“No kidding? Treasurer, huh? That’s a pretty good post for you.”
“The pacifist tradition is big in Massachusetts. It’s multipartisan and cuts across the blocs. Besides, it has to be done. The President is really serious. He’s not bluffing. He really wants a war. He’ll send gunboats across the Atlantic. He’s bullying that tiny country, just so he can strengthen his own hand domestically.”
“You really believe that, Yosh? That’s really your assessment?”
“Oscar, you’re all out of touch. You’re in here all night, every night, slaving away on this minutiae about the tiny differences between nomad tribes. You’re pulling all the backstage strings inside this little glass bubble. But you’re losing sight of national reality. Yes, President Two Feathers is on the warpath! He wants a declaration of war from the Congress! He wants martial law! He wants a war budget that’s under his own command. He wants the Emergency committees overridden and abolished overnight. He’ll be a virtual dictator.”
It instantly occurred to Oscar that if the President could achieve even half of those laudable goals, the loss of Holland would be a very small price to pay. But he bit back this response. “Yosh, I work for this President. He’s my boss, he’s my Commander in Chief. If you really feel that way about him and his agenda, then our situation as colleagues is untenable.”
Pelicanos looked wretched. “Well, that’s why I came here.”
“I’m glad you came. You’re my best and oldest friend, my most trusted confidant. But personal feelings can’t override a political difference of that magnitude. If you’re telling the truth, then we really have come to a parting of the ways. You’re going to have to go back to Boston and take that treasury job.”
“I hate to do it, Oscar. I know it’s your hour of need. And your private fortune needs attention too; you’ve got to watch those investments. There’s a lot of market turbulence ahead.”
“There’s always market turbulence. I can manage turbulence. I just regret losing you. You’ve been with me every step of the way.”
“Thus far and no farther, pal.”
“Maybe if they convict me in Boston, you could put in a good word with your friend the Governor on the clemency issue.”
“I’ll send mail,” Yosh said. He wiped at his eyes. “I have to clean out my desk now.”
__________
Oscar was deeply shaken by the defection of Pelicanos. Given the circumstances, there had been no way to finesse it. It was sad but necessary, like his own forced defection from the Bambakias camp when he had moved to the President’s NSC. There were certain issues that simply could not be straddled. A clever operative could dance on two stools at once, but standing on seven or eight was just beyond capacity.
It had been some time since Oscar had spoken to Bambakias. He’d kept up with the man’s net coverage. The mad Senator’s personal popularity was higher than ever. He’d gained all his original weight back; maybe a little more. His krewe handlers wheeled him out in public; they even dared to propel him onto the Senate floor. But the fire was out. His life was all ribbon cuttings and teleprompters now.
Using his newly installed NSC satphone, Oscar arranged a video conference to Washington. Bambakias had a new scheduler, a woman Oscar had never seen before. Oscar managed to get half an hour penciled in.
When the call finally went through he found himself confronting Lorena Bambakias.
Lorena looked good. Lorena, being Lorena, could never look less than good. But on the screen before him, she seemed brittle and crispy. Lorena had known suffering.
His heart shrank within him at the sight of her. He was surprised to realize how sincerely he had missed her. He’d always been on tiptoe around Lorena, highly aware of her brimming reservoirs of feminine menace; but he’d forgotten how truly fond he was of her, how much she represented to him of the life he had abandoned. Dear old Lorena: wealthy, sophisticated, amoral, and refined—his kind of woman, really; a creature of the overclass, a classic high-maintenance girl, a woman who was really put together. Seeing Lorena like this—all abraded in her sorrow—gave him a pang. She was like a beautiful pair of scissors that had been used to shear through barbed wire.
“It’s good of you to call, Oscar,” Lorena told him. “You never call us enough.”
“That’s sweet of you. How have things been? Tell me really.”
“Oh, it’s a day at a time. A day at a time, that’s all. The doctors tell me there’s a lot of progress.”
“Really?”
“Oh, it’s amazing what millions of dollars can do in the American health-care system. Up at the high end of the market, they can do all kinds of strange neural things now. He’s cheerful.”
“Really.”
“He’s very cheerful. He’s stable. He’s lucid, even, most of the time.”
“Lorena, did I ever tell you how incredibly sorry I am about all this?”
She smiled. “Good old Oscar. I’m used to it now, you know? I’m dealing with it. I wouldn’t have thought that was possible—maybe it isn’t possible—but it’s doable. You know what really bothers me, though? It isn’t all the sympathy notes, or the media coverage, or the fan clubs, or any of that…It’s those evil fools who somehow believe that mental illness is a glamorous, romantic thing. They think that going mad is some kind of spiritual adventure. It isn’t. Not a bit of it. It’s horrible. It’s banal. I’m dealing with someone who has become banal. My darling husband, who was the least banal man I ever met. He was so multifaceted and wonderful and full of imagination; he was just so energetic and clever and charming. Now he’s like a big child. He’s like a not very bright child who can be deceived and managed, but not reasoned with.”
“You’re very brave. I admire you very much for saying that.”
Lorena began weeping. She massaged her eyes with her beautifully kept fingertips. “Now I’m crying but…Well, you don’t mind that, do you? You’re one of the people who really knew what we were like, back then.”
“I don’t mind.”
Lorena looked up after a while, her brittle face composed and bright. “Well, you haven’t told me how you are doing.”
“Me, Lorena? Couldn’t be better! Getting amazing things accomplished over here. Unbelievable developments, all completely fascinating.”
“You’ve lost a lot of weight,” she said. “You look tired.”
“I’ve had a little trouble with my new allergies. I’m fine as long as I stay around air filters.”
“How is your new job with the President? It must be exciting to be in the NSC when there’s almost a war on.”
Oscar opened his mouth. It was true; he was on the National Security Council, and there was a war in the works, and despite his tangential status and his deep disinterest in foreign affairs, he knew a great deal about the coming war. He knew that the President planned to send out a flotilla of clapped-out battleships across the Atlantic, without any air cover. He knew that the President was utterly determined to provoke his token war, whether the Congress could be talked into declaring one or not. He knew that in a world of precisely targeted cheap missiles and infinite numbers of disposable drone aircraft, the rust-bucket American fleet was a fleet of sitting ducks.
He also knew that he would lose his job and perhaps even face espionage charges if he revealed this to a Senator’s wife on an NSC satphone. Oscar closed his mouth.
“I’m just a science adviser,” he said at last. “The Senator must know a great deal more about this than I do.”
“Would you like to talk to him?”
“That would be great.”
Lorena left. Oscar opened his nomad laptop, examined the screen for a moment, shut it again.
The Senator arrived on-camera. He was wearing pajamas and a blue velvet lounge robe. His face looked plump, polished, and strangely shapeless, as if the personality behind had lost its grip on the facial muscles.
“Oscar!” Bambakias boomed. “Good old Oscar! I think about you every day.”
>
“That’s good to know, Senator.”
“You’re doing marvelous things over there with the science facility. Marvelous things. I really wish I could help you with that. Maybe we could fly over tomorrow! That would be good. We’d get results.”
Lorena’s voice sounded from off-camera. “There’s a hearing tomorrow, Alcott.”
“Hearings, more hearings. All right. Still, I keep up! I do keep up. I know what’s going on, I really do! Tremendous things you’re doing over there. You’ve got no budget, they tell me. None at all. Fill the place with the unemployed! Genius maneuver! It’s just like you always said, Oscar—push a political contradiction hard enough, it’ll break through to the other side. Then you can rub their noses in it. Great, great tactics.”
Oscar was touched. The Senator was obviously in a manic state, but he was a lot easier to take when he was so ebullient—it was like a funhouse-mirror version of his old charisma.
“You’ve done plenty for us already, Senator. We built a hotel here from your plans. The locals were very impressed by it.”
“Oh, that’s nothing.”
“No, seriously, your design attracted a lot of favorable comment.”
“No, I truly mean that it’s nothing. You should see the plans I used to do, back in college. Giant intelligent geodesics. Huge reactive structures made of membrane and sticks. You could fly ’em in on zeppelins and drop ’em over starving people, in the desert. Did ’em for a U.N. disaster relief competition—back when the U.S. was still in the U.N.”
Oscar blinked. “Disaster relief buildings?”
“They never got built. Much too sophisticated and high tech for starving, backward third worlders, so they said. Bureaucrats! I worked my ass off on that project.” Bambakias laughed. “There’s no money in disaster relief. There’s no market-pull for that. I recast the concept later, as little chairs. No money in the little chairs either. They never appreciated any of that.”
“Actually, Senator, we have one of those little chairs in the Director’s office, here at the lab. It’s provoking a lot of strongly favorable reaction. The locals really love that thing.”
“You don’t say. Too bad that scientists are too broke to buy any upscale furniture.”
“I wonder if you’d still have those disaster plans in your archives somewhere, Alcott. I’d like to see them.”
“See them? Hell, you can have them. The least I can do for you, after everything I’ve put you through.”
“I hope you’ll do that for me, Senator. I’m serious.”
“Sure, have ’em! Take anything you want! Kind of a fire sale on my brain products. You know, if we invade Europe, Oscar, it probably means a nuclear exchange.”
Oscar lowered his voice soothingly. “I really don’t think so, Al.”
“They’re trifling with the grand old USA, these little Dutch creeps. Them and their wooden shoes and tulips. We’re a superpower! We can pulverize them.”
Lorena spoke up. “I think it’s time for your medication, Alcott.”
“I need to know what Oscar really thinks about the war! I’m all in favor of it. I’m a hawk! We’ve been pushed around by these little red-green Euro pipsqueaks long enough. Don’t you think so, Oscar?”
A nurse arrived. “You tell the President my opinion!” the Senator insisted as the nurse led him away. “You tell Two Feathers I’m with him all the way down.”
Lorena moved back into camera range. She looked grim and stricken.
“You have a lot of new krewepeople now, Lorena.”
“Oh. That.” She looked into the camera. “I never got back to you about the Moira situation, did I?”
“Moira? I thought we had that problem straightened out and packed away with mothballs.”
“Oh, Moira was on her best behavior after that jail incident. Until Huey came looking for Moira. Now Moira works for Huey in Baton Rouge.”
“Oh no.”
“It got very bad for the krewe after that. Their morale suffered so much with the Senator’s illness, and once Huey had our former press agent in his own court…well, I guess you can imagine what it’s been like.”
“You’ve lost a lot of people?”
“Well, we just hire new ones, that’s all.” She looked up. “Maybe someday you can come back to us.”
“That would be good. The reelection campaign, maybe.”
“That should be a real challenge…You’re so good with him. You were always so good with him. That silly business with his old architecture plans. It really touched him, he was very lucid for a minute there. He was just like his old self with you.”
“I’m not just humoring him, Lorena. I really want those disaster relief plans. I want you to make sure that they’re sent to me here. I think I can use them.”
“Oscar, what are you really doing over there? It seems like a very strange thing. I don’t think it’s in the interests of the Federal Democrats. It’s not a sensible reform, it’s not like what we had in mind.”
“That’s true—it’s certainly not what we had in mind.”
“It’s that Penninger woman, isn’t it? She’s just not right for you. She’s not your type. You know that Moira knows all about you and Greta Penninger, don’t you? Huey knows too.”
“I know that. I’m looking after that. Although it’s challenging work.”
“You look so pale. You should have stayed with Clare Emerson. She’s an Anglo girl, but she was sweet-tempered and good for you. You always looked happy when you were with her.”
“Clare is in Holland.”
“Clare is coming back. What with the war, and all.”
“Lorena…” He sighed. “You play ball with a lot of journalists. So do I, all right? I used to sleep with Clare, but Clare is a journalist, first and last and always. Just because she gives you softball coverage doesn’t mean that she’s good for me. Don’t send Clare over here. I mean it. Send me the old architecture plans that Alcott did, when he was a wild design student who had never made any money. I can really use those. Do not send Clare.”
“I don’t want to see you destroyed by ambition, Oscar. I’ve seen what that means now and it’s bad, it’s worse than you imagine. It’s terrible. I just want to see you happy.”
“I can’t afford to be that kind of happy right now.”
Suddenly she laughed. “All right. You’re all right. I’m all right too. We’re going to survive all this. Someday, we’re going to be okay. I still believe that, don’t you? Don’t fret too much. Be good to yourself. All right?”
“All right.”
She hung up. Oscar stood up and stretched. She had just been kidding about Clare. She was just teasing him a little. He’d broken her out of her unhappiness for a little moment; Lorena was still a player, she liked to imagine he was her krewe and she was looking out for him. He’d managed to give her a little moment of diversion. It had been a good idea to make the phone call. He had done a kindly thing for old friends.
__________
Oscar began the liquidation of his fortune. Without Pelicanos to manage his accounts and investments, the time demands were impossible. And, on some deep level, he knew the money was a liability now. He was encouraging thousands of people to abandon conventional economics and adopt a profoundly alien way of life, while he himself remained safely armored. Huey had already made a few barbed comments along that line; the fact that Huey was a multimillionaire himself never hampered his sarcastic public outbursts.
Besides, Oscar wasn’t throwing the money away. He was going to devote it all to the cause of science—until there was no money left.
The resignation and departure of Pelicanos had a profound effect on his krewe. As majordomo, Pelicanos had been a linchpin of the krewe, always the voice of reason when Oscar himself became a little too intense.
Oscar assembled his krewe at the hotel to clear the air and lay matters on the line. Point along the way: he was doubling everyone’s salary. The krewe should consider it hazard pay. They wer
e plunging into unknown territory, at steep odds. But if they won, it would be the grandest political success they had ever seen. He finished his pep talk with a flourish.
Resignations followed immediately. They took departure pay and left his service. Audrey Avizienis left; she was his opposition researcher, she was far too skeptical and mean-spirited to stay on under such dubious, half-baked circumstances. Bob Argow also quit. He was a systems administrator, and he made his grievances clear: pushy computer-security nonsense from Kevin Hamilton, and hordes of would-be netgods in the Moderators who created code the way they made clothes: handmade, lopsided, and a stitch at a time. Negi Estabrook left as well. There was no point in cooking for such a diminished krewe, and besides, the cuisine of road proles was basically laboratory rat chow. Rebecca Pataki also left. She felt out of place and half-abandoned, and she was homesick for Boston.
This left Oscar with just four diehard hangers-on. Fred Dillen the janitor, Corky Shoeki his roadie and new majordomo, and his secretary and scheduler, Lana Ramachandran. Plus, his image consultant, Donna Nunez, who sensibly declared that she was staying on because in terms of its image, the Collaboratory was just getting interesting. Very well, he thought grimly; he was down to four people, he would just start over. Besides, he still had Kevin. There were plenty of useful people walking around loose within the Collaboratory. And he worked for the President.
He would ask the NSC for help.
__________
Two days later, help arrived from the National Security Council. The President’s personal spooks had at last sent military reinforcements to the Collaboratory. Military aid took the form of a young Air Force lieutenant colonel from Colorado. He was the very man who had been on the graveyard shift when Oscar had been abducted, and when Kevin had made his frantic phone call. In fact, it was he who had ordered Oscar’s armed rescue effort.
The lieutenant colonel was erect, spit-polished, steely-eyed. He wore a full uniform with scarlet beret. He had brought three vehicles with him to Texas. The first contained a squadron of rapid-deployment ground troops, soldiers wearing combat gear of such astonishing weight and complexity that they seemed scarcely able to walk. The second and third trucks contained the lieutenant colonel’s media coverage.
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