by Jim Stark
"So ... what happened?” he ventured.
"Well,” drawled Tirone, “Buck told me he found out how come he always messed up with the ladies, for one thing."
Ray didn't bite. Buck made his own bed, just like everybody else, and if he didn't care to lie in it ... well, tough shit. Besides, every red-blooded stud from Gatineau all the way to Fort Coulonge envied the guy, envied the fact that he got more tail than any other three dudes lumped together, even after adjusting for the bragging and B.S. Shoulda took my own car, Ray thought.
"He said he had a dream, too,” explained Tirone as they approached the outskirts of Gatineau.
"Oh yeah?” said Ray, trying to sound interested and figuring this ought to be easier to swallow than the tribulations of Buck's sex life.
"Yeah,” said Tirone as he checked the rearview to make sure he hadn't outrun the pack. “He says it came to him every night since they put him on those painkiller drugs ... but he says it's not the drugs, it's for real ... or at least it will be, in a way."
Ray didn't like being stuck up in the air like that, but it seemed real clear that Tirone wasn't going to finish his stupid story unless he got some sort of personalized invitation. “Oh yeah?” he managed, again, in a tone that put a big question mark at the end, beside the aggravation mark.
"Yeah,” said Tirone. “It was like that guy—uh—jeeze—that black guy. He gave that famous speech in Washington there, about having a dream ... then he got shot..."
"Martin Luther King,” intoned Ray, in a manner that seemed to say, “Read a damned book, for God's sake ... any book at all."
"That's the guy!” exploded Tirone. “But that King fellow, he wasn't talking about an actual sound-asleep-type dream, and he was into all that religious stuff, of course, but he sure got everybody all riled up about things being different from what they were, better, for black people. You must have seen it on the TV, eh? Crops up every now and then."
"I seen it,” sighed Ray.
"Well, Buck said that in his dream, he saw himself up on this stage with everybody in the whole friggin’ world standing there like an ocean of faces, as far as the eye could see, rocking back and forth and singing some kind of song that repeated over and over and over, and he—"
"A round,” Ray cut in.
"What!?” barked Tirone—he didn't like stupid interruptions much.
"It's called a ... never mind ... go on."
"So anyways, Buck sees himself standing at the microphone talking out of this huge loudspeaker system, shouting about how things were soon going to get like unbelievably better after we stop lying to each other and bullshitting each other, eh? And he said it was like all of history got divided into two, and like the big turning point was the invention of the LieDeck machine, and starting next year, everybody's got to get used to being ... you know ... nice.
"And he said we got no choice any more, and after we stop bitching about it, we're all gonna kind of get ... used to it, and even start liking it and wondering how come we were such jerks beforehand, and then he said we're gonna start finding new ways of looking at everything, like sex and power and money and taking care of the planet and all that. And he said in his dream, everybody gets sort of hooked on that vision, eh? And so they start imagining what it could be like, and then they realized that the world actually will be like that if ... you know ... if we don't screw it up first. Like everybody's imagination starts running wild, and then whammo, they get hit again right in the freakin’ gut by realizing that this transformation was really and truly going to happen. It was like everybody in the world found Jesus, sort of, all at the same time, except that there was no need for a Jesus person ... like the idea of Jesus got replaced by something real. And you know what he said it all boils down to, in the dream he had? He said that everybody stops being scared ... scared of anything ... even dying!"
Tirone stopped talking and just steered for a bit, letting his mind go on a fine run with Buck's most excellent dream. They were on the Champlain Bridge now, crossing over the river to Ottawa, to Ontario, to a situation that belied all that theorizing about not being afraid of the end of life. He reflected a bit on Buck's odd terror of being buried alive by mistake, and realized that sorting stuff out in your brain and actually being that way were two altogether different things. “Still, if people all joined together and helped each other to change over...” he said aloud, forgetting that Ray hadn't had the advantage of hearing what led up to that.
Ray gave him a glance that said, “You're losing it, pal,” but Tirone missed it. For his part, Tirone figured that no way was Ray going to catch on all that quick anyway, so he decided not to even finish his story about Buck's dream. And besides, it was now sort of his dream too, Tirone's dream, and a dream that might soon belong to millions ... even billions, maybe.
"Buck said he talked to Father ... to Steve about that too,” said Tirone, “about talking out loud to yourself. He said it's like lots of people like to exercise their bodies, but not too many people like to exercise their minds, eh? He said most people were ... aw jeeze, what the hell did he call that?” Tirone twisted his face and banged his left temple with the butt of his left hand. He hated it when he couldn't remember stuff, and it seemed to be happening more and more often as the years rolled by. “Intellectual couch potatoes!” he yelped. “That was it! Fucking intellectual couch potatoes was what he said people were. You got to admit the guy's got a way with words, eh?"
Ray took a final drag on a cigarette and flicked the butt out the window. He'd had enough of Tirone's gobbledygook for one day.
"You shouldn't do that, you know,” said Tirone, meaning the butt out the window.
"Oh fuck right off,” said Ray, which killed the conversation for the rest of the way in.
By 8:50 p.m., the gang of revelers had assembled on the third floor of the indoor parking garage at the Ottawa General. A couple of cold ones were tucked into Tammy Lucas's handbag, for Buck, and then thirteen people walked down the garage stairs and across to the hospital, led by Tirone, with old Jesse McCain pulling up the rear. They all squeezed onto one elevator, and if you judged by the squeals and complaints, there was a fair amount of bum-pinching going on in the close quarters.
A man in a wheelchair gawked at the invasion as it disembarked on the sixth floor. The lone woman at the nursing station looked concerned.
"Excuse me,” she said authoritatively. “You're looking for whom?"
"For whoooommm?” mimicked Jesse McCain, with a face like he'd just discovered an anchovy in his ice cream.
"We're here to visit Buckminster Ash,” announced a slightly tipsy Merrick McFee.
"It's okay,” said Tirone. “We're all his friends. I know where his room is."
"Could you ... just wait here for one minute?” asked the nurse, very forcefully, “while I...” She was down the hall, out of earshot, before the rest of the words came out.
"Maybe he's on the can,” suggested Claire hesitantly, “or he's getting another test or something."
Ten seconds later, Helen Kozinski walked up the hall with the nurse, and everybody could tell. They were too late.
"Buck didn't make it,” said Helen. “He just took a deep breath and—uh—expired. He died ... easy."
"I'll be back in a minute,” said Tirone as he took off down the hall and struggled to keep his composure. “There's something I gotta do."
Chapter 55
IN GOD'S NAME
Randall Whiteside sat at his desk, feeling overwhelmed by the events of the day—of the past week, actually. Adding to his dark burden, he had just learned from Helen, half an hour ago, that Buck Ash had lost his battle with lung cancer. He didn't know “the Buck” that well, but he had loved to watch him play hockey when they were both a lot younger, and he had personally instructed Cam to hire him when his injuries had made him an NHL has-been. What next, he wondered.
"Next” was a pre-arranged phone call that was due to come in shortly, a call he had to handle himself. It ha
d been set up twenty minutes earlier between Helen and the rather surly representative of the Vatican to Canada. The Papal Nuncio had initiated the process, and he had been emphatic about the precise timing of the call, and totally uncooperative about its purpose. Randall thought it might have to do with Bill Doyle's suicide, or with the race riots, but serious as these things were, they hardly called for an intervention from the pope. Guess I'll just have to wait and see what the man's got on his mind.
"Everything set?” he asked over the speakerphone.
"Ten-four,” came Helen's voice.
"Are those protesters ever going to go home and get some sleep?"
"Doesn't look that way,” she replied. “A couple left, but six more just straggled in. There's about forty of them now, and they seem to be stuck on that one main chant they dreamed up. The minister—the sweaty little fart with the loud bullhorn—we were able to LieDeck him using a directional mike, and—"
"Let me guess,” interrupted Randall. “He doesn't even believe it himself, right?"
"You got it,” said Helen.
"Assholes,” he muttered.
The question of religion was really bothering Randall. Even though he'd never bought into the “God trip,” he had recently LieDeck-verified himself on the subject to test out his attitudes. He found out that if he discounted the psychiatric dimension, the mental health implications of believing in and praying to and obeying someone who doesn't exist, what remained was fairly positive. He tended to view religion as a legitimate part of the social landscape. In fact, he accepted it as benign, for the most part.
But that was before the believers—"Godists,” they were called by a robust and very outspoken atheist community—had decided to focus their boisterous attentions on the head office of Whiteside Technologies, and on himself in particular. He understood the psychology of the move, why they would decide to take their frustrations out on him. They were, after all, in crisis—Judaism, Christianity, Islam, the lot of them—ever since the LieDeck started beeping them into personal humiliation ... and corporate insolvency. Still, it's not fair for them to blame their problems on me, he thought.
"Any Catholics out there?"
"We can't really tell,” said Helen. “None in uniform. The cops told me the bullhorn guy is a Reverend Robert Barnes. He's a fundamentalist preacher, and he ran an ad on the radio calling on all believers to join in at our front gate, so we—"
"And that's the whole team, only a few dozen?” he scoffed.
"Well ... so far,” said Helen.
Randall turned up the volume on the speakerphone and wandered over to the window. Twelve stories below, beyond the floodlit parking lot and front lawn of the office tower, it looked like a police convention.
On the near side of the street, there was a string of twenty or so cruisers and vans, all with their blue-red roof strobe lights ablaze, giving the site the air of a rock concert. The demonstrators had been restricted to the far side of the street, opposite the main gate. Randall could see only their heads and their placards because eighty or so police officers were standing about two feet in front of them, shoulder to shoulder, in a straight line. The cops were dressed in full riot gear—helmets, face guards, bulletproof vests—and they were holding clear plastic shields and black truncheons. This was the second day in a row that they had been called out to the Whiteside plant, and they obviously didn't want any repetition of the car bombing they'd had to cope with yesterday. They were also keenly aware that Canada was now officially under martial law, and they didn't want to lose control to the point where the Army had to come in and save their butts.
The protesters were holding hands and rocking back and forth, ignoring the police and chanting their nasty ditty. From inside his office, Randall couldn't distinguish the words, not even from the little guy with the leather lungs and the battery-powered megaphone, but he knew what they were saying:
Enemy of God, you will fail,
Randall Whiteside belongs in jail.
It baffled Randall that fully grown adults would expend so much time and energy trying to “kill the messenger.” No, not kill me, he mused. They just want me thrown in jail, and they probably want that only because it rhymes with “fail.” I wonder if they would've toddled on home and done something constructive if they hadn't been able to come up with a slogan that rhymed? I wonder if some day the shrinks will redefine belief in God as a psychiatric disorder?
"Have we got any agents in there with them?” he asked loudly.
"Three,” came Helen's voice, “chanting along with gusto, and hoping you don't take it personally. Want me to fire them?” she added with a chuckle.
Randall ignored her small attempt at humor. It felt extremely uncomfortable having an interfaith jihad aimed personally at him, and he wondered how the kids and Doreen would react to news reports of this latest development ... even if the protesters were sure to be portrayed by the media as nothing more than a bunch of deluded airheads.
He also wondered why the L.A.P. group hadn't been more alert, hadn't been clever enough to expect this impact of the LieDeck, or why Patriot hadn't been able to predict it. It bothered him that he hadn't anticipated this kind of entanglement himself, and he felt that he would have been sharper in his analysis a decade ago. I must be losing my edge, he thought as he glanced at his watch and returned to his desk. Hope I can hang on until Michael's old enough to take over ... mature enough.
It was exactly 10:30 p.m. when Randall's private phone rang. “If that's the Pope, tell him I'll call back,” he said.
"What!?” gasped Helen.
"I'm kidding,” he said as it rang for the second time. “I just ... always wanted to say that."
"Jesus,” said Helen, “answer the goddam—"
Randall silenced the speakerphone and picked up his private line. “Your Holiness,” he said deferentially. “I'm truly honored."
"Mr. Whiteside,” came the mellow drawl of the first-ever pontiff of American origin, “I appreciate the opportunity of this private conversation. I understand you do not believe in God?"
"Uh—no, I ... don't,” stuttered Randall, who was taken aback by the strange opening foray. “I ... understand you do,” he said nervously.
"My beliefs are not at issue,” came the stiff reply—no one liked being put on the spot about their beliefs any more, not with the possibility their words could be checked out on a LieDeck in real time or later, by verifying a tape. “I would like to invite you to come to Rome to meet privately with a select committee drawn from the College of Cardinals. Do you accept?"
Randall was caught off guard once again. He saw no useful purpose being served by such a visit, but he also knew what the media would do with the story if he said no to the Pope. “There is a gentleman in my employ,” he said carefully, “Steve Sutherland, and he is a former Catholic bishop. If he is willing to go, I'd be pleased to send him as my—"
"This invitation is for you only,” stated the Pope, unequivocally.
Curiously, Randall found himself amused to be talking to a pope with a Tennessee accent. He quickly refocused. “I accept ... with pleasure,” he said, “but my visit will have to wait for a few—"
"The meeting is tomorrow,” the Pope shot back.
"Then ... I'm sorry,” said Randall. “I can't just—"
"The invitation is withdrawn,” said the Pope. “Mr. Whiteside, before we part, may I ask you a personal question?"
"Of ... course,” said Randall.
"Did you know that the LieDeck would have the effect of undermining the faith?"
"No ... of course not,” said Randall. “If I had, I ... I...” His voice stopped as his mind frantically searched for words.
"Yes?” came the pope's hard-edged voice. “If you had..."
Randall couldn't find an ending for the sentence he'd begun with such certitude, at least not one that would survive LieDeck-verification. He hated hypotheticals, and this one irritated him profoundly. If I'd had time to study this matter in adv
ance, he thought, I might have been inclined to take a bit more...
Something inside cancelled that flight, and reminded him that he had planned to take several months to study the LieDeck ... perhaps even for a year before it was released. It was not his fault that the schedule had to be moved up. That's why we set up the L.A.P., he said to himself, to give ourselves time to study these questions. And then, as usually happened on those rare occasions when he found himself cornered, Randall flipped over to offence—the best defense.
"Your Holiness,” he said tersely, “some people in the press have suggested that the Catholic Church was a founding member of the World Democratic Alliance. I wonder if you—"
The phone went dead, instantaneously, not with the clunk of a hang-up, but with the silence of a high-tech switch. “Nice talking to you too, your popeliness,” he snarled as he hung up his private line. “Did you get it?” he asked after re-activating the speakerphone with Helen.
"Oh yeah,” she said, “for what it's worth.” She'd been taping the call, and LieDeck-verifying both parties.
"And ... what is it worth?” asked Randall.
"Well,” said Helen, reviewing her notes, “your first lie was about your being ‘truly honored,’ and you lied about being ‘pleased’ to send Steve to Rome, and about accepting his invitation ‘with pleasure,’ and about your visit ‘having to wait,’ and about being ‘sorry’ that you had to decline his invitation, but ... that's all pretty much diplomatic stuff. The one that counts is ... well, you lied about not anticipating the impact of the LieDeck on religious faith, sir. It—"
"But I ... I can't recall ever—"
"Apparently you ... you must have thought about it in the past and then ... forgot that you thought about it ... consciously ... but in your subconscious ... well, you know how that works."
Randall knew all too well. It was a hard lesson that a great many people were learning these difficult days. Sloppy thinking and forgetfulness were so ... forgivable, he thought, before the LieDeck.
He had always thought of himself as an honest man, a man who chose his words ever so carefully, and he honestly hadn't realized that he'd told five little white ones. Lies are lies, he said to himself, and if I didn't tell all those innocent ones, maybe when it came to the important issue, I might have been more...
