hot summer morning, the Black Widows, Los Cuervos del Oro, and other gangs in the area were just waiting for an eager pushbutton soldier like him to come poking his finger into the inner city.

  Oh, they knew he was coming, all right.

  These wasps were also better coordinated than the campesinistas. Willoughby thought he was going to shoot down a blind charge by a bunch of screaming teenagers with zipguns. Instead, they were tracking him before he even got the ground carriers stopped along the lakefront. They let him unload his men and advance across the perimeter of burned-out and bulldozed buildings that defined their territory. Worse, they let him walk the streets unopposed and poke his guns into empty doorways. And the more inside he got, the more outside—and above—they got. Until these children had ten Federal companies, almost 1,400 soldiers with a collective firepower of almost 600 kilotons, right under their sights.

  Willoughby had penetrated too far, letting the street fighters close the gap silently behind him. But that wasn’t his first mistake. He should have worked his way into the downtown from the west. Our tactical consultants, who went over the ground eighteen months later to analyze the action, all agreed on that. The element of surprise he hoped to gain by approaching from the lakeshore was a very small potato. It was far overshadowed by the limitations of the ground: You can’t “feint and fall back” when you’re standing at the edge of the water. You don’t have the lob-range to use your 440Ts effectively.