What everyone here seemed to agree on was that the whole thing had at least begun as an American plot to destabilize Common Europe and fragment the world’s dominant economy. And while no one in Europe mourned the death of Harry Carson, no one seemed to take Nathan Wolfowitz seriously either.
From the European point of view, a maniacal adventurer had been replaced by a cypher who was a captive of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the Central Security Agency, which had been running the United States for years anyway. C’est normal, was the attitude. C’est l’Amérique. C’est la même merde.
Left, right, and center, the hatred of America now seemed far worse than anything Bobby remembered from his boyhood. When he changed to the Métro at the Gare du Nord, he saw anti-American graffiti scrawled everywhere. The magazine covers on the kiosks were more of the same. The faces of the people on the Métro were grim and angry-looking, staring into space, more like a New York crowd than his memory of Parisians, and such was his paranoia, that it seemed to him that everyone could see the American passport tucked into his jacket pocket.
Avenue Trudaine was much as he remembered it, the boucheries and the pâtisseries, the vegetable stands and the tabacs, the flower stalls and the brasseries, the smells of fresh bread and roasted coffee and the elusive ozone tang of Paris itself, the joie de vivre of an uncannily ordinary Parisian day.
As a boy, he had never quite felt truly at home here, and now, returning as a man after all these years, the charm seemed somehow false, unreal, the Disney version of an eternal Paris where the butcher and the baker, the flower seller and the vegetable vendor, the corner newsdealer and the shoppers with their net bags and their carts, would be there like this forever, untouched and immortal no matter what happened to the real world outside.
Or perhaps it was something far more personal. Perhaps, Bobby thought as he took the little elevator up to his parents’ apartment, it’s stepping back into a reality that’s been no more real than voices on a telephone for all these years. The divorce, the years of separation, the accident, the reconciliation, if that was what it was, he had been there for none of it. It was a story told to him by people who had long since become strangers.
And he felt very much like a stranger himself as he rang the doorbell, a stranger from another land, an American, which, just now, did not seem to be something of which to be proud.
Mom answered the door. She looked older, but not as old, somehow, as he had expected her to look. Her face had networks of fine lines around the eyes and the mouth, but her chin was still firm, and her hair ungrayed, though that might have been dye. What was most different from his memories was the haunted look in her eyes, that, and the indefinable sense of maturity she exuded, the aura of a woman who had been touched by tragedies and travails, but who was long accustomed to wielding authority. A professional bureaucrat at the height of her powers.
They stood there studying each other silently for a long awkward moment. “So you’ve finally come, Robert,” Mom said, and she kissed him on both cheeks French-style, though there seemed to be no warmth in it.
Dad was sitting on the couch in the living room. The sight of him was a dreadful shock that Bobby tried his best not to show. He was thinner than Bobby remembered. His face was sallow and gaunt. His hair was half-gray now and receding around the temples. And there was a feverish, too-bright look in his eyes.
And the machine . . .
Dad had described it on the phone often enough, but nothing could have really cushioned Bobby from the first sight of his father, with an electrode fastened to the back of his head by some kind of outsized rubber band, with a cable leading from it to a reel atop the gray metal console that was keeping him alive, which sat beside the couch.
The only vital thing about him was those eyes, still fixed upon vistas that other men could not see, and that told Bobby that he had been right to fly to Palo Alto and back in the middle of the crisis, that he had been right in risking all to get here, that he had been right to accost the President of the United States in the midst of a disaster, that he was right in what he was going to do now.
Dad rose up off the couch and walked across the living room toward him, the cable unreeling smoothly behind him from the hibernautika console. He didn’t say anything. He just reached out his arms and took Bobby into them. They hugged each other for a long time before anyone spoke.
“Good to see you, Bob,” Dad finally said awkwardly.
“Good to see you too, Dad.”
They stood there just looking at each other across the gulf of years. Mom stood to one side, watching the two of them, seeming sadly apart.
“I’ll . . . I’ll go get us some lunch,” she said coolly. “We’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”
“Did you bring the material from Immortality, Inc.?” Dad asked anxiously the moment she was gone.
“Yeah, yeah, I’ve got it in my bag,” Bobby said, half exasperated, half amazed, at his father’s single-mindedness, and yet somehow also deeply touched.
Ten years of separation later, hooked up to this life-support machinery, slowly dying while the world itself was threatening to come apart, Dad was still the same old space cadet. It was as if Bobby had gone out to the pâtisserie for a loaf of bread and come back ten years later, with, in some weird way, no time at all having passed.
EURORUSSIANS AT NEW LOW IN POLLS
—Izvestia
UNLEASH THE RED ARMY, MARSHAL BRONKSKY DEMANDS
—Tass
Jerry fidgeted fretfully all during the agonizingly stiff lunch, waiting for an opening. They talked for what seemed like forever about endless this and that. Slowly, ever so slowly, as the small talk wound down, Sonya began to warm up to Bob, at least to the point of letting her mask of frosty politeness drop and her real emotions show.
“Things have not been so easy here, you know, Robert, if only you could have come sooner. . . .”
“I explained all that, Mom,” Bob said in a carefully controlled voice. “They weren’t about to issue an exit visa to someone whose mother was a ranking Red Star bureaucrat.”
“Surely things could not really have been—”
“Oh yes they were! For chrissakes, Mom, Harry Carson was President!”
“I still—”
“Let him be, Sonya!” Jerry said. “The important thing is that he’s here now.” And, suddenly sensing the opening he had been waiting for coming out of his own mouth, added: “And he had to go all the way to President Wolfowitz to do it!”
“Believe me, Mom, if it wasn’t for Nathan Wolfowitz, I still wouldn’t have been able to get here,” Bob told her.
Sonya’s face softened. “You really knew this Wolfowitz in college, Robert?” she said in a somewhat less hectoring tone. “He is different from Harry Carson?”
“Night and day, Mom.”
Sonya frowned. “He did not seem very impressive on television. And the things the man said! At any rate, he is not really in charge, is he? The CIA, the Central Security Agency, the Pentagon, and Carson’s old Cabinet, they are still running things, are they not?”
Bob shrugged. “I think he’s still fighting for control,” he said. “You should have heard him yelling at the Secret Service.”
“He seems like such a . . . such a clown.”
“You never played poker against him. Don’t underestimate Wolfowitz.”
“And President Wolfowitz told Bob something wonderful, Sonya,” Jerry broke in.
“He did?” Sonya said.
Bob looked at Jerry perplexedly.
“Carson’s brain,” Jerry said.
“What on earth could be wonderful about that madman’s brain?” Sonya exclaimed. “Except, perhaps, that an autopsy showed that he actually had one.”
Bob glanced at Jerry. Jerry shot him a glance back and kicked his ankle under the table. Bob shrugged. “It’s been polymerized, Mom,” he said, somewhat hesitantly.
“It’s been what?”
“Bob and I have a surprise for yo
u, Sonya,” Jerry said. “Something quite wonderful. Tell her, Bob.”
“Jesus, Dad,” Bob moaned.
“We have to talk about it sooner or later.”
Sonya glanced back and forth between the two of them. “What have you two been up to?”
“You’d better tell her, Dad,” Bob said. “You understand this stuff a lot better than I do.”
Jerry took a sip of wine, gathered up his courage and his wits, and did.
PRESIDENT GORCHENKO CALLS FOR CALM
—Pravda
MAY DAY PARADE TO BE HELD AS USUAL DESPITE CRISIS
—Mad Moscow
“The whole thing sounds insane,” Sonya said when Jerry had finished his preposterous story. “Record your mind and your genome in software! Polymerize your brain! You can’t be serious!”
“The science is sound,” Jerry insisted. “They’ve already cloned rat brains.”
“You are not a rat, Jerry Reed! You have a mind! A . . . a soul!”
“There might be some data loss, but when they clone me a new body, transplant the depolymerized brain, and dump the stored hologram into it, it will be me.”
“Surely you are not saying that that is all there is to a man, to a soul, to a human spirit!”
Jerry leered at her wolfishly. “I thought you were the dialectical materialist,” he said.
Sonya looked at Robert, who had said nothing during all of Jerry’s mad presentation. “You believe this is possible too?” she said incredulously. “You really believe it?”
“Well . . . ,” Robert muttered uncertainly.
“Show her the literature,” Jerry said sharply.
Robert nodded, went into the living room, returned with a thick packet of papers contained in a folio embossed with the logo of Immortality, Inc.
It was certainly a slick presentation. There was an introduction that explained the process in layman’s terms, lavishly illustrated with a photo layout on the labs and facilities. There was a long section of technobabble filled with formulas and diagrams and graphs and equations. And there was a balance sheet that indicated that the corporation was heavily capitalized, ran a small cash-flow surplus, but spent most of its income on research and development.
All in all, it reminded Sonya of a thousand such presentations that she had seen as the Director of Red Star’s Paris office, all designed to convey soundness, seriousness, fiscal stability.
“It all looks quite impressive,” she finally admitted. “But then so would a presentation for a well-designed fraud.”
“They’ve already processed President Carson,” Jerry said. “Bob got that straight from President Wolfowitz.”
“So what?” Sonya snapped. “His brain was mummified before he ever took office, and if they ever bring him back to life as a zombie, no one will be able to tell the difference!”
Jerry shot a quick glance at Robert. Robert shrugged.
“Dad does have a point,” he said. “Carson was the President, meaning that the Central Security Agency must have checked the whole thing out.”
Slowly, the whole crazy idea began to take on a certain solidity for Sonya. It was hard to believe that a fraud would have gotten past the Central Security Agency.
Still . . .
“You really believe in this, Jerry?” she said softly.
Jerry looked right into her eyes. There he was, wired to the machinery that was keeping him alive, with his pale skin, his emaciating body, slowly wasting away, day by day, week by week, with only his eyes still bright and fully alive. He didn’t have long to live, and he knew it. And so did she.
Jerry sighed. He shrugged. He hesitated, and when he spoke, Sonya knew that this time he was speaking the hard truth straight from his heart. “I want to believe in it, Sonya,” he said. “So it’s a long shot, so it’s a big leap into the unknown. So maybe it’s just whistling in the dark. But at least it’s a hope, isn’t it?”
Tears welled up in Sonya’s eyes. He had been so brave since the accident, far braver, she realized, than she. And suddenly she realized what all this was really about. He wanted her to believe in death suspension so badly not just to relieve her anguish, but because if she did, it would remove the last excuse she had for not helping him to get his probably fatal spaceship ride.
That’s how important it really was to him. It was quite literally more important than her grief or his own life itself. At last she understood that deep in her gut. It awed her. It filled her with a strange sort of envy. And it made her love him again in a way that the accident and these last weeks together never really had.
He was her crazy space cadet. And if he wanted to die as he had lived, who was she to deny it to him? What kind of love was that?
Sonya sighed. She smiled wanly at him. She reached out and took his hand. “I can’t say I’m really convinced, Jerry,” she said, “but God help me, I want very much to believe in it too.”
BEER-HALL PUTSCHES, EVERYONE?
If it weren’t making an already grim situation that much worse, the current mania for beer-hall declarations of independence would make a great musical comedy. We’ve already had independent republics declared by drunks and rowdies in Tbilisi, Alma-Ata, Minsk, Tashkent, and Baku, and reportedly, even at an Eskimo village above the Arctic Circle, and each and every one of them has been instantly recognized by the Republic of the Ukraine.
We’re thinking of declaring an independent republic ourselves, citizenship available by subscription only.
—Mad Moscow
In a perverse sort of way, Franja was sorry she was not going to be in Moscow to witness the May Day parade in person, but realistically, she knew all too well that it just might turn out to be a piece of good luck that Ivan was in London and she was here in Paris on her way to her parents’ place, even if it was going to mean being forced to share the same apartment with Bobby.
There was a bad wind rising in Moscow, with the election still two weeks away and Gorchenko sitting on his hands, while the Bears in the KGB and the Red Army openly demanded an immediate invasion of the Ukraine.
In desperation, Gorchenko had publicly appealed to the American President to restrain the Kronkol clique, and Nathan Wolfowitz had replied with the bizarre statement that “the United States will be the last to use nuclear weapons, but we will certainly use Battlestar America to prevent anyone from gaining any satisfaction out of being first.”
Grasping at straws, Gorchenko had actually praised this gibberish as “statesmanlike conduct.” The Ukrainians, of course, took it as a statement of American support and praised Wolfowitz for his “solidarity with the Ukrainian people in their hour of need.”
The Eurorussians sunk to new lows in the polls and the Defense Minister, Marshal Bronksky, openly called for Gorchenko’s resignation.
Ominous rumors had been sweeping through Moscow for days. Gorchenko had tried to cancel the May Day parade but had been blocked by the Red Army. Gorchenko would make a dramatic speech of resignation from atop Lenin’s tomb. There would be a military coup. Gorchenko would use the occasion to send the Red Army into the Ukraine in an attempt to salvage his position.
The parade would have already started back in Moscow as Franja left the Anvers Métro station, and she double-timed through the streets to the apartment building on Avenue Trudaine, waited impatiently for the agonizingly slow descent of the elevator, and thumbed the doorbell repeatedly till Mother appeared to let her in.
She dashed into the living room with Mother trailing behind her, where Father rose to greet her, and where Bobby sat frozen on the couch, looking anywhere but into her eyes.
“Hello, Father,” she said, giving him a brief hug and a peck on both cheeks. Then she broke the embrace, loped across the room, turned on the wall screen, and tuned in the Tass channel.
A huge formation of schoolchildren in bright white peasant blouses, brilliant red pants, and black felt boots was marching past the reviewing stand atop Lenin’s tomb. On a big float in the midst of the formation, a hu
ge robot cossack danced with a giant robot bear.
“Jesus Christ, Franja,” Bobby snapped, “I don’t expect you to pretend to be glad to see me, but this is hardly the time to watch television.”
“Shut up, Bobby, I have to watch the May Day parade!”
“Franja!”
“You too, Mother, something terrible is about to happen, I just know it!”
A squad of Olympic athletes, dressed only in red shorts and competition T-shirts despite the apparent chill, paraded past the camera behind ranks of Soviet and Olympic flags, the privileged few bearing giant papier-mâché replicas of their medals.
“Yeah,” Bobby said, “we’re all gonna be bored to death.”
“Come on, Franja, is this really necessary?” Father said. “You haven’t even said hello to your brother, whom you haven’t seen for ten years!”
Franja glanced away from the TV long enough to glare at Bobby for a moment. “Hello, brother,” she said poisonously, and then returned her attention to the parade coverage.
Behind the Olympic athletes came a huge formation of cossack horsemen in a film version of the traditional costume, with long red cloaks, black fur hats, and waving outsized swords in slow lazy circles above their heads while the prancing hooves of identical black chargers beat a staccato thunder as they trotted across the stones of Red Square.
Behind them came a unit of the Red Army. The front rank was a squad of hovertanks, their rotors roaring like an endless rocket blast inside their armored skirts, their turrets swiveled around backward so that the long guns seemed slung over their metal shoulders at the same angle as the combat rifles of the infantry in full-dress uniform that entered the square after them. Behind the infantry was a rank of self-propelled rocket guns, tracked all-terrain vehicles with huge clusters of revolving barrels mounted like telescopes atop them, each capable of firing ten mini-rockets a second.
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