Lessing couldn’t follow it. Frankly, he was not very interested. He stirred restlessly. “Mr. Mulder…”
“It’s like chess. A game with an unknown number of players, some of whom you can’t see. Chess played with money, power, prestige, and privilege instead of knights and bishops and pawns. You plan your strategy ten moves in advance and pray that your opponents haven’t planned theirs for twenty. It’s a kind of war, Alan, something that ought to be right up your alley.”
“Too abstract for my taste…”
“Then you’ll always be one of the pieces and never a player.”
“Yeah, I can see that.”
“No, Alan, you don’t see. That’s the trouble. You’re a product of your age: footloose, easy, mobile, purposeless, without a value system… right or wrong. You’re intelligent and semi-educated, but you’re not going anywhere. You just ‘fit in.’ You suffer from moral paralysis, what the French call accidie. You want to exist, to ‘get along,’ not to think.”
“That’s not fair. I read… more than Morgan does…”
“Military history, other things.” Lessing decided to risk a personal statement. “Morgan reads to reinforce his prejudices, and Wrench does it to get his kicks. I’m not like either of them. I read because I want to know.”
“The best reason, I suppose.” The oIderman paused, and a silence grew between them. Then: “Yes, Wrench. You’ve known Wrench a long time, Alan.” He hesitated again. “I don’t usually ask questions that aren’t my business. But… do you think Wrench is gay?”
“Sir?” The question had taken Lessing by surprise. “Ah… no. Not gay.” He hunted for words. “Wrench is… I think… asexual. Non-sexual. A long time ago he decided sex was too much trouble, too expensive, too… physical, and too risky psychologically. He may be afraid of AIDS or herpes, too, for all I know. At any rate, he’s stayed away from anything beyond his bathroom pom magazines as long as I’ve been around him.”
Mulder saw that Lessing was uncomfortable. He said, “Don’t worry; my wife wants to… um… line him up. I guess some of her younger friends were interested. She’s working on Morgan, too.”
Lessing laughed outright. “Good luck! Sam’s got a string of expensive bint-babies a mile long! To him, sex is like Saturday-night TV: you know, first the heavy, competitive stuff like on the game shows, then a chase like the cop programs, and finally comes wrestling, two falls out of three. Sam thinks sex is a contest, one he has to win. No, the Fai… your wife… won’t get him to settle down, not for a long while!”
“Married executives are good for the movement’s image. Any corporation president’ll tell you that.”
“I suppose I’m marriage material myself, then?” Something somebody had once said — he couldn’t recall who — rose to the surface of Lessing ‘s thoughts. “Liese…?”
Mulder folded his hands before him on the desk. “Liese. What… how… can I say? You’ve heard her story? About New York? Cairo?”
“Yes.” He’d heard enough of the hideous details. Yet he didn’t know how to ask the questions he really wanted answered.
“They… used her. They forced her. They did… things. They tied her, beat her, made her… You can’t imagine.”
He tried to breathe. “I heard… Liese and Mrs. Delacroix?”
“Is that what’s bothering you? Lovers? I doubt it. Only rumors. I knew Emma Delacroix well, back before… before Ponape. She wasn’t a homosexual, a lesbian. She was like Wrench, perhaps: unwilling to get involved. The movement kept her busy, as it did Liese, after Emma rescued her and got her to Paris.” The old man’s glasses looked hollow and faceted, alien insect-eyes in the red and blue and green light reflected from the mural wall.
Lessing didn’t know what to say next.
Mulder helped him. “Go after her, Alan. Don’t let your chance at happiness slip away.”
“I… we… don’t know…”
“Yes, you do.” Mulder did something quite out of character for him: he leaned across the desk and whispered, “Don’t be an asshole, Alan Lessing!”
Laughter came like a gust of wind, a welcome release.
Their communion lasted only a second; then Mulder leaned back in his chair. “Oh, Liese has work to do… as you will. A century of bad press, a world to put back together before Armageddon demands are-match. You can help her, and she you.”
“I… was afraid I’d be interfering. That you wouldn’t like us to…”
“Me? I’m delighted… and Alice’ll be ecstatic. You and Liese need it. Take a holiday. There’s always time for a time-out, as my hockey coach used to say. Did you know I played hockey in college?”
“No.” Mulder playing hockey was more than he could picture; he stifled a snort.
The wall-hologram shimmered, making Mulder look up.
“Eighty-Five? Now what?”
“Yama-Net has just acquired the National Broadcast System of Thailand.”
“What does that do to your projections?”
“All major networks will be affected. Present data are insufficient.”
Mulder blew out his cheeks. “The media, Alan, always the media! We thought we could dismantle the networks, but they just regrouped and bounced back. Now we find ourselves competing, hawking trinkets right alongside the other hucksters! Soft pom, soft news, and hard sell! Don’t scare the customers; otherwise they won’t buy, and your profits’ll drop. This isn’t what we… the movement… wanted.”
“The media are useful. A major weapon
“Our own Home-Net is. The others are weapons against us. They offer the usual sappy morality, the stuff my wife watches. You know, every story has a happy ending with a simple little moral attached: be moderate, be open-minded, be tolerant… buy our products. Be good. Obey.”
“Bland.” Lessing couldn’t remember who had once used that word to describe television.
“The message may be overt or covert… or even subliminal… but it’s there. And there’re corollaries: don’t think, don’t listen to people who are outside of the Establishment.”
Mulder arose to stand before the flow-chart; its lines and squares transformed him into an apocalyptic abstraction. Lessing saw why people listened to Herman Mulder.
“Take hockey… any sport… personal exercise. It’s all for the individual, for looks, for superficial appearance. You build ‘the body beautiful,’ but your mind stays as deep as a cookie-sheet. There’s no intellectual counterpart to sports, no ideological foundation, no overriding social objective.”
“Some of the kid-vids do emphasise education….”
“Rolls off ’em like ballbearings off a plate! What do the kids like? The Bangers. Meaningless individualists pretending to social significance! Sex without affection, brainless masturbation, African rhythms performed by illiterate head-poppers and bint-babies. Gut-grabbing, thump-a-bump copulation that wrecks your eardrums and blasts your reason. Lyrics that supposedly have ‘great social value’ but say no more than ‘don’t do drugs,’ ‘have safe sex,’ and ‘let’s all be gub-buddies and love-foozies together!’ Are these the ‘great thoughts’ of stars who make a million dollars a week? The Bangers also preach opposition to authority, instant gratification, anti-social… often criminal… behavior, religious cults, race mixing, and ‘bang me, bang you, bint-baby!’ How can the Bangers’ victims vote? Most of ‘em can’t even see through the drug haze! How can they function as citizens? Too many of our kids have no math, no science, no history, no humanities! Seventy percent think the Persian Gulf is next to Italy, and Cairo is a couple of miles from Peking! Ideas? Hah!”
Mulder’s opinion of the younger generation was well known. Wrench had to listen to his antiquarian rock music late at night, after Mulder and the Fairy Godmother were in bed.