Twilight's Last Gleaming

by John Michael Greer

  “I didn't need that image in my mind,” said Nancy Liebkuhn.

  “Sorry. I think I can get the votes to pass something requiring a supermajority for any new unfunded mandate, but that's as far as it goes. Repealing the existing mandates? That's dead on arrival. Amend the Constitution? That's not just dead, it's gone to heaven and started taking harp lessons. Nobody's gonna do that.”

  “Then the states will do it for them,” Bridgeport said. “They're not bluffing; they really can do it. Mike, you can give them the amendment they want, or they're going to play Russian roulette with the Constitution. Those are the only choices you've got.”

  Kamanoff's face twisted. “Look, Pete, I'd do that if I could. I can't. I could call in every favor I've got and get nowhere. The Senate won't go for it.”

  “Even if it did,” Liebkuhn said then, “I'm not at all sure that would do the trick.”

  The two men looked at her. “Have either of you been keeping track of online media?” she asked. “It's not just unfunded mandates any more. People are talking about all kinds of amendments—and not just bloggers. People in politics.”

  “I've heard McCracken,” Bridgeport said.

  “Not just state politicians. You know Beidermann and Solti, in the House? They jumped on the bandwagon this week—hour-long podcast speeches, ‘Let's give the people what they want,’ that sort of thing. It may be too far along to stop.”

  “And the White House paying zero attention because it's got its head up its ass over the Stedman thing.” Kamanoff gave Liebkuhn a sidelong look. “You knew Stedman pretty well. What do you think of that whole business?”

  She considered that for a moment. “Bill was a decent man—well, as decent as you can be and still get a job in this town. If he'd handed me the papers and said they were genuine, I'd have believed him.” She looked at them both. “And I don't believe for a minute that he killed himself. He wasn't that kind of man.”

  “Rosemary Muller told me,” Bridgeport said, “that Stedman agreed to testify to her committee.”

  “I know,” said Kamanoff. “Wouldn't be the first time somebody did an assisted suicide to keep the White House out of trouble.” He shook his head. “Helluva town.”

  24 April 2030: Salem, Oregon

  McGaffney peeled a couple of Canadian bills out of his wallet, handed them to the cab driver and watched the man's face light up. “This'll do?”

  “Any time,” the cabbie said. “Lessee, that'd be—”

  “Don't worry about the change,” McGaffney told him.

  “Hey, thanks.” The man grinned and drove off, leaving McGaffney to the rain.

  For the last few weeks McGaffney had paid most of his expenses in Canadian money; you could get it easily enough at the airports, and everybody in the United States took it these days. He'd watched euros and a few other foreign currencies change hands, too. No surprises there; with the dollar still skidding against every yardstick that mattered and the federal government frozen up in something worse than its usual gridlock, taking things into some other currency was plain common sense.

  One of the things behind the government's state of paralysis stared at him as he walked down the sidewalk toward the statehouse. The building across the street was an upscale retail block, not ten years old from the look of it, but every space was boarded up courtesy of the economic slump. Pasted across the plywood was a line of posters, all of them identical, with a picture of William Stedman above the inevitable slogan IF YOU ARE READING THIS I HAVE BEEN MURDERED.

  Those posters were all over the country; McGaffney had seen them in Boston, Denver, New Orleans, and a dozen other cities. The mainstream media was still trying to avoid the story, but blogs and podcasts buzzed with it, and angry denials from the White House had done precisely nothing to defuse the issue. Presidents had gotten past that sort of scandal before, but something had shifted in the United States since the East African War, and McGaffney found himself wondering as he walked whether this would be one more challenge than the Gurney administration could survive.

  He spotted the statehouse a moment later, with its weird ribbed not-quite-dome, and crossed the street to the edge of the grassy area around it. The building itself was surrounded by a murmuring crowd and a line of Oregon state police in riot gear. The crowd didn't look ready to start a riot just at that moment, but McGaffney stayed well back from the main mass of people. This wasn't just an ordinary meeting of an ordinary state legislature; thirty-three states had already voted to call for the constitutional convention, and if Oregon voted the same way, the Constitution's two-thirds requirement would be met.

  He walked along the edges of the crowd, listening to conversations, sizing up the mood. A woman in a bright red raincoat was talking in animated tones about how she thought the Constitution ought to be amended; a man with a military buzz cut made a rude comment about President Gurney; dozens of people peered at tablets and smart phones, taking in whatever the news media had to say about the debates inside the statehouse.

  When half the conversations around him suddenly went dead silent, McGaffney knew something was up. He looked around, saw the crowd clustering around those who'd tuned in to the news. Any minute, he thought—

  Someone let out a high-pitched whoop. A moment later it seemed as though everyone was talking at once.

  “What's the word?” McGaffney asked the air, hoping that someone would answer.

  “They passed it,” the woman in the red raincoat said. “Twenty-one to nine. Now maybe we can get this country back on track.”

  17 June 2030: Silver Spring, Maryland

  “Penny for your thoughts,” McGaffney asked.

  Melanie Bridgeport blinked. “Hmm?”

  “Okay, two pence.”

  She laughed. “Not worth the investment.”

  They were sprawled naked on her bed with the covers kicked off—with the dollar still sinking, the price of electricity had gotten high enough that air conditioning had to be saved for the worst of the heat. Melanie's military paycheck was worth less and less every month, and she'd had to ask her father for help covering expenses too many times already that year.

  “No, I mean it,” McGaffney said.

  “Oh, just wondering about the convention again. Dad hasn't said much of anything about it, which means that he's worried.”

  “Let him worry,” he said. “It's his job, not yours.”

  “And yours.”

  “Not hardly.”

  “And who just spent six days in North Dakota reporting on what special election?”

  “I went for the climate.”

  She whacked him with a pillow, and he laughed, caught her and kissed her.

  He'd originally planned to get clear of Washington once the states finished voting for the convention, and do a series of stories from all over the country, the kind of human interest stuff the folks back in Brisbane liked. That plan went out the window, though, because he had no shortage of story material in and around the capital. Congress had gone into recess but the politics were heating up faster than the summer weather; between the bitter stalemate pitting Gurney's administration against Congress, the ongoing economic slump, the increasingly frantic maneuverings over the constitutional convention, and the unexpected rise of extremist ideas in the political mainstream, Washington DC was a reporter's paradise.

  And there was the girl, of course. He'd been startled enough when he figured out that she was the vice president's daughter, and that had its inconveniences now and then; he'd had to sit through three hours of polite but thorough grilling by the Secret Service in April, and she'd had to call off dates because something official had come up and she had to play hostess at One Observatory Circle. Still, she was a lively little sheila, and though she was careful not to pass on anything she shouldn't, she had an insider's grasp of Washington politics, and had helped him figure out more than once what was behind some bit of news.

  “What about the convention?” he asked, after he'd finished the kiss.


  “You've heard the latest bit, right? They're going to meet in St. Louis.”

  “Wasn't there some kind of stink about that?”

  “A big one. A lot of people here tried to pressure the states into having it in Philadelphia.” When he responded with a blank look: “That's where the original constitutional convention was, and it's close enough to Washington that they figured they could influence things.”

  “And the states said no dice.”

  “Exactly. It makes me wonder what they're planning, besides elections.”

  “Too right.” There had been some talk about having all the states elect delegates on the same day, but that went the same place as so many other attempts to coordinate the fifty fractious not-quite-nations that made up the United States. Half a dozen states had already had their special elections, and the others would be doing so on a succession of Tuesdays spilling on into early August, with the convention itself scheduled for the beginning of September.

  “I thought about running for a seat,” Melanie said then.

  “Thinking of getting into politics?”

  “Not really—but this feels like more than politics.” With an uncharacteristically bleak look: “This feels serious.”

  8 July 2030: Spokane, Washington

  The little storefront north of downtown on Division Street was packed with campaign volunteers and well-wishers by the time the returns started coming in. One of the staffers had hauled in a big plasma screen and mounted it up on the wall where everyone could see it, between two signs that said HARRIET ELKERSON in big print across the top and Delegate—Constitutional Convention in smaller print underneath.

  The candidate herself was in the middle of it all, short and silver-haired, shaking hands, talking with anyone who had something to say, gesturing emphatically with a half-full plastic cup of her trademark drink, which was ginger ale. That was her style; it had kept her in the thick of local politics for more than three decades, and won her an assortment of minor city, county and state elections over that time. “Listen to the people,” she liked to remind her staff. “They know what they want—and they just need to know that I'll do all I can to get it for them.”

  Washington was a mail-in voting state, and only the inertia of old laws kept returns from being posted days before election day proper. Once nine o'clock arrived, that restriction no longer applied, and local news splashed the current vote totals on the screen:

  ELKERSON 43%

  MORALES 26%

  BARRETT 11%

  The room exploded in whoops and cheering. Elkerson beamed up at the screen for a moment, then worked her way through the crowd to the table where her campaign manager sat hunched over a laptop. “How are we doing?”

  He glanced up, frowning, the way he always did when things were going his way. “You got it,” he told her. “Most of the precincts that polled heavy for Vince Morales have already been counted.”

  She nodded, smiled, headed for the screen just as her percentage clicked up another two points. As the volunteers cheered again, she found an empty chair, stood on it.

  “Thank you,” she said, pitching her voice to be heard over the celebration. “Thank you all. Mick's been watching precinct totals, and it looks like we've won.”

  The crowd yelled and whooped. As they quieted down again, she went on. “I want you all to remember what this means. All through this race, my opponents criticized me for suggesting that unfunded mandates weren't the only issue the constitutional convention needs to tackle. The people have spoken, though, and they want change—and when I go to St. Louis in September, I'm going to do my level best to see that change is what they get.”

  14 July 2030: Hainan Island

  Liu Shenyen leaned back into the beach chair, tried to let the tensions of too many long days slide off him. The beach in front of him stretched out golden and unoccupied to the blue surging waters of the South China Sea, sparkling with afternoon sunlight, and palm fronds rustled in the salt breeze; behind, unseen for the moment, a resort hotel that catered only to the highest ranks of the Party raised its unobtrusive roofline against a perfect blue sky. He and Meiyin had three weeks to do absolutely nothing, he reminded himself, and he needed that.

  The end of the East African War and the nuclear crisis had lifted one set of burdens off him, but the PLA units involved had to return to China, and new units had to be sent out to the new permanent bases in East Africa and Diego Garcia: all of it his responsibility to manage, or at least to supervise. Then there was the trip to Moscow: officially, to negotiate a new set of mutual defense agreements with Bunin, the Russian defense minister; unofficially, to give the upper end of the Russian government a chance to meet the man who would be China's next president. After that had come three busy weeks visiting East African capitals, shaking hands, posing for photographs, meeting with heads of state, and sitting on a platform in Dar es Salaam while the African soldiers who'd taken the brunt of the fighting marched past and jubilant crowds cheered.

  Liu had said all the things he knew he had to say, handed out praise and carefully chosen promises, made sure that the rest of the Chinese delegation that traveled with him did their jobs and handed out the rewards of victory with a suitably lavish hand, but all the while he'd had to keep his own misgivings in check. Tanzania stood tall; half the nations of Africa were busy negotiating agreements of their own with the Tanzanian government, and the coalition that had been created to counter the Americans was about to be deployed to end the long-running Congolese troubles once and for all. Watching the proud battle-hardened soldiers march past him in Dar es Salaam, Liu wondered whether he'd just witnessed the birth of a power that might one day challenge China for control of the Indian Ocean, and just maybe of the world.

  He reminded himself to discuss the matter with Fang when he got back to Beijing; he let out a ragged breath, tried to let himself bask in the sun and the crisp salt air. From the chair next to his, Meiyin gave him an amused glance, turned back to the tablet in her lap and the daily news.

  She had been radiantly happy since the end of the war, and the reason was no riddle to Liu. He knew the fierceness of her ambition, the drive to distinguish herself that had taken her from a bleak communal farm in Heilongjiang Province to an influential position in the Ministry of Trade and a home in Zhongnanhai, and knew also how passionately she longed to rise still further. Now she would be—what was the term the Americans used?—China's First Lady, the closest and most trusted adviser of the President of the People's Republic. Every one of the dreams she'd dreamed in girlhood, as she trudged through her chores or looked out across the barren Manchurian plains, was within her grasp. He smiled, thinking of the delight with which she'd greeted him on her return from the shelter in Inner Mongolia, the way they'd made love like besotted twenty year olds in the days and weeks that followed. Of all the consequences of Plan Qilin, that was the one that pleased him most.

  Her breath caught then, and he turned toward her. “What is it?”

  “News from America,” she said, and handed him the tablet. On it was a thoughtful article from some Australian newspaper—he and Meiyin were both high enough in the Party to access foreign web pages without censorship—talking about the agitation in the United States over the upcoming constitutional convention, and the increasingly loud calls for radical change being heard across the country. Liu read it, shook his head. It baffled him that the American government would permit the rise of so obvious a threat.

  An instant later, he recalled Fang's oh-so-tentative discussion of the plan that could bring the United States of America crashing down in ruins. Despite the warmth of the day, a chill moved through him.

  He'd discussed the plan privately with Chen, Ma, and a few other core members of the Central Military Commission, and as far as he could tell, their reaction had been the same as his: a moment of exhilaration, thinking of the possible benefits, and then a long cold moment of horror as the other potential consequences sank in. Liu was certain t
hat the collapse of a nuclear-armed superpower had too many possible downsides to contemplate—but had Chen and the others actually felt the same way? Had Fang mentioned the same plan to someone in one of China's intelligence agencies, and a different faction of the Politburo taken it up as a way to try to counterbalance the soaring prestige of the PLA? Or had events gone cascading down the trajectory Fang had sketched out all by themselves, hurtling toward a perilous future with no one in charge? He could not tell.

  “I wonder,” she said as he gave her back the tablet, “what the second most powerful man in America is doing right now.”

  He laughed at the implied compliment, not least because it was true. “I doubt he's sitting on a beach,” he said. “Whatever he's doing, I don't envy him.”

  15 July 2030: Columbus, Ohio

  At that moment, the second most powerful man in America was sitting in a comfortable suite at the top of a hotel in Columbus, a laptop computer on the desk in front of him, considering the speech he was scheduled to give later that day and wondering if it would do any good at all. Half a dozen members of Ohio's congressional delegation had asked Pete Bridgeport to come to their state and try to talk some sense into the state legislature, and since the Senate was in recess and he had half a dozen days free of other commitments, he'd agreed.

  An afternoon reading local Ohio newspapers online and an evening reception with the state's most influential politicians had left him wondering if the trip was wasted effort. It wasn't just that the papers were full of letters to the editor denouncing the federal government for a galaxy of real and imagined misdeeds; it was that the editorials said the same thing, and so did the governor and most of the state legislators he'd met at the reception. Hostility toward the pretensions of Washington DC was a long-established American tradition, and one Bridgeport had been coping with since he first arrived in Washington as a first-term representative on his way to the House, but this was different.