Dancy Flynn Thayer shot the commissar. Bright blood and gore spurted from his gaping chest wound, and Dancy’s grand-mother, Tessa Kai Flynn, said in a sweet voice, “Wonderful shot, darling!”
“Mother, you should be ashamed of yourself. It’s bad enough that you encourage Dancy—but now you’re actually playing those awful games?” Victorine Thayer admonished them.
A soft rustle behind them, she passed by their modular control chairs and snapped open the heavy drapes. Agonizingly bright sunlight struck them with a tangible warmth. Victorine pushed a control button on the wall, and the glass doors slid silently to the side. The sound of a lazy summer surf, the smell of salt and sand, and the jangling crowing of seagulls drifted in.
Turning to her sixteen-year-old daughter, Victorine put her hands on her hips and said with exaggerated patience, “And you, Miss Dancy Flynn Thayer. How many times have I explained to you how awkward it’s going to be if a commissar sees how you’ve altered the—those—”
“The Evil Horde of Ungol,” Dancy said gravely.
Victorine refused to be amused, outwardly at least. “—the wicked soldiers to look like commissars. And Dancy, really. Even without my glasses I can see that woman looks exactly like Third Commissar Silverthorne! We’ll probably be managing public amenity facilities in a Structured Dependence Zone if she sees that!”
“She won’t, Mama Vic, I promise I’ll zap it before she gets here tomorrow,” Dancy argued. “Besides, no self-respecting Cyclops operator would ever take a second look at this ancient, rickety game! The players, they aren’t even real! They’re—they’re like— dumb drawings, or something.”
“They’re called cartoons,” Victorine said with exaggerated patience. “And they’re real enough for those gory games you play.”
Suddenly smiling brightly, Dancy jumped up and threw her long arms around her mother’s neck. “I know, Mother, I love you, and I don’t care if you don’t let me play the Cyclops Ultimate Reality games. You know I don’t.”
Victorine immediately softened, and reverted to her vaguely anxious look again. She was not an unattractive woman, but she was untidy sometimes. Especially when she was preparing for a visit from the commissars. The chief and second ministers weren’t so bad, but the commissars were nerve-racking to cater to. They were arrogant and demanded outrageous services such as cooking for them, and then still seemed resentful that Victorine and her daughter and mother were there in their biosphere area to manage their Diversionary Facility.
Their resentment worried Victorine, for in the last ten years she’d seen people lose their homes without even that much of a reason. The worry made her absentminded, and she became a little frowsy and windblown when she was worried. Her hair was tangled and half of it was pulled back with an old tortoiseshell comb. Her glasses were hanging around her neck with a plastic cord that had broken, and was tied in a messy knot in one place. Her Tyvek-cotton pants had smudges at both knees.
But Dancy knew that by tomorrow, her mother would look so polished and dignified that she could calm even the gruffest of commissars. Her mother was a relic, yes, but in one way it was to her advantage: She was an intellectual, a truly intelligent woman who clearly knew a vast amount of things. Not all of them were particularly useful, but somehow her certainty of her intellectual superiority—though never arrogant—seemed to intimidate other adults in a manner that Dancy had never quite comprehended. When she grew older, she would recognize the qualities: They were called dignity and self-respect. All except the most brutish of beasts responded, however reluctantly, to these traits in a human being.
“Have you seen my copy of the Tang poems, Dancy?” Victorine asked abruptly, searching around the room as if to see them flying there, tucking a stray strand of hair into the lopsided comb.
“As if any normal human would steal those dry, incomprehensible things,” Tessa Kai, a spirited Irishwoman, replied to her daughter. “Of course Dancy doesn’t have them, Victorine, you’ve lost them.”
“I haven’t lost them, I just can’t find them,” Victorine replied somewhat distractedly. “They were right there, with those socket wrenches . . . who could have taken them?”
Well, she is very intelligent, Dancy amended her previous thoughts of her mother with amusement. She’s just a little disorganized at times . . . But people like her, they enjoy her, they like to be around her . . . except that awful Alia Silverthorne, Dancy thought fiercely. Why does she resent my mother so much? It doesn’t make any sense! She’s never been rude to me or to Grandmother Tessa Kai . . . why is she so hateful to Mother?
Behind them, the Cyclops gave a soft chirp and a robotic male’s deep voice intoned, “Victorine, you have a live comm coming in.”
“From whom?” Victorine asked impatiently.
“Third Commissar Alia Silverthorne, from an unknown location in the Shortgrass Steppe Biome.”
Victorine touched her messy hair self-consciously, then pulled her glasses from around her neck and hid them. Hurriedly she smoothed her clothing, took a deep breath, and sat down in Dancy’s chair. “Go,” she said to Dancy, who obediently scooted into the bedroom, followed by her grandmother. “Put her through, please,” Victorine said hastily.
The screen changed from the old toy war game, and Alia Silverthorne filled it. “Thayer, I’m canceling my scheduled diversionary weekend there tomorrow. None of my party will be there. But I want you to block out the sixth weekend from now; a large party will be coming. I’ll let you know the details later.”
“Yes, My Commissar,” Victorine said, wishing that she didn’t look as though she’d just come in out of a typhoon. Alia Silverthorne, as usual, had the hard sheen of a highly polished blade. “How many units do you wish blocked off ?”
“All of them.”
“All of—but, My Commissar, how can I refuse if another high commissar or some of the ministers—”
“Send word to my personal Cy II immediately if anyone reserves that weekend,” Alia said sharply. “Do you understand?”
“Yes, My Commissar.”
“Do you still have my personal access code?”
“Yes, My Commissar.”
“Good. Remember, let me know immediately.”
“Yes, My—” But Alia Silverthorne disappeared abruptly, and the enormous flat screen filled with the frozen image of the cartoon commissar sprawled on a cartoon desert with cartoon blood and guts coming out of his chest.
“I must go apologize to Dancy,” Victorine mused to herself. “And maybe I’ll ask her to teach me to play this game.”
The library of a luxurious beach cottage
House Island, off the coast of Maine
A fevered storm was brewing in Casco Bay, and the wind shrieked imprecations and beat at the old wooden shutters, making them shiver and crack. President Bishop Beckwith liked it. He liked storms; he admired their power, he reveled in their Gothic mystery, he responded on a deep personal level to their challenge. If he had been at the cottage alone, he would have, in defiance of all convention and common sense, gone for a walk along the wild and deserted shore.
But he was not alone. Men were with him, grave men, somber men, and there was much work to be done and difficult decisions to make. Beckwith, with a last, longing look at the wildness outside the shadowed and smoky room, turned his attention back to the man who sat in the wing chair to his left .
“So Therion’s meeting with some Germans in six weeks? Him and his witch? That doesn’t seem so ominous to me, my old friend.Remember, the Germans are our friends!” He spoke with caustic heartiness. Beckwith was a bombastic, colorful man who left a strong impression on people, and even imprinted rooms. He was a big, barrel-chested man, with a rich roar. His hair was thick, luxuriant, the color of purest silver. He had a tan that had been engraved on his skin in countless dawns and days and late afternoons as he had soldiered for thirty straight years. People loved him, hated him, despised him, worshiped him, feared him, but they never forgot him.
; The man on Beckwith’s left—an older man, weary-looking, with rounded shoulders—leaned up so that he could speak clearly to his friend. “Sir, you know as well as I do that Germany appears to have managed—again—to rise to superpower status, and has a standing in the world today that is equal in many ways to our own. If he is meeting with influential German officials, the vice president should announce if it is a state visit, or even if it’s purely a personal diversionary weekend.Certainly these days no one would care about that, as long as it’s just an orgy or something. But he didn’t. It’s the secretiveness of it that’s telling.”
Beckwith took a long time to reply. He did that. He could appear to be a hearty blabbering fool when it suited him, but in serious talk with men he trusted, he never insulted their intelligence in such a way.“Yes, you’re right. And as far as meeting on American soil—their military presence here is so integral, there would appear to be no reason to have to arrange a meeting in secret. They have—how many is it now— eighteen air bases?”
A man sitting in a nearby armchair, dressed in a khaki Marine uniform with a slender row of single ribbons but with two stars on his epaulets, nodded slowly. He was staring into the fire as it hissed and sizzled. The rain had begun. “Eighteen Luftwaffe bases, sir, and they have begun negotiations with the Commerce Department for another three.”
“They pay good money, and they mind their own business, and they never miss a chance to express their appreciation at our allowing German pilots and soldiers to train here,” Beckwith said heavily. “So why should Therion keep it a secret if he wants to meet with the lot of them?”
Beckwith stopped talking, but the four men present, and even the splendid Marine guards who unobtrusively stood at attention at each of the two doors, knew that it was a rhetorical question. Beckwith was just organizing his thoughts.
“It’s got to be that bloodsucking MAB Project,” he finally growled.“Gerade von Eisenhalt talks a good game in the chambers of the UN.He’s especially helpful and supportive when America wants to do something stupid.”
He stood, a towering, intimidating figure of a man, with a power that did not come from just being tall and muscular. He emanated strength, raw and barely contained, even at fifty-five years of age. He had never had any corrective surgeries; he openly scorned them. He had a daily physical workout regimen that would have stunned an ox.
“So what can they possibly do?” he asked, striding to the fireplace, grabbing the poker, and stoking the fire so savagely that the other men hoped the entire old cottage didn’t catch fire from the sparks. “Nothing.In the first place, Therion can’t hope to get any kind of legislation through without my knowledge; that’s ridiculous. He can’t issue any executive orders that I can’t cancel. He’s tried that before, remember?Sneaky little red-eyed rat.”
“You’re absolutely correct, sir,” his old friend in the wing chair said. “So. What is he doing? Something that must be kept secret, that’s what, and that means nothing good. And there’s something else that my sources managed to gather, sir. He’s using commissars for security. No Marine guards.”
Beckwith swore. He had requested, as a personal favor to him, that Therion always use U.S. Marine guards, as did he. Neither of them disdained their pervasive Secret Service protection, of course. But Beckwith felt that since he had to mealymouth those absurd earth platitudes all the time to assuage that slice of America, so Therion could tone down his Green fastidiousness and have a decorated and shining marine or two standing behind him as symbols of the nation’s military guardianship. Beckwith and Therion, the two men, despised each other, and each was incomprehensible to the other. But they had managed, in their seven years of office together, to make certain concessions to one another. Their peculiar blood and water had mixed to America’s taste, so they were generally careful to give the other every consideration possible—in public, at least.
“That little weasel and his cartoon SS troopers!” Beckwith grunted.“I hate ’em! Prancin’ little toylike soldiers, rounding up stray cattle and counting gophers and running good God-fearing people off their land.How did we come to this? How could this have happened—to Americans? What’s happened to our country, our people?” He shook his head, a curiously helpless gesture, jarring in such a forceful man. “But I’m wandering, aren’t I? I do that a lot these days. My time’s growing short, isn’t it, my old friends? And I haven’t made one whit of difference.Not a whit.”
All four men, spoke up, protesting, but Beckwith stopped them with an impatient cutting gesture. “So Therion’s taking the storm troopers with him, huh? Well, let him. In fact, good riddance to him.I don’t much like the idea of any of my boys being cooped up with that dreamy-eyed witch for a long, cozy weekend, anyway. She’s trouble, and I don’t mean a little, either.”
“People love her, sir,” Wing Chair said neutrally. “You don’t want to go around saying things like that too much.”
“I know, I know, but I’ve just about had it. For the night, anyway.I think all of you are getting your shirttails untucked for no reason. Let Therion go off dreaming his little Green dreams with his dainty little whore. If the Germans want to waste their time bowing down to rocks and worshiping bushes and kissing prairie dogs, that’s their crisis. I’m going for a walk—before my wife gets here. Because she wouldn’t let me go if she knew.”
He marched to the two Marines guarding the door. They were in dress blues, swords intact, brass shined to mirrors. “You little boys sure look pretty,” he boomed. “Guess if you get wet you’ll melt into sweet little puddles of goo, huh?”
“No, sir!” shouted his two “boys.” All soldiers were Bishop Beckwith’s “boys.”
“Ready to go and guard my precious body from the nasty raindrops, then?”
“Sir, yes sir!” they responded in unison.
“Let’s go then, little boys, if you can keep up with the old man.And keep a sharp eye out for my wife’s helo. We’ll have to run and hide for sure when she shows up.”
Beckwith, in private, got a positive delight in calling his second wife his wife, with emphasis added. It galled him to have to refer to wives and husbands as “partners,” so as not to offend the adulterers and homosexuals and who knows what other weird pairings that seemed to make up a lot of America these days. But there it was; it was a compromise he’d had to make, and one of the smaller and less consequential ones at that. Still, it was one of the most irritating for this straight-talking and straight-shooting man’s man.
Stamping to the mud room, he pulled on a thick sou’wester and jammed the hat on his head, shadowed by his “boys.” As he flung open the door and let the raging wind snatch his breath away, he decided that he was going to tell the world, on Cyclops, during the very next stupid speech he made, how proud he was of his wife! He didn’t care if he made every sensitive pervert in America cry when he did. He was out, anyway, in just a year. They could all go hang.
Back in the darkened library, the mood was not so exultant. The uniformed men looked to President Beckwith’s oldest friend, his closest adviser, and the savviest internal intelligence officer that had ever been a silent shadow in Washington. He looked troubled. “He just can’t make himself care anymore. Bishop’s tired, you know. He’s sick of it all.He’s fought valiantly and courageously, and he’s lost so many times. His victories have been few and small, and most of them unknown by his people and unappreciated when they did know. Oh, he won’t stop, he’ll keep on fighting until the last day, the last minute, his last breath. But I think he’s really glad it’ll all soon be over.”
The sad old man in the wing chair never knew how prophetic his words would prove to be.
PART II
FULL SUMMER
Now learn a parable of the fig tree; when his branch is yet tender, and putteth forth leaves, ye know that summer is nigh: So likewise ye, when ye shall see all these things, know that it is near, even at the doors.
—MATTHEW 24:32–33
From Nineveh the silk th
at made the sash
She wore about her. On it played the flash of splendid gems.
When Brunhild saw, she wept.
—FROM NIBELUNGENLIED (THE SONG OF THE NIBELUNGS)
But at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
—ANDREW MARVELL, FROM TO HIS COY MISTRESS
SEVEN
LIKE AN ENORMOUSTIDALWAVE, the Black Death scythed over Europe in the fourteenth century and slew nearly a third of the people in three years. The cry “Bring out your dead!” was echoed in every city and village, and the inhabitants of the royal castle died as quickly and as terribly as did the serf in his straw hut. During the height of the plague a song was sung by children:
Ring around the rosy,
Pocket full of posies,
Ashes, ashes,
All fall down!
The “ring around the rosy” was a description of the sign of the plague—a raw skin eruption encircled by a red ring. The doctors were helpless, and the common way of attempting to ward off the plague was to deck oneself with flowers—“a pocket full of posies.” “Ashes” referred to the great funeral pyres of corpses that burned—at first. Later, attempts at cremation were abandoned, as the dead seemed to outnumber the living. The final line sung so lightly by countless children all over the Western world for centuries to come—“All fall down”—was the grim fate of most who were infected.
Although the plague that struck the Native American population in the summer of 2028 never was given a popular label, some called it the Red Plague. “Red” referred not to any physical symptom, but to the fact that only Native Americans were susceptible to the disease.
Prior to the onslaught of the plague, Native Americans had secured generous federal lands and protection for their tribal homes. They grew proud and disdainful of the white race, and determined to be set completely apart from them. As a result, they became very insular, and interbreeding with other races, even other tribes, was rare. All tribes secured rights to have gambling casinos in order to develop their tourist trade.
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