The Angel & the Brown-eyed Boy (20 page)

“You believed whatever nonsense I programmed you to believe. The Great Peace! There hasn’t been peace since the Second Revolution. You do boom-boom war, not my kind of war.” Linc strained to understand.

“You don’t know what a boom-boom war is? It’s one you fight with guns and missiles. Boom-boom has decimated your countryside. You maintain the illusion of peace because you didn’t destroy your major cities. Why? I didn’t allow you. It’s part of my plan.

“Tomorrow, I’ll blow up the planet!” The hologram raised its arms in triumph. “That’s my kind of war! Everyone dies!”

Linc wanted to say something, but his helmet muffled his voice. He didn’t want to take it off now.

“Take off your helmet, idiot. Talk to dear Tsar Yuri. Do you think your pitiful armor will protect you? I can melt this room.” The figure laughed.

Yuri’s laughter was worse than his voice; it turned Linc’s stomach. Linc pulled off his helmet and set it on the floor beside him. He wasn’t going to let Yuri push him around. “We have had some defensive military engagements. The peace hasn’t been perfect—”

“Don’t you look at your budgets? Don’t you know how much you spend fighting, Mr. Commander in Chief?”

Linc sputtered. He didn’t really understand the budget that much, but his guys told him everything was great.

“You believe your own lies,” Yuri bellowed. “I lied to you. I set you up. But you were too stupid to question anything. Even now, you can’t ask me a decent question.”

Linc thought hard. “OK, what about the Bloodless Revolution? Everyone says you took over most of the earth with no bloodshed.”

“Blood washed the streets. For miles around Moscow, the bodies of my enemies swung from scaffolds. All over the world, crows feasted on the dead. No one opposed me when I was done—anyone who would try was dead.”

Linc quailed. That did make sense. History had shown that you couldn’t pop out one leader and put in one you liked better in a couple of months. If you tried, you might get something worse. He looked at the massive figure, which appeared to be 100 percent alive and staring directly at him.

It spoke: “Shall I tell you what I see when I look at you? I can see you, you know. I don’t know what”—that slight pause that said a name was being inserted into his programming occurred again— “President Lincoln Charles looks like, but I know what kind of fool you are. You are tall and good-looking. Your people picked you because you make them feel safe and secure.”

Linc started to shake. Maybe he wasn’t the smartest president in the world, but he wasn’t what Yuri implied. Linc’s mouth opened and closed, but he couldn’t say anything.

A banging noise from the hall interrupted them. “Linc? It’s Ron. We’re breaking in. Can you hear me?” They must have been using a battering ram; the rotunda reverberated with the blows.

“Ron. I’m fine. We’re having a chat. We’re OK.” Linc heard his own voice saying stupid pleasantries. He wasn’t OK; he was in a terrible place with an electronic maniac and didn’t know how to get out.

“Ron! Ron! Everybody! I’m not OK. Get me out of here,” he shouted. “I’m in danger! Help me! Help!”

The blue lights in the hologram’s eyes twinkled. “They can’t hear you. But shut up or I’ll blow up the White House.”

Linc paled. “You can do that?”

“If I can blow up the world, I can blow up this palace of excess.” Yuri waved his arms, indicating the room they were in. “Would you like to see me do it?”

“No! No! I believe you!”

“Then I will say what I brought you here to hear,” the terrible voice continued. “When I took over the world, I looked around and thought, ‘I know they’re stupid now, but what if I gave them a thousand years to develop?’”

“A thousand years?” Linc whispered.

“Oh, you didn’t know,” the Tsar’s voice soothed. “Yes, my friend. It’s been a thousand years since the glorious Second Revolution. It’s not 2197—it’s 3199. You’ve had more than a thousand years to prove yourselves. But I knew how it would end at the beginning.

“I thought, ‘Will they make a good society once they’re freed of the fear of atomic war? Will all society benefit from prosperity, or will the fat, sucking owners take it all and leave the workers living like slaves?’” He laughed, a sound like drowning cats. “If I gave you a thousand years, would you have a moral shift so that you cared about what was worth caring about—your fellow humans—and not every stupid other thing?

“I knew that you would fail. I knew that you’d have a huge military. Oh, you’d call them police and have them rounding up people. There’ll be a danger you have to fight. A peril. You’d be engaged in continuous warfare that you didn’t talk about, except as a pretext to pry more money out of the pathetic, whining taxpayers.

“And you’d feed the population with nonstop movies. Games. Shopping. You’d have bigger and bigger malls, and you’ll walk around them like rats, buying and hoarding. The people would gobble it down as fast as you could shovel it to them, mindless grubs eating their way through shit.

“Yes? Yes? This is true, isn’t it?”

Linc nodded; he couldn’t think to do anything else. He didn’t think his culture was so bad. He liked movies. If some people had more than the others, they’d worked for it. People were not equal, as the Constitution said. Or was it the Declaration of Independence?

“You have camps where you lock the people who speak against the stupidity of your lives. You call them subversives and revolutionaries, and you do whatever you want to them—don’t you? DON’T YOU? ANSWER ME!”

“We do have detention centers for people who don’t fit in. We have to have them to keep the peace.”

Yuri chuckled. “Oh, yes. Have you been to these camps? Have you seen what they do on your orders?”

“Well, yes. I’ve visited several of them. They were sort of like scout camp when I was a kid.” Maybe he hadn’t seen the worst ones, but what he’d seen wasn’t so bad. His Secretary of Public Stability said they had to have them to stop the plots. “If there’s anything wrong, we can fix them, I promise,” he begged.

“You have had a thousand years to fix them, President Lincoln Charles. You and your advisers have reasons for the way things are. Just like you have reasons for your salaries and lifetime benefits and the luxurious resorts they call presidential retreats. Your children spend their days playing video games, taking drugs, and fucking each other. And so do you.

“You call it the Great Peace, but twenty miles outside your cities is a wasteland run by vigilantes.

“I knew you’d take what I gave you—AND FUCK IT UP.”

Linc couldn’t stand any more. “How can you say that? We tried!”

“TRIED? YOU AVOIDED EVERY UNPLEASANT TRUTH. YOU LIVED LIKE MORONS.”

Linc cowered, but kept plugging. “If you loved us, you would have kept us in line and taught us.”

Yuri’s laughter roared around the metal room. “I never loved you. I knew you too well! If you hadn’t destroyed your brightest people, I never would have come out.

“But here I am—with you and with the other rulers of the world in places like this—telling you that you’ve lost.” Linc’s eyes bulged. “Yes, right now, I am talking to the current tsar of Russia and to all the pathetic presidents and prime ministers of your world—telling them what I am telling you.

“You may think I’m a hard man. I am a hard man. I’m also a dead man.

“What does your plight matter to me? I’m dead.” That horrible laugh resounded. “As long as nuclear weapons have existed,
everyone has known that one day, a madman would blow up the planet.

“I am that man. I’m doing it tomorrow morning.”

With an electric crackle, Yuri’s powerful figure compressed, becoming a line of light running from the ceiling to the floor. It disappeared with a snap. Lincoln Charles stood staring at the space where the Great Tsar had been. He picked up his helmet, put it under his arm, and walked to the doorway.

“Hail to the Chief” began to play and the lights along the ceiling directed him out. He stood in the doorway as it opened wide. Light flooded him and the guards outside.

“Linc, are you OK?” Ron asked.

J
eremy and Eliana walked around the mansion to the lawn in the back. He didn’t clutch her arm the way he had before. He was afraid to touch her again. He felt as though a computer ten times as powerful as anything he’d used had booted up inside him, and he didn’t know how to control it.

He leaned forward and marched along frowning, the way he did when he was working something out in his lab. She ducked her head forward under his and looked up at him.

“Jeremy no like me?” she said.

“No! Jeremy... I really like you, Ellie. I’ve never liked anyone like I like you. And I really like talking to you. It’s not just because you don’t understand me, either. I think you do understand me.”

“OK.” She skipped over the lawn, up on her little hooves. She looked weightless.

The back of the mansion had simple landscaping, some bushes around the house, then acres of lawn flowing to a cliff overlooking the sea. Below, the rock face was crowded by a maze of jagged boulders slammed by breakers.

“Be careful,” he yelled. “It’s a cliff.”

Eliana careened toward the precipice, arms over her head, coat flapping, that irrepressible smile beaming from every inch of her body. She looked like she’d fly over the edge, but she pivoted and came to a stop. She was standing close to the brink, looking over, when he got there.

“You have to be careful,” he chided her.

She pointed at the ocean, babbling excitedly. He was surprised, because Henry said she was afraid of water. Water, but not an ocean.

“They come,” she said. “This good. They come here.”

“Who’s coming here?”

“My people come.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Well, it had better be before—well before—7:35 in the morning. Otherwise, everything above ground will be toast.”

“OK,” she nodded. “Before toast.” She put her hand in her coat pocket. He saw her hand moving. He knew she had something in there and wanted to see what it was. He’d find out soon enough.

“It’s time to go back. It’s getting dark. There are marauders out here.”

She stood on the very edge, looking at the panorama very carefully, moving her head from right to left. She peered over the face, noting the rocks and the surf pounding on them. She seemed to be memorizing them. Without moving, she faced the ocean. She raised her hands over her head. At her arms’ fullest extension, her eyes were closed. He thought he saw something fly from her heart. They were pulsations of the type he felt when he touched her, but hers were almost visible. She returned her hands to her sides very slowly, turning to him and holding out her arm to be grabbed.

“Is OK,” she said. “Before 7:35.”

He took her arm and pulled her back to the house, and then stopped. “No, Ellie. This is how a gentleman escorts a lady.” He offered her his arm and showed her how to put her hand through
it. “See, now you’re my date. Would you like to go to dinner with me, Ellie?”

“Date. Dinner.”

He didn’t know if she understood. She greeted everything with such sweet enthusiasm. He stiffened when he saw the hulking figure observing them from the rhododendrons by the house. Sam Baahuhd, the village headman—Sam of the village—stood in the shadows.

Sam’s presence jerked Jeremy back to the reality of the Hamptons. The “staff” at the estate was a clan of settlers who had wandered in over the last couple of hundred years. They were as trustworthy as a gang of rattlesnakes and way smarter. They lived in the farm’s barns and outbuildings because Jeremy’s ancestors had recognized that they needed a resident army, not good gardeners.

In the beginning, absentee owners visited their summer homes to find them occupied by half-wild savages. The flood of criminals grew higher and more desperate as escapees from the camps took to the forests. Marauders had turned the other great landholdings in the Hamptons into pirate enclaves. The villagers fought—and won— battles with marauders a couple of times a year.

Sam looked the way he always did, wearing dirty canvas pants, a quilted wool jacket that appeared a hundred years old, and a widebrimmed hat. Its band was a rattlesnake skin, the rattle prominently displayed. His reddish, matted hair stuck out from under the hat, complementing his red beard and sunburned skin. The way his skin cracked and peeled around his nose showed that he once had been fair, but the sun had tanned him like hide.

Sam Baahuhd was close to seven feet tall. His size accounted in part for his status of leader of the village, as did the fact that he was the oldest son of the previous headman.

Sam Baahuhd’s last name meant “Bad,” which summed up life in rural Connecticut. The natives settled disputes with guns and fists. Blood feuds between villages and families ripped the countryside. Hooch—rotgut whiskey—and homegrown hallucinogens were staples of life, along with violence.

“How do you do, Sam?” He clutched his pistol’s handle. Jeremy watched Sam carefully, searching for signs of intoxication. He smelled sweat and stale alcohol on Sam’s clothes, but not the sharp bite of fresh booze.

The headman returned Jeremy’s greeting. “Fair n’ fi’, Mr. Egerton. It’s a troll evenin’.” Jeremy knew this meant, “Fair and fine, Mr. Edgarton. It’s a great evening.”