With a Little Help (19 page)

He looked away and set down his taco. "Trish, I have a lot of respect for you. Please remember that when I tell you this. You are talking nonsense. The network is, by definition, above corruption. You simply can't direct it to give your cronies a better deal than the rest of the world. The system is too complex to game. Its behavior can't be
predicted
-- how could it possibly be
guided
? Statistics can be manipulated to 'prove' anything, but everyone who has any clue about this understands that this is just paranoid raving --"

She narrowed her eyes and sucked in a breath, and he clamped his lips shut, breathed heavily through his nose, and went on.

"Sorry. It's just wrong, is all. Science isn't like law. You deal with shades of grey all the time, make compromises, seek out balance. I'm talking about mathematical truths here, not human-created political constructs. There's no one to compromise
with
-- a human-readable emergent network just doesn't exist. Can't exist. It doesn't make sense to say it. It's like asking for me to make Pi equal three. Pi
means
something, and what it means
isn't
three. Emergent networks
mean
not-human-readable. "

She looked at him, and he looked at her, and they looked at each other. She felt a sad smile in the corners of her lips, and saw one tug at his, and then they both broke out in grins.

"We're going to be seeing a lot of each other," she said.

"Oh yes, we are," he said.

"Across a committee room."

"A podium."

"On talk-shows."

"Opposite sides."

"Right."

"No fighting dirty, OK?" he said, raising his eyebrows and showing her his big brown eyes. She snorted.

"Give me a hug and go home," she said. "I'll see you at the hearings when they introduce my bill."

He hugged her, and she smelled him, thinking,
this is the last time I'll smell this smell.

"Rainer," she said, holding him at arm's length.

"Yes?" he said.

"I'm going to call you, when I have questions about ant-colony optimization, all right?"

He looked at her.

"I need the best expertise I can get. It's in your interest to see to it that I'm well-informed."

Slowly, he nodded. "Yes, you're right. I'd like that. I'll call you when I have questions about policy, all right?"

"You're on," she said, and they hugged again, fiercely.

Once he was gone, she permitted herself the briefest of tears. She knew that she was right and that she was going to make a fool out of him, but she didn't want to think of that right then. She felt the place behind her ear where he'd kissed her before going home and looked around her office, five years of her life in thirty banker's boxes ready to be shipped across the country tomorrow, according to a route that would be governed from moment to moment by invisible, notional,
ridiculous
insects.

She ate more taco bell. The logo was a pretty one, really, and now that it had been adopted by every mom-and-pop burrito joint in the world, they'd really levelled the playing field. She thought about the old Taco Bell mystery-meat and plastic cheese and took a bite of the ground beef and sharp Monterey Jack that had come from her favorite little place on the corner, and permitted herself to believe, for a second, anyway, that she'd made that possible.

She was going to kick ant ass on the Hill.

#

3. Conflict of Insect

Trish gathered her staff in the board room and wrote the following in glowing letters on the wall with her fingertip, leaving the text in her expressive schoolmarm's handwriting rather than converting it to some sterile font: "First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win."

Her staff, all five of them, chuckled softly. "Recognize it?" she asked, looking round at them.

"Pee-Wee Herman?" said the grassroots guy, who was so young it ached to look at him, but who could fire a cannonload of email into any congressional office on 12 hours' notice. He never stopped joking.

The lawyer cocked an eyebrow at him and stroked her moustache, a distinctive gesture that you could see in any number of courtv archives of famous civil-rights battles, typically just before she unloaded both barrels at the jury-box and set one or another of her many precedents. "It's Martin Luther King, right?"

"Close," Trish said.

"Geronimo," guessed the paralegal, who probably wasn't going to work out after all, being something of a giant flake who spent more time on the phone to her girlfriend than filing papers and looking up precedents.

"Nope," Trish said, looking at the other two staffers -- the office manager and the media guy -- who shrugged and shook their heads. "It's Gandhi," she said.

They all went, "Ohhhh," except the grassroots guy, who crossed to the wall and used his fingertip to add, "And then they assassinate you."

"I'm too tough to die," the lawyer said. "And you're all too young. So I think we're safe."

"OK," Trish said. "This is an official pep talk. They're playing dirty now. Last night, my car tried to take me to Arlington via Detroit. My email is arriving on a 72 hour time-delay. My phone doesn't ring, or it rings all night long. I've had to switch it off.

"But what all of this means is that I've got more uninterrupted work-time than ever and I'm getting reacquainted with my bicycle."

"Every number I call rings at my ex-girlfriend's place," the grassroots guy said. "I think we're going to get back together!"

"That's the right attitude, boy-o," the lawyer said. "When life gives you SARS, make sarsaparilla. I appear to be unable to access any of my personal files, and any case-law I query shows up one sentence at a time. I've discovered that the Georgetown University law-library makes a very nice latte and serves a terrific high tea, and I've set Giselle to work on refiling and cross-indexing twenty years' worth of yellow pads that had previously sat mouldering in a storage locker that I was paying far too much for."

"Which has given Giselle a rare opportunity to explore the rich civil rights history that you embody," Trish said, looking pointedly at the paralegal. "But I suspect that she could use a hand, possibly from a grad student or two who could get some credit for this. Let's ask around at Georgetown, OK?"

The lawyer nodded. The office manager pointed out that their bill-payments were going astray after they'd been dispatched to their suppliers but before they were debited from their -- dwindling -- account, which meant that they were getting a couple days' worth of free cash-flow. Only the media guy was glum, since he couldn't field, make or review calls or press-releases, which made him pretty useless indeed.

"Right," she said, and scribbled something on one of the steno pads she'd bought for everyone when their email started going down three times a day. "This guy owes me from back in the copyright wars -- I fed him some good stories that he used to launch his career. He was the ABNBC Washington bureau chief until last year and now he's teaching J-School at Columbia. Take the afternoon train to Manhattan and bring him back with you tonight. Don't take no for an answer. Tell him to bring his three most promising proteges, and tell him that they'll have all the access they need to produce an entire series on the campaign. Sleeping on our sofas. Following us to the toilet. Everything on the record. Do-able?"

"It's do-able," the media guy said. "I'm on it."

Once they'd all cleared out, the lawyer knocked on her door. "You going to be all right?" she asked.

Trish waved her hands at the piles of briefing books, red-lined hardcopies, marked-up magazine articles and memos from her Board of Directors. "Of course!" she said. She shook her head. "Probably. We never thought we'd get this far, remember? All this psy-ops shit they're pulling, it's just more proof that we're on the right track. No one should be able to do this. It's the opposite of democracy. It's the opposite of civil discourse."

The lawyer smoothed her moustache. "Right on," she said. "You should be proud. This is a hell of a fight, and I'm glad to be part of it. You know we'd follow you into the sun, right?"

Trish fluttered her hands. "God, don't give me that kind of responsibility."

"All right then, into the ocean. We're making this happen, is what's important."

"Thanks, babe," Trish said. She put on a brave smile until the lawyer had backed out of the office, then stared down at her calendar and looked at her morning schedule. Three congressional staffers, a committee co-chair, an ACLU researcher, and the head of the newly formed Emergent Network Suppliers' Industry Association -- a man she had last seen in her office at UCLA, backing away from a long and melancholy hug.

#

When he rang off the phone and joined her, finally, she straightened out her smart cardigan and said, "Rainer, you're certainly looking... well."

"...funded," he finished, with a small smile. The Emergent Network Suppliers' Industry Association's new offices were in a nice Federal Revival building off Dupont Circle, with lots of stained glass that nicely set off the sculptural and understated furniture. "It's not as grand as appearances suggest, Trish. We got it for a song from the receivers in the Church of Scientology's bankruptcy, furnishings included. It
is
nice though. Don't you think?"

"It's lovely," she said. Around her, staffers bustled past in good suits and good shoes and smart haircuts. "Hard to believe you only set up shop a week ago," she said.

"It came furnished, remember," he said.

"Oh yes, so you said," she said, watching a kid who looked like he'd gone tops in his class at the Naval Academy put his ankles up on the plasticized return beside his desk and tilt his chair, throwing his head back with wild laughter at whatever it was some other Hill Rat (in her mind, it was a key Congressman's aide -- some old frat buddy of Mr Navy 2048) was saying at the phone's other end.

She looked back at Rainer and saw that he was staring where she had.

"Well, it's a far cry from academic research," he said.

"I know you'll be very good at it. You can explain things without making it seem like an explanation. The first lesson I ever learned on the Hill was, 'If you're explaining --'"

"'-- you're losing,'" he said. "Yeah, I've heard that. Well, you're the old hand here, I'm just learning as I go. Trying not to make too many mistakes and to learn from the ones I do make."

"Do you want some free advice, Rainer?"

He sat down in one of the chairs, which bulged and sloshed as it conformed itself to his back and butt. He patted the upholstered jelly beside him. "You may always assume that I would be immensely grateful for your advice, Trish," he said.

She sat down and crossed her legs, letting her sensible shoe hang loose. "Right. DC is a
busy
place. In academic circles, in tech circles, you might get together to feel out your opponent, or to make someone's acquaintance, or to see an old friend. You might get together to enjoy the company of another human being.

"We do that in DC,
after
working hours. Strictly evenings and weekends. When you schedule a meeting during office hours, it has to have a purpose. Even if it appears to have no purpose, it has a purpose. There's a protocol to meetings, a secret language, that's known to every Hill Rat and written nowhere. What time you have the meeting, who's there, who's invited, who knows it, how long you schedule, whether you cater: they all say little things about the purpose of the meeting. Even if you have no reason to call the meeting, one will be read into it.

"If this was any other city in the world, it would make perfect sense for you to look me up once you got to DC. We're still friends, I still think about you from time to time, but here in DC, you calling me over for a meeting, this kind of meeting, at this time of day, it means you're looking to parley. You want to strike a deal before my bill goes to the committee. I don't know how well you know the Hill, so I don't want to impute any motives to you. But if you took a meeting like this with anyone else, that's what they'd assume."

Rainer's forehead crinkled.