First Citizen

by Thomas T. Thomas

  Corbin made a face at that.

  “—but just our having the guts to actually use The Bomb impresses a lot of people. Even on this side of the river. We have been riding that wave for four years.”

  “What does Mexico want?” Corbin asked.

  I studied the map myself. This one did not have a single color or code. The key was not clear. What does any people want, who once ruled a subcontinent from pyramids of stone, whose land is more bitter than dust and richer than the Pharaohs’ Egypt, who have gotten the boot from every European who ever landed there?

  What does a woman want, when she has been raped so often, it is the only love she knows?

  “Respect,” I said at last. “That man who can show his understanding for Mexico’s heritage and potential, can rule her.”

  “Then we’ll do film clips and docudramas,” Gran said immediately. “Check our Merida archives—we must have a couple of thousand hours of children and me speaking Spanish. And our road system, the new docks at Progresso … Narration in the vernacular only.” He was giving orders to Pet Gervaise as if she were part of his video crew, not a fire team leader. And she was nodding away and pretending to take notes. After that thought had run out, Corbin looked up at me.

  “What else, Billy?”

  “Nothing else, except to come up with a plan. Our strength is on the map.” I keyed up the symbols for various military units: black circles ours, black squares others. “You only have to move them where you want them and decide who gets hit first.”

  “Rupert?” Wong ventured.

  “Eventually, but not the first,” I said. “Save him for mop-up.”

  “What about the politics in Congress?” Corbin asked.

  “Ah!” Missed that dimension. I quickly overlaid the map on the wall with an orange-and-black checkerboard, which clumped up in some areas.

  “Here are the party standings as of 2018, the last valid election after the start of the war. And here they are today.” I keyed again, and the checkerboard faded. “Nothing, since the Boot Heel Election of ’20 was disputed and no candidate took his or her seat in Congress. No one has a seat now, and the last session adjourned sine die. Primaries were spotty this spring, and no one is sure what will happen.”

  “So, Corbin concluded, “the man who called for new elections now would be picking up points for leadership.”

  “Something like that,” I agreed.

  “And to do that, I’d have to be somewhere in or near Baltimore. Which is closed to us.” He studied the map, its puddles and swatches of color. The East Coast around the capital was uniformly hostile.

  “What about my authority as a member of the last Special Executive?” he asked.

  “Good question. And was it invalidated by your breaking the G.V. charter and bringing troops into the country?”

  “It’s going to be a question of what people want to believe,” Corbin said quietly, almost to himself. “Like most things. But they don’t know what the stakes are—and don’t have a reason to care. Our task, then, is to create a venue, an arena in which they are forced to choose and believe. Just as we did in Houston.”

  “A victory march?” Pet asked. “Like Napoleon returning from Elba? Slow enough to let people rally to him, but too fast for the opposition to organize itself. Something like that?”

  “And when the East encloses Baltimore in a ring of steel?” Corbin countered.

  “I didn’t say we wouldn’t take weapons,” she purred.

  “I don’t like leaving Rupert behind us,” Barney Wong said. “Feels like a pincers.”

  “I think we can take care of him later,” I said. “From Baltimore.”

  Corbin looked from one of us to another, then turned to my major, Sanders. He had sat through all these discussions without speaking, following them only with his eyes.

  “What do you think, Carl?”

  Sanders considered his words for five seconds. “I think they will lay roses at your feet, General.”

  “Then let’s do it.”

  The conference turned operational. We discussed troop strengths and how to move them so they would build our “standing wave” of support. We weighed our army along the Mississippi and how it would play into the eastward roll. We gave thought to the western desert, the great barren patch in Nevada and Utah that we would have to cross. We counted satellite uplinks and plotted transmissions that would show the victory march to its best advantage.

  After two hours, I looked up and my eye was caught by a flash of material in one of the doorways. It was a sleeve of red silk. I could guess whose it was. After two or three seconds it disappeared.

  By noon, we had hammered out the details. We agreed that the five companies camped here should move out as soon as possible, but no later than tomorrow at dawn. I would leave this day to begin arranging the route and our outside troop strengths.

  We broke for lunch, which I insisted we all take in the camp. Our aides went out, but Gran hesitated.

  “I think I’ll stay here for—” he began.

  “For what?” I asked sharply. “To say good-bye? To torture yourself? Or to torture her?”

  Gran turned his head aside, looking toward that door where I had seen the sleeve.

  “Your destiny is to rule this country, Gran. You must go to that destiny. And you cannot do that and have her, too. Even if she were willing, she is on the wrong side of the economy. Your alliance would not serve anyone’s interest.”

  “I know.” Corbin’s shoulders sagged half an inch, his jaw muscles loosened. With one step, one turn of the heel, he seemed to age ten years. It was a man carrying fifty-two winters of hard fighting whom I led out from the house of the arches on that California hilltop.

  The rest of our story is in the history books.

  While Napoleon may have taken twenty days to march from Cannes to Paris, it took us twenty months. Half the State of Nevada met our armored column coming out of the passes of the Sierra, and they cheered us as we started into the Carson Sink and the great deserts east of Reno. Nevada, like California, had been Granny’s home.

  Utah had not. They blockaded the main road, old I-80, against us at the State line. The Mormon troops and the Desert Pilgrims were backed up by at least three “legions” of Rupert I’s fanatics. They outnumbered the 750 men and women we had in marching order by at least eight to one. Gran could have radioed to his friends at Nellis AFB and had a wing of heavy bombers to cover us in forty minutes. He could have made a strategic strike and reduced Salt Lake City to lath and cinders. But none of those would have done our work of consolidation.

  Instead, we rolled my yellow truck, the Nuke Wagon, out in front and fired a brace of our star shells high in the air over them. The Pilgrims ran for it. Our Stompers dove on the roadblock itself, blasting it apart with concussion grenades. Only Rupert’s men held their ground and kept firing. They were only put down with a bullet each to the head. I had never met this King Rupert, who could inspire such loyalty or fear, but I was beginning to get a feeling he would require our special attention.

  Passing through Colorado, Corbin sent a special task group under Mike Alcott, backed up by reinforcements moved in from our army along the Mississippi, to the Federal Strategic Forces center at Colorado Springs. Alcott was to reason with the “First Strike Fellahs” and get them to acknowledge Corbin as the only viable alternative to a complete power vacuum on a nationwide scale.

  The FSF had been indoctrinated in loyalty, not to the extinct Gordon Pollock or any one man, but to the Constitution of the United States and the country’s duly elected chief executive. Alcott had no other options except to put the center under blockade and try to starve them out. The pushbutton warriors had enough resources with them under the mountain to survive a thermonuclear war, stay sealed in two years, and come out to plant cesium-reducing hybrid corn and rebuild the American way of life. Alcott made the gesture anyway, but privately he told Corbin to start winning elections.

  That was not so easy.
Our allies in the various western States may have backed us when it was a shooting war against a single Federal force under Pollock. But now that Corbin had won and wanted to put his own name on the whole enchilada, they got skittish. They had second thoughts. They saw the possibilities of running their own little regional empires, on the model of Rupert in Montana. They wanted their quid-pros.

  East of Colorado, the victory march broke down into a hopscotch of private consultations, Corbin and his closest aides meeting with the local honcho and his or her bully boys. When talks broke down, there was usually some military maneuvering, which Corbin won because he had always managed to hold the greatest resources at any point in time. He also had some chits out, of course, and he called them in with a vengeance.

  When the opposition gave in, it was more through exhaustion than conversion.

  Corbin was finally allowed to approach Baltimore, but only on his way to Annapolis to negotiate with the Maryland legislature, and he could come only as a private citizen—no bodyguards, no honor guard, nothing. He told me later about walking across Rotunda Square in the Capitol Complex. The groundskeepers had maintained it perfectly; even the twenty-four fountains were still spraying.

  “But it was empty, so empty,” Gran said. “So much white marble and pink granite, cold and stiff, like icing on a cake after they’ve cancelled the wedding.”

  It was not until 2024 that Corbin felt strong enough to call for congressional elections, and he did it from Columbus, Ohio, because the capital was still officially closed to him. However, by that time his popularity with the rest of the country was so great that they fought over where he was to campaign. They were throwing roses at his feet, as Major Sanders had predicted.

  Corbin could take his pick from more than fifty-six districts that assured him a landslide if he would only put his name on the ballot. In 232 other districts, the write-in campaign was at least eight points ahead of the nearest official candidate in the polls. However, he could not run for them all himself. So he plotted it carefully, making sure the candidate of his choice was known—and that the man or woman so favored understood it. For his own seat, he ran from his old district in West Texas.

  “Purely sentimental reasons,” he told the nation with a mock humble smile. And he let it be understood that he meant it as a salute to Texas, which had first welcomed him under the threat of impeachment. Actually, it was for political reasons, as we on the inside knew. By representing only sagebrush and armadillos, Corbin limited the number of strings on himself and could isolate himself from local interests.

  When the 117th Congress was called to order in January 2025, the Corbinites held 342 of the 620 seats in the House. Among them was Mike Alcott, who had easily taken his former district in Massachusetts; he was working hard to help heal the breach in the East. Gabriel Ossing, Corbin’s nephew, had also won a seat, in Maine. That election was full of loopholes, however, because the boy was still in his twenties, technically under age for a congressman, and although his mother was an American, he was technically a Canadian citizen. In their enthusiasm, the voters of Maine had waived all that, but one could still question whether local statute should take precedent over constitutional law.

  Alcott was totally Corbin’s man now, his whip in the House. Alcott shaped up the vote that made Corbin Speaker. Alcott marshaled support for most of Corbin’s bills and proposed the extraordinary measure that was to install him as Speaker for a guaranteed term of ten years. Even the most faithful Corbinites hesitated over that one. It was a completely unprecedented law, surely counter to the Constitution, and would certainly be challenged in the Supreme Court. Only the fact that Corbin had just named six new associate justices and the chief justice—the years of civil war and confusion having been hard on an already elderly Court—gave the bill any hope at all.

  The measure presumed that Corbin would win the next five elections and keep his district. But considering where he was running from, that was no problem.

  There was also the presumption, among the other congressmen and -women, that Corbin would meet any challenge with military force. He had done it once. And they had also seen how quickly, as Speaker, he had signed commissions in the FSF for Alcott and me. I got three stars, Alcott two.

  That became a sore point, later, when we finally decided to mop up Rupert I and bring Montana back into the Union. I had thought the job would be mine.

  “Can’t spare you, Billy,” Corbin said, in what was to be our last interview.

  “What?” I was shocked. “Do you know how little I have to do these days? Just fly around the country, inspect bases, review fitness reports, poke my nose into rocket silos, and run a gloved finger across mess-hall griddles. Just personnel and public relations work. All protocol.”

  “A necessary job, considering our tenuous position,” he nodded.

  “Tenuous? Well, yes, but the fight against Rupert is going to be the last grand act of the civil war. I have worked for it, Gran. I want it. It should be mine.”

  “That’s not how military decisions are made, and you know it.” His eyes never got much higher than my campaign ribbons.

  “But, Gran—”

  “The decision is made, General.”

  “May I know who is going to direct the action?”

  “That’s really no … General Alcott.” Still he would not meet my eyes.

  “Mike! But you need him in Congress, he is—”

  “He has done his work in Congress, and now I need him in the field against King Rupert.”

  “I see.”

  And suddenly I did. That was Alcott’s payoff, the quid-pro for his work as Gran’s whip.

  My own career, my years of service with Granville James Corbin, somewhere had taken a wrong turn. Maybe I should have run for Congress. Maybe I should have left him in California and marched on Baltimore myself. Maybe I should have been born a white man—a full white.

  I asked to be dismissed and left his office. That very afternoon I folded my nice, newly printed commission three different ways, so the corners stuck out, and sent it to Corbin. He never acknowledged it.

  All this was years ago.

  I went back into the business that I know best—sludge. The technologies had progressed in groundwater reclamation, and there was a steady market for it in Louisiana, where the deepest water wells were bringing up a Hell’s broth of refinery chemicals. I took my back pay, bought a small detox outfit, and started in. This was honorable work, helping people living healthier lives. In its way, it was clean.

  Granny Corbin, reaching his moment of greatest power, had developed what my people call the Custer sickness. He saw himself as a kind of natural force, a power to move people and shape the Earth itself. He thought his actions and decisions constituted some kind of law. And he did not see consequences.

  The best of my people laid down their lives fighting such men. The lesser ones, the weak ones, my ancestors, laid down their weapons and lived. It is for them—and for me—that I am ashamed.

  Chapter 22

  Granville James Corbin: MARCH 14, 2028

  [From the WWY-CV Archive]

  Take apart with a hammer. Rebuild with tweezers.

  That’s the instruction manual we have followed in restoring the country, reuniting the eighty-three States into a working nation. The last five or six years have been a real scramble.

  Simply getting to the stage where we could hold the 2024 elections, I had to keep a lot of people happy. That meant making promises as fast as I could talk, handing out psychological blank checks by the fistful: concessions, special considerations, rights to levy new local taxes and repeal old ones, Federal licenses and monopolies and charters to issue and rescind, sons and party faithful to favor. We needed a cyber to backtrack the trail of my agreements with State governors, legislators, party bosses, community organizations, business groups, military officers. And sometimes, in keying up the totals, the outgo was maybe more than we had in hand to offer. But I never told a deliberate lie,
never gave both A and B the same cookie, when I could help it, and never incurred a debt I had no intention of repaying.

  Things went faster after the elections. My friends and followers had enough political clout that we could order the priorities in Congress. However, I very quickly discovered that being the political linchpin in the Federal government didn’t mean a whole lot. Not when that government was, in most people’s lives, merely an economic inconvenience, a club of political cronies in Baltimore to be paid off with a few user fees, while the separate States operated on wholly libertarian doctrines and held the real power. This still wasn’t a nation but a patchwork quilt of regional interests. Civil war had burned over them like a fast prairie fire, scorching the grass but hardly touching the deeply tangled roots.

  Luckily, fierce anti-Union feeling still existed in pockets like South Florida, Louisiana Free Port, and the lands of the late King of Montana. During the months immediately before the elections, I had sent our best G.V. units in to probe their defenses and gauge their war-making capability. But we soon figured out that another series of military victories wouldn’t reunify the nation.

  So we changed the agenda. By placing stories with the right correspondents and providing some exciting video footage, the final, later-stage mopping-up operations could be made to look more dangerous than they might actually, tactically, have been. A few sponsored editorials, appearing in the media of neighboring States, declaimed against the threat to public safety. And Rupert I and his Aryan Legions did the rest, giving us enough material to carry the whole campaign.

  When my agents introduced the “Petition to Ensure Domestic Tranquility” in forty-four State houses, all in the same week, the emotionally exhausted and now frightened legislators fell on it with glad little cries. The primary purpose of this artfully vague document was contained in the resolution that I be “empowered to form a stronger, more vital Union.” Whatever that meant. On my terms.