“School?” Liese inquired of Patty.
The child favored her with a level, blue gaze. “September tenth. Third grade. Missed a year ‘cause of the war.” She rarely spoke of the weeks she had spent in the Lava Beds. Her memories of that place were mostly of cold and hunger and smelly tents and caves and noise and terror. Gottschalk and his strange companion had dwindled away to become dream figures. Children were more flexible — at forgiving and forgetting — than adults.
“Which school?” Wrench asked idly. The waitress was busy with a party of brown-uniformed PHASE officers two tables away, and he was keeping an eye on them.
“Oak Tree.” Party schools were named for positive, natural images. Patty took a spoonful of mushroom soup, then gasped, “Wow, tha’s hot’.”
“Excuse me,” Wrench muttered. He rose and pushed through the crowd to the PHASE men’s table. One of his bodyguards dawdled along after him.
“All education equal in our new schools,” Liese said to Lessing. “Same curriculum everywhere. Same tests. Standardized. Teachers nationally trained and licensed. Frequent transfers to other cities and states to maintain uniformity. No tuition.”
“Those are Wrench’s ideas. He loves tinkering with things like educational reforms.” Lessing, too, was watching the PHASE men. “Mulder’s pushing Wrench for Secretary of Education and Information.”
“Too radical sometimes. Should think more about reforms first.”
“Like a certain blonde, revolutionary lady I know.” They smiled at each other, and Liese put out a hand but did not quite touch his. They were together a lot these days. They hadn’t talked marriage-many people no longer wanted to risk the legal hassle just for a piece of paper — but both felt a growing commitment
Patty glanced from one to the other. “Wrench says school’ll cost a lot.” She gave Lessing a big-blue-eyed, I-love-you look. “Lessing, you gonna pay for me?”
He laughed. Her grown-up ploys continually amazed him. “Don’t have to. It’s in the Party plan: free school for everybody.”
He thought about Wrench’s struggle to make education a top Party priority. Eighty-Five had had to do some fiscal footwork, even though a fat military budget was no longer as urgent as it used to be. Pacov and Starak had taken care of keeping up with the Soviets and the Chinese. There were other priorities, of course: the lib-reb war, disaster relief, reorganizing the shattered economy, national medical care, aid to the elderly, farm subsidies — a lot of things. Yet education was the key.
American education had been a haphazard house of cards built upon foundations of sand. Western civilization wouldn’t last long in the hands of illiterates. Bring your kids up to the standard of students in Japan, the blossoming Turkish empire, the Izzie-Vizzie Russian colonies, and a revitalized Europe, or else watch while those other ethnos groups shouldered you aside and ran the planet their way. Sweeping reforms were hard, though: the academic establishment was as crusty and conservative in practice as its educational policies were doggedly liberal. A step in any direction gored somebody’s ox and provoked loud, literate cries of outrage. The Party of Humankind had to take advantage of the country’s post-Pacov disruption and do something before the Old Boys’ clubs regained control. Once that happened, it would be business as usuaclass="underline" committees and reports and task forces and meetings and bullshit bureaucracy until it was too late. It was almost too late now.
Party schools, youth camps, parental organizations, sports groups, scholarships, curricular revisions — Wrench had laid out a whole agenda of changes, and Mulder was doing his best to see that he got them. As somebody once said, “Give me the children until they are seven, and anyone may have them afterwards.”
Lessing came back to Patty. He would do everything in his power to see that she got the best.
What was she to him? Why did he care so much? He wasn’t sure. He had never been much for introspection. Examining your innermost feelings — clearly and objectively — was like trying to peek up your own asshole. Contortionists could do that, but Lessing — along with a couple billion others — could not.
Was Patty just a sop for all the guilt he carried around with him, like Atlas with the world on his shoulders? Be nice to this one child and thus atone for the deaths of half the planet — whether he was guilty of those deaths or not? Or was he atoning for the Lava Beds massacre?
No, neither. He wasn’t much for guilt trips.
Guilt made him think of his mother. Guilt was the mainspring of her life. In her flinty way, she believed that God would take away her guilt on Judgment Day. After all, hadn’t Jesus Christ died for her sins? Whatever she did was already forgiven. If God got snotty with her, she could point over at Jesus and proclaim, “He’s already paid my tab, Lord!” Then she’d weep, get down on her bony knees, and repent like she was humping for an Academy Award! God would surely see things her way.
Christianity and the other Middle Eastern religions were certainly alike in one respect: they all sweated over “sin.” The ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead had a great judgment scene, Lessing had read somewhere. When you died, Thoth, the ibis-headed god, weighed your heart against the Featherof Truth. You confessed your sins before Osiris, the Lord of the Dead, and if you lied you were lunch for a crocodile-headed monster. Needless to say, this sternly moral scene was followed by other chapters that told you how to lie safely to the Forty -Two Judges of the Dead, how to con Osiris, how to fool old Croco-Smilc, and how to sashay on into the Fields of the Blessed without anybody laying a hand, claw, or tentacle on you!
Why did all the religions from that part of the world bother postulating an omnipotent, omniscient god who handed down iron-clad commandments — only to spend the rest of history figuring ways to bamboozle him? Must be something in the Middle Eastern psyche.
Patty jogged his arm for the salt shaker, and Lessing returned to reality with an palpable jolt. If somebody had suggested that Patty, all by herself, were a complete and sufficient reason for love, he wouldn’t have known what to say.
Wrench slid back into his chair, polished his silverware on his napkin, and devoured his chowder in uncharacteristic silence. By the time their entrees arrived, however, he was telling Patty fantastic stories about Indian elephants and maharajahs. Lessing watched him curiously.
The salmon steak was good, and Liese’s prawns were perfect. There was no spaghetti on the menu, but Patty allowed herself to be satisfied with her braised beef, even so. She was definitely no seafood lover.
The winking, garnet goblets, the tablecloths of red damask, and the silver-gleaming cutlery took Lessing back to the restaurant in Sioux City where his parents had celebrated their anniversaries. The memory was as hazy as candle smoke, yet it was immensely comforting. Angola and Syria and India and Ponape and Palestine and New Sverdlovsk faded away; they had never happened. Pacov and Starak were meaningless acronyms on file covers in some forgotten desk drawer. This was reality.
A buzz of conversation near the door caused him to glance in that direction. Half-a-dozen tall men in black uniforms had entered the restaurant and were looking around. One of them spotted Lessing, motioned his sable-hued comrades to wait, then made his way slowly along the aisle toward their table.
Something stirred deep in Lessing’s memory but did not make it to the surface. He watched warily as the stranger approached.
“Hey, Lessing, you pogger!” Wrench crowed in his ear. “Don’t you know this jizmo? Bill Easley… Cadre… from Kansas?”
The youth who bent over their table had a friendly, hawk-beaked, Midwestern face with a toothy grin. “Remember me, sir?” He extended a hand.