There were also some poems, and then songs, but I didn't know enough of the words to sing along with them.
Then Debbie got up to deliver the eulogy. I was tired by now, and hungry, and it was hard to concentrate. Next to me, Thor took my hand and we laced our fingers together.
"Miguel is gone," Debbie was saying, "but the fight is anything but over."
There was something of a commotion and for a second I thought that despite all the kids, all the religious leaders, and everyone else who'd come, there was going to be violence. But it was someone with a note, which was passed up to Debbie to read.
She stared at it wordlessly for a moment.
"This says that a consortium of business owners has agreed in principle to providing health care as a standard part of every contract, effective immediately and retroactively," she said. "They're requesting a meeting to discuss details."
She started to go on, probably to say that the details might be important (for one thing, presumably the bond-workers would want it spelled out that they'd be seeing REAL doctors and not someone who got his medical degree by printing off an official-looking certificate) but her voice was lost in the ecstatic cheer.
Thor clapped, but he was looking at me, and I could tell that we were thinking the same thing: that was way too fast. Too easy. What are they playing at now ?
Thor walked me back up to my father's apartment.
"Are you sure about this?" he said. "I still think a night down on the bottom level would be a pretty cool adventure."
"Have you ever slept on a concrete floor?" I asked. "It's really uncomfortable ."
"Who said anything about sleep?"
My face flamed and he looked a little stricken. "I meant talking ," he said, hastily. "We could just, you know, hang out." He lowered his voice. "And I don't care what you said to your father, I still think you should get off the stead."
"He's worried about losing me," I said. "He wants me to come home. If I leave, I lose any power and influence I have."
"I don't trust your father," Thor said. "Not to keep his word, and not to keep you safe."
"Me, either. But I don't think he'll hurt me."
"Well," Thor said, "at least the stuff about eating kittens was always a joke, right?"
"Right."
We were about to turn down the corridor where my father lived, and Thor stopped dead. When I looked up at him to ask what was up, he bent down and kissed me. Then he broke the kiss and looked embarrassed. "Sorry," he said. "I just realized, once we're by your father's apartment.…"
"Yeah, he has a camera," I said. "Good thought." I wrapped my arms behind Thor's neck and kissed him back.
The entry code let me into my father's apartment this time. He was waiting for me in the living room.
"I wondered if that would be good enough for you," he said.
"Well," I said, "it sounded like a good-faith effort."
He didn't smile. Instead, he let out a long breath and studied me in the dim light.
"Do you have any questions about your mother?" he asked.
"Where does she live?" I asked.
"California somewhere. I'm not sure, exactly."
I thought about asking if I could write to her, but I knew if he knew I was writing to her, he'd be monitoring the mail. It might be easier just to keep sending letters through the embassy. I could have asked him why he lied, but we'd already covered that by phone, and I didn't really believe his answer anyway.
"Well," I said. "Now what? Do I go back to living here, sleeping in my own bed, going to school?"
"Yes," he said.
"Okay, then," I said, wondering why he was still looking at me that way.
"You'll be attending classes by video for now, though," he said. He had an abstracted look on his face—not angry, not the way he'd looked when he was grounding me. Worried . He raised an eyebrow at me, probably reacting to the look on my face. "I'm not punishing you," he said. "There was…there may have been an accident on Sal."
"What?" I whispered.
He laced his fingers together. "As it happens, the bond-workers' demand was something we'd begun to think we would need to provide anyway. There's an illness on the stead. It may be contagious, and it may be spreading. I'm not grounding you, Beck. I'm quarantining you."
* * *
The Assassin
By Albert E. Cowdrey | 16667 words
There are many different sorts of rebellious acts. This story investigates some of them.
CONNIE'S LITTLE GYRO WAS crossing the Blue Ridge when Andy began to shiver. The city where he'd spent some of the worst times of his life was fast approaching. That was how he thought about Washington—it was advancing on him, not the other way around.
The plane entered the Potomac corridor and the wilderness of red brick and eroded marble inexorably took form. On the right, the grim gray hulk of the Pentagon appeared, surrounded by the white teeth of missile batteries. After the War, Americans had talked of demolishing the Puzzle Palace, yet there it was, now the headquarters for the world government's Security Forces. It's like the Sphinx, Andy mused. The ugliest things always seem to last the longest.
His companions ignored the view. Connie was reading some sort of printout, while Gomez sprawled across three seats, snoring. Andy wished he could do the same. Instead, like a man reading Braille, he fingered the ridges of scars hidden by his poplin shirt. Astonishing to think that today he was wearing the same uniform as his onetime tormentors. Connie had checked every detail of their getups—their regulation haircuts, clothing, boots, insignia—before they left Tuamotu. Their ID badges displeased her, for they bore the Roman numeral IX. She'd wanted to get them X's, which would have enabled them to go almost anywhere, but didn't try for fear of provoking an investigation. She, of course, had top clearance and wore it casually, as she wore her gold-washed name tag saying Griffin and the stars on her shoulder-straps.
The gyro banked and descended. The roof of the military terminal rose to meet them, displaying in giant white letters the slogan of the Security Forces, To Serve All Humanity . Andy wore the same words on a patch sewn to his right sleeve, and he remembered guards at the penal colony where he'd served his time who had it tattooed on their biceps, along with Mother and Born to Die.
With a small thump the gyro settled on the landing pad, the autopilot shut down, and Connie rose to her feet, stretching like a cat. Her skin had a yellowish tinge that sometimes made him wonder if she might be ill, yet her dark eyes glowed with all the old familiar fire. The waiting was over, the time for action close at hand. "Here we are, guys," she said. "Don't forget your weapons."
Better not, he thought wryly, considering that their mission was to kill the world's most powerful man—in Andy's case, to kill him for the second time.
Improbably, in view of what he had since become, Andrew Walden Emerson III had been a quiet boy, raised by his grandmother after his parents were killed when an errant missile landed on—of all unlikely targets—Great Barrington, Vermont.
In her quiet, ladylike home he'd become an obsessive reader, summoning books on his Omnipad from every surviving library. By the time Security reprogrammed the servers to filter out all writings on the Index of Subversive Literature, he'd already read such dangerous works as A Tale of Two Cities and Les Miserables, storing away old-fashioned rhetoric and quaint notions of honor and self-sacrifice he could hardly have learned from the world around him. It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done, young Andy liked to whisper to himself as he fell asleep. Yes!
But instead of going to the guillotine like Dickens's hero, he grew up and went to college. He decided to be a doctor, won a scholarship to New Yale, entered the pre-med program, and thought he'd found his calling. He was working hard, his fingers stained with chemicals from the labs, his life seemingly laid out before him, when he met an older woman—thirty at least—a blonde firebrand who called herself (revealingly) by the code name Faith.
He'd never kno
wn anyone like her, and went eagerly when she invited him to a meeting of a group she headed, Action for Anarchy. The members all had code names, which looking back was pretty silly, because the campus was such a tight community that they all knew each other's real names, too. The guys were Friedberger, Villeneuve, Swanson, Mbeki, and Nguyen, but at meetings they had to be called Karl, Max, Oliver, Mandela, and Minh. When Andy joined, he was assigned the name Thoreau, a man he resembled in little except a regional inability to pronounce the letter r .
Faith taught her boys that the politics of bygone times, like the faux-medieval towers of Old Yale, had been ground into rubble by the War. (They all capitalized the word, even in their thoughts, because to them it was the only war that mattered.) Under a dictatorship, she declared, death was the only way to get rid of a bad ruler, and that was why all politics had become the politics of violence. The first time she gave Andy this revelation they were in bed, and despite the place and the mood and the moment he retained enough New England skepticism to protest that he didn't really think people could live without any government at all.
Faith told him not to be so literal-minded. "We're not into fantasy," she said. "We want to tear down the monster the War created and see what emerges, once people are free." Then she became again a passionate and demanding lover.
Such horizontal lectures made her the inspiration of the young men of the AFA. She slept with each in turn, partly for the sex (good sex, they all agreed, was in itself an act of rebellion) but mainly to inspire them with her burning vision of a whole planet , for God's sake, set free by the death of World President Mahmud Alonzo Sol. When the War ended, exhausted humanity at last had formed a universal government with teeth, including nuclear teeth. Sol won the presidency by democratic means—a perfectly deracinated man, suave, eloquent, full of generous thoughts, not identifiable with any race or nation or creed. Then he used the newly formed international army (called the Security Forces to make it sound less threatening) to seize dictatorial power.
"It's like Caesar posing as the friend of the people, then overthrowing the Roman Republic," Faith declared. "It's like Napoleon coming on as the defender of the French Revolution, then making himself emperor. It's like Hitler getting power legally, then destroying free government in Germany. It's been tyranny's formula for 2,200 years!"
Exciting talk. The meetings of the AFA were noisy, fueled partly by cheap wine, partly by testosterone, but mainly by her fiery words. Her boys spread the message in every possible way, and yet they knew—for she had taught them—that words alone could never change history. Lanky, bearded Karl, aka Friedberger, liked to quote Goethe's line am Anfang war die Tat , in the beginning was the Deed. But it was Thoreau, aka Andy, and not his garrulous friends who finally volunteered to do what they'd all been talking about. That was when Faith became his alone.
Also when his life changed forever. He left the semiplast classrooms of New Yale, the crowded dorms, the smelly labs, the shoddy wards of not-yet-completely-rebuilt New Haven General Hospital, where he'd worked as an aide to gain practical experience. He really hated to go, and in cool moments wondered just why he'd volunteered to kill the President—how much was idealism, how much sex, and how much a yearning for action that had grown up inside him during his excessively quiet, bookish boyhood.
He told himself, It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done, but maybe didn't quite believe it, for the day he left Yale a blinding migraine came upon him, forcing him to hole up in a darkened room while Faith put compresses soaked in cold tea on his forehead. After twenty-four agonizing hours the pain faded, and he walked blinking into the sunlight of a summer day. He felt nervous as a young boxer before his first bout, but determined to fulfill the promise he'd made to her, to himself, and to the enigmatic force called Destiny that appeared to be urging him on.
In the Maine woods north of Bangor he practiced marksmanship, making the resinous green glades echo with shots from an impact rifle Faith had obtained on the black market. Every day they checked a website that reported the activities of President Sol. They thought they'd have to go abroad to catch him, and were debating how to obtain passports when his visit to Washington was announced.
That made everything simple. They plugged Faith's little electro in overnight to build up the charge, and next morning headed south. The old capital on the Potomac had survived the War under an umbrella of geosynchronous interceptor satellites that diverted incoming missiles onto Pennsylvania cornfields and the Virginia hunt country. Amish farmers and the horsey set—such as were left—didn't think much of the arrangement, but Washington was saved, alone of the cities in the onetime Eastern Megalopolis. Andy's first sight of it was a confused impression of brick and marble, tall quiet elms and broad acres of greensward badly in need of a mowing, for the War had left the American government too impoverished even to cut its own grass on a regular basis.
Faith knew the city well and led Andy via mysterious ways—a closed Metro station, abandoned service tunnels, a collapsed wall opening into a nineteenth-century cellar—until they reached a dusty cast-iron staircase corkscrewing up inside the two-centuries-old Executive Office Building. At the top lay a small loft whose single dirty window gave a slanted view of the White House lawn and the platform—still noisily under construction—where Mahmud Alonzo Sol was to address his American subjects the following day.
Andy was astounded at Faith's professionalism, her uncanny ability to find the aerie, then to slip him and the illegal rifle into it through a gauntlet of electronic sensors and armed guards. How, he asked, did she manage her miracles? "Better," she smiled, "that you don't know," and he accepted that, for he was about to put his life on the line, and had no time to think of anything else.
TODAY AN OLDER, wiser, weightier, and infinitely more cynical Andy exited a black limo at the Pentagon, and with Gomez followed Connie past sensors that blinked at their IDs and banks of lasers that withheld their fire.
The trio entered a concourse with milling uniformed crowds and shops selling goods not available to the general public. To Serve All Humanity was everywhere, in every language of the earth, as inescapable as Koranic verses in a mosque—chiseled into stone, cast into steel security screens, woven into carpets, stitched into uniform patches like their own. Connie ignored a rank of golf carts offering rides in plaintive small robotic voices—"E Ring, sir or madam, I will take you to any place on E Ring"—and led the way down kilometers of musty corridors, past cubbyhole offices where uniformed clerks bent over flickering monitors, and up ramps eroded by a century and a half of shuffling feet.
Soon he was hopelessly lost. Despite its logical form of five concentric rings and transecting diagonals, the Pentagon was hell to navigate. Here a wall had been erected for no visible reason, while over there a battery of lasers stood ready to fry anyone whose ID didn't give him right of passage. Everywhere, posted against the walls like caryatids, stood guards in the red berets of the Spetsnaz —Security's own security force—thick young men and hard-eyed women wearing X badges and carrying weighty impact pistols.
Connie threaded the maze without hesitation. Locked doors were no problem, for her palm pressed against glowing sensor pads opened them all. Twice she made Andy try the same trick, for she'd entered his print into the system, and was pleased that the computer remembered it. Everyone was so indifferent to their passage that he began to feel like a ghost moving unobserved among the living. Or maybe the other way around. On Tuamotu he'd become used to ghosts, which the villagers saw everywhere and accepted as a part of life, and he began to wonder if the crowds were the ghosts of the men and women for whom the Pentagon had originally been built—fighters in a war against genuine evil that now seemed as remote and fabulous as the Crusades. Then Connie murmured, "Here we are," and all his fancies vanished.
They halted in a corridor outside a conference room. Twenty or so guards were lounging around—not Spetsnaz, just ordinary enlisted people with IX tags—peons assigned as per
sonal aides to serve, protect, and grovel to a general officer, the same role that Andy and Gomez were enacting. All wore empty holsters and Andy learned why, when a sergeant wearing a red beret gave him and Gomez each a chit and removed their guns for safekeeping. "God, they're so paranoid, " Connie muttered, reminding him of the old saw that paranoid people sometimes have real enemies.
The double doors to the conference room stood open and the interior was banal, with a speaker's dais and lectern and metal chairs that were clamped to the floor so they couldn't be used as weapons. Only X's could enter, and even they had to pass through still more sensors able to detect the different kinds of plastic used in bombs, nonmetal weapons, and exploding bullets. Connie tucked an earbud under her short, dark regulation hair to catch the simultaneous translation, and walked past the gadgets without a glance to join the staff members already seated inside.
Gomez and Andy lingered, surrounded by a hum of gossip. The enlisted people all used the f-word as noun, pronoun, adjective, adverb, preposition, conjunction, and interjection, sometimes with comic results. "I told that effin effer, eff you, Jack, that's what I effin told him," said a guy, and his pal replied, "Effin A."
Then a tall, pale, blunt-featured man wearing multiple stars entered the conference room from a door outside Andy's range of vision, mounted the dais, and took his place at the lectern. Instantly the hallway quieted down, for the Chief of Security had appeared. The general officers inside applauded politely, and at the same time the doors—steel, Andy noted, and thick at that—closed slowly, like vault doors controlled by a timer. But before they clicked shut, he spotted an iridescent shimmer in the tall man's uniform, as if his gray tunic were woven not of cloth but of oily metal wires.
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