“For that you need a mega-billion-buck computer?”
“Easy! We’ll find the gubber. You needn’t worry: plenty of security.” He snickered. “Even got guys sniffing your pee for slow-acting poisons. No more funny teddy bears.”
Lessing lay back down. “Those people… our people… died because of me. Ken Swanson, with a plastic star in his brain. The lib-rebs, too… Gottschalk and his woman.”
“You couldn’t help what Hollister did. Nobody blames you… or the Cadre either. Your guys didn’t know what the pog was happening. The peaceniks roasted us for thumbing prisoners, and the good folks up at Dee-Net in Montreal are raising a holy stink about ‘war-crimes.’ But the public’s on our side: nobody expects soldiers in a combat zone to react any differently to a bomb tossed… literally… into their soup!”
The memories hurt. He said, “Jennifer came to see me. I was worried about her.”
“Smart girl. When the teddy bear blew its stack, good old Jenny was flat on her back with some doggie under a table.”
“Not fair!” Liese cried. “Mullet! It was Arlen Mullet! Wounded protecting her! Threw her down when Alan yelled.”
“Oh, I know!” Wrench put out a hand in the closest thing to an apology Lessing had seen him make. “Just a dumb joke. Jen and Mullet are green light now, though he couldn’t sit down for a couple weeks, and Jen’s got shrapnel scars across her back. She’s gone back east to Goddard’s PHASE headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland. She’ll be closer to Mulder there too.”
“Is Arlen still at Cadre Officer’s Training School in Denver?” Lessing owed his aide the big one. Mullet had said “Mistadet” meant “Mister Death.” Without that warning Lessing would have ignored the little girl with the teddy bear. He would have died. So would a lot of other people.
“Yeah. He’s happy. Got a card from Stan Crawford, too. He’s driving for Tim Holm now, down on the San Francisco front.”
“Patty… the kid who brought me Hollister’s present… is here in the hospital, in the bum unit. I… I couldn’t block all the hot soup when I fell on her. Do me a favor and go see her.”
“I have. A couple of times.”
“Me too,” Liese said. “Often.”
“Patty’s physically as good as new.” Lessing swallowed. “She’s not over it, but she’s coming. Did you find out her last name?”
“Not yet. She sure as hell wasn’t Gottschalk’s kid, nor any relation to that kosher wildcat he had with him. Patty remembers her name as something like ‘Heuer’ or ‘Hoyer,’ and we think she came from Eureka. The war destroyed the records, though, and… well, we’re just not sure.”
“A loose casualty of war!” Suddenly the tension pent up within him poured out in a single, ragged snarclass="underline" “God!”
Liese touched his good hand. “Hey, hey, green light! Changed my mind. No work. Lunch. With Patty and Wrench. Tall Pines Restaurant. Pretty day. Lake Washington.” Lessing’s anguish was contagious; it was playing havoc with Liese’s speech.
“As I was saying about Goddard….” Wrench, too, saw the danger of letting Lessing brood upon the Lava Beds massacre. “Well?”
“Let me warn you. When Outram goes there’ll be a power struggle like you wouldn’t believe, a real rough-and-tumble. It’ll be time to choose up sides and smell armpits!”
Lessing glanced over at Liese. She wrinkled her nose. Wrench’s Goddard-o-phobia might be no more than his usual paranoia; wherever there was an extreme. Wrench seemed to delight in going beyond it. Still, Goddard was quite capable of an end run for the touchdown.
“Lunch.” Liese picked up the telephone and dialed. After a moment she nodded to Lessing. “Lunch. Downstairs. Patty.”
He dressed, favoring his injured shoulder. Two of his bodyguards stayed in the hospital room; the other four accompanied them down in the elevator and fanned out into the parking garage. They checked Lessing’s black Titan-909 Party sedan, then joined Wrench’s squad in their two escort cars.
So much security struck Lessing as unnecessary. Hollister had had plenty of chances to thumb him: a shot from a passing car, a sniper on a rooftop, walk up on the street and unzip him with a kitchen knife! Wrench was obsessed with Goddard more than Hollister, of course; he was also worried about the lib-rebs, the Izzie-Vizzies, and probably Dracula and the Loch Ness monster as well.
Some of his fears were not entirely groundless.
Patty pushed through the glass doors, trailed by one of the bodyguards and a nurse. Lessing found her beautifuclass="underline" a skinny, lively child of six or maybe seven — who knew? — with eyes as pale blue as Lessing’s own. She had shoulder-length, sun-blonde hair, which she combed, teased, permed, braided, and manipulated in whatever other way the holo-vid bint-babies did theirs. Today Patty wore a white blouse and black jeans, the Party’s unofficial kid-suit.
In a more peaceful world she could have been Liese’s and Lessing’s daughter.
“Hi, Lessing! ” She always called him that, just his last name, no titles, nothing. She took his arm, giggled, and pulled him down for a peppermint-flavored nuzzle.
She was rarely this bubbly. Her burns had mostly consisted of splatters along herright arm and shoulder. The pain was mostly gone now, but she still had nightmares.
“Hi. You in the mood for salmon? Crab legs?”
Patty flicked a self-conscious glance at the watching security men. “No. Spaghetti.”
“Seafood,” Liese announced. “My vote.”
The little girl shrugged. “You’re buyin.’” She’d get her way; Liese would give in.
The Tall Pines Restaurant was new and glossy, the sort of place beloved of businessmen and the supper crowd: a “yuppy-suppy,” Wrench called it. This afternoon a third of the tables were occupied by civilians and another third by soldiers home on leave from California, but the remaining places were empty. It took a while for tourism and gracious living to return to normal after losing upwards of forty-five million customers.
Lessing slitted his eyes and saw peace: a drowsy August afternoon, with pleasant people enjoying good food in comfortable surroundings in a happy land. He saw summer: time to go up to the San Juan Islands, over to the Olympic Peninsula, maybe to Mount Rainier. He did not see war, soldiers, tanks and guns, Pacov and Starak, Armageddon.
It was like in combat: when you can’t stand to think of bullets and pain and death any longer, your mind turns off. You look at the sky, the weeds in your foxhole, the color of the rocks, the patterns made by runnels of sweat in the dust in front of your nose.
During the past weeks, lying in his hospital bed, Lessing had come to a decision. He would give in to Liese, Wrench, and Mulder and join the Party of Humankind. It might not provide “balanced,” “moderate,” “open-minded,” “liberal” solutions, but it was better than anything else going. The Party promised peace, prosperity, stability, progress, and love.
Love?
He had thought it over, and it was true. The Party’s foes did not see its policies as “love,” of course, especially its racial policies and the exclusivity of the ethnos. Yet love was the essence: love of one’s people, love of one’s heritage, love of those with whom one em-pathized and identified.
The Party of Humankind offered love — love in the societal sense — the only type of love that made survival sense. The Party, the movement, had an uncompromising ideology and a stern discipline, but it also seemed to be the best means of keeping humanity — all humanity, all the ethnos groups — alive on Earth.
Their Cadre uniforms got them a table right away, and the waitress took their order.