He had known all along that he would never really have risked everything for the sake of his father, and Sara had known it too. She had certainly objected when he went down to apply for the exit visa, but her objections had been as pro forma as the futile gesture itself.
Indeed, she had even made light of it when he had come home afterward and told her what had happened.
“Well, Bobby, I suppose you could try to get through to Nat Wolfowitz,” she had said sardonically. “After all, he is the Vice President of the United States. Maybe he’d remember you.”
Bobby groaned.
Nathan Wolfowitz, true to his word all those years ago back in Little Moscow, had indeed made a career out of campaigning futilely for President. The first time out, he had run for the Republican nomination and gotten about 900,000 votes. As soon as the election was over, he announced that he was now a Democrat, and declared for the Democratic nomination four years hence.
He continued to call himself the “American Gorbachev,” and ran once more on a program of “Bringing America Back Into the World” that called for repealing the National Security Act, dismantling the Central Security Agency, pulling out of Latin America, slashing the defense budget by 70 percent, and using the money to pay back the old abrogated foreign debt over a twenty-year period in return for an immediate entry into Common Europe.
Sensible as this might be, it was about as generally popular as a fart in church, but it did make him great talk-show filler, the archetypal “Man You Love to Hate,” and the endless TV exposure did give him recognition value.
After four years of this, he actually managed to qualify for matching federal campaign funds in the Democratic primaries, and he pulled almost three million votes. He went into the convention with something under two hundred delegates, but as the only candidate willing to violate the ancient tradition of not appearing on the convention floor till after the nomination, he was the media star of the otherwise dull event.
Immediately after the general election, he announced that he was now a Republican again and started running for the nomination. By now he was a familiar figure in a crowded field, dominated on the one hand by Creighton Laxalt, the candidate of the established money, and on the other by the fire-breathing Senator from Texas, Harry Carson.
The television debates swiftly degenerated into a series of over-the-top shouting matches between Carson and Wolfowitz. There was something perversely refreshing, after so many decades of meaningless blather, about a Presidential campaign in which two of the candidates openly hated each other’s guts.
Carson went into the convention ahead of Laxalt, but about two hundred delegates shy of the nomination, after having earned the undying enmity of the also-rans. The convention remained deadlocked through twenty-three ballots.
The party brass locked all of the candidates in a smoke-filled room for twelve straight hours. What went on in there was mercifully lost to history, but what came out was surely the slimiest and most amazing back-room deal in the history of American politics.
Nathan Wolfowitz had gotten to the convention a distant fourth, with 281 delegates.
But that was enough to put Harry Carson over the top.
And somehow, the party leaders had managed to break the deadlock by getting the two of them to share the same ticket.
When dumbfounded reporters asked Wolfowitz how he could possibly have agreed to run for Vice President with Harry Carson, Wolfowitz had leered into the camera and shrugged.
“The real job of the Vice President is to sit around hoping the President will drop dead,” he said. “At least now the American people know they’ve got themselves a candidate for the job with his heart in his work.”
Carson and Wolfowitz never campaigned together. Wolfowitz spent the campaign making the same speeches that had regularly goaded Carson into televised rage. Carson never even mentioned Wolfowitz’s name.
Vice President Wolfowitz occasionally presided over the Senate, but Carson wouldn’t even send him to a funeral unless it was his own. It seemed to suit the Vice President just fine. He spent most of his time attacking his own administration and suggesting that Harry Carson could best serve the nation by doing himself in.
“Wolfowitz! Wolfowitz couldn’t even fix a parking ticket.”
And Sara had just shrugged and smiled. That she had suggested that Bobby try to get Wolfowitz to help him get an exit visa was her strange way of forgiving him, of telling him that she had really known that he had never been serious about leaving her to be with his father in the first place.
Bobby loped into the little living room, still naked, took the phone from Sara, sat down on the couch. “Hello, Dad, how’s it going?”
“Getting there, Bob, getting there. But I need your help.”
Oh no!
“I told you, Dad, there’s no way I can get out of the—”
“There’s something you can do for me in the States, Bob.”
“There is?” Bobby said. Sara brought him a cup of coffee and a toasted bagel from the kitchen area. Bobby checked the clock—8:36! Jesus, and he wasn’t even dressed!
“Could you get me my clothes from the bedroom?” he asked Sara. “I’ve got to be out of here in five minutes.” Sara nodded and departed.
“I want you to check out an outfit called Immortality, Inc., in Palo Alto,” Dad said.
“Check out what?”
“They’ve supposedly developed a death-suspension technique, Bob.”
“A what?”
“I’ve only been able to extract a sketchy description from the data bases here. They take a tissue sample and freeze it in liquid nitrogen, and they also back it up by recording the genome in software. Then they record your instantaneous consciousness somehow and polymerize your brain.”
Sara came back into the living room with his suit, a shirt, shoes, socks, tie, a pair of Jockey shorts. “I’m not following you, Dad,” he said as he pulled on the shorts.
“It seems pretty sound. Lots of redundancy. They’d clone a new body from the genome, then either fix what’s wrong with my brain and transplant it, or just dump the software into a new one.”
“Do what?” Bobby exclaimed as he managed to wriggle into his shirt without dropping the phone.
“Bring me back to life,” Dad said.
“Sounds like science fiction to me, Dad,” Bobby blurted. “They can’t really do that, can they?”
“Not now, of course,” Dad said. “Later, when the technology has progressed. Five years, ten, a century, it doesn’t really matter, not if my genome is properly recorded and my personality software is preserved.”
Bobby buttoned up his shirt and stepped into his pants, trying to figure out what to say to that. It all sounded quite crazy, but how could he say that to his father, to a man facing his own impending death? It wasn’t any worse than a belief in heaven or nirvana, was it? But then again, it wasn’t any better either. . . .
“Bob? Bob? Are you still there?”
“Yeah, I’m still here, Dad, but I’ve got to get going soon. I . . . I . . . Look, Dad, you . . . ah . . . you really take this . . . uh . . . seriously? I mean, you really believe . . . ?”
“What counts is what we can make your mother believe,” Dad said sharply. “If she believes I have a chance to live again, then maybe we can finally convince her to do what she has to do to get me on the Grand Tour Navette.”
Oh Christ! Bobby thought as he sealed his fly and buckled his belt. What the hell is going on back there? They said that there would be progressive brain damage. Had it started already?
“And you, Dad?” he said, pulling on his socks. “Do you really believe this stuff?”
There was a long pause on the other end of the phone. “It doesn’t matter what I believe,” Dad finally said softly.
“It does to me,” Bobby told him, stepping into his shoes. I’d like to know whether you’ve gone completely round the bend.
Another pause. “Well, at least it’s better than just being dumped in a h
ole in the ground,” Dad finally said.
Bobby sighed. There was no refuting the logic of that. The scheme might be crazy, but Dad was sane. He had been dealt a handful of crap, and everything he had was in the pot, so what else could he do but pull to that inside straight?
8:44! Shit, I’ve got to get out of here!
“Look, Dad, I’m running real late,” Bobby said. “Just what do you want me to do?”
“Go to Palo Alto. Find out everything you can about Immortality, Inc. And get ahold of whatever promotional material you can get out of them. Tell them you’re doing a feature story.”
“Fly to California! Look Dad, in case you haven’t noticed, there’s a big crisis about to—”
“Ninety minutes there, ninety minutes back, a couple of hours in Palo Alto, is that so much to ask, Bob?”
“They don’t fly Concordskis in the United States, remember?” Bobby reminded him. “It’s an all-day trip here, and I’ll get back zoned out of my mind right in the middle of the biggest story I’ve ever gotten to cover.”
8:50! Bobby had been trying to fasten his tie with the phone in one hand, and it was proving impossible. And he should have been out of here ten minutes ago!
“It’s my life, Bob,” Dad said plaintively. “It’s everything I’ve ever lived for. I’m begging you, Bob, you’ve got to do this for me, and you’ve got to do it soon.”
Right, Bobby thought, this is your father, and he’s got about a year to live, and now you’re about to brush him off because you don’t want to take a day out of your own life for fear of screwing up a story!
I could take a red-eye Saturday night and fly back Sunday afternoon. Nothing ever breaks on Sunday, not even the end of the world. . . .
You certainly owe him that much, now don’t you?
“Okay, Dad, okay, I’ll do it, and I’ll call you Sunday,” Bobby said. “Now I’ve really gotta go.”
“Do what?” Sara said when he had hung up the phone.
“Fly out to California and back this weekend,” Bobby told her, knotting his tie clumsily without bothering to waste time going to a mirror.
“For what?” Sara demanded.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” Bobby said, slipping into his jacket and snatching up his computer. And he pecked her on the cheek and dashed out the door.
EURORUSSIANS SLIDE FURTHER IN POLLS
While the fragmented field running against him all but insures Constantin Semyonovich Gorchenko’s reelection as Soviet President, the Eurorussians continue to slide in the polls, the latest results of which indicate the election of a Supreme Soviet almost equally divided among Bears demanding an immediate invasion of the Ukraine, Ethnic Nationalists supporting Ukrainian independence, and Eurorussians like President Gorchenko, prevaricating and chewing their fingernails down to the quick.
In other words, unless something totally unexpected happens, we are likely to elect a President who doesn’t seem to know what to do and a Supreme Soviet so thoroughly deadlocked that it would probably prevent him from doing it if he knew what it was.
—Argumenty i Fakty
Like everyone else in Moscow, and no doubt all across the Soviet Union, Franja had stayed home to watch the disaster unfolding on television, wishing very much that Ivan was here to hold her hand, or even that she was back in Paris with her mother, for this was no time for a Russian to be alone.
Vadim Kronkol’s fateful U.N. speech had gone more or less as expected until the very end. The Ukrainian President, still decked out in his television costume—black cossack boots and pants and a floridly embroidered peasant blouse—had ranted on about Stalin’s genocide against the Ukrainian kulaks, the outlawing of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, Khrushchev’s atrocities, continuing Great Russian economic and cultural hegemonism, and so forth, working himself up into the usual towering rage before he got to the point.
With his long black hair, thick black beard, and piercing blue eyes, he looked the perfect incarnation of Rasputin, and indeed, Mad Moscow claimed, perhaps even seriously, that the American media advisors had actually chosen him by programming Rasputin’s physical and personality parameters into a computer and running that against the Ukrainian national data bank.
Watching him in his hour of glory, Franja could well believe it. Certainly Kronkol’s performance could not have been more perfectly crafted both to appeal to the worst depths of centuries of jealous Ukrainian hatred of the Russians and to inflame the Bears’ most rabidly chauvinistic image of the treacherous race of ingrates who had sold out to the Nazis in droves during the Great Patriotic War.
Which was precisely what the real Rasputin, the one in Washington, no doubt intended.
“The free people of the Ukraine therefore are left with no real alternative but to throw off the yoke of Russian oppression once and for all and reclaim their rightful place in the community of sovereign nation-states,” Kronkol finally roared. “Now is the hour! This is the moment that the Ukrainian people have waited for through centuries of religious, economic, political, cultural, and linguistic subjugation! As duly elected President of the Ukrainian people, I hereby declare complete and total Ukrainian independence from the Russian Empire! The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic is dead! Long live the independent Republic of the Ukraine!”
Actually hearing the Ukrainians declare independence might still be a shock to the nervous system, but Franja had known it was coming, and the actual moment came as almost a relief.
What really counted would be the speech of the American delegate, and the reaction of President Gorchenko.
If Gorchenko let the Ukraine secede without following the tedious and lengthy process adopted during the Pribaltic crisis to prevent just such actions, how many other republics would try the same thing? Worse still, the Ukraine was the second most populous republic in the Soviet Union, and without the Ukrainians, who had been the ambivalent allies of the Great Russians for centuries, the Russians would be outnumbered by the Asiatics.
What was at stake was nothing less than the survival of the Soviet Union as a multinational state, as the Eurorussians saw it, or Russian control of that state, as the Bears saw it.
But if Gorchenko sent in the Red Army, the resulting bloodbath would surely polarize every other ethnic minority in the Soviet Union into irreconcilable anti-Russian hatred, increasing the strength in the Supreme Soviet of Russian and Ethnic Nationalist chauvinists alike, at the expense of his own Eurorussian faction. And what a madman like Carson would do did not bear thinking about.
So Gorchenko’s only course would be to prevaricate through the election, hold the Red Army in check while the Bears ranted for action, and, by playing them and the Ethnic Nationalists off against each other as extremists, assume the vague statesmanlike middle ground. It wasn’t much, but it was all that Gorchenko could do under the circumstances.
But then Kronkol dropped his bomb.
“As the President of the independent Republic of the Ukraine, I am now submitting our formal application for admission as a new member state in Common Europe to the Common European Parliament,” he declared with the wickedest leer. “And in so doing, I express solidarity with oppressed stateless peoples everywhere! Let the courage of the heroic Ukrainian people inspire you all to seek your own destinies! I not only ask you to vote for our admission, I ask you to join us! Side by side, we will build a new Europe, a free Europe, a Europe not of nation-states but of free and independent peoples!”
What an uproar that had started on the floor of the General Assembly, as Kronkol marched down from the podium and out through the center aisle to boos and cheers and the waving of fists, grinning like an ape at his own masterstroke of devilment!
“A Common Europe of Peoples, not Nation-States,” as Vadim Kronkol had known all too well, was the slogan of the Congress of Peoples, the umbrella organization of the ethnic nationalist movements that permeated Common Europe. Basques. Bretons. Scots. Welsh. Bavarians. Slovaks. Serbs. Croats. Flemings. Frisians. L
apps. Catalans. Macedonians. There was hardly a member state in Common Europe that was not an ethnic mosaic, that did not contain minorities who spoke their own languages, professed their own culture, considered themselves a subject people.
And now the damnable Ukrainians had incited a whole new level of this transnational tribalism. Ethnic nationalists throughout Europe had long been campaigning for various forms of local autonomy, but none of them had dared to unilaterally declare their independence from a nation-state and apply for membership in Common Europe.
By forcing the issue in the Common European Parliament, the Ukrainians had transformed their cause from an internal Soviet matter into a transnational debate on the nature of Common Europe itself in which ethnic nationalists all over Europe would be their rabid allies.
And the worst was surely yet to come.
The President of the Assembly rapped his amplified gavel for order, and the tall, elegant, silver-haired figure of Reagan Smith, the American Ambassador to the United Nations, slowly paraded down the center aisle to the podium.
“We now recognize the delegate from the United States,” the President said, and Franja held her breath, no doubt along with the rest of the world, as Smith ascended to the podium, and the camera moved in for a head-and-shoulders shot, and the shouting died away into a terrible, pregnant silence.
Smith slowly drew a single piece of paper out of the breast pocket of his suit jacket, placed it before him, took out an old-fashioned pair of wire-rimmed reading glasses, and put them on, as if to distance himself personally from the official nature of what he was about to say.
“I am authorized to read the following statement from the President of the United States,” he said in a strange flat voice, as if he were trying very hard not to choke on his words.
“The government of the United States hereby formally recognizes the sovereign and duly elected government of the Republic of the Ukraine and takes great pleasure in welcoming the formerly oppressed people of the Ukraine into the community of free nations. And in keeping with our long and honorable tradition of protecting the national integrity of threatened peoples from the depredations of Soviet imperialist hegemonism, the government of the United States hereby formally notifies the government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics that the Republic of the Ukraine has been placed under the nuclear shield of Battlestar America. Any nuclear attack upon the Republic of the Ukraine will be tactically regarded as a nuclear attack upon the territory of the United States and dealt with accordingly with the full defensive resources at our command.”
Russian Spring Page 61