“Pre-need plan . . . ?” Bobby stammered. The whole thing was getting more and more ghoulish by the moment.
“We take a tissue sample and record your genome right now. Your instantaneous hologram of consciousness too. And free updates as often as you can get here for them. When the time comes, your brain gets polymerized as soon as it becomes legal to do so, so you retain all your long-term memories, and we dump everything up until the time of the last hologram update into the hardware when we install it in the clone.”
And as if that wasn’t ghoulish enough, Burton opened one of the drawers and let Bobby look inside. There, cradled in Styrofoam like an enormous egg, was a human brain tightly packaged in some kind of clear shrink-wrap.
“Jesus . . .” Bobby muttered.
“Go ahead, touch it, man,” Burton said.
Bobby goggled at him.
“Just to make a point,” Burton said, smiling.
Gingerly, Bobby reached out and tapped the brain twice with his knuckles.
It was hard as a rock.
“No longer meat,” Burton said. “Polymerized hard as a rock and twice as chemically inert. You could dunk it off a backboard and you wouldn’t hurt it. Needs no refrigeration or special conditions. It could survive like that for centuries.”
That was the capper of the guided tour, after which Burton took Bobby back to his office, gave him a large packet of lavishly illustrated promotional material, and asked if he had any questions.
Bobby, quite dazed by now, could think of only one question, and that was the only one that mattered. “Look, Dr. Burton, you’ll pardon me for being brutally frank, but are you really serious about all this? Do you seriously think that someday you’ll actually be able to clone bodies, depolymerize brains, and bring these people back to normal life?”
Burton just smiled his wide-open surfer’s smile. “Can we really bring back dead people? Well, that’s a philosophical question, man. Will they be the same people, or only feel like the same people? Depends on your beliefs about the soul. . . .”
He shrugged. “We don’t have those answers,” he admitted. “But you want certainty, why then you can always have yourself stuffed in a hole in the ground.”
Bobby had planned to wait till a decent hour in Paris before he called his father, but by the time he got back to the motel, his head was reeling from the most macabre experience of his life, his sense of reality was slipping, and he needed to dump it all on someone right now.
So he had gone straight to the telephone and woken Dad up in the middle of the night.
“So tell me about it, Bob,” Dad said, after a long pause, now, apparently, more or less fully awake. And Bobby did.
“Well, Bob, what do you think?” Dad said when he was finally finished.
“Hey, Dad, I’m no technical expert. . . .”
“But you are a journalist. Tell me what you feel. Is this a fly-by-night outfit or are they substantial?”
“Seemed pretty gilt-edged to me.”
“Do you think these people are sincere or is this a fraud?”
Bobby had to think long and hard about that one. “Both, I think,” he finally said. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s all an expensive set for a high-budget science-fiction movie, but if it’s bullshit, I think they’ve really sold it to themselves too.”
“Good enough for me,” Dad said immediately.
“Dad, I just got through telling you—”
“If these scientists have convinced themselves they’re really onto something, then we can certainly convince your mother, she wants so much to believe. . . .”
Bobby groaned. “That’s it, isn’t it, Dad?” he said wearily. “You just want to use this to convince Mom to help you get your spaceship ride. I dragged my ass all the way out here with the world coming apart just to—”
“You’ve got to get to Paris, Bob! Together, I know we can convince her, the mere fact that you believe it enough to finally—”
“Jesus, Dad, you know that’s impossible! Especially now! Don’t you have any idea of what’s going on in the world? That asshole Carson has put Battlestar America on yellow alert! Red Army units are moving toward the Ukrainian border! All flights to Europe have been suspended. No one can get in or out of the country now, let alone the likes of me!”
“You’ve got to try, Bob, you’ve got to try!”
“I have been trying, Dad, you know I have,” Bobby told him guiltily. “Maybe when all this is over, if we haven’t all been blown to bits . . .”
“Soon, Bobby, soon, I haven’t got that much time.”
Maybe none of us has, Bobby thought somberly.
And as he thought it, he at last understood his father’s single-minded obsession with the wisdom of a sympathetic heart.
The whole world was staring death in the face now, just as Dad had been ever since the accident. The only difference was that he knew for a certainty when and how.
As he sat there in the sunny California motel room, Bobby found himself suddenly envying his father his inspired madness, his vision of something worth throwing away what was left of his life over. He even could find some empathy with the crazy schemes of John Burton.
Millions of lives might soon be thrown away for nothing more worthwhile than the fanaticism of the Ukrainian nationalists and the reckless stupidity of the imbecile in the White House.
Including his own.
Only now did that awful reality seep into his bones and his gut, only now had it really become something more than a hot news story. Time might very well be running out on everyone. This macabre conversation with Dad had suddenly made that theoretical truth terrifyingly personal.
He could die at any moment, he could be vaporized with no warning. The things that might be left undone, the debts that might be left forever unpaid, the words that he might never get to say . . .
“You’re a lunatic, Dad,” Bobby said tenderly. “You’re a real space cadet. But I love you very much.”
“Does that mean you’ll help me, Bob? Does that mean you’re on my side?”
Bobby sighed. “Yeah, I’m on your side,” he said, and found somewhat to his surprise that now he really meant it. The dream might not be his, but the feeling behind it was now all too comprehensible. “I’ll do what I can.”
CARSON DEMANDS WOLFOWITZ RESIGNATION
After days of official silence, President Harry Carson has finally responded to Vice President Wolfowitz’s call for his impeachment.
Speaking to a group of selected reporters in the Oval Office, President Carson, whom those present described as flushed, and tense, and barely controlling his fury, demanded that the Vice President resign.
“If he doesn’t, we’ll see who impeaches who!” the President declared. “That s.o.b. is a traitor, he always has been, and now he’s gone and proven it! He oughta be tarred and feathered and run all the way to Siberia on a rail in his underwear, not just impeached.”
The President said that he had summoned the Vice President to a Cabinet meeting tomorrow to tender his resignation or face impeachment on charges of treason.
When reached for comment, Vice President Wolfowitz said that he would “accept the invitation.” As for resigning, the Vice President said that he had no intention of stepping down unless the President resigned simultaneously.
“I hope he does try to impeach me,” Vice President Wolfowitz declared. “At least it would force the House to debate the real issues instead of just clicking their heels and screaming Heil Carson on cue. So go ahead, Harry, do it, get your feeble little rocks off. Go ahead and make my day.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
The tension in Prague had been so thick you could cut it with a knife, and while the Americans were still considered the main villains of the piece, and the Czechs certainly had nothing good to say about the Ukrainians, there had been a big demonstration in Wenceslas Square by Slovak nationalists supporting the admission of the “Republic of the Ukraine” to Common Europe behind th
e banner of “A Common Europe of Peoples, not Nation-States,” there had been a strident anti-Russian undertone, and Franja had been glad to get airborne on her way back to Moscow.
According to the news, it was the same all over Europe. A broad coalition of Basque, Breton, Scottish, Catalan, Slovak, Corsican, Flemish, Welsh, and Lapp delegates had sponsored a resolution in the Common European Parliament calling for the admission of the Ukraine, and while they clearly did not have the numbers to push it through, it seemed likely that they would be able to force a formal vote.
It was becoming quite clear that the Americans were aiming not only at the dismemberment of the Soviet Union but at the destruction of the unity of Common Europe itself, by championing, through their puppets in the Ukraine, the worst sort of jingoistic tribalism, turning national minorities against their nation-states, nation-states against their national minorities.
The “Republic of the Ukraine” was loudly proclaiming its “solidarity with the oppressed peoples of the Soviet Union” and inviting them to join it in building a “Liberated Common Europe of Free Peoples.” There had been demonstrations of support in Uzbekistan, Byelorussia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and for the first time in Franja’s memory, riot police had been sent in with water cannon and neuronic disrupters to break them up.
But other than that, and a futile paper attempt to put the Ukrainian National Militia under Red Army command, President Gorchenko had done nothing. Like this flight to Moscow, which had been stuck circling in the stack for twenty minutes now, he seemed trapped in a holding pattern.
As she sat in the cockpit, flying endless circles, Franja found that, despite the deteriorating situation, she could sympathize with Constantin Gorchenko. What, after all, could the poor bastard do?
He certainly couldn’t accept Ukrainian secession. But if he sent in the Red Army, there was no telling what the maniacs in Washington would do. So all he could do was mass more and more troops along the Ukrainian border, insist that it was all an internal Soviet matter, and use the impending national election as a handy excuse to “wait to hear the voice of the Soviet People.”
But what seemed certain to emerge after the election, assuming Gorchenko could really hold off the catastrophe until then, would be a Supreme Soviet bloated with Bears and Ethnic Nationalists, where no one could put together a working majority, leaving Gorchenko himself, elected by default against fragmented opposition, sitting on an even hotter stove.
What would happen then was something not even Mad Moscow cared to speculate on in public print.
As for Franja—
Suddenly her co-pilot, Lentski, let out a wordless whoop.
Franja instantly snapped out of her trance of boredom. “What’s wrong, Sasha?” she said, scanning her instruments at the same time and seeing that nothing was amiss.
Looking at Lentski, she saw that he was grinning from ear to ear like a foolish ape.
“It just came in on the radio, and we’re ordered to inform our passengers immediately,” he said. “Harry Carson is dead. He suffered a massive stroke during a Cabinet meeting, according to Tass. Apparently in the act of screaming obscenities at Vice President Wolfowitz, though that part’s not official.”
“Carson is dead?” Franja stammered.
“As a parboiled pig. You’re to announce the sad news immediately.”
Now it was Franja’s turn to break into a simian smile and not care who saw it. “I’ll try to keep my tears in check,” she said as she switched her mike to the cabin speaker system.
“A sad moment, isn’t it?” Lentski said, and burst out laughing.
“Comrades, your attention please, this is Captain Gagarin speaking. It is my . . . ah . . . solemn duty to tell you that we have just been informed that the President of the United States, Mr. Harry Carson, is dead. It would seem that his brain exploded in a fit of rage. I repeat, Harry Carson is dead. We will give you details as we have them.”
Even through the cabin door, the applause from the passengers was quite thunderous. For of course Harry Carson was loathed by Bears and Eurorussians alike; the former because his threat to use Battlestar America to protect the American puppet regime in Kiev was preventing the Red Army from giving the Ukrainian traitors what they so richly deserved, the latter because his reckless adventurism was responsible for the crisis which threatened to sweep the Eurorussians out of the Supreme Soviet and destroy the Russian Spring itself.
Only the Ethnic Nationalists had anything but loathing for Carson, and if there were any of them aboard, they knew enough to keep their big mouths shut.
And now the architect of the impending catastrophe was dead, and Nathan Wolfowitz, Carson’s bitterest enemy, the self-proclaimed “American Gorbachev,” was apparently President of the United States.
It was almost enough to have a good Marxist believing in a just God.
* * *
WHO’S IN CHARGE HERE?
While the world hardly has cause to honestly mourn the sudden death of Harry Burton Carson, it has little cause to welcome the ascension of Nathan Wolfowitz to the American Presidency either.
With the Soviet Union and the United States seemingly on the brink of a nuclear confrontation, the White House is now occupied by a man who has vigorously opposed the policies that have brought us to this pass. That would be cause for guarded rejoicing, were not the new American President a man who has never held any position of responsibility.
Worse still, all the calculated leaks emanating from Carson Administration figures still in place in the so-called Wolfowitz Administration seemed designed to convey the impression that the new President will be the political prisoner of his Cabinet, the Pentagon, the Central Security Agency, and the CIA. If this is true, who will really be running the American government during the worst crisis since World War II?
And if it is not, how will a governmental neophyte like Nathan Wolfowitz cope with a hostile Cabinet, military, and security apparatus? Under the American constitution, he has the power to dismiss these disloyal officials, but the Congress must approve any replacements he nominates, and, judging by the impeachment talk already emerging, should he attempt to purge his administration of these Carson holdovers, we could end up with no government in Washington at all.
—Le Monde
* * *
XXVI
It had been a decade since Bobby had seen Nathan Wolfowitz in the flesh, but this seemed like neither the man he had played poker with nor the media image he had watched age on television, and not just because Wolfowitz was now wrapped in the aura of the Presidency.
Wolfowitz did not at all look like a man who had suddenly been granted the impossible dream of a lifetime by the hand of fate. Wolfowitz did not look like a man whose worst enemy had just dropped dead.
Wolfowitz looked like shit.
His thick salt-and-pepper hair was an uncombed mess. His Presidential blue suit looked as if it had been slept in. The knot of his tie was crooked. His face was drawn and ashen, and his eyes looked positively haunted.
And his performance was a good deal less than reassuring to both those who had voted for the “American Gorbachev” and the supporters of the Carson Administration, whose unwholesome apparatus and nightmarish policies he had so suddenly inherited.
Bobby had expected Wolfowitz to be nervous. He had a hostile Congress, an even more hostile Cabinet, a nonplussed Pentagon, a rebellious Central Security Agency and CIA, and there he was, with Battlestar America on yellow alert, and the borders sealed, and the Red Army massing on the Ukrainian border, and America already committed in the vaguest terms to defending the Ukraine.
But neither the poker wizard Bobby had played against in Berkeley nor the fast-talking shoot-from-the-hip Nathan Wolfowitz of a thousand and one television appearances had ever looked as freaked-out as this, would have been constitutionally capable of all this mealy-mouthed evasion, even with nothing showing and only a pair of deuces in the hole.
Bobby had moved heaven and Earth to get StarN
et to send him here to Washington to cover President Wolfowitz’s first press conference. He had bullshitted his superiors shamelessly about his “personal relationship” with the new President.
For now Sara’s previously sardonic suggestion that he appeal to Nat Wolfowitz to get him an exit visa had new meaning. Wolfowitz was no longer a Vice President in political purdah. He was in charge of everything. He could do it with a word, with the stroke of a pen. All Bobby had to do was get to him.
And now here he was, in the middle of a crush of White House reporters, wondering what the hell he had been thinking. How was he really supposed to get close enough to Wolfowitz to ask him for anything? What made him think the new President would even remember someone he had played poker with a decade ago?
From the way Wolfowitz was behaving, it seemed like a minor miracle that the man had been able to remember to seal his fly.
“Mr. President, what does it really mean that the United States has placed the Ukraine ‘under the nuclear shield of Battlestar America’?”
“Uh . . . Moscow’s guess is as good as mine at the moment. . . .”
“You mean you don’t even know what the policy is!”
“I mean that the previous policy died with Harry Carson, and I haven’t had time to figure things out.”
“But Mr. President, just what will the United States actually do if the Red Army invades the Ukraine?”
“Ah . . . I’m sure Mr. Gorchenko would like the answer to that one too. . . .”
“Mr. President, do you support independence for the captive peoples of the Soviet Union?”
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