The Penultimate Truth (9 page)

     But a good speech is a good speech. Whoever delivers it. A kid in high school, reciting Tom Paine . . . the material is still great, and this reciter doesn't falter or stumble or get the words wrong. The 'vac and all these main-men standing around see to that. _And_, he thought, _so do we. We know what we're doing_.

     "Who are you?" he asked this strangely capable young Yance-man.

     "Dave something. I forget," the man said, almost mystically absorbed, even now that the sim had become inoperative once more.

     "You forget your _name?_" Puzzled, he waited, and then he realized that this was merely an elliptical way by which the dark young man was telling him something: that he was a relatively new Yance-man, not yet fully established in the hierarchy. "Lantano," Adams said. "You're David Lantano, living in the hotspot near Cheyenne."

     "That's right."

     "No wonder you're black." Radiation-burned, Adams realized. The youth, eager to acquire land for a demesne, had gone in too soon; all the rumors, passed back and forth in the idle hours of evening by the worldwide elite, appeared true: it had been far too soon, and physically young David Lantano was suffering.

     Philosophically, Lantano said, "I'm alive."

     "But look at you. What about your bone marrow?"

     "Tests show there's not too much impairment of red-cell production. I expect to recuperate. And it's cooling daily. I've gotten over the worst part." Wryly, Lantano said, "You should come and visit me, Adams; I've had my leadies working night and day; the villa itself is almost complete."

     Adams said, "I wouldn't go into the Cheyenne hot-spot for a pile of poscreds ten miles high. That speech of yours shows how very much you can contribute; why risk your health, your _life?_ You could stay here in New York City, live in a conapt of the Agency, until--"

     "Until," Lantano said, "the Cheyenne hot-spot cooled down enough in ten years, fifteen years . . . and then someone grabbed it ahead of me." My only chance, he was saying in other words, was deliberately to go in prematurely. As has been attempted in the past by Yance-men in the exact same position, before me. And--so often those premature investments, those hasty, anxious entries into still-hot areas, meant-- death. And not a mercifully quick death but a gruesome slow deterioration over a period of years.

     Viewing the dark--in truth severely scorched--youth, Adams realized how fortunate he himself was. To be fully established; his villa was long-built, his grounds were fully planted, green throughout. And he had entered the West Coast hot-spot south of San Francisco at a safe time; he had relied on Footemen reports, brought at great cost, and look how it had all worked out. In contrast to this.

     Lantano would have his fine villa, his vast stone building made out of the rubble, the concrete that had been the city of Cheyenne. But Lantano would be dead.

     And that, according to the Recon Dis-In Council's ruling, put the area up for grabs once again; it would be a rush by eager Yance-men to get in and acquire what Lantano had left behind. An ultimate end to Adams pathetic irony: the youth's villa, built at such cost--at the expense of his life-would go to someone else who did not have to build, supervise a gang of leadies day after day .

     "I presume," Adams said, "that you get the hell out of Cheyenne as often as is legal." Twelve out of every twenty-four hours, according to Recon Dis-In Council law, had to be spent within the new demesne area.

     "I come here. I work. As you see me now." Lantano returned to the keyboard of Megavac 6-V; Adams trailed after him. "As you say, Adams, I have a job to do. I expect to live to perform it." Once more Lantano seated himself at the keyboard, facing his copy.

     "Well, at least it hasn't impaired your mind," Adams said.

     Smiling, Lantano said, "Thanks."

     For one hour Joseph Adams stood by while Lantano fed his speech to Megavac 6-V, and when he had read it all and then, as it emerged from the 'vac to the sim, had heard it actually delivered by the dignified, gray-haired father-figure Talbot Yancy himself, he felt, overwhelmingly, the futility of his own speech. The dreadful contrast.

     What he himself gripped in his briefcase was beginner's prattle. He felt like slinking away. Into oblivion.

     Where does a barely grown radiation-burned unestablished new Yance-man get such ideas? Adams asked himself. And the ability to express them. And--the knowhow as to exactly what the 'vac's treatment of the copy would result in . . . how it would ultimately emerge as spoken by the sim before the cameras. Didn't it take years to learn this? It had taken _him_ years to learn what _he_ knew. To write a sentence and, after examining it, know approximately--that is, sufficiently accurately--how it would in its terminal stage sound, be. What, in other words, would appear on the TV screens of the millions of tankers subsurface, who viewed and believed, were taken in day after day by what was fatuously called _reading matter_.

     A polite term, Adams reflected, for a substance lacking substance. But this wasn't strictly true; as for instance young Dave Lantano's speech here and now. It preserved the essential illusion--in fact, Adams had grudgingly to admit--the illusion of Yancy's reality was heightened. But--

     "Your speech," he said to Lantano, "isn't just clever. It has real wisdom. Like one of Cicero's orations." Proudly, he traced his own work to such eminent ancient sources as Cicero and Seneca, to speeches in Shakespeare's history plays, and to Tom Paine.

     As he stuffed the pages of his copy back into his own briefcase, David Lantano said soberly, "I appreciate your comment, Adams; especially coming from you it means something."

     "Why me?"

     "Because," Lantano said, thoughtfully, "I know that, despite your limitations--" He shot Adams a keen, quick glance, then. "--you have sincerely tried. I think you know what I mean. There are things, easyway things and bad things, that you've scrupulously avoided. I've watched you for several years and I've seen the difference between you and most of the others. Brose knows the difference, too, and despite the fact that he axes rather than coaxes much of your stuff, he respects you. _He has to_."

     "Well," Adams said.

     "Has it frightened you, Adams, to see your best work axed at the Geneva level? After getting that far? Do you find it merely frustrating or--" David Lantano scrutinized him. "Yes, it does frighten you."

     After a pause Adams said, "I get scared. But at night, when I'm not here at the Agency but alone with my leadies in my villa. Not when I'm actually writing or feeding it to the 'vac or watching the sim itself . . . not here where--" He gestured. "It's busy. But--always whenever I'm alone." He was silent, then, wondering how he had managed to confide his deepest proclivities to this young stranger. Normally, one took care as to what one revealed about oneself to a fellow Yance-man; any personal info could be used against one, in the incessant competition to be the speech writer for Yancy; in effect, _the Yancy itself_.

     "Here at the Agency," Dave Lantano said somberly, "in New York, we may compete against each other, but underneath we're a group. A corporate body. What the Christians used to call a congregation . . . a very meaningful special term. But then each of us, at six p.m., goes off in his flapple. Crosses an empty countryside to a castle inhabited by mental constructs that move and talk but are--" He gestured. "Cold, Adams; the leadies, even the advanced types who dominate the Council; _they are cold_. Get a couple of your retinue, all the leadies of your household staff that you can cram into your flapple with you, and go visit. Every night."

     "I know that the smart Yance-men do that," Adams said. "Are never at home. I've tried; I've arrived at my demesne, eaten dinner and then gone right out again." He thought of Colleen, and then, when he had lived, his neighbor Lane. "I have a girl," he said deftly. "A Yance-man or I suppose one would have to say a Yance-woman; we visit and talk. But the big front window of the library of my demesne--"

     "Don't look out over that fog and coastline of rocks," David Lantano said. "That stretches south of San Francisco a hundred miles; one of the most bleak on Earth."

     Blinking, Adams wondered how Lantano had known so exactly what he meant, his fear of the fog; it was as if Lantano had read his deepest mind.

     "I'd like to see your speech, now," Lantano said. "Since you've given mine about as thorough a study as possible--and, for you, Adams, that's rather thorough." He glanced toward Adams' briefcase, especially alert, now.

     Adams said, "No." He couldn't show his speech, not after the strong, fresh declaration he had just now seen and heard.

     The reading matter concocted by David Lantano which had emerged from the Yancy-simulacrum so effectively, dealt with deprivation. Hit at the heart of the tankers' main problem-area . . . at least as he understood it from the reports of the pol-coms in the tanks which the Estes Park Government, the apparatus there, received--received and made accessible as a feedback to all Yance-men, in particular the speech writers. Their sole source of knowledge as to how well they were getting their reading matter through.

     Reports from the pol-coms on this speech of Lantano's, when it had been coaxed, would be interesting. It would take at least a month, but Adams made a note of it, noted the official code-designation of the speech, and promised himself to be alert for the feedback responses as they emerged from the ant tanks all over the world . . . Wes-Dem, anyhow, and possibly, if the response was good enough, the Soviet authorities would take the top-copy of the spooi from Megavac 6-V which contained the speech, give it to their own 'vac in Moscow to program their own sim . . . and, in addition, Brose in Geneva, if he wished, could sequester the spool, the original, not the top-copy, and decree it officially and formally to be primary source-material from which Yance-men the world over were mandatorily to draw on for later reading matter. Lantano's speech, if it were as good as Adams thought it to be, might become one of those few rare "eternal" declarations, incorporated in permanent policy. What an honor. And the guy was so damn young.

     "How can you face it," Adams asked the dark young new Yanceman, who did not even have a demesne, yet, who lived in a lethal hot-spot by night, dying, being scorched, suffering, but still doing this superb job, "how can you openly discuss the fact that those tankers down there are _systematically deprived of what they're entitled to?_ You actually said it in your speech." He remembered Lantano's exact words as they had issued from the firm-jawed mouth of the Yancy. What you have, Talbot Yancy, the synthetic and in a sense actually nonexistent Protector, told the tankers--would be telling them in a couple of weeks, when the tape had passed Geneva's scrutiny as of course it would--is not enough. Your lives are incomplete, in the sense that Rousseau had meant when he talked of man having been born in one condition, born brought into the light free, and everywhere was now in chains. Only here, in this day and age, as the speech had just pointed out, they had been born onto the surface of a world and now that surface with its air and sunlight and hills, its oceans, its streams, its colors and textures, its very smells, had been swiped from them and they were left with tin-can submarine--figuratively--dwelling boxes in which they were squeezed, under a false light, to breathe repurified stale air, to listen to wired obligatory music and sit daylong at work-benches making leadies for a purpose which--but even Lantano could not go on here. Could not say, for a purpose you don't know. For each of us here above to augment our retinues with, our entourages which wait on us, follow us, dig for us, build, scrape and bow . . . you've made us barons in baronial castles, and you are the Nibelungen, the dwarves, in the mines; you labor for us. And we give back--reading matter. No, the speech hadn't said that--how could it? But it had admitted the truth, that the tankers were entitled to something they did not have; they were the victims of robbers. Theft had been committed against all the millions of them, and there had been no moral or legal remedy all these years.

     "My fellow Americans," the Talbot Yancy simulacrum had said gravely in its stern, stoic, military, leadership, fatherly voice (Adams would never forget this moment of the speech) "there is a certain ancient Christian idea, which you may know, that life on Earth, or in your instance, beneath Earth, is a transition. An episode between a life that came before and an eternal, other-kind-of-life to follow. Once a pagan king in the British Isles was converted to Christianity by the image of this life being the short flight of a nocturnal bird which has flown in through one window of a warm and lighted dining hall of a castle, for a moment passed above a scene of motion and talk, of tangible fellow-life; the comfort of being within a place inhabited by others. And then the bird in its flight has gone on out of the lighted dining hall, out of the castle once more, through a second window. Into the empty, black, unending night on the far side. And it will never see that lit-up, warm hail of murmur and motion and fellow-life again. And--" And here the Yancy, in all its pomp and dignity, the authority of its words that reached so many, many human beings in so many anywhere in the world tanks, had said, "--you, my fellow Americans in subsurface shelters, you have not got even this moment to cling to. To remember or anticipate or enjoy, this short flight through the lighted hall. Brief as it is, you are entitled to it, and yet, because of a terrible madness fifteen years ago, a hell-night, you are doomed; you are paying every day for the insanity that drove you from the surface exactly as the whips of the furies drove our two grandparents from the original garden eons ago. And this is not right. Somehow, one day, I assure you, the alienation will end. The abridgment of your reality, the deprivation of your rightful life--with the swiftness said to accompany the last trump's first sound, this terrible calamity, this inequity will be abolished. _When it comes it will not be gradual_. It will hurl you all, expel you, even if you resist it, back to your own land that is waiting for you above, awaiting your claim. My fellow Americans, your claim is staked and we guard it; we are the securing agents only for the present. But everything up here will disappear and you will come back. And even the memory, even the _idea_ of us who are up here now, will forever vanish." And the Yancy simulacrum had finished, "And you will not be able to curse us because you will not even recall that we existed."