First Citizen

by Thomas T. Thomas

  Going up Sonoma County on Highway 101, someone took a few pops at us. We countered with a thumper round fused to airburst over them, from the lead truck. It was a heavier than usual charge of gelignite, with a big fraction of magnesium shavings to make it flare. Whoever owned those hills cut out that shit right away.

  North of Ukiah, the highway angled west toward Willits. We took the first road to the northeast, following our radio signal. We found Gran’s five companies near Potter Valley. They were pulled up, parked, and dug in pretty hard in the valley of the Eel River. Petula Gervaise was in charge, kind of.

  “Colonel Birdsong! No one—that is, I didn’t—uh …” She took her size tens down off an ammo case and struggled up out of the camp chair where she had been dozing.

  “At ease, Lieutenant.” Although she was pretty much at ease. “Where is General Corbin?”

  “Out on maneuvers, sir.”

  “Exactly where, ‘out on maneuvers’?”

  “He doesn’t tell us, sir.”

  “How long has he been gone?”

  “Couple of days.”

  “Did he take any men with him?”

  “Yeah, some of ours and some others.”

  “Do they have a radio with them?”

  “Yes, sir, but it’s set to her frequencies.”

  “Who is ‘her,’ Lieutenant?”

  “Mandy, sir.”

  “Who is this Mandy?”

  Gervaise shrugged. “She owns this place.”

  “Where is this Mandy?”

  “With the General, sir.”

  “On maneuvers?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Tired of talking in circles, I looked at the hills around us. Just brown grass and scrub oak, an isolated farm site except for a California rancho, a house as big as a hotel, on top of one of the ridges.

  “Does Mandy normally live up there?” I guessed, pointing.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And General Corbin stays up there, too? Sometimes?”

  “Yeah, all the time, now.” She grinned.

  “We will go visit.”

  “They aren’t up there now.”

  “Right. They are ‘out on maneuvers.’ ”

  I climbed into the yellow truck and waved the column forward.

  At the last curve before the house, we pulled the buses over, parked them, chocked the wheels, and deployed my troops. They had orders to surround the house and make sure no one got out.

  “Oh, and Sanders,” I said to my major in charge, “pass the word not to eat, drink, or smoke anything they did not bring with them. Not until we find out what is going down.”

  He saluted and moved his first squad west around the house.

  We drove the truck up to the gates and tooted the horn.

  They opened and out stepped a cartoon character, all whites and pastels, dressed with a turban like a swami Indian’s. He bowed low before our front bumper.

  “Welcome to the house of—”

  We put the truck in gear and drove right ahead, forcing him to dodge aside. We went through the gates and up the ramp. In the wing mirror I could see Swami whirl around, straighten his turban, and puff one of his mustaches off his lip. He was pushed aside again as half of my men came out of the bushes and advanced, weapons at the ready, behind the truck.

  Taking this little hilltop fortress was that easy. Everyone inside was armed with kitchen spoons and garden rakes, and they put those down fast enough.

  After a sweep through the main corridors and rooms, I parked the truck in the middle of the fountained courtyard, put the men at ease in the shade still with the order to ingest nothing, and waited. The turbaned houseboy tried to get a word in, but I ignored him.

  At 1800 hours, with the sun still high, the men got orders they could squat by threes and break out their energy bars and cigarettes. Dinner, on maneuvers. They were told to answer the call of nature in the storm drains, not in the fountain.

  “Please, sir!” Swami entreated. “There is no need for all this crudeness. There is comfort here for all.”

  I just looked at him.

  “We truly intend no violence.”

  I did not ask him where the General and this Mandy woman were, nor when he expected them to return. The first rule of intimidation is self-containment. Plus, I did not want to get into any more circular conversations, which seemed to be popular around here. After a while, Swami gave up and went inside.

  When the sun went down behind the western roof, we slept—again by threes, in place.

  With the dawn, we made coffee, heating canteen water in a helmet shell on the truck’s engine block. Swami was appalled.

  At 1000, Sanders reported by talkie from the perimeter that a pair of Stompers—ours—had landed in the valley. And at 1027, that a car was coming up the road. I told him to pass it.

  At 1042, the car rolled into the courtyard and jerked to a stop behind the nuke truck. Corbin got out of the back on one side; a woman, thin and dark and in her thirties, got out on the other. The driver stayed in the car.

  “Why, hello Billy …” He looked younger than he had in the sateltrans.

  “Been having fun, Gran?”

  “Yeah, lots of fun.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Fighting.”

  “Who?”

  “The Asian drug lords, mostly. They were giving Mandy a hard time, trying to ruin her pele crop. I’ve been using our hardware and some of the boys to even the sides a little.”

  For the first time, I took a close look at this little Mandy. She had a good face and a competent body, and she used them like Jankowski uses a violin—for maximum effect. She was a stunning woman, actually. Then, I saw in her face a nose, the shadow of a nose, that I had known for thirty years. And her jawline, her chin, her overall bone structure, hints and shadows. If Granny Corbin had ever sired a daughter—and I knew he had not—then this Mandy might have been her. But her manner and movements were her own. Most effectively.

  “—about under control?” Gran finished with a question, whatever he was saying, and I had missed most of it.

  “What? Oh yes. Of course,” I covered.

  “So why are you here?”

  “To get you.”

  “And bring me back?”

  “The situation is getting pretty ripe, out there, in the rest of the country, Gran. Falling apart, in fact. Small enclaves, regional nationhoods just forming up. If you want to—”

  “Why are we standing here talking beside this—this truck?” Mandy broke in with a hard smile. “Why don’t we go inside? And get this—truck—out of my courtyard!” The atom symbol was really spooking her.

  Gran nodded and smiled, put an arm around her, squeezed her once for comfort and again because she was squeezable, and they led me under one of the cloistered arches. Before I left the area, I signaled my troops to stay put.

  Inside, in a room you could play a fast game of touch football in, we settled into chairs of soft leather and took drinks that Swami brought us. I just sniffed mine and put it aside.

  “The country’s falling apart, did you say?” Gran began.

  “First of all,” I countered, “what happened to Gordon Pollock? Did you find him? Or still looking?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Good.”

  “Mandy’s people captured him and his party. One of her lieutenants executed them for trespassing. It was kind of an accident.”

  “Does it matter?” I asked.

  “I don’t want it said that I put him to death without legal process. Pollock wasn’t a criminal. In fact, he was probably more in the right than—”

  “So long as somebody did it.”

  “Ah—yes.” He switched gears. “Now tell me. What’s the situation really like outside?”

  “Gran?” Mandy interrupted. “Will your guests be staying here in the house or down at the camp?”

  “Oh … some in each, I suppose.”

  “Well, you want to decide, don’t you,
so we can make up the rooms?”

  “First, my dear, I want Colonel Birdsong to give me his report.”

  “Of course, dear.” She smiled, then looked at me, and the smile withered to something like a pinched stare.

  “Gran, the country is in very strange space,” I began, working from a script that I had been writing mentally ever since we landed in San Francisco. “So much of the opposition to you has been focused on Gordon Pollock, his aura of political power, and his own personal following, that removing him puts the entire Federal movement into a warp. There is no secondary personality, and not much of a structure, to carry on.”

  “And so?”

  “So we have a situation filled with kinetic and emotional energy, but no direction. The inertia of everyday events and institutions is stopped. For a span, perhaps a brief one, we suddenly find ourselves in a situation a lot like the Roman Republic of the first century B.C., in the aftermath of the Civil Wars. Or the French Republic of the 1790s, after the Terror. Or the Weimar Republic in the 1920s, after the economic collapse. There is confusion, discontent, hope, all mingled. The established order has broken down, and no single engine—no government body, no church doctrine, no invading army—is pushing the pieces back together.

  “This is one of those delicate balance points—where one man can move a nation. You cannot do that when there is momentum, because you need a huge amount of force to bend the direction of everyday affairs even slightly. And huge power is not given to any man. But when there is a pause, like now, when the train runs out of track, when the ship of state runs into shallow water, when the pendulum is at the top of its arc, ready to swing in another direction …”

  “Yes?” Gran prompted.

  I shrugged. “If this pause goes on long enough, the country will collapse. It will end as a coherent nation and become instead a swamp of regional interests. The Midwest will barter its corn and cattle. The Rockies will export coal and gas. And California will sell its pele and its wines. …” Here I nodded at Mandy, but she just glared at me.

  “But there will not be enough common interest to hold it together as a nation,” I continued. “That is where we need you, Gran. You could unite them. You could be our Caesar, our Napoleon, our Hitler—”

  “Unlucky role models, don’t you think?”

  “Well, yes. Still, the country needs someone to rally around, to make sense of the confusion. That man should be you—but you have to move fast.”

  Gran steepled his fingers and sank down in his chair. His eyes focused at a point in the rug eighteen inches from his toes. I had said enough and knew when to shut up.

  Mandy sat on the very edge of her chair, the tip of her tongue touching her upper lip, her eyes blazing at him. But she, too, knew when to shut up around Gran.

  After a minute or more, his eyes slid over to her. He put out a hand and touched her thigh. He gently rubbed his palm up and down, rucking her skirt up and back across her tanned knees. Gran’s face had an expression of longing and sadness. Whatever he was going to say, he knew how it would end.

  “I have to go, you know.”

  “I know,” she said evenly.

  “You could come with me, even just for a little while. Think of it as a vacation. A kind of honeymoon. Or, well, a camping trip.”

  “Would we be coming back here to live?”

  “Probably not. The country has to be run from its power centers. But we could visit. …”

  “It wouldn’t be the same.”

  “No, it wouldn’t. But I would still love you.”

  “When there was time, when the affairs of state did not need you more.” Here she shot a hard look at me.

  “Yes, that’s true. Still, I could give you—” He paused, calculating. “—a third, or half of my days.”

  “Not enough, Gran.”

  “No,” he agreed.

  “It wouldn’t work. Because this is my place. This is my life, what Mother built and left to me. I won’t give up this plantation. And just how would it look in Baltimore, if the—what?—President’s? Speaker’s? The Big Man’s wife—mistress? consort?—ran a pot plantation on the side. Junk to pollute the minds of our nation’s stalwart youth, right?”

  “Something like that.” He grinned, but the corners of his mouth were drooping.

  “I won’t leave,” she said.

  “And I can’t stay.”

  She lifted his hand off her leg, gave it a squeeze, and put it on the arm of his chair. Then she rose and, back straight, head high, walked out of the room. The queen from her court. I never saw Mandy Holton again.

  “Leave me alone now,” Gran said. “We will discuss strategy tomorrow.”

  I left Sanders and half the men invested on the hill and took the yellow truck down to the camp. There, I arranged a snap inspection for 1400 hours and came prepared to put the whole five companies on punishment drill if they were slacked off as badly as my first trip through the camp had suggested.

  We went down the rows of men and women, giving out a flick here for a frayed cuff, there for a scuffed boot or dirty weapon. I test-fired a thumper and saw the shell fall in the river without exploding: two weeks’ duty in the supply depot, counting shells and checking the pins.

  We went down the rows of Stompers and Turtles, checking off the crew chiefs for cracked fan sets, leaky gaskets, or battle computers that punched up FFFF instead of 0000. I switched on one of the Stompers and ran her turbines up to red, listening for synch and watching for smoke. She coughed blue at 9,750 rpm: three days assigned in the rotor shop, packing bearings.

  Then I took the whole troop, tech specs as well as grunts, out on a little field march. Ten miles through the hills, double time with full packs. On the final leg, I stepped aside and counted off the last hundred grunts—and gave them extra drill.

  Every one of those lads and lasses knew that Colonel Birdshit had finally come to California.

  The next morning, I rolled up to the house in a Turtle with Lieutenants Wong and Gervaise. We met with Gran and Major Sanders in the map room or control center or whatever Mandy kept that big room for. I had brought along a field cyber with projection rig. Its disks were crammed full of demographic stats, situation reports, political vectors, troop concentrations and capabilities, elint summaries—about 900 gigs’ worth of data on the whole country. I set it up to display on a white wall and began briefing Corbin and the others.

  “The political options are largely unchanged from this spring,” I began. “The West is mostly ours, adhering to the nucleus of the TENMAC. The East belongs to itself, or to anyone—except anyone named ‘Corbin’—who can claim to hold Congress.”

  I brought up a simple two-color map on the wall, green for us, red for them.

  “Now, it is never quite that simple. First, in our own West, allegiance is a sometime thing. Utah, with its Deseret tradition, is talking about a ‘closed community.’ It would work, too, except their citizens hold the deed on too much ground outside the State, and they are afraid they might lose it.”

  “They will,” Corbin said.

  “Nevada wants concessions. What they are, and in return for what, nobody is saying yet. Just ‘concessions.’ And the Ore-Wash Axis wants a laundry list of environmental miracles out of you, ending with ‘stop the rain’ and ‘bring back the price of timber.’ ”

  I shaded the map while talking, with patches of blue and yellow.

  “The Farm Belt wants to see how you stand on farm issues, particularly whether the next government is going to continue meddling in the market. I gave their military envoys assurances, when asked, that I could not think why you would want to do that, but they just hum and haw and suck on their mints. Maybe they want a freer money market, or maybe—who knows?—a war with Canada over exports.”

  “Not this year,” Corbin agreed.

  “Finally, there is Rupert the First, by the Grace of God, King of Montana and All the Lands to the Ocean. Which ocean, he does not say. Probably both. He is trying to run th
e country by fiat from Helena. Although he has fanatical supporters in Wyoming and the Dakotas, for the rest of the country his transmissions are just so many free-floating photons.”

  “Is he insane?” Barney Wong asked.

  “Possibly. No matter. We still have to whup him, and he has an army about thirty thousand strong.”

  “Shit,” Gervaise said.

  “What about the East?” Corbin asked quietly.

  I slid the colors up on the wall.

  “The Midatlantic was strong for Pollock and to them you are still ‘the enemy.’ That creates a vacuum now being filled with lightweights. Money moguls, mostly. All the real military people chose up sides and came to our war long ago.

  “Outside of the Middle States, however, there is no psychological dominant—unless you count aggravated fatigue and the desire to be left alone. New England is still allied with us, but mostly to annoy their southern neighbors. The Ohio Valley and the Rust Bowl want markets. That means they are beginning to realize they need the West, and not just on a contraband basis.”

  “We’ll trade,” Corbin affirmed.

  “Of course.” Next I brought up an orange-and-yellow patchwork on the map.

  “The Deep South would like to sign a nonaggression pact with you and go their own way. But that turns out to be about eight ways, because they cannot even agree on Standard Time. And Florida, of course, is fast becoming a Caribbean Island.”

  “Bet Georgia loves that,” Pet Gervaise chuckled.

  “They are talking about a ditch,” I nodded. “Big one—dug with atomics.”

  “And finally, that leaves us with Old Mexico. …”

  Their three heads craned forward and studied the map. They were silent for a couple of minutes, with only their eyeballs moving.

  “Lost them?” Barney Wong asked at last.

  “Not quite. The psychometry says the various States need a northern affiliation more than ever. And opinion about the General is pretty evenly divided—even inside some heads. For one thing, he is the G.V. military officer who ran the State of Yucatan fairly and progressively. For another, he is the babykiller who incinerated three cities in Coahuila. Now, that does not count entirely against us. Call it the Whipped Dog Syndrome—”