Aftermath

by Charles Sheffield

  I was, therefore, from that one point of view in a much superior position. He certainly knew it. He, on the other hand, had both a gun and a knife, and he was at the moment far stronger than I. He also, though this was an asset whose worth was difficult to evaluate, knew far more about the Supernova Alpha world than I. From those points of view, he held the better position. We both knew that.

  What else? Well, if I didn't develop the tests to monitor his telomeres, and after a while he became convinced that either I could not or would not do it, then all he had to do was open the door and shout, "Oliver Guest. I have Oliver Guest in here." But so long as I was developing those tests, that was the last thing on earth that he would do.

  Of course, when he had the test methods and materials, he would no longer need me at all. At that point he would be eager to have me arrested again, no matter what he told me. Only in that way would his own safety be assured.

  I know all this; and he knows all this. And I know he knows it. And on, through the infinite regression.

  I snuggled into the pillow, which carried with its mustiness a faint gardenia smell reminding me of LaRona. I was over my ghastly disappointment when I saw what those police-state barbarians had done to my cloning facility. I had no clone of myself, but I would find some other answer when Seth and I reached our unknown destination. I always had, and I always would. Somewhere, somehow, I would build again.

  I see it clearly. My darlings rise from their dead ashes. They grow as I want them to grow, learn as I want them to learn, clear of the encumbrances of dreadful unhealthy diets and half-witted parents and siblings. I make only one genetic change. They remain fourteen forever; and I possess them at that golden age—forever.

  Giddy with that splendid vision of the future, I want to remain awake longer. It is much against my will that I quickly descend into profound, and regrettably vision-free, sleep.

  39

  By noon, Saul's day felt as though it should be ending. It had begun with a call in the darkest predawn hour.

  "Mr. President?" A stranger's voice, on Saul's private bedside telcom.

  "Yes." He peered at the illuminated display. Four-ten. Someone on the White House staff had made the decision to put this call through. It must be World War Three, at least. Except that every conceivable enemy was in economic and technological chaos. "Who is calling?"

  "This is Dr. Evelyn Macabee, director of the Ben Ezra Sunglow Center. Mr. President, I'm sorry to have to tell you that Mrs. Hannah Steinmetz has suffered a serious stroke."

  "When?"

  "Shortly after two o'clock this morning."

  Dr. Macabee was reassuringly calm and direct. How many calls like this had she made? Hundreds? Thousands? "Should I come down there?"

  "I do not recommend it. Mrs. Steinmetz is unable to speak or see and the left side of her body is paralyzed, but her condition is stable. I will inform you at once if there is a significant change. Do you have questions or special instructions in the event of rapid deterioration?"

  "What's the prognosis?"

  "I cannot yet offer a meaningful one. We are conducting tests at the moment. They are somewhat hindered because the SQUIDs and OMRs were knocked out by the supernova. I will call again this evening. Do you have any special instructions?"

  It was the second time she had asked that. Saul knew exactly what it meant: If your mother's condition worsens, when should we stop trying?

  Thou shalt not kill, but need not strive, officiously to keep alive.

  That would be Mother's own view. She was "stable," but stable how? A stability with loss of speech and sight and mobility, the things that make life worth living.

  Saul forced the words out. "We want no extreme measures for life support."

  "Thank you, Mr. President. Mrs. Steinmetz is ninety-two years old. I feel sure that you are making the right decision."

  "Keep me informed."

  "Of course."

  Saul closed the line and lay back on the pillow. Polite, tidy, efficient. Logical. At the end of life the Gordian knot of existence, so complicated in youth and middle age, straightened and simplified. And, at last, was cut.

  He would make sure that an aircraft was ready at all times to fly him to Florida. More than that, neither he nor anyone else in the world could do.

  After such a call, sleep would not return. And at seven-thirty he had a top-secret briefing in the basement War Room. Finally he abandoned the effort. He alerted the switchboard that he was up and about, showered, dressed, and wandered through darkened rooms to his office. Breakfast was waiting when he arrived. Amazing. Did someone in the White House kitchen prepare meals twenty-four hours a day on the off chance that the President would ask for one?

  He sat down at the web controller in the corner. To this point came all his global feeds. Before Supernova Alpha he could watch, in real time, events in almost every city in the world. Now, like Mother, he was blind.

  Or almost blind. The light for the White House security system was blinking. There seemed little point in watching places he could walk to in a minute, but he flicked idly from floor to floor. Quiet, empty rooms, calls being taken from around the country and the world, guards drowsing over cups of coffee.

  The surprise came from an unexpected place. In a room on the second floor, the two visitors who had removed Oliver Guest from the syncope facility were having sex.

  Saul switched displays at once—this wasn't a security issue, and they clearly had no idea the room was monitored. But in that moment he had noticed their faces. Faces were his thing, they said far more than words. The two were sharing feelings that went beyond physical sensation. What he read was sorrow and comfort and reassurance. As the display roamed on through the rest of the floor, Saul remembered that closeness.

  He arrived for the briefing fifteen minutes early, but the War Room was set up and the other participants were present and waiting. When you are President, other people's time is yours. Meetings begin when you are ready, and end when you say so. There is, of course, an unfortunate corollary. When you are President, almost all your time is spent on someone else's problems.

  The agenda called for General Grace Mackay to lead the presentation. She provided a thirty-second introduction and handed over to Madeleine Liebchen.

  The move from Indian Head to Washington had done nothing to improve the blond doctor's social skills. Saul received a scowl of recognition, followed at once by the opening words, "The first chart provides an estimate of military strength, by country and category, as of January 1, 2026."

  No welcoming smile, no morning greeting—but also no posturing and no waffle. Half his cabinet could use a lesson from Madeleine Liebchen on the effective use of time. Saul hunched down in his seat, concentrated, and tried to absorb the torrent of facts. He had a reputation as a quick study. He didn't care what the assortment of staff colonels thought, but he was damned if he'd look like a monkey in front of Grace Mackay and La Belle Dame Sans Merci.

  The meeting was scheduled to last for one hour. Madeleine Liebchen, presumably on orders from Grace Mackay, spoke her final word precisely on the thirty-five-minute mark. Long before that, Saul was feeling a profound discomfort. Not because he had not understood the briefing, but because he had.

  "That's it?" he said, when she gave him a final scowl and sat down.

  "Unless you have questions." General Mackay spoke with a straight face. Saul was not fooled. Unless? She knew he would have a thousand. She had deliberately left lots of time in the hour.

  "I'm going to tell you what I heard," he said slowly, "and you can tell me when I go wrong.

  "Our earlier estimates of this country's military strength were too pessimistic. We are helped today by four main factors—two of which I would normally deplore. First, our deep sea and deep underground resources were shielded from EMP effects and survived intact. Second, our military bases, for reasons of historical pride and respect for the past, hung on to weapons superseded by newer technology. Third, a continuing
interservices rivalry produced great redundancy of fighting equipment. And fourth, intelligence community information storage, in protected Prospero environments, illegally duplicated and maintained many civilian data bases."

  General Mackay said, "That is correct, sir." Dr. Liebchen raised one blond eyebrow.

  Saul took that for assent and continued, "On the other hand, our earlier estimates of foreign war-fighting potential were made in the absence of facts. Now that we have those facts from overseas, we see reduced foreign capacity in every area, civilian and military. A few days ago, Dr. Liebchen told me that on the basis of her analysis—which she made single-handed—our relative strength in the world had improved by forty percent. You are now telling me that is much too conservative. A better number is more than a hundred percent. As a country we are over twice as strong, relatively speaking, as we were before Supernova Alpha."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Thank you. I have no questions." Saul stood up. His three security guards stood up with him. "I need to think about all this."

  "It's good news, Mr. President," Grace Mackay volunteered.

  "It may be. But remember: 'Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried.' "

  She looked at him uncertainly. "Disraeli?"

  A fair guess, given Saul's interests. But Madeleine Liebchen gave the general a glance of infinite pity and said sharply, "No, Grace. Winston Churchill."

  Saul continued out of the room. Sometime he would like to be present when those two were working together. When they were not bickering, they clearly did work together—and he suspected they did so with mutual respect and admiration. How long had he known General Mackay before he had dared to call her Grace?

  Humans—present company not excepted—were strange animals.

  But Grace Mackay and Madeleine Liebchen, without meaning to do so, had presented Saul with a terrible problem. They had no idea what he meant when he made his final remark. But he did. The overwhelming military and industrial strength of the United States was the worst situation, except for all the other options. It pointed the way to awful possibilities. Sarah Mander and Nick Lopez, and however many others in Congress they had recruited to their ideas, had a real case. If any moment in history offered the chance of maximizing the country's influence and power in the world, here it was. It could be done. That was the terrifying message of the briefing.

  Next on Saul's agenda was a meeting with his agriculture commission. He made the right noises and nodded in all the right places, but his mind was elsewhere. Pax Americana. An American global outreach, industrial, political, and where necessary, military. It was immoral, but could you stop it? When you were on the wrong side of the argument, you could delay but you could not prevent.

  The agriculture session was important, but he was delighted when it ended and he was free to escape.

  Yasmin, groveling on the floor of his private office, completed the morning's surrealism. She clutched a mess of papers to her chest and stared at him with tawny, nervous eyes.

  "I found out about Tricia." She held printed pages out toward him. "I know what she was doing, why she left you."

  It took a few moments to realize that she was talking two years and not two nights ago. As Yasmin revealed what she had discovered, his spirits sank. The third blow of the day. His mother; the evidence that a global Pax Americana was possible technically, if not morally; and now this.

  Yasmin might think she had proof beyond doubt about Tricia. Maybe she did. She was surely excited, relishing the description of her detective work. But Saul was not ready to accept her conclusion. Not ready to believe it. The passion, the heady excitement for each other, Tricia's absorption in everything he did, all that could not be faked. But—she had married Rumford Leighton and Bobby Beacon and Willis Chartrain and Joseph Goldsmith. Had they, too, enjoyed Tricia's blazing passion and focused affection?

  It wasn't something Saul wanted to think about right now. He was relieved when Yasmin told him about the Mars expedition, throwing it in almost as a by-the-way. He forgot his own troubles.

  "They survived? They made it all the way to Earth, when we thought that was impossible."

  "So Moira Suomita at the State Department says."

  She held out the paper on which she had recorded the message. Saul ignored it.

  "Where are they now?"

  "On their way to Washington."

  "Excellent. I don't want them going to State, though, I want them here. I'd like you to get on over there, change things so they come to the White House first, and bring the whole bunch of them here with you."

  "Yes, sir. Sir, they didn't all survive."

  "How many?"

  "Three died during orbiter reentry. Four made it back to a safe landing—but apparently two of those are being held prisoner."

  "They landed somewhere abroad?"

  "No, sir. They landed in Virginia. But they were captured by members of the Legion of Argos."

  "Damn that woman and her crazy organization. They pop up all over the place. Go over to State anyway, bring the survivors."

  He read Yasmin's sudden discomfort, and went on, "If you think they'll give you a hard time over there, ask General Mackay to go with you. They hate her guts, and after their last runaround they're terrified of her."

  "Yes, sir."

  "And while you're gone, I'll see what I can do to get the other two crew members freed."

  As Yasmin left, Saul collapsed into the seat in front of the web controller. It seemed days since he had left it. How did you free members of the Mars crew from the grasp of the Legion of Argos? If you were ruthless and determined you invoked a domestic version of the Pax Americana. You found out where the prisoners were held, and went in with maximum firepower.

  And if the prisoners were killed during the liberation process? Well, tough.

  We had to destroy the village in order to save it. Another century, another President, another continent. But that particular disaster would not happen on Saul Steinmetz's watch. You'd have to kill him first.

  I have brought myself by long meditation to the conviction that a human being with a settled purpose must accomplish it, and that nothing can resist a will which will stake even existence upon its fulfillment.

  Now that was Benjamin Disraeli. It all came down to purpose and will. Saul saw only one problem. What purpose and will didn't tell you, unfortunately, was how to do something that must be done.

  40

  From the secret diary of Oliver Guest.

  Seth Parsigian, I surmise, is a good chess player and a better poker player. I do not mean by this, better than I am. But in the first two days at my house, we both knew who held the high cards. Consider.

  He was totally dependent on me to produce a telomere monitoring system, without which his long-term survival was doubtful. Until that work was completed, he dared not kill or injure me. He could, of course, starve and abuse me in order to force my cooperation, but even here his power was limited. I had to be well enough to work.

  I, on the other hand, daily gained in strength and confidence. Soon I would reach a point where I could vanish into the faceless multitude rendered homeless and hopeless by Supernova Alpha. I could begin a new life, if not in this country, then abroad. Travel itself might be more difficult, but travel controls and restrictions would surely be less.

  All these facts, obvious to an intelligence far less acute than Seth Parsigian's, revealed themselves not in words but in acts. When I was working I could turn my back on him, fully confident that he would do nothing to harm or impede me. For him, on the other hand, constant vigilance was a necessity.

  How was such continuous overview possible? The man was tough, but he was human. He had to sleep.

  His solution was simple. The subbasement, from which there was no exit but the stairs, became my living quarters. I was locked down there all night, alone. It was the most frustrating situation in the world. Had the clone tanks been in working or
der, I would have been free to do with them anything I liked. As it was I was obliged to live for twenty-two hours a day with their gutted, useless shells in plain view, and think of what might have been.

  Three times a day I ascended to the upper level of the house. There we would eat, go outside into the open air, and stroll around the big yard. Under Seth's watchful eye (and gun) I inspected and deplored the forsaken condition of my garden. I was careful to show no special interest in Methuselah, though it would probably have made no difference had I done so. Seth was, as he said, not big on turtles.

  I moved all the equipment that I needed down one floor to the subbasement. There I had light and power and running water. And there I began work. Seth didn't need to be present, but of course he could not bear to stay away. He sat on the stairs, gun in hand, and watched my efforts.

  I did not tell him this, but for those first couple of days he needed no gun. I had my compulsions, even as he had his. He had posed a challenging problem, in the central area where my own ego lies: How does one make an efficient device for telomere inspection, without genome scanners or anything else involving microchip technology?

  After I had set up my microscope, ultra-centrifuge, electron capture detectors, and projection screen, I turned to Seth.

  "As a first step, we are going to inspect the current state of your telomeres. For that, I need two things."

  "Anything that helps, you got it."

  I handed him two vials. "I require a skin fragment, from anywhere in your body. It can be small, all we need are a few cells. And we must have a semen sample."

  Seth looked at the vials doubtfully. "Let me make sure I got this right, before I go an' do somethin' dumb. You want me to jerk off in this little jar?"

  "Exactly."

  "Mind if I ask why?"

  "Not at all. During telomod therapy you were given two drugs. The first inhibited the telomerase enzyme. Without that, the telomeres at the ends of your chromosomes shortened every time a cell divided. The cancer cells in your body divided a number of times, rapidly, and then died. Next you were given a drug that stimulated the production of telomerase. This rebuilt the telomeres in your cells. Do you now need inhibitor or stimulant? I do not know. But once I have samples of both your germ cells and your normal body cells, I will use the information to calibrate the present condition of your telomeres."