Serpent's Walk

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Monday, August 23, 2049

“I want the job,” Lessing said stubbornly. “I can do it.”

Wrench, crosslegged on the carpet in front of the Mulders’ wall-size, interactive TV screen, did not answer.

“Sit down, for God’s sake,” Sam Morgan twisted around to glare up at Lessing. “You had a change of heart?”

“If you’re asking whether I’m going to let the Party tell me which medal to wear on my jockstrap, then the answer’s no!”

“So?” Wrench inquired over his shoulder. He held the TV remote control up to the light so he could sec its buttons. He pushed one. The pretty brunette actress on the screen began to remove her net stockings.

“So you need me. The Party needs me.”

Wrench belched politely. “It’s you who needs the Party. You need us. You need Mulder. And you need a certain lovely, blonde person.”

“Let’s leave her out of this,” Lessing answered evenly. By unspoken mutual agreement he and Liesc had been polite but distant ever since the episode in the corn-link room. They each needed time to think.

Liese had stayed closeted with Mulder, Borchardt, and Jennifer all day Sunday, working on speeches for Eighty-Five; this morning she and Jennifer had gone horseback riding. Neither Mulder nor the Fairy Godmother knew which end of a horse ate hay, but the old man had purchased a stable full of handsome beasts anyway. If it made Mulder’s snobby Virginia neighbors accept him, then the animals served a useful purpose.

“Green light!” Wrench backed away from the sensitive topic of Liese. “But tell me, old buddy, why this passion to soldier for the Cadre? Stay a happy houseguest, watch Mulder’s security system, drill the beegees, and wind the clocks! Why do you want to go command a Cadre unit? What did the Cadre ever do to you?”

“lean help.”

“Come on, sweetie!” The little man hammered at the button again, and the actress wriggled lithely out of her bra, lay back on the tiger-striped sheet, and gazed up into the cameras. Her breasts, real or plastic, heaved nicely; they certainly were copious! The girl wouldn’t strip all the way; this was the wrong channel for that — and at ten in the morning! The TV’s interactive plot-choice system did have limitations. The Fairy Godmother had sealed off the porn channels, moreover, with a code that even Wrench hadn’t been able to break.

Morgan shifted to look at Lessing. “S ‘pose you’ve got reasons?”

“Good reasons… apart from being bored to death and wanting a real job! The main one is that you need more than fancy, black uniforms to tum the Cadre into a military unit. You need men with training and experience. That’s my specialty.”

Morgan stayed noncommittal, idly watching Wrench punching buttons.

“You shouldn’t depend on the regular military. What if some power-hungry general, the Joint Chiefs, or the closet lib-rebs still in Outram’s government decide to stage a revolution? One day you’re in, the next day you’re peeking up the barrels of a firing squad’s shiny rifles.”

“Can’t happen!” Wrench scoffed. “Not now!”

“Sure, it can. Did you ever think this would happen?” He waved all around to include everything since Lucknow. “You know it can. But if the Cadre builds its own military arm, like the Wajfen-SS, separate from the AllgemeineSS, it’ll be harder for a coup to get started. Gradually you take over the Army’s military responsibilities, and then you’re in. Solid.”

“The kid may have a point,” Wrench conceded. He jabbed a button, but the girl on the screen was down to her black Bylon panties and a smile, as far as her contract allowed. She wriggled, caressed her nipples, and gazed slumbrously out at the audience. The story would now revert to its main plot-line.

Wrench scrunched around to face Lessing and Morgan. “There is a good reason for the Cadre to have its own doggies. Sam, you know what I mean.”

“So do I,” Lessing said. “It’s no secret: Goddard and PHASE.”

“Dingo-dongo! You win the macrame potato-masher!” Wrench made a grandiose game-show gesture.

Morgan ran his hands over his short, young-business-executive haircut. “Goddard’s getting stronger every day. His guys are the ones people see at rallies, inparades, bumping heads with the leftists, the Blacks, the Jews, and the rest. What’s more, Mulder and the Board of Directors like what he’s doing.”

“The bully boys, the street troops,” Wrench grumbled. “We get the schools, the publishing, the re-education programs, the heavy security stuff. Goddard gets the glory.”

“And if it isn’t Goddard, it’ll be the old-power boys: the FBI or the CIA. They’ll be back.” Lessing drew a finger across his throat.

“The Vizzies infiltrated those agencies during President Rubin’s administration,” Wrench admitted. “Outram did some sweeping, but some of ‘em are still there. They’re scared we’ll come to full power.” He punched in a new channel and watched a dachshund stand up and beg in a cutesy human voice for a can of Luvva-Dog. “Here’s Yama-Net. What’ve they got on now?”

Morgan wrinkled his nose. “Crap, what else? Yama-Net sells appliances, electronics, computers, cosmetics, and plastics; Omni-Net peddles cars, steel, heavy industry, and transport; First-Net pushes communications, food, banks, insurance, and real estate. Business as usual.”

“Not quite,” Wrench corrected. “At least now the Jews don’t run all the media. Only Dee-Net: clothes and fashions and soaps and detergents and deodorants and the like.”

“Which doesn’t leave a lot for us. We’re the new kids on the block.” Morgan opened one of the cloisonne boxes on the coffee table in hope of finding mints or nuts; it was empty. “Our Home-Net markets whatever’s left… mostly product lines we’ve acquired since Starak.”

“I thought Outram was going to break up Big Media,” Lessing said.

“He tried. Mulder’s still trying. The power of money, you know.” Wrench flexed his diminutive biceps like Atlas; the other two chuckled.

Morgan said, “Once the media honchos saw he was serious… that it’d be a cold day in hell before they could reoccupy New York and Chicago and their other corporate citadels… they set up shop in Louisville, Salt Lake City, New Orleans, Milwaukee, Seattle, and elsewhere, diversified to protect against attack by Starak, by Pacov, by Outram… and especially by us. The foreign biggies like Yama-Corp moved to pleasanter climes abroad, but they hung onto their American affiliates. We’re where the consumer dollars are.”

“Yeah, look at Dee-Net,” Wrench said. “After Pacov unzipped Israel and ended its control of Middle Eastern oil, the Vizzies moved their Dee-Net headquarters up to Montreal. You’d think they’d give up, but they’ve still got more’n enough piss to water the lawn. Here, see!” He pressed a button.

The TV wall displayed a young, handsome, and very blonde Adonis wearing tennis shorts, a sun-glow Bylon shirt of shocking vermilion, and a tan so darkly bronze as to appear almost black. This masculine vision swung a tennis racket at the screen and sang, “With Tanel on the label you’ll be an able Gable! Bang up, foozies!” His craggy features glowed with the light of Absolute Truth. “Push your A-3 button right now! Jick it for Dad, jick it for Mom, jick it for your bint-baby, jick-a-tick it for yourself. Love my rag-a-tags! ” He caressed his shirtfront lasciviously, then was replaced by a chorus of prepubescent children attired in dazzle-white sports clothes.

These sang in unison, “Goozy, goozy, little foozy! Tanel koozy! Tanel doozy!”

“Judgment Day is al hand,” Wrench mourned. “Banger slang to sell tennis fashions! Sex did it better… and that we could at least understand!”

Morgan pulled his stockinged feet up under himself on the divan. He had left his Cadre uniform boots by the door. “Dee-Mar’s offering bribes to the Pakistanis, the Turks, the Free Iranis, and the Saudis to regain control over Persian Gulf oil. Israel’s gone, but their lobby’s alive and well.”

“Dee-Mar?” Lessing interjected.

“You were really out of things, weren’t you, off wrestling weeds in Russia? Dee-Mar, short for ‘Diversified Marketing Corporation, Limited,’ is the super-syndicate that owns Dee-Net, and it’s as Jewish as lox and bagels.”

Wrench pointed to a lace-edged, lavender bolster. Lessing tossed it to him, and the little man plumped it up and leaned back. “Our own Homex Corporation’s in there pushing, though. Right after Pacov and Starak our Third World investments looked pretty wim-pish. The Greeks nationalized Tee-May Industries, and we lost megabucks when the Soviet refugees trampled our Italian, Belgian, and German stuff into the mud. We had to transfer most of our action back to the movement’s original bases in South America: coffee, bauxite and other minerals, emeralds, Argentine beef, agro-products from the reclaimed lands in the Amazon Basin… a lot of stuff. Now we’re coming back.”

“No drugs?” Lessing asked mildly. Unlike many meres, he had never gone in for brain-benders. Aside from high-school experiments with Emily Pietrick and a rare joint with his unit in Angola, he had avoided “phunny pharmaceuticals,” as one of the TV yuck-sters called them. One of the few good things the Born-Agains had accomplished back around the turn of the century was to make smoking, sniffing, needling, and most other intoxicating recreations socially incorrect. Only liquor had survived the Puritans’ zealous scythes.

Morgan threw him an irritated glance. “Not us! Some supercorps deal in drugs, but to Mulder and the Board they’re a no-no. Against good genetics and racial principles, you know. Hell, maybe we should’ ve gone in for smokables and White Christmas and snuffy-doo, principles or not. We could’ve made a bundle. You got any idea how much Yama-Corp made on Thai and Indian stuff last year? Or Dee-Mar on Turkish and Irani ‘Red Gold’? Shit, we could’ve been pulling in those bucks!”

“‘What shall it profit a man…?’” Wrench rolled his eyes up ward and donned an angelic smile. “Money’s fine, but you’ve got to consider image, Sam. Remember last year, when the Latin Americans asked if we wanted to buy into their nose-candy, and Mulder turned ‘em down? Well, they went to Nevarco instead… big gambling, entertainment, prostitution, and crime, along with legit stuff… and cut a deal. Then when Mexico started sending troops to the lib-rebs, Nevarco was as popular as dog turds and head lice. Now they couldn’t sell a Bible to a Born-Again!” He flicked a button on his remote control.

“Hey!” Morgan grabbed at the little box. “Let’s see that… the news! ” Wrench held on but let Morgan have his way.

The picture-wall showed a scene on a rubble-strewn city street: a group of men wearing white suits, their faces concealed by copper-hued, mirror-glass helmets, were the only persons to be seen. They wore gloves and boots and carried breathing tanks and awkward backpacks, and they roused an echo in Lessing’s memory, but he couldn’t recall what it was. A sealed van followed the party as they picked their way slowly along the littered pavement past silent, empty buildings.

“New York,” Morgan whispered.

“Center of Manhattan.” Wrench indicated a rusting sign.

Lessing asked, “Haven’t they got it cleaned up yet?”

“On the surface, yes,” Wrench said. “Almost all the bodies have been disposed of, but they’re still working underground: thousands of people died in the subways. Hans Borchardt thinks Starak made its victims look for dark and cool places. They crawled down in there to die.”

Lessing shuddered. A picture of the corpse-packed waiting room in Israeli police headquarters on Derekh Shekhem Street swam up to the top of his memory, then was gone again. He wasn’t over that yet. He probably never would be.

Ice-blue.

An open, staring, dark-lashed eye.

“There’re mutant fungi down in the subways,” Wrench stated with macabre relish. “All colors, and poisonous as hell. Some can even move… crawl along a pipe and drop down on your head.”

“Oh, bullshit!” Morgan jeered. “You been reading the tabloids at the checkout counter!”

“I swear it’s true! Dr. Vasilev, that Russian biologist we picked up from New Moscow, said so. He’s seen ‘em. Big, green, blue, white… icky, wriggly.”

“Go gub yourself!”

Wrench grinned sweetly up at Mrs. Mulder, who had been standing behind them in the doorway for some time.

Morgan had the grace to blush, like a schoolboy caught pulling the girls’ pigtails. It was funny how attitudes stayed the same, Lessing thought, even when everything else had changed beyond recognition.

“Good morning!” The Fairy Godmother chose to ignore Morgan’s obscenity. “You’ve had breakfast?” She twitched the sleeve of her feathery, blue housecoat in the direction of “the morning room,” as she called it.

They chorused that they had. She peered at Morgan, and he wriggled his toes to show that his clean, white socks would not soil her expensive furniture. She then went to Wrench and substituted a dark-grey cushion for the delicate, lavender bolster. Cleanliness enjoyed a decided edge over godliness in the Fairy Godmother’s household.

“Herman’s waiting for you in the study,” she told Lessing.

As he got up to leave, the TV screen cleared to show a hall hung with American flags and Party banners. Black and brown uniforms mingled with an artist’s palette of multi-colored civilian garments. Trumpets sounded and drums thuttered as a procession began to wend its way down the center aisle.

Wrench cried, “Hey, look, there’s AbnerHand…!”

As he spoke, the announcer said, “And it was at this moment that the grenade was thrown.”

The screen erupted in noise and smoke. Mrs. Mulder gasped and covered her eyes. The others watched, stunned.

“Five members of the Party of Humankind were killed outright, and seven were wounded. Two people in the audience also died, and four more are in the hospital with injuries ranging from minor to critical. No one has yet claimed responsibility, and it is not yet known “

“Crap, God damn it, crap!” Wrench shouted. “Of course, they know who did it! They just won’t say!”

Mrs. Mulder fluttered ivory fingers. “Please… oh, dear…”

The imperturbable voice from the screen continued: “Cadre-Captain Abner Hand, apparently the bomb’s main target, will recover, a hospital spokesperson has said.”

“It’s time we did something.” Morgan snarled.

Lessing said, “I told you: Goddard’s PHASE isn’t enough. What’s he got? Ex-cops, vets, private security men, meres… and sixty-year-old night watchmen. But he’s no soldier. He can’t hack this kind of thing. The Party needs teeth.” He fixed Wrench and Morgan with a grin. “The Party needs me. I’m teeth.”

He left them staring after him.

Mulder’s office-study was very different from the one in India. This was “Party palatial,” designed to awe, to overwhelm, and to make power brokers quail. The vista of sweeping lawns and precisely trimmed gardens behind the monumental, teak-and-black, marble-topped desk at the north end of the room was real, but the west wall was another holo-vid mural. Depending upon a visitor’s psychological profile, displayed on a hidden screen behind Mulder’s desk, the holo-vid presented near-three-dimensional scenic panoramas, Classical statuary, Aztec art, abstract sculptures, mobiles of metal or chiming stained glass, or — for all Lessing knew — a hero-size photo-bust of the First Führer himself!

The room breathed opulence. The floor was buried three centimeters deep beneath lush, maroon carpeting; the ceiling was creamy ivory; and the walls were paneled with matched-grain cherry wood, polished to satin brilliance. TV hookups, telephones, computer consoles, and communications gear occupied the south wall, together with the visitors’ entrance, while doors in the east wall led to secretarial offices, to a private lounge and bar, and to a tiny “war room” with its own bed and bathroom, vital in case of an emergency. Somewhere here, too, was a secret elevator that would drop Mulder and his staff a hundred meters to an underground bunker where they could presumably survive anything short of God’s Fickle Finger.

Mulder’s desk was inundated with clutter. Party reports, files, proposals, financial projections, and data summaries were neatly arranged at one end of the four-meter-long monstrosity, while bills pending in Congress, correspondence, summaries marked “Top Secret” for Mulder when he wore his Secretary of State hat, and the “paper blizzard” of top-heavy government were stacked on the other. The overflow was heaped untidily on the floor nearby.

Colored light from the desk TV screen rainbowed Mulder’s bald head and made prisms of the reading glasses he now regularly wore. He pursed his lips and scowled.

“I know,” Lessing said. “We were watching downstairs.”

“Abner’ll be all right. I’ve been in touch with the doctors in Boise, where it happened. We lost Johansen, Partridge, Carter, Colbert, and that boy from Ohio… what was his name?”

“Amsler, Keith Amsler. Anything I can do?”

“No. Not now. Maybe contact their relatives later… you knew Johansen and Carter on Ponapc, didn’t you?” Mulder glowered down at his reflection in the polished desktop. “God, Alan, our opponents believe in free speech only when it’s their speech. Freedom only when it’s their freedom. To them, whatever we do is ‘bigotry’ and ‘oppression’ and ‘evil’! When they do the same things to us it’s ‘justice.’ And they dare to blame us!”

“Still, the Party’s come a long way.” Mulder needed soothing; he looked like a man about to explode.

“Yes…. Well, I never thought I’d see Party schools side by side with public schools… and more popular because we offer a better education. Nor open rallies, nor elections won by Party candidates, nor newspapers that… once in a while… tell it the way it is.”

“Except for Home-Net, the TV networks still don’t like us.”

Damn it, he hadn’t meant to say that. It would remind Mulder of Abner Hand.

It didn’t. Mulder depressed a button with a pudgy finger. “The networks? Let me show you something.” The west wall cleared to show a complex flow-chart: a maze of colored lines and boxes and oblongs filled with text. “Eighty-Five?”

“Yes, Mr. Mulder?”

Lessing hadn’t known there was a corn-link in this office. Mulder was having terminals put in everywhere, like condom-vending machines!

“Show us the chain of takeovers, buy-outs, bankruptcies, and stock purchases that will result in our acquiring Omni-Net and possibly Yama-Net by next July.” He nodded Lessing toward one of the capacious leather chairs on the visitors’ side of the desk.

Boxes lit up, lines connected them, and dots of colored light travelled from one to another as Eighty-Five laid out the future. A section of the diagram broke off and hung suspended in midair: a distant probability chain whose effects had no immediate relevance. Bar graphs in reds, blues, and yellows appeared beside their respective boxes, indicating investments, personnel, resources, and likely profits or losses. Overlays replaced sections of the chart, and portions vanished entirely. A time scale at the top blinked off days and months.

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.

“Well, if they’re anti-social, at least the Bangers’re not bland.”

Mulder peered at him to see if he was serious. “It’s all pan of the design package, Alan. Psychologists’ll tell you that young people need anti-social outlets. Adolescent rebellion is a natural phenomenon. You channel it, sublimate it into orgies and frenzy, and you don’t get student riots, politics, and trouble. Party-animals don’t join revolutionary political parties.”

“I….”

Mulder abruptly turned to the mural wall. “Any further news from the hospital?”

“Mr. Hand is out of surgery. The police have arrested a man, a member of one of the lib-reb groups.”

“Hmmph. Keep me posted.” He came around the desk to stand by Lessing. “Wrench tells me you want to set up a military force for the Cadre, a kind of Waffen-SS. You’re an experienced soldier, Alan, and people tell me you have talent.”

Wrench was fast. Lessing had first broached his idea last night at dinner. He said, “I can lead troops, sir. In tactical spesh-ops anyway. Policy’s someone else’s job.”

“But do you have commitment! Loyalty?”

“Yes… to those who treat me right. I’m loyal to you. I’m loyal to my troops. I’m loyal to my friends. You know that”

“Oh, I believe you. You’re a ‘mere’s mere,’ as Wrench once put it. You have great personal loyalty, but you don’t know what you’re fighting for… and so far you haven’t seemed to care.” He pointed a finger. “A Cadre military unit needs more than just a mere as its commander. We want commitment to our objectives. No hesitation. Can you give us that?”

Lessing didn’t reply. Far down inside himself, fathoms deep beneath the murky waves, something moved. He only glimpsed it: the scales of Leviathan, the great, staring eye of the kraken, the sleek form of the barracuda, the fangs of the killer shark.

He saw a flicker of ice-blue.

Very carefully, he said, “I don ‘ t know, Mr. Mulder. Commitment was never my thing. You need soldiers. I can lead them.”

Mulder plunged both hands into the pockets of his shapeless, tan slacks. “Duty and responsibility: two of the foundation stones for my grandather’s SS. You possess those, Alan, more than Morgan or Wrench or Borchardt or even Goddard, who lives and breathes the Party. You don’t share the rest of our beliefs, but you may come around to them too, some day.”

Lessing let him think.

Mulder shifted from one foot to the other. “I shall recommend to the Party… and to President Outram… that you be allowed to try. Outram needs soldiers and political support; he can’t afford to turn our offer down. I think you’ll get your Cadre unit. You’ll start with one division, the best-trained of the present Cadre. If that works out, we’ll push for more. I warn you, though: if you fail, we’ll cancel it.”

“Thank you, sir.” He felt a lot lighter somehow. The prospect of getting out of Mulder’s gilded cage was exhilarating.

“May I ask a question? A different matter?”

“Sure.”

“Pacov, Alan. Aren’t you curious about Pacov? Who sent you to Marvelous Gap? Who killed Gomez and your comrades? Who slaughtered a third of the human race?”

“I… yeah, I’m curious.” He actually wasn’t; for a mere, death was just the other side of the mirror. He’d seen too much, and he probably did suffer from moral ennui, the accidie that Mulder had spoken of. Conscience? His nightmares were subsiding. Fictional heroes might mourn and bemoan their fates forever, but not real

people. Weep, grieve, bury your dead— and get back to your life. It’s the only one you’ve got.

He said, “Wrench told me he still has Eighty-Five sifting data.”

“He does. But you never ask about Pacov, even though you had so much to do with it. Not with using it, of course. You know what I mean.”

Lessing started to shrug, then turned that into a restless stretch. He felt something bump against the floodgates of memory again, something big and probably horrible. He held those valves closed with all his might. “If Wrench finds anything, he’ll tell me. Has he found something?”

“Nothing much. A scrap here, a fragment there. A memo that leads from Gomez back to an untraceable address in the United States… and then to nowhere. Invoices for the weapons you had, sold to names that don’t exist and shipped to a lithographer’s shop in Detroit. The owner of that shop died in the first Starak attack. We also have a Detroit hotel statement and a drycleaner’s bill in the name of a ‘Mr. James F. Arthur,’ who otherwise does not exist. There are areas in Eighty-Five’s memory that have been dumped. Not just shoved into an oubliette file but physically erased.”

“What more can I do, then?”

“Don’t you want to know? The world wants to catch the genocides who nearly annihilated us. If there’s any one thing both the government and the Party keep hearing, it’s this: get those monsters and execute them… in ways that’d make Vlad the Impaler blanch! Yet you, the man who actually handled Pacov and lived to tell it… you act like you were sent to deliver a case of beer!”

“What can I say? That’s the way I am.” It was a lame excuse, but it was absolutely honest.

Mulder blinked at him in silence, sighed, and then faced the flow-chart on the wall. “What if we don’t buy Armikon Industries next spring?” He was talking not to Lessing but to Eighty-Five, playing his chess game of power again. The display rippled obediently, and colored lines, dots, and boxes danced around and over him.

“Interrupting?” a voice asked. It was Liese.

“No, no, come in.” Mulder did not look around. “Just showing Alan what we’re doing.”

She laid a stack of computer printouts on the desk. “Eighty-Five’s response to Boise attack. Small opinion swing in our favor.”

“What does Goddard say?”

“Not Vizzies. Lib-reb sabotage team. Best guess.”

“Tell Niederhofer at Home-Net to lay it on the Califomians for now. We can change it later if we have to.” He rubbed at his bald pate. “I hate making propaganda out of something this awful, but the psych people say every atrocity story is worth ten soldiers’ lives.”

“Wartime propaganda forgotten afterwards,” Liese confirmed. “Good example: little hostility between Americans and Japanese within ten years after World War II. Vietnamese and Chinese now friends, even after War of 2010.”

“Only the Jews have managed to keep the ‘Holocaust’ alive all these years.” Mulder stumped back to his desk and picked up a sheet of paper. “Here, Alan. This is my letter to Jonas Outram asking that a Special Forces unit be set up under Army auspices. Scott Harter, the Secretary of Defense, is a friend of ours, and he owes us favors. We’ll see that the unit is largely made up of Cadre personnel. You’ll be in charge, with authorization to set up a planning and procurement team. I think Outram will want the unit named ‘Winged Victory ‘ or ‘ First Freedom’ or something else unifying and patriotic. Green light?”

“You had this already written!”

Mulder spread his hands wide. “Somebody has to think ahead around here.”

“Congratulations!” Liese touched Lessing’s shoulder and murmured, “Talk?”

He took the letter and the related files Mulder handed him, shook hands, and left. Liese joined him outside, and they walked together along the powder-and perfume-fragrant corridor to Mrs. Mulder’s sewing room. At this hour the Fairy Godmother would be interacting with the beautiful people of soap-opera never-never-land, provided that Wrench and Morgan hadn’t managed to pry her loose from the TV.

The sewing room lay at the south end of the second floor, over the garage and the kitchens. Large and airy, it had originally been intended as a nursery. The wallpaper was gay with hyacinths, cornflowers, and sunny, yellow animals; the floor was of durable, blue Lino-Last; and the curtains were of white chintz. Mrs. Mulder rarely used the shiny Katayama sewing machine that stood squarely in the center of the room, however, and the boxes and trunks and bolls of fabric piled against the walls were mostly unopened. It was a pretty place, but there was an air of poignancy about it. Perhaps there were even little ghosts of the children the Mulders had never had. Lessing sensed a great loneliness here.

Liese moved to inspect the pattembooks stacked on the single bookshelf, while Lessing pulled a stool from under the cutting table and gingerly lowered his not-inconsiderable weight down upon it. Good living — and no ‘Raja’s Revenge’ — had plumped him out like a Christmas turkey! If commanding a Cadre unit did nothing else, at least it would give him a reason to exercise.

He had no idea how to begin. Neither, apparently, did she. They both spoke at once, then made polite motions.

“Us?” Liese was very direct. Lessing had liked this about her and once, long ago on Ponapc, had told her so. Now it unsettled him.

He tried to answer in the same fashion. “Yeah, us. Do we or don’t we?”

Tears welled up, astonishing him. “Don’t want “

“Hey… what? I thought…”

Her nostrils flared, and her lips worked soundlessly. Then she husked, “Fifty lira pog? Cairo special?”

He knew at once what the trouble was: her past was her millstone. He strove for a soothing, gentle tone. “Liese, why? Why drag it up? Why wallow in what happened to you… before? That’s history! It doesn’t matter! I heard some of it from Mrs. Delacroix… poor lady… and more from other people. It has nothing to do with us, with now.”

“Oh?” She moved, lifted her arms, shifted her stance, and licked her lower lip. Suddenly she was someone else: sleek, seductive, sensuous — every doggie’s centerfold, every pervert’s pom-queen! She leaned back so that her small, high breasts thrust out against the pearl-grey fabric of her blouse. She bent a knee so that the curve of her long thigh became as sinuous as the serpent in the Garden of Eden. She was lust; she was sex; she was what the Israeli and Arab heavy-breathers in Cairo had plunked down their coin for.

Was this Eighty-Five in another zany hologram disguise? One of Wrench’s silly jokes? This wasn’t the woman Lessing knew: Liese, the lady, the cool executive, the dedicated worker, the unflap-pable, twenty-first-century sophisticate.

He couldn’t help himself: lust swept up out of his loins to pound against his temples. His hand hurt, and he looked down to see that he had cut himself on Mrs. Mulder’s sewing scissors. Liese licked her lip again. Her hazel -and-gold cat’s eyes were as ancient and wise and knowing as Astarte and Lilith and Bast and the priestesses of the Dark Mysteries. The very air seemed to become turgid and hot. It pulsed.

“Hundred lira? Five hundred?” She was mocking him.

“Jesus…! Stop that! What the hell…?”

“What you see is what you get.” She ran slender Fingers down over her breasts, her belly, her hips, sliding her clinging charcoal-grey skirt aside to reveal tawny skin beneath. “Syphilis once. Gonorrhea four times. No herpes… lucky there. Never AIDS… really lucky! Can’t have children, though.” Her voice cracked on that last sentence, and her erotic pose began to crumple.

He stared. “Never forget. What I was.” She bit her words off a mouthful at a time. “All kinds. Men, women. White, Brown, Black, Yellow. Young, old. Kind, sad, timid, vicious, crazy. Sadists, masochists, fetishists. A necrophiliac Irishman once… white face-powder and a coffin.”

He wanted to slap her, kick her, beat her senseless. Instead, he balled his fists, bit his tongue, and listened in grim silence as she recited her litany of degradation.

Lessing was not shocked. He had seen things in Angola, in Syria, and elsewhere. Liese had been treated no worse than many other hookers, but humiliation stuck to this girl like cat fur to strawberry jam, as his mother used to say. Some women saw prostitution — in all its aberrant forms — as a business; some professed to enjoy it and the money it made; some shut their minds and did it because they had no talent, nowhere to go, and nothing else to sell. Some did it for drugs, while others were too weak and emotionally dependent to pull free. Liese was different from these: she had never given up hating. She hated those who brutalized her. She hated society foF caring so little about her plight. She hated herself for lacking the courage to fight, to run away, or to kill herself. She bore few physical scars — her pimps had been careful about that — but those she carried inside were gaping wounds that would never heal.

“How can you know? Care…?”

Lessing cared very much. He didn’t know what to say, how to comfort her, what would heal her. God damn his lack of words!

“Earn a lot, get your pick,” she continued tonelessly. “Money, clothes, jewels, perfume, special treatment. Earn too little, you’re the ‘M’ in the ‘S-and-M,’ center ring in the whips and chains circus. Don’t cooperate at all….”

“Shut the fuck up’.” He shook a fist at her.

Her features stayed expressionless, as stony as the Sphinx of Giza. “Want you to see. What you get.”

“I don’t give a pogging dink about that! I don’t care if you gubbed the whole world, men, women, and children… dogs and donkeys!” He slammed a fist down on the cutting table. “Oh, shit\ I am not getting some fifty-lira Cairo whore! I am not ‘getting’ anybody’. We are getting. You are getting, and I am getting. It’s mutual! We both get, or it doesn’t happen!”

Her lips were trembling. She was visibly on the edge of hysteria. “Not…! No…!”

“You’re afraid, aren’t you? Afraid of men? Afraid of me? Or maybe you hate men. God knows I can’t blame you. But I’m not ‘men M’mme! I’m Alan Lessing. A million rotten apples don’t spoil every one in the barrel!”

“No… yes Can’t help it.” She lifted her chin and looked straight at him. He admired her then. He loved her. When faced with the unendurable, she had escaped into aphasia and an inner landscape of her own. She had not surrendered. She had not broken. Anneliese Meisinger might bend, but she didn’t break.

“Oh, gub it!” he cried in frustration. “What am I supposed to do… to say? I can’t erase the hell you suffered! I don’t have a magic wand… I wish I did! I can’t make you trust me. I know you’ve seen psychiatrists and therapists… witch-doctors enough to pack a loony bin! If they couldn’t help you, then how in God’s name can I? How can I make you see me… not an abuser, not a violator, not a devil, not a man? Just me, Alan Lessing?”

She put her hands over her face and let her dark-blonde tresses swing down. He was reminded of someone else: a whiff of sandalwood, a flash of ice-blue. He shook his head angrily, like a horse bitten by a fly.

He didn’t dare take her in his arms. Patience!

“You… Alan… you…,” she moaned.

“Yeah, me. Alan Lessing. Mr. Potato Patch, as Wrench called me after I got home from Russia.” Desperately, he wanted her to smile.

“You: no bargain.” She did smile; between her fingers he could see the comers of her mouth quirk up. “Alan Lessing: nothing… nobody… wasted talent.”

“Right. Big and gawky. Waddles like a rhinoceros, sings like a duck.”

She giggled, low in her throat; her control was coming back. “Yes, you. Fixated in adolescence. Never grew up. Can’t relate to closeness. Bad childhood. Sex limited to groping in the movies, quickies in cars, banging in the bushes after the senior prom.” She must have picked those things up from one of his doctors. Or from Eighty-Five! Some bastard talked too much.

“Thanks a lot! I never even went to the senior prom.”

A vision of Beverly Rowntrce clicked into place, suddenly and clearly, like a slide into a projector: furious, weeping, whining at him in that nagging, badgering way she had. The head-doctors hadn’t dug deep enough into Alan Lessing; they hadn’t dredged up all the ugly muck and spread it out in the light of day. Here was a picture he never let even himself see: Beverly telling him she was pregnant, telling him it was his baby, telling him she didn’t love him — didn’t even particularly like him. It was time she married somebody, and he was it: the prick and the pocketbook. She would agree to an abortion, however, but then he’d have to pay for the best: a first-class vacation somewhere while she got her oven cleaned.

He wasn’t the father. He could count days and months as well as she could, and it wasn’ t possible. He could guess who the father was, but Beverly had picked him instead. Why? She must have seen him as the dumbest asshole since Simple Simon. That was what hurt.

She was wrong, though: he would not be blackmailed. He would not pay. He would not marry her. He’d marry a black widow spider before he’d tie himself to Beverly Rowntree. He was going to college next year, and no conniving bitch of a Great White Whale was going to wreck that. He told her so, explicitly, bluntly, and in detail. After that evening he never saw Beverly again.

Liese was watching, twin furrows of puzzlement between her brows. She had no idea what he was thinking. His problems could come later.

He went to her.

She held him off, turning her head to the side, so that he got only a nose full of tickling, blonde hair. “No. No commitment.”

Commitment again! Liese and Mulder both! Did she mean that she wanted no commitment? Or that he lacked it? Whatever! He held her gently, and, sure enough, he fell her tenseness ebbing.

“Take what I can give,” he urged. “All the commitment I’ve got. No education, no money, no class, no talent, no permanent job. A body that’s middle-aged, tired, scarred, and not as sexy as it used to be. Take it or leave it.”

“Goddard offered better.” He thought she was smiling. “Make me queen over his kingdom. All I survey.” She sounded quavery, but this time he was sure it was laughter. “Asked me to marry him. Out by Mulders’ swimming pool.”

“And?”

“Told him I couldn’t survey anything with his hairy belly in the way.”

It was Lessing ‘s turn to laugh.

“Neither of us is a winner,” he chuckled. “Let’s go see if money, power, and sinful luxury can ruin two beautiful people. Watch the next heart-throbbing installment of ‘Mulder’s Maudlin Mansion*!”

“No commitment. No marriage. Not now.” She took his hand. “Green light?”

“Either of us can bring up those things later. The other one can always say, ‘Gub off, foozy!’”

She hugged him, and he kissed her, hard and deep. Then things got better.

“Come on. My room. No Eighty-Five there.” She was just as urgent as he was.

She waited while he closed the sewing-room door after them. As a parting joke, he called, “Good night, Eighty-Five!”

He did not see the tiny, red light blink on beside the camera high up in the ceiling molding, or hear Eighty-Five answer, “It is not night, Mister Lessing. The time is 11:03 hours. But have a nice day anyway.”