Capitol

by Orson Scott Card

  It said:

  "Today Russian troops entered New York State and Maine from Quebec. The National Guard is trying to cope with the emergency as U.S. Army units converge on the area. We believe that the aggression will be dealt with shortly, but in, the meantime we are proceeding with an orderly evacuapon of New York City, Buffalo, Rochester, and other major cities that seem to be primary targets for the enemy.

  "Throughout our administration we have struggled to maintain at least a semblance of detente. We have struggled for peace. Let the court of world opinion decide whether we have done badly. But the time for peace and restraint has ended. We will fight as necessary to preserve our great nation.

  "Because I know it will be asked, I answer the question, 'Will we use nuclear weapons?' The answer is an unequivocal no. I wish I could say the reason was altruistic. But blood will be shed anyway. The reason we will not launch our missiles is because today our aerial photographs showed that the Russians did not remove their missiles from Quebec or Cuba after all. Today they removed the camouflage so we would know how futile an attempt to launch missiles would be. Because the moment we begin preparations for launch; the enemy will have destroyed us. It is that simple. So we will fight on the ground and in the air and on the sea with conventional weapons, and, God willing, we shall prevail. Pray for our soldiers. And pray for their commanders."

  George set the paper back on the senator's desk, slowly.

  "We used to joke about the day the Russians invaded."

  The senator buried his face in his hands. "The press release doesn't even begin to tell the story; George. The Russians aren't meeting any resistance."

  "The National Guard--"

  "The National Guard is breaking and running at every confrontation. The National Guard is taking its weapons and going home, presumably to protect their families. And we all saw what our Army can do in Europe. It can run. But it can't fight."

  George felt sick. "But I thought--"

  "No one thought. Nobody gives a damn. For the last five years we've been in the worst situation the world could possibly be in, and no one stopped making money long enough to notice." The senator picked up the first few folders of George's report. "Starships. I wish I had one now. I would fly far, far away. I'll make a bet with you, George. I'll bet you that the enemy's in Washington within two weeks. And I'll bet you that the U.S. surrenders within a month. And I'll bet you that during all that time, we outnumbered them and outgunned them three or four to one."

  "I hope you're wrong."

  "I'm being optimistic, George. Now get the hell out of my office and take your starships with you."

  George had to call his secretary at Berkeley, which was hard, since the phone lines were crowded, but he got the number of Aggie's lawyer. He caught him in his office just as he was leaving.

  "After a year, now, you suddenly decide to call," the lawyer said.

  "Things are worse than anyone thinks," George insisted. "Give me Aggies phone number."

  "She's forbidden me to give you any information as to her whereabouts, Mr. Rines, and I don't have time to argue with you. I have a case in court in half an hour and I have to leave immediately."

  "A case in court! You idiot, I can't believe you're going to a case in court! You're in New Jersey! The Russians aren't two hundred miles away! And you have a case in court!"

  "Don't be an alarmist."

  "Listen, listen to me. I just talked to Senator Maxwell. He estimates we only have a few days. Days, he said. I have passes and clearances that can let me use high priority aircraft to get Aggie and the girls to California, where it's safer. Do you understand that? I can save their lives or at least let them live without being inconvenienced and heaven knows they love not to be inconvenienced, particularly by bullets, so give me their telephone number and their address and don't give me any more argument."

  The lawyer, still reluctantly, gave George the telephone number and the address. It was a Virginia telephone number, and the address was in Sterling Park. Half an hour if the roads were clear.

  And, to his surprise, the roads were nearly clear. It was as if there were no war at all. Business as usual. Delivery trucks, the normal number of cars. No exodus into the countryside. No panic. Not even a sense of grim determination to fight. The only grimness was from the habitual speeders who resented the presence of drivers going the normal rate of speed. George was one of those who sped. He turned on the radio-- sure enough, the news was blaring out every fifteen minutes. But in between they were still playing music. The top forty on some stations; easy listening on others; a talk statio was interviewing a man who swam the Chesapeake Bay once a week. "Someday soon I plan to swim it the long way. The only real danger is from the pollution. One swallow of the water is like smoking a pack a day for ten years." Laughter from the studio audience.

  Am I living in the same world with these people? George couldn't believe the indifference. If all the world is crazy, I must be the one who's insane.

  But he got to Sterling Park, and found his wife and daughters packing a four-wheel-drive vehicle.

  "Aggie," he said, and when Agle turned around George was relieved to see that she was happy to see him, that her arms reached out instinctively for him, and he embraced her and told her he could get them to California immediately, it's a good thing they were packing, and hurry.

  "We are hurrying," Aggie said. "But George, you don't understand. We've been ready for this for a year now. We knew this was going to happen. We know where we're going to go. And it isn't California."

  "But California's safer."

  "Wo place is safer, George, except away from the cities. We didn't know you'd be here, George, but we have enough to spare. We even have an extra sleeping bag. Come with us, George."

  She meant it. She wanted him. And he remembered the lonely nights coming home to his apartment. He almost said yes. But then he remembered his work at Berkeley.

  "I can't," he said. "I have work to do. Why do you think I have the priority passes?"

  "Work?" she said, and her face turned, bitter. "Playing with rats?"

  "Aggie, I've found the way that we can travel to the stars!"

  "And we've found the way we can travel to the hills. Which do you think is more practical?"

  She turned her back on him and went back to loading the jeep. He watched for another fifteen minutes or so, trying to think of something to say. Finally he said good-bye.

  "Good-bye, Daddy," Diane said.

  "I'm afraid for you," he said.

  Aggic turned to him and acidly retorted, "Afraid? You'll never notice the war, George."

  "I notice it."

  "You know it's going on. But it won't change anything, will it? You've got work to do. Save the world. Go to the stars. Clean up rat shit. Nothing, but nothing, can interfere with that."

  The words stung. She had said them before, during their many quarrels before the separation, but they stung now, because he saw that he was no different from Aggie's lawyer-- both trying to conduct business as usual, both shutting out the storms that would soon sweep the world away. Almost. Almost he said, "I'll go with you." But he could not. It was impossible.

  "It's impossible," he said. "I am what I am. I can't change."

  Aggie smiled a little then. "How fatal for you. I am also what I am. I wish it weren't true. I wish I could cultivate your oblivion to reality. "

  "I wish I could think my work was as trivial as you do."

  "If wishes were fishes."

  "We'd never starve." And they laughed in memory of a joke they had shared years ago when they still shared jokes. And then George got back in his car and, because he had priority passes, he was able to get on one of the few airplanes that wasn't shuttling troops to the front, and he was in Berkeley when the news came about the surrender.

  The troops had begun fighting, but they kept coming to cities in their slow retreat. And in every city they came to, most of the citizens had refused to evacuate. "Declare us an open city
," the mayors would say. "There are too many people to evacuate, and a battle would kill thousands. Millions. Declare us an open city." And so the military declared it an open city and moved on.

  In less than a week they were at the outskirts of Washington, D.C., and when the general commanding the division that had just left Baltimore realized that even now Congress couldn't make up its mind, he surrendered and went home. And by that night, the war was over, except for a few futile pockets of resistance in the South and the West and the Midwest.

  The first Russian troops to arrive in Berkeley only three days later found George Rines standing guard over his files with a few like-minded graduate assistants, as others, led by Doran Waite, tried to break in to burn the papers. "You can't let the Russians have this!"

  "I can't let this knowledge be destroyed!" George yelled back. And then the submachine guns were pointed at them and the fight was over and the files were safe for posterity and it was only then that George realized that what he was fighting for was not knowledge, but his command of it, and the Russian scientists came only a week later and George was out of a job. They occasionally visited him to ask questions, but other than that, he was not allowed into the building. "Security," the Russians told him. "You might try to destroy something."

  Eventually, however, they let him back in, offering him a position as a lab assistant. He took it.

  And he watched in frustration as they kept making mistakes, kept violating simple rules of procedure, and he realized serious research was dead here. Enough had been done that somec and braintaping could be done on a fairly large scale. It didn't occur to the Russians-- or they were forbidden to let it occur to them-- that there was a great deal more theoretical work to be done on the question of man's soul.

  "Am I correct," the Russian supervisor asked him one day, "in believing that your final report declares that these sleepers can never be revived?"

  "Not as themselves. Not as sane human beings. They'd have to be cared for as infants."

  "And they all have cancer?"

  "Or something else."

  That evening, at closing time, Goerge heard a Russian casually mention the fact that the bodies of the sleepers had all been sent to the mortuary for cremation.

  "What?" George asked. He had heard correctly, they told him. "But they're people!" he insisted, shouting at the supervisor, whom he accosted in the lobby of the research building.

  "Hopelessly ill people who can never be productively awakened. By any man's definition they're dead."

  "Not by mine!" George insisted.

  The Russian laughed. "Angry, aren't you? If you Americans had shown half so much spirit on the battlefield, we might not be here today." And he left.

  George went to the files and reread the dialogues. Now he saw easily the real person behind the facade of phony memories. Now he loved them all, and mourned for their deaths. Now he understood why Aggie had left him, because in the long run all his work could be so easily undone, and at the last only the people remain, the only achievements that matter are the people he knew, and he realized he knew the dead sleepers better than he knew his wife, his daughters, or himself.

  It was not in his nature to kill himself.

  So he went to the braintaping room and erased his braintape. Then he went to the somec lab and injected the somec into his veins. They would cremate him, when they realized they had no hope of reviving him. But he would be asleep, and wouldn't notice.

  And in the meantime, his memories were gone, because he knew who he really was, and he couldn't, after all, live with himself. Who you are may be fixed by the genes, he said to himself as the somec swept through him. But it doesn't mean you have to like it.

  A THOUSAND DEATHS

  Am I therefore become your enemy, because I tell you the truth?

  -- Galatians 4:16

  "You will make no speeches," said the prosecutor.

  "I didn't expect they'd let me," Jerry Crove answered, affecting a confidence he didn't feel. The prosecutor was not hostile; he seemed more like a high school drama coach than a man who was seeking Jerry's death.

  "They not only won't let you, " the prosecutor said, "but if you try anything, it will go much worse for you. We have you cold, you know. We don't need anywhere near as much proof as we have."

  "You haven't proved anything."

  "We've proved you knew about it," the prosecutor insisted mildly. "No point arguing now. Knowing about treason and not reporting it is exactly equal to committing treason."

  Jerry shrugged and looked away.

  The cell was bare concrete. The door was solid steel. The bed was a hammock hung from hooks on the wall. The toilet was a can with a removable plastic seat. There was no conceivable way to escape. Indeed, there was nothing that could conceivably occupy an intelligent person's mind for more than five minutes. In the three weeks he had been here, he had memorized every crack in the concrete, every bolt in the door. He had nothing to look at, except the prosecutor. Jerry reluctantly met the man's gaze.

  "What do you say when the judge asks you how you plead to the charges?"

  "Nolo contendere."

  "Very good. It would be much nicer if you'd consent to say 'guilty'," the prosecutor said.

  "I don't like the word."

  "Just remember. Three cameras will be pointing at you. The trial will be broadcast live. To America, you represent all Americans. You must comport yourself with dignity, quietly accepting the fact that your complicity in the Assassination of Peter Anderson--"

  "Andreyevitch--"

  "Anderson has brought you to the point of death, where all depends on the mercy of the court. And now I'll go have lunch. Tonight we'll see each other again. And remember. No speeches. Nothing embarrassing."

  Jerry nodded. This was not the time to argue. He spent the afternoon practicing conjugations of Portuguese irregular verbs, wishing that somehow he could go back and undo the moment when he agreed to speak to the old man who had unfolded all the plans to assassinate Andreyevitch. "Now I must trust you," said the old man. "Temos que conflar no senhor americano. You love liberty, no?"

  Love liberty? Who knew anymore? What was liberty? Being free to make a buck? The Russians had been smart enough to know that if they let Americans make money, they really didn't give a damn which language the government was speaking. And, in fact, the government spoke English anyway.

  The propaganda that they had been feeding him wasn't funny. It was too true. The United States had never been so peaceful; it was more prosperous than it had been since the Vietnam War boom thirty years before. And the lazy, complacent American people were going about business as usual. As if pictures of Lenin on buildings and billboards were just what they had always wanted.

  I was no different, he reminded himself. I sent in my work application, complete with oath of allegiance. I accepted it meekly when they opted me out for a tutorial with a high Party official. I even taught his damnable little children for three years in Rio.

  When I should have been writing plays.

  But what do I write about? Why not a comedy-- The Yankee and the Commissar, a load of laughs about a woman commissar who marries an American blue blood who manufactures typewriters. There are no women commissars, of course, but one must maintain the illusion of a free and equal society.

  "Bruce, my dear," says the commissar in a thick but sexy Russian accent, "your typewriter company is suspiciously close to making a profit."

  "And if it were running at a loss, you'd turn me in, yes, my little noodle?" (Riotous laughs from the Russians in the audience; the Americans are not amused, but then, they speak English fluently and don't need broad humor. Besides, the reviews are all approved by the Party, so we don't have to worry about the critics. Keep the Russians happy, and screw the American audience.) Dialogue continues:

  "All for the sake of Mother Russia."

  "Screw Mother Russia."

  "Please do," says Natasha. "Regard me as her personal incarnation."


  Oh, but the Russians do love onstage sex. Forbidden in Russia, of course, but Americans are supposed to be decadent.

  I might as well have been a ride designer for Disneyland, Jerry thought. Might as well have written shtick for vaudeville. Might as well go stick my head in an oven. But with my luck, it would be electric.

  He may have slept. He wasn't sure. But the door opened, and he opened his eyes with no memory of having heard footsteps approach. The calm before the storm: and now, the storm.

  The soldiers were young, but unslavic. Slavish but definitely American. Slaves to the Slavs. Put that in a protest poem sometime, he decided, if only there were someone who wanted to read a protest poem.

  The young American soldiers (But the uniforms were wrong. I'm not old enough to remember the old ones, but these are not made for American bodies.) escorted him down corridors, up stairs, through doors, until they were outside and they put him into a heavily armored van. What did they think, he was part of a conspiracy and his fellows would come to save him? Didn't they know that a man in his position would have no friends by now?

  Jerry had seen it at Yale. Dr. Swick had been very popular. Best damn professor in the department. He could take the worst drivel and turn it into a play, take terrible actors and make them look good, take apathetic audiences and make them, of all things, enthusiastic and hopeful. And then one day the police had broken into his home and found Swick with four actors putting on a play for a group of maybe a score of friends. What was it-- Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Jerry remembered. A sad script. A despairing script. But a sharp one, nonetheless, one that showed despair as being an ugly, destructive thing, one that showed lies as suicide, one that, in short, made the audience feel that, by God, something was wrong with their lives, that the peace was illusion, that the prosperity was a fraud, that America's ambitions had been cut off and that so much that was good and proud was still undone--

  And Jerry realized that he was weeping. The soldiers sitting across from him in the armored van were looking away. Jerry dried his eyes.