Chapter 10
Etiquette
The President, whose given name was William, did what he had not done in quite this way for many years: he took a walk.
He left the White House by the Main Portico and crossed Pennsylvania Avenue into Lafayette Square. He walked alone.
It was a fine September morning. The air was cool, but a gentle sunlight warmed his hands and face. The President paused as he entered the park. Then he smiled and shrugged off his jacket. He unbuttoned his collar and pulled off his tie. He folded the black silk tie into a square and tucked it absentmindedly into his hip pocket.
No etiquette in the new world, he thought.
He was reminded of the story about Calvin Coolidge, who had shocked the fashionable guests at a White House breakfast by pouring his heavily creamed coffee into a saucer. Shocked but unfailingly polite, Coolidge’s guests had done the same. They waited wide-eyed for the President to take the first sip. At which point Coolidge picked up the saucer, leaned over, and presented it to the White House cat.
The story was funny, but it seemed to William there was something ugly about it, too—too much of the ancient vertebrate politics of dominance and submission. After all, what was a President that anyone should be frightened of one? Only a title. A suit of clothes—and not a particularly comfortable one.
He was ashamed that there had been times when he thought of himself as “the President”—as a sort of icon, less man than emblem. He supposed that was how the Roman emperors might have felt, anointed by the gods; or their Chinese counterparts ruling under the Mandate of Heaven. These are dream-names we give ourselves, he thought; indeed, much of his life seemed like a dream, a dream he had been dreaming too deeply and for too long. A dream from which he had been awakened by a dream. The morning air made him feel young. He remembered a summer his family had spent at a beach resort in Maine. Not the riverside cabin he had recalled in that long-ago address to the nation. That had been an isolated July in the Adirondacks, much embroidered by his speechwriter. The family’s summer place in William’s twelfth year had been a fabulous old resort hotel, erected in the Gilded Age and preserved against the solvent properties of salt air and progress. Its attractions were its fine linens, its European cuisine, and its two miles of wild Atlantic beach. William’s mother had admired the linen. William had admired the beach.
He had been allowed to explore the beach by himself as long as he promised to stay out of the water, which was, in any case, too chilly and violent for his liking. He loved the ocean from a cautious distance, but he loved it nonetheless. All that summer, every morning, he would choke down breakfast and bolt from the hotel like a wild horse vaulting a fence. He ran where the sand was packed and hard, ran until his side stitched and his lungs felt raw. And when he couldn’t run anymore he would take off his shoes and explore the wetter margin of the beach, where water oozed between his toes and odd things lived in the tide pools and among the rocks.
When he tired of that, he would sit in the high salt grass and gaze at the juncture of ocean and sky for as much as an hour at a time. England was across that water. England, where American flyers had gone to join the battle against the Luftwaffe. Beyond England, Vichy France. Europe under the heel of the Nazis; embattled Stalingrad.
He watched the great clouds roll along the ocean rim, clouds that might have come from war-torn Europe, but more likely from the tropics, from seas that still carried a whiff of Joseph Conrad and H. Rider Haggard when he saw their names on a map: the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal. He would dream in such a fashion, and then he would eat his lunch: cold roast beef from the hotel kitchen and a thermos of sweet iced tea.
I was once as alive as that.
What fairy tales our lives are, William thought. How strange that that child could have conceived an ambition to rule the United States—could have pursued his ambition so relentlessly that he became something stony and patrician. It seemed to him now that he had fallen into a kind of trance, though he could not say exactly when. In law school? When he first ran for office? He had folded himself into the cloak of his career until it dimmed his urge to run away down some sunny summer beach. What a shame.
He drifted into sleep, sun-warmed on a park bench by the statue of Rochambeau… but the touch of the pistol barrel on his neck woke him instantly.
* * *
The steel barrel was pressed against a space two inches below his left ear, sliding minutely against a knot of muscle under the skin.
William turned his head cautiously away from the pressure and looked up.
He did not immediately recognize the man who was holding the pistol. He was a tall man with a neat brush of white hair. A strong man, but not a young man—on the shy side of sixty, the President guessed. He was wearing an immaculate three-piece suit with the jacket open. William saw all this in the blink of an eye.
The face was startlingly handsome. And not completely unfamiliar.
He probed his memory. “Ah,” he said at last. “Colonel Tyler.”
John Tyler kept his body tight against the weapon to disguise it from the few tourists strolling in the park. He slid the barrel across William’s collarbone and into his belly as he sat beside him on the bench.
John Tyler’s name had cropped up every so often in the National Intelligence Daily or the President’s FTPO briefings. Tyler had been a minor player in the planned coup d’etat, which had been derailed, of course, by Contact. He was one of those ex-military men who lead odd little careers in the defense lobby, the so-called Iron Triangle. Revolving-door connections with—who was it? Ford Aerospace? General Dynamics? In exchange for some ground-floor lobbying with the House Armed Services Committee or the Subcommittee on Procurement. A man with contacts at the Pentagon, and Langley, and at certain banks. Tyler was an educated man and a convincing public speaker, and his prospects might have been brighter if not for the hint of a scandal that had ended his military career—some sexual impropriety, as William recalled.
He knew one other thing about John Tyler. A small piece of intelligence from a loyalist Air Force general. The architects of the coup had had a particular role in mind for Colonel Tyler: If William had refused to retire peaceably to some country dacha, it was John Tyler who was to put a bullet in his brain.
“I watched you,” Tyler said. His voice was quiet but bitter. “I watched you leave the White House. My God, it’s startling to see a President in public without a Secret Service escort. Did you think it was all over? You didn’t need the bodyguards anymore?”
“It is over. The guards all went home, Colonel.” He looked at Tyler’s pistol. An ugly little machine. “Is this your revolution? I thought that was over, too.”
“Keep your hands down,” Tyler said. “I should kill you right now.”
“Is that what you mean to do?”
“Most likely.”
“What would be the point, Colonel Tyler?”
“The point, sir, would be that a dead President is better than a live traitor.”
“I see.”
In fact, William understood several things from this small speech:
He understood that the coup was a thing of the past; that Colonel Tyler had come here representing no one but himself.
He understood that Tyler had said no to the Travellers and was only beginning to grasp the significance of Contact.
And he understood that beneath his rigid calm, the Colonel was teetering on the brink of panic and madness. Would Tyler shoot him? He might or might not. It was an open question. It would be decided by impulse.
Choose your words carefully, William told himself.
“You had friends,” he said to Tyler, “but they all changed their minds. They woke up and saw that the world is a different place now. Not you, Colonel?”
“You can bank on that.”
“That was a week ago. Did you wait all this time to see me?” William nodded at the White House behind its spiked fence. “You could have walked in the
front door, Colonel. No one would have stopped you.”
“I talked to your friend Charlie Boyle yesterday. He told me the same thing. I didn’t believe him.” Tyler shrugged. “But maybe it’s true. I mean, if you’re out taking a goddamn stroll.”
Charlie Boyle has only been my friend since he woke up immortal, William thought; but yes, Charlie had been telling the truth. The White House was open to the public. Like any other museum.
There was a twitch of impatience from Tyler, a slight pursing of the lips. William drew a slow breath.
“Colonel Tyler, surely you know what’s happening. Even if you don’t want any part of it. Even if you said no to it. This isn’t an alien invasion. The flying saucers haven’t landed. The Earth hasn’t been occupied by a hostile military force. Look around.”
Tyler’s frown deepened, and for a space of some seconds his finger tightened on the trigger. William felt the barrel of the gun pulse against his body with the beating of Tyler’s heart.
Death hovered over the park bench like a third presence.
That shouldn’t frighten me anymore, William thought. But it does. Yes, it still does.
“What I think,” Tyler said, “is that everybody has been infected with a hallucination. The hallucination is that we can live forever. That we can cohabit like the lamb and the lion in a Baptist psalm book. I think most people succumbed to this disease. But some of us didn’t. Some of us recovered from it. I think I’m a well man, Mr. President. And I think you’re very sick.”
“Not a traitor? Just sick?”
“Maybe both. You collaborated—for whatever reason. You’re not qualified to hold office any longer.”
“Am I sick? You’re the one with the pistol, Colonel Tyler.”
“A weapon in the right hands is hardly a sign of illness.”
How strange it was to be having this conversation on such a gentle day. He looked away from Colonel Tyler and saw a ten-year-old attempting to fly a kite from the foot of the statue of Andrew Jackson. The breeze was fitful. The kite flailed and sank. The boy’s skin was dark and gleaming in the sunlight. The kite was a beauty, William thought. A black-and-yellow bat wing.
For a moment the boy’s eyes caught his and there was a flash of communication—an acknowledgment in the Greater World of each other’s difficulties.
J may yet talk my way out of this, William thought.
“Colonel Tyler, suppose I admit I’m unqualified to hold the office of President of the United States.”
“I have a gun on you. You might admit any damn thing.”
“Nonetheless, I do admit it. I’m not qualified. I say it without reservation, and I’ll continue to say it when you put the gun away. I’ll sign a paper if you like. Colonel, would you care to help me nominate a successor?”
For the first time, Tyler seemed uncertain.
“I’m quite sincere,” William hurried on. “I want your advice. Whom did you have in mind? Charlie Boyle? But he’s not trustworthy anymore, is he? He’s ‘diseased.’ The Vice-President? The same, I’m afraid. The Speaker of the House?”
“This is contentious bullshit,” Tyler said, but he looked suddenly miserable and distracted.
“Colonel Tyler, it would not surprise me if you were the highest-ranking military officer not under the influence of what you call a disease. I don’t know how the chain of command operates in a case like this. It’s something the Constitution doesn’t anticipate. But if you want the job—”
“My Christ, you’re completely insane,” Tyler said. But the gun wavered in his hand.
“It’s a question of constituency. That’s the fundamental problem. Colonel, do you know how many people turned down the opportunity to live forever? Roughly one in ten thousand.”
“You can’t possibly know that.”
“For the sake of argument, let’s assume I do. The population of the Earth is roughly six billion, which yields six hundred million individuals who are not, as you say, diseased. Quite a number. But not all of them are Americans—not by a long shot. Colonel Tyler, do you recall the last census estimate of the American population? It’s vague in my mind. Something on the order of three hundred million. That would give you a constituency of roughly thirty thousand people. The size of a large town. Quite an amenable size for a democracy, in my opinion. Under ideal circumstances, you could establish direct representative government… if you mean to continue holding elections.”
Colonel Tyler’s eyes had begun to glaze. “I can’t accept that. I—”
“Can’t accept what? My argument? Or the Presidency?”
“You can’t confer that on me! You can’t hand it to me like some kind of Cracker Jack prize!”
“But you were willing to take it away with a gun—you and your allies.”
“That’s different!”
“Is it? It’s not exactly due process.”
“I’m not the fucking President! You’re the fucking President!”
“You can shoot me if you want, Colonel Tyler.” He stood up, a calculated risk, and made his voice imperious. He became the President of the United States—as Tyler had insisted—one more weary time. “If you shoot me once or twice I might survive. I understand this body of mine is a little tougher than it used to be. If you shoot me repeatedly, the body will be beyond repair. Though it seems a shame to-clutter Lafayette Square with a corpse on such a fine sunny morning.”
Colonel Tyler stood up and kept the pistol against William’s belly. “If you can die, you’re not immortal.”
“The body is mortal. I’m not. There is a portion of the Artifact that contains my—I suppose essence is the best word. I am as much there as I am here. I am awake here, Colonel, and I am asleep there… but if you shoot me you’ll only reverse the equation.”
A wind swept through the park. A dozen yards away, the boy’s kite flapped and hesitated. Pull, William thought. Work the string.
The kite soared, black and yellow in a blue sky.
“Let’s take a walk, Colonel,” William said. “My legs cramp if I don’t stretch them once in a while.”
* * *
They walked along 17th toward Potomac Park, past the Corcoran Art Gallery and the offices of the OAS, the blind jumble of Washington architecture.
The city’s most revealing buildings were still its monuments, William thought. The Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial. An American idea of a British idea of a Roman idea of the civic architecture of the Greeks.
But the Athenians had operated their democracy in the agora. We should have copied their marketplaces, not their temples. Should have moved in some fruit stands, William thought. A rug vendor or two. Called Congress to session among the peanut carts on Constitution Avenue.
He had once loved the idea of democracy. He had loved it the way he loved his beach in Maine. Like his love of the beach, he had misplaced his love of democracy in the long journey to the White House.
Oh, he mentioned the word in speeches. But all the juice had gone out of it.
He wondered if Colonel Tyler had ever really loved democracy. He suspected the Colonel had never loved a beach.
“You gave all this away,” Tyler was saying. “It went without a battle. Not a raised fist, Mr. President. It’s a crime worth a bullet, don’t you think?”
The gun had retreated into a holster under the Colonel’s jacket, but William was still acutely aware of its presence.
“What are you suggesting I gave away, Colonel?”
“ America,” Tyler said. “The nation. It’s sovereignty.”
“Hardly mine to give up.”
“But you collaborated.”
“Only if you persist in seeing this as an invasion. Well. I suppose I did collaborate, in a certain way.” It was true, the President’s significant dream had come a few nights before the rest. Early Contacts fell into two categories: the very ill and the very powerful. The ill, so their diseases wouldn’t carry them off at the eleventh hour. The powerful, so dangerous mistakes might
not be made. “I think of it as cooperation, not collaboration.”
“I think of it as treason,” Tyler said flatly.
“Is it? What choice did I have? Was there some way to resist? Would a panic have changed anything?”
“We’ll never know.”
“No, I don’t suppose we will. But, Colonel, the process has been democratic. I think you have to admit that much. The question—the question of living forever and all that it entails—was asked of everyone. You think I should have spoken for America. But I couldn’t, and I didn’t have to. America spoke for itself. Colonel, it’s obvious you were able to turn down that offer. Others could have made the same choice. By and large, they didn’t.”
“Absurd,” Tyler said. “Do you really believe that? You think creatures who can invade your metabolism and occupy your brain can’t lie about it?”
“But did they? You were as ‘invaded’ as everyone else. And yet, here we are.”
“I said I might be immune.”
“To the compulsion but not to the asking? It’s an odd kind of immunity, Colonel.”
They settled on a bench in the Constitution Gardens where pigeons worried the grass for crumbs. William wondered what the pigeons had made of all these sweeping changes in the human epistemos. Fewer tourists. But the few were more generous.
He should have brought something to feed the birds.
“Think about what you’re telling me,” Tyler said. “They approached everyone? Every human being on the surface of the earth? Including infants? Senile cripples in rest homes? Criminals? The feebleminded?”
“I’m given to understand, Colonel, that the children always said yes. They don’t believe in death, I think. An infant, a baby, might not have the language—but the question was not posed entirely in language. The infants and the senile share a will to live, even if they can’t articulate it. Similarly the mentally ill. There is a nugget of self that understands and responds. Even the criminals, Colonel, though it is a long journey for them even if they accept this gift, because it comes with the burden of understanding, and they have many terrible things they may not want to know about themselves. Some of the worst of them will have turned down the offer.”
The Harvest Page 10
