Lessing was amused. If the Born-Agains ever managed to stamp out sex, Jennifer Caw would immediately re-invent it.
He said, “Jen could set fire to an iceberg! “Mentioning her would annoy Goddard. Now that the Party was socially acceptable she had little time for the man. There were wealthier and politically sexier fish to fry.
Goddard looked like an Olmec stone head: a pouting, scowling, fat-cheeked infant. “She’s got Party work to do.”
“As do you, of course. That’s why you’ re not leading troops into San Francisco.”
“Right. New branches to organize, meetings to arrange, rallies and parades to police
“And your own private army to build.”
Goddard grinned. “Police. Executive police to oversee Party functions and protect our rights of free speech and assembly.”
Lessing grinned back. “Sure. While Wrench and Morgan are organizing their black-uniformed Cadre.”
“Different duties “
“Unh-hunh. Party Police versus State Security.” “Their functions “
“…Are separate. I know. At the same time the Party’s pushing a bill in Congress that puts all the various police forces into one nationwide system: no more Federal, state, county, and city cops; no more Secret Service, FBI, CIA, Treasury agents, customs agents. Federal censors, and what have you. Just one big, happy ‘Central Office of Public Security,’ spelled C.O.P.S. for short.”
“That’s not reasonable? One law-enforcement organization? One unified, standardized set of laws? No more marriage in one state but adultery in the next; whiskey on this side of the state line but dry on the other.”
“The end of ‘state’s rights.’ And community rights.”
“Yeah. So? Those ideas have whiskers. Our society’s become too interconnected for them A guy living in California flies to New York, commits a crime, and hides in Texas. Tracing him with a bunch of disconnected law enforcement agencies is hard enough, what with no central data banks and too much paperwork, and then if you do find him the lawyers play ‘get rich quick’ with extradition procedures, changes of venue, jury selection, and appeals, appeals, and more appeals! More than half of all crimes go unpunished because it takes too much time, money, and energy to prosecute them! We can’t afford that any longer!”
A blonde in the crowd below caught Lessing’s eye. She was not Liese. “And the same goes for other government agencies. Right?”
“Count on it. Welfare, taxes, social security, old-age benefits, health, education… each run by a centralized, streamlined, Federal department. The military too: the National Guard, Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, Coast Guard… one chain of command. Eighty-Five’s working on feasibility studies now. It’ll take time, though; old traditions ‘re tougher’n buzzard shit to root out.”
“Green light! Given all of that, why do you. Bill Goddard, insist on having your PHASE Brownshirts separate from Cadre Black-shirts? I’ve been reading history. What happened in the Third Reich ought to worry you: the SA… the Sturmabteilung… versus the SS. Lots of infighting and rivalry. And guess who lost, Mr. Brownshorts!”
Goddard snorted. “Yeah, yeah, but right now we need two agencies. Their jobs are different. Eventually they’ll become divisions of one organization.”
“So you say now. Wait’ll you’re ten years down the road. And remember what happened to Ernst Rohm, the SA leader!” Lessing crooked his trigger finger and made a “bang” sound. “His shirt was brown, but people say he wore lavender lingerie.”
Goddard waylaid a servant to grab a handful of nuts and a fresh cocktail. “The situation was different then. We do leam from history, Lessing. And tell whoever you’ve been talking to that he’s full of crap. What happened to Rohm was politics. It had to happen for the good of the movement. Otherwise there’d have been a helluva split.” He popped a pistachio shell. “Listen, do you know if President Outram is coming tonight?”
Jonas Outram was less than a year into his first properly elected term. After Starak in 2042, he had imposed martial law for six years while the world buried the dead and sorted out the living. In 2048 the President had ended the state of emergency and set a date for the expected election. As one of the very few surviving — and experienced—members of the old Congress, he won this handily. Lessing had been under therapy in Mulder’s mansion during the campaign and remembered little of it.
Lessing peered down into the reception hall. “I don’t see any of his kikibirds, so he’s probably no-show.” Outram had become a very careful man; he had survived two more assassination attempts after the one in Colorado.
“Isn’t that Liese? There, by the door, in red?”
It was.
She had arrived late, accompanied by Hans Borchardt and Irma Caw Maxwell, Jennifer’s mother, who had been airlifted out of Los Angeles just before the lib-rebs had shut down the airport and declared California an independent nation.
Liese looked around, a trifle uncertainly, then moved inside to let the Fairy Godmother peck her cheek. Heads turned to watch.
Now Lessing had a reason to go down. Seeing her made him realize how much he had missed her.
She was gone when he reached the main floor. He wandered through the dining room, where the staff was picking up dishes, and into Mrs. Mulder’s TV room, a place of cozy armchairs, baroque coffee tables, and crowded bric-a-brac.
Mulder had gone all the way for his wife. He had splurged for a whole-wall TV screen made up of individual cells, computer coordinated to display a single picture, as if the viewer were looking into another part of the same room through a faintly visible lattice of one-meter squares. The system was also interactive: you could direct plot developments in certain programs via a voice hookup or a control pad. As Lessing hesitated in the doorway, one of the actors on the screen turned to the audience and asked archly, “Should we tell Emma?” Buttons clicked, and the image said, “Well, that’s settled. It’s better that we don’t.” The action was jerky, and the dialogue sounded forced. Nonetheless, a buzz of discussion went up when “Emma” appeared.
“Oh, they should have told her!” Mrs. Mulder wailed to the dowager next to her. “Emma ought to know about Dianne’s abortion!”
Liese was definitely not here.
Lessing drifted on into what Mulder named “the sitting room”: a twenty-meter-long salon that occupied the west side of the mansion. The sun had set, and the chromo-electric windows would have been transparent to the Virginia sky, except that Mulder had transformed the entire outer wall into a TV-screen mural of the Taj Mahal by moonlight. The old man still had fond memories of India.
More of the guests were here, seated on semicircular divans, sprawled on cushions on the floor, or standing about in groups. The only light came from the wall-screen itself, and Lessing zigzagged, stumbled, and excused himself a dozen times before finding Mulder, who pointed him on toward the inner reaches of the mansion. Liese had gone to speak to Eighty-Five.
The four unobtrusive security guards let him pass. He entered what looked like a pantry, went through a double-doored airlock that would withstand anything short of a tactical nuke, and came to Mulder’s corn-link with Eighty-Five: a room four meters square, its walls mirrored from ceiling to floor, and lit by a subdued desk lamp and two bars of non-glare tracklights up near the ceiling. A simple, metal desk and two jade-green, cushioned chairs stood starkly upon the swirling, pine-needle-pattemed rug.
Liese was there, but she was not alone. She was talking to a tall, robust-looking, middle-aged man with iron-grey hair, a jutting jaw, and the sort of deep-set, dark-ringed eyes that made Lessing think of Sunday-school portraits of Jesus: eyes that brought forth adjectives like “burning,” “dedicated,” “caring,” and “compassionate.”