Текст книги "The Harvest"

Автор книги: Robert Charles Wilson

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Chapter 10
Etiquette

The President, whose given name was William, did what he had not done in quite this way for many years: he took a walk.

He left the White House by the Main Portico and crossed Pennsylvania Avenue into Lafayette Square. He walked alone.

It was a fine September morning. The air was cool, but a gentle sunlight warmed his hands and face. The President paused as he entered the park. Then he smiled and shrugged off his jacket. He unbuttoned his collar and pulled off his tie. He folded the black silk tie into a square and tucked it absentmindedly into his hip pocket.

No etiquette in the new world, he thought.

He was reminded of the story about Calvin Coolidge, who had shocked the fashionable guests at a White House breakfast by pouring his heavily creamed coffee into a saucer. Shocked but unfailingly polite, Coolidge’s guests had done the same. They waited wide-eyed for the President to take the first sip. At which point Coolidge picked up the saucer, leaned over, and presented it to the White House cat.

The story was funny, but it seemed to William there was something ugly about it, too—too much of the ancient vertebrate politics of dominance and submission. After all, what was a President that anyone should be frightened of one? Only a title. A suit of clothes—and not a particularly comfortable one.

He was ashamed that there had been times when he thought of himself as “the President”—as a sort of icon, less man than emblem. He supposed that was how the Roman emperors might have felt, anointed by the gods; or their Chinese counterparts ruling under the Mandate of Heaven. These are dream-names we give ourselves, he thought; indeed, much of his life seemed like a dream, a dream he had been dreaming too deeply and for too long. A dream from which he had been awakened by a dream. The morning air made him feel young. He remembered a summer his family had spent at a beach resort in Maine. Not the riverside cabin he had recalled in that long-ago address to the nation. That had been an isolated July in the Adirondacks, much embroidered by his speechwriter. The family’s summer place in William’s twelfth year had been a fabulous old resort hotel, erected in the Gilded Age and preserved against the solvent properties of salt air and progress. Its attractions were its fine linens, its European cuisine, and its two miles of wild Atlantic beach. William’s mother had admired the linen. William had admired the beach.

He had been allowed to explore the beach by himself as long as he promised to stay out of the water, which was, in any case, too chilly and violent for his liking. He loved the ocean from a cautious distance, but he loved it nonetheless. All that summer, every morning, he would choke down breakfast and bolt from the hotel like a wild horse vaulting a fence. He ran where the sand was packed and hard, ran until his side stitched and his lungs felt raw. And when he couldn’t run anymore he would take off his shoes and explore the wetter margin of the beach, where water oozed between his toes and odd things lived in the tide pools and among the rocks.

When he tired of that, he would sit in the high salt grass and gaze at the juncture of ocean and sky for as much as an hour at a time. England was across that water. England, where American flyers had gone to join the battle against the Luftwaffe. Beyond England, Vichy France. Europe under the heel of the Nazis; embattled Stalingrad.

He watched the great clouds roll along the ocean rim, clouds that might have come from war-torn Europe, but more likely from the tropics, from seas that still carried a whiff of Joseph Conrad and H. Rider Haggard when he saw their names on a map: the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal. He would dream in such a fashion, and then he would eat his lunch: cold roast beef from the hotel kitchen and a thermos of sweet iced tea.

I was once as alive as that.

What fairy tales our lives are, William thought. How strange that that child could have conceived an ambition to rule the United States—could have pursued his ambition so relentlessly that he became something stony and patrician. It seemed to him now that he had fallen into a kind of trance, though he could not say exactly when. In law school? When he first ran for office? He had folded himself into the cloak of his career until it dimmed his urge to run away down some sunny summer beach. What a shame.

He drifted into sleep, sun-warmed on a park bench by the statue of Rochambeau… but the touch of the pistol barrel on his neck woke him instantly.

* * *

The steel barrel was pressed against a space two inches below his left ear, sliding minutely against a knot of muscle under the skin.

William turned his head cautiously away from the pressure and looked up.

He did not immediately recognize the man who was holding the pistol. He was a tall man with a neat brush of white hair. A strong man, but not a young man—on the shy side of sixty, the President guessed. He was wearing an immaculate three-piece suit with the jacket open. William saw all this in the blink of an eye.

The face was startlingly handsome. And not completely unfamiliar.

He probed his memory. “Ah,” he said at last. “Colonel Tyler.”

John Tyler kept his body tight against the weapon to disguise it from the few tourists strolling in the park. He slid the barrel across William’s collarbone and into his belly as he sat beside him on the bench.

John Tyler’s name had cropped up every so often in the National Intelligence Daily or the President’s FTPO briefings. Tyler had been a minor player in the planned coup d’etat, which had been derailed, of course, by Contact. He was one of those ex-military men who lead odd little careers in the defense lobby, the so-called Iron Triangle. Revolving-door connections with—who was it? Ford Aerospace? General Dynamics? In exchange for some ground-floor lobbying with the House Armed Services Committee or the Subcommittee on Procurement. A man with contacts at the Pentagon, and Langley, and at certain banks. Tyler was an educated man and a convincing public speaker, and his prospects might have been brighter if not for the hint of a scandal that had ended his military career—some sexual impropriety, as William recalled.

He knew one other thing about John Tyler. A small piece of intelligence from a loyalist Air Force general. The architects of the coup had had a particular role in mind for Colonel Tyler: If William had refused to retire peaceably to some country dacha, it was John Tyler who was to put a bullet in his brain.

“I watched you,” Tyler said. His voice was quiet but bitter. “I watched you leave the White House. My God, it’s startling to see a President in public without a Secret Service escort. Did you think it was all over? You didn’t need the bodyguards anymore?”

“It is over. The guards all went home, Colonel.” He looked at Tyler’s pistol. An ugly little machine. “Is this your revolution? I thought that was over, too.”

“Keep your hands down,” Tyler said. “I should kill you right now.”

“Is that what you mean to do?”

“Most likely.”

“What would be the point, Colonel Tyler?”

“The point, sir, would be that a dead President is better than a live traitor.”

“I see.”

In fact, William understood several things from this small speech:

He understood that the coup was a thing of the past; that Colonel Tyler had come here representing no one but himself.

He understood that Tyler had said no to the Travellers and was only beginning to grasp the significance of Contact.

And he understood that beneath his rigid calm, the Colonel was teetering on the brink of panic and madness. Would Tyler shoot him? He might or might not. It was an open question. It would be decided by impulse.

Choose your words carefully, William told himself.

“You had friends,” he said to Tyler, “but they all changed their minds. They woke up and saw that the world is a different place now. Not you, Colonel?”

“You can bank on that.”

“That was a week ago. Did you wait all this time to see me?” William nodded at the White House behind its spiked fence. “You could have walked in the front door, Colonel. No one would have stopped you.”

“I talked to your friend Charlie Boyle yesterday. He told me the same thing. I didn’t believe him.” Tyler shrugged. “But maybe it’s true. I mean, if you’re out taking a goddamn stroll.”

Charlie Boyle has only been my friend since he woke up immortal, William thought; but yes, Charlie had been telling the truth. The White House was open to the public. Like any other museum.

There was a twitch of impatience from Tyler, a slight pursing of the lips. William drew a slow breath.

“Colonel Tyler, surely you know what’s happening. Even if you don’t want any part of it. Even if you said no to it. This isn’t an alien invasion. The flying saucers haven’t landed. The Earth hasn’t been occupied by a hostile military force. Look around.”

Tyler’s frown deepened, and for a space of some seconds his finger tightened on the trigger. William felt the barrel of the gun pulse against his body with the beating of Tyler’s heart.

Death hovered over the park bench like a third presence.

That shouldn’t frighten me anymore, William thought. But it does. Yes, it still does.

“What I think,” Tyler said, “is that everybody has been infected with a hallucination. The hallucination is that we can live forever. That we can cohabit like the lamb and the lion in a Baptist psalm book. I think most people succumbed to this disease. But some of us didn’t. Some of us recovered from it. I think I’m a well man, Mr. President. And I think you’re very sick.”

“Not a traitor? Just sick?”

“Maybe both. You collaborated—for whatever reason. You’re not qualified to hold office any longer.”

“Am I sick? You’re the one with the pistol, Colonel Tyler.”

“A weapon in the right hands is hardly a sign of illness.”

How strange it was to be having this conversation on such a gentle day. He looked away from Colonel Tyler and saw a ten-year-old attempting to fly a kite from the foot of the statue of Andrew Jackson. The breeze was fitful. The kite flailed and sank. The boy’s skin was dark and gleaming in the sunlight. The kite was a beauty, William thought. A black-and-yellow bat wing.

For a moment the boy’s eyes caught his and there was a flash of communication—an acknowledgment in the Greater World of each other’s difficulties.

J may yet talk my way out of this, William thought.

“Colonel Tyler, suppose I admit I’m unqualified to hold the office of President of the United States.”

“I have a gun on you. You might admit any damn thing.”

“Nonetheless, I do admit it. I’m not qualified. I say it without reservation, and I’ll continue to say it when you put the gun away. I’ll sign a paper if you like. Colonel, would you care to help me nominate a successor?”

For the first time, Tyler seemed uncertain.

“I’m quite sincere,” William hurried on. “I want your advice. Whom did you have in mind? Charlie Boyle? But he’s not trustworthy anymore, is he? He’s ‘diseased.’ The Vice-President? The same, I’m afraid. The Speaker of the House?”

“This is contentious bullshit,” Tyler said, but he looked suddenly miserable and distracted.

“Colonel Tyler, it would not surprise me if you were the highest-ranking military officer not under the influence of what you call a disease. I don’t know how the chain of command operates in a case like this. It’s something the Constitution doesn’t anticipate. But if you want the job—”

“My Christ, you’re completely insane,” Tyler said. But the gun wavered in his hand.

“It’s a question of constituency. That’s the fundamental problem. Colonel, do you know how many people turned down the opportunity to live forever? Roughly one in ten thousand.”

“You can’t possibly know that.”

“For the sake of argument, let’s assume I do. The population of the Earth is roughly six billion, which yields six hundred million individuals who are not, as you say, diseased. Quite a number. But not all of them are Americans—not by a long shot. Colonel Tyler, do you recall the last census estimate of the American population? It’s vague in my mind. Something on the order of three hundred million. That would give you a constituency of roughly thirty thousand people. The size of a large town. Quite an amenable size for a democracy, in my opinion. Under ideal circumstances, you could establish direct representative government… if you mean to continue holding elections.”

Colonel Tyler’s eyes had begun to glaze. “I can’t accept that. I—”

“Can’t accept what? My argument? Or the Presidency?”

“You can’t confer that on me! You can’t hand it to me like some kind of Cracker Jack prize!”

“But you were willing to take it away with a gun—you and your allies.”

“That’s different!”

“Is it? It’s not exactly due process.”

“I’m not the fucking President! You’re the fucking President!”

“You can shoot me if you want, Colonel Tyler.” He stood up, a calculated risk, and made his voice imperious. He became the President of the United States—as Tyler had insisted—one more weary time. “If you shoot me once or twice I might survive. I understand this body of mine is a little tougher than it used to be. If you shoot me repeatedly, the body will be beyond repair. Though it seems a shame to-clutter Lafayette Square with a corpse on such a fine sunny morning.”

Colonel Tyler stood up and kept the pistol against William’s belly. “If you can die, you’re not immortal.”

“The body is mortal. I’m not. There is a portion of the Artifact that contains my—I suppose essence is the best word. I am as much there as I am here. I am awake here, Colonel, and I am asleep there… but if you shoot me you’ll only reverse the equation.”

A wind swept through the park. A dozen yards away, the boy’s kite flapped and hesitated. Pull, William thought. Work the string.

The kite soared, black and yellow in a blue sky.

“Let’s take a walk, Colonel,” William said. “My legs cramp if I don’t stretch them once in a while.”

* * *

They walked along 17th toward Potomac Park, past the Corcoran Art Gallery and the offices of the OAS, the blind jumble of Washington architecture.

The city’s most revealing buildings were still its monuments, William thought. The Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial. An American idea of a British idea of a Roman idea of the civic architecture of the Greeks.

But the Athenians had operated their democracy in the agora. We should have copied their marketplaces, not their temples. Should have moved in some fruit stands, William thought. A rug vendor or two. Called Congress to session among the peanut carts on Constitution Avenue.

He had once loved the idea of democracy. He had loved it the way he loved his beach in Maine. Like his love of the beach, he had misplaced his love of democracy in the long journey to the White House.

Oh, he mentioned the word in speeches. But all the juice had gone out of it.

He wondered if Colonel Tyler had ever really loved democracy. He suspected the Colonel had never loved a beach.

“You gave all this away,” Tyler was saying. “It went without a battle. Not a raised fist, Mr. President. It’s a crime worth a bullet, don’t you think?”

The gun had retreated into a holster under the Colonel’s jacket, but William was still acutely aware of its presence.

“What are you suggesting I gave away, Colonel?”

“ America,” Tyler said. “The nation. It’s sovereignty.”

“Hardly mine to give up.”

“But you collaborated.”

“Only if you persist in seeing this as an invasion. Well. I suppose I did collaborate, in a certain way.” It was true, the President’s significant dream had come a few nights before the rest. Early Contacts fell into two categories: the very ill and the very powerful. The ill, so their diseases wouldn’t carry them off at the eleventh hour. The powerful, so dangerous mistakes might not be made. “I think of it as cooperation, not collaboration.”

“I think of it as treason,” Tyler said flatly.

“Is it? What choice did I have? Was there some way to resist? Would a panic have changed anything?”

“We’ll never know.”

“No, I don’t suppose we will. But, Colonel, the process has been democratic. I think you have to admit that much. The question—the question of living forever and all that it entails—was asked of everyone. You think I should have spoken for America. But I couldn’t, and I didn’t have to. America spoke for itself. Colonel, it’s obvious you were able to turn down that offer. Others could have made the same choice. By and large, they didn’t.”

“Absurd,” Tyler said. “Do you really believe that? You think creatures who can invade your metabolism and occupy your brain can’t lie about it?”

“But did they? You were as ‘invaded’ as everyone else. And yet, here we are.”

“I said I might be immune.”

“To the compulsion but not to the asking? It’s an odd kind of immunity, Colonel.”

They settled on a bench in the Constitution Gardens where pigeons worried the grass for crumbs. William wondered what the pigeons had made of all these sweeping changes in the human epistemos. Fewer tourists. But the few were more generous.

He should have brought something to feed the birds.

“Think about what you’re telling me,” Tyler said. “They approached everyone? Every human being on the surface of the earth? Including infants? Senile cripples in rest homes? Criminals? The feebleminded?”

“I’m given to understand, Colonel, that the children always said yes. They don’t believe in death, I think. An infant, a baby, might not have the language—but the question was not posed entirely in language. The infants and the senile share a will to live, even if they can’t articulate it. Similarly the mentally ill. There is a nugget of self that understands and responds. Even the criminals, Colonel, though it is a long journey for them even if they accept this gift, because it comes with the burden of understanding, and they have many terrible things they may not want to know about themselves. Some of the worst of them will have turned down the offer.”

The Colonel laughed a wild and unpleasant laugh. “You know what you’re saying? You’re telling me I’m the unelected President of a nation of homicidal maniacs.”

“Hardly. People have other reasons for not wanting immortality. Such as your reason, I presume.”

The Colonel scowled. Here was dangerous territory, William thought. He took a breath and persisted: “It’s like looking into a mirror, isn’t it? When the Travellers talk, they talk to the root of you. Not the picture of yourself you carry around in your head. The heart. The soul. The self that is everything you’ve done and wanted to do and refrained from doing. One’s truest self isn’t always a handsome sight, is it, Colonel? Mine was not, certainly.”

Colonel Tyler had no response except a haggard exhalation of breath.

The pigeons didn’t like this sound and they rose up in a cloud, to settle some distance away by the Reflecting Pool, where the image of the sky was pleasant in the cool wind-rippled water.

* * *

Over the past week, traffic inside the Beltway had been light. Official Washington had begun to close up shop, in a mutual consensus that required no debate. Capitol Hill had become a ghost town—just yesterday, William had stood in the Rotunda and listened to his footsteps echo in the dome above his head. But there were still tourists in the city, if you could call them tourists—people who had come for a last look at the governing apparatus of a nation.

Some of these people passed quietly along the Mall. William did not feel misplaced among them, though they seemed to make Colonel Tyler nervous.

“I want to ask you a question,” Tyler said.

“I’m a politician, Colonel. We’re notorious for dodging the hard ones.”

“I think you ought to take this more seriously, Mr. President.” Tyler touched the bulge of the pistol almost absently. His eyes were unfocused. And William reminded himself that the Colonel’s madness might not be new; it might be an old madness that Contact had simply aroused and let loose. It was as if Tyler generated a kind of heat. The heat was danger, and the temperature might rise at any provocation.

“I’m sorry if I seemed flippant. Go on.”

“What happens next? According to your scenario, I mean.”

William pondered the question. “Colonel, don’t you have anyone else to ask? A wife, a girlfriend? Some member of your family? I have no official standing—my information is no better than anyone else’s.”

“I’m not married,” Tyler said. “I have no living family.”

And here was another piece of the John Tyler puzzle: a grievous, ancient loneliness. Tyler was a solitary man for whom Contact must have seemed like a final exclusion from the human race.

It was a bleak and terrible thought.

“In all seriousness, Colonel, it’s a difficult question. You don’t need me to tell you everything is changing. People have new needs, and they’ve abandoned some old ones—and we’re all still coming to terms with that. I think… in time, these cumbersome bodies will have to go. But not for a while yet.” It was an honest answer.

Tyler fixed him with a terrible look—equal parts fear, outrage, and contempt. “And after that?”

“I don’t know. It needs a decision—a collective decision. But I have an inkling. I think our battered planet deserves a renewal. I think, very soon, it might get one.”

* * *

They had made a circle; they stood now outside the gates of the White House, and the day had grown warm as it edged toward noon.

Despite the threat, William was tired of dueling with John Tyler. He felt like a schoolboy waiting for some long detention to grind to an end. “Well, Colonel?” He looked Tyler in the eye. “Have you decided to shoot me?”

“I would if I thought it would help. If I thought it would win back even an inch of this country—dear God, I’d kill you without blinking.” Tyler reached beneath his suitcoat and scratched himself. “But you’re not much of a threat. As quislings go, you’re merely pathetic.”

William concealed his relief. Immortal I may be, he thought. But I’m not finished with this incarnation.

Besides, how would he have explained his death to Elizabeth? She would accuse him of clumsiness—perhaps rightly so.

“You think this conflict is over,” Tyler said. “I don’t grant that. Some of us are still willing to fight for our country.”

But why fight, William thought. The country is yours! Colonel Tyler—take it!

But he kept these thoughts to himself.

“I only hope,” Tyler said as he turned away, “the rest of the geldings are as docile as you.”

* * *

William watched the Colonel walk away.

Tyler was a man on a terrible brink, William thought. He was alone and vastly outnumbered and carrying some ghastly cargo of old sin. The world he lived in was receding beyond the limits of his comprehension.

And it need not have been that way. Maybe that was the worst part. You could have said yes, Colonel. And you know that, whether you choose to admit it or not.

* * *

William experienced this sadness for Colonel Tyler, then folded it into memory the way he had folded his silk tie into his pocket.

He might not have seen the last of Colonel Tyler—but that was tomorrow’s worry.

Today was still pretty and fresh. He had fifteen minutes to spare before lunch. And no one had killed him.

He considered the White House lawn. Scene of countless Easter egg hunts, diplomatic photo opportunities, presentations of awards. Had he ever really looked at it? The groundskeepers did excellent work. The grass was verdant and still sparkling with morning dew.

He wondered how it would feel to unlace his shoes and peel off his socks and walk barefoot over that green and gentle surface.

He decided it was time to find out.