“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.