With a Little Help (20 page)

"No Fretting," she said. Then she smiled a sad smile. "Oh, Fret if you want. You're a big boy."

He twiddled his thumbs, caught himself at it, and folded his hands in his lap. "Huh," he said. "Well. I
did
want to talk to you because it's been a while and because we meant a lot to each other. I
also
wanted to talk to you about the bill, because that's what I'm here to do, at a pretty decent salary. I
also
wanted to see you because I had an idea that you'd be different here in your native habitat, and well, that's true."

She refused to let that make her self-conscious. Of
course
she was different, but it wasn't geographic. The last time they'd seen each other, they were lovers and friends. Now they were ex-lovers who were being paid to accomplish opposing, mutually exclusive objectives. She knew that there was a certain power in not saying anything, so she wrapped herself in silence and waited for him to say something. She didn't have to wait long.

"Your bill is going to committee?"

"Well, I certainly hope so," she said. "That's what I'm here for, after all. The discussion draft has been circulating for a week, and we're confident we'll see it introduced and assigned to committee by the end of this week. That's what we're told, anyway. It's got strong bipartisan support. Selling Congress on the importance of human-generated governance is pretty easy. Wouldn't want to be in your shoes."

He grinned. "You're trying to psych me out."

"Maybe," she said, grinning back. "But that's nothing compared to the psych job that we've been getting down at my office." She told him about the phone weirdness, the oddball traffic-management. "Someone on your side has a funny sense of humor."

His smile faded. "You're still trying to fake me out," he said. "If you're seeing corruption in the net, it's because you're looking so hard, you can't help but find it. You're reading malice into accident. Dead spots aren't personal, you know. This is a law of nature -- the networks emerge solutions, they're the best they can come up with. If you don't like the results, talk to nature, not me."

She shrugged. "Whatever, Rainer. I know what's happening. You'll believe what you want to believe." She pursed her lips and made an effort at controlling her irritation. "It's really happening, and it's not helping your side. If you know who's responsible, you might let him know that the dirty tricks are what convinced Senator Beauchamp's staff to green-light the bill. Conspiracy is supposed to be beneath the surface. It doesn't look so good when it's exposed to fresh air and sunshine."

"You've got to be kidding," he said. "Doesn't matter, I suppose. All right, message received. If I happen to run into someone whom I think should hear it, I'll be sure to pass it on, OK?"

"That's all I ask," she said.

"You want to talk about the bill now?"

"Have you seen the discussion draft?"

He squirmed. "No," he admitted. "I didn't know it existed until just now."

"I'd offer to send you a copy, but I expect it would take a week to arrive, if it ever did. Why don't you ask that guy," she gestured at the Navy man, "to get you a copy? He looks like he knows his way around. And then drop by my office if you want to chat about it."

She stood up and tugged at her cardigan again. "It's been very nice seeing you," she said. She picked up her coat and her mitts. "Good luck settling in."

He gave her a hug -- which felt weird, hugging was strictly west-of-the-Mississippi, and she broke it off firmly -- and showed her to the door. The first snows were coming in, and the steps were slightly icy, so she maneuvered them slowly, carefully. When she reached the road, he was no longer in the doorway. He was standing right behind her, breath coming out in foggy huffs.

"Trish," he said, then stopped. His arms dropped to his sides and his shoulders slumped.

"Rainer," she said, keeping her voice calm and neutral.

"God," he said. "God. How'd this happen, Trish? Look, I've never been happy the way I was with you. I haven't been that happy since. God, Trish --"

"Rainer," she said again, taking one of his hands, firmly, motherly. "Rainer. Stop it. You're here to do a job, and your job requires that you and I keep it on a professional level. It doesn't matter how it happened --" But it did, didn't it? She'd left him to come east and do something he thought of as wrong-headed and backwards and superstitious. But she'd left him, not the other way around. And he'd never recovered, though she'd built herself a new life here. It wasn't a contest (but she was winning anyway). "It doesn't matter. We respect each other. That's enough."

He deflated and she said, "Oh, come here," and gave him a long and soulful hug, right there on the street, knowing that she was giving the hug and he was taking it. Then she let him go, spun him round, and gave him a little push back toward his office.

By the time she reached the corner and looked back over her shoulder, he was nowhere to be seen.

#

That afternoon, her phone started ringing normally, with actual people on the other end. Her outbound calls were connected. Her email was delivered. Her car got her home in record time. She sighed as she eased it into her driveway and carried her briefcase inside and poured herself a very small glass of Irish whisky so rare that it had been known to make grown men weep. Normally, she saved it for celebrations, but if she was celebrating something, she was damned if she knew what it was.

Her phone rang as she was licking the last few drops of liquor from the little glass. It was the lawyer, with news.

"I just stopped by the office and found a messenger on the doorstep. He had hard-copy of a press-release from Senator Beauchamp's office. They're introducing the bill in the morning. Congrats, kid, you did it."

Trish set the glass down and said :whoopee: very quietly and very emphatically.

"You're durned tootin'," the lawyer said. "And double for me."

Of course, it wasn't over by a long shot. Getting a bill introduced was not the same as getting it through committee. Getting it through committee was not the same as getting it passed in the Senate, and getting it passed in the Senate was not the same as getting it passed in the House, and then who the hell knew what the hereditary Chimp-in-Chief in the Oval Office would do when it was passed through the bars of his cage with his morning banana.

But she had ridden back into town less than a year before, and she had gone from nothing to this. The ACLU was supporting the bill, and EFF, EPIC, all the old civ-lib mafia had opened their arms to her. She poured herself one more very small whisky, gave herself a fragrant bath and put herself to bed, grinning like a fool.

#

"There are four news-crews, six print reporters, and a couple of others here to see you," the office-manager said. The office phones were out again, but that hadn't stopped a fair number of determined people from figuring out that they could actually move their physical being from one part of Washington to another and have a real, old-fashioned face-to-face. The lawyer and she had each taken a dozen press "calls" that morning, with their embedded reporters from Columbia J-School perched obtrusively in the corners of their offices, taking copious notes and filming constantly.

"Others?"

"A mixed bag. Some Hill people, some I'm not sure about."

Trish stood and stretched out her back, listening to it pop. She usually worked in bursts, typing or talking for an hour, then taking a little walk to gather her thoughts and touch base with her co-workers. Today, she'd been glued to her seat from 7AM to after lunchtime, and her back and butt were shrieking at her.

She walked into the front area, trailed by her reporter. She recognized some of the journos and some of the Congressional staffers, and a local rep from a European Privacy think-tank in Brussels, and -- Rainer.

He was turned out in a very natty suit and a homburg, a fashion that had recently come back to DC, and she knew that he'd been put together by a personal shopper. Her own Board had suggested to her, matter-of-factly, that she should get one of her own once the bill cleared committee, since she'd be doing tons of press and as sharp a dresser as she fancied herself, she was no pro. Her prodigious talents, they assured her, lay elsewhere.

He took her hand with both of his and gave her a long, intense hand-shake that drew stares from the journos and the think-tank man.

"Nice to see you again, Ms. McCavity," he said, somberly.

"A pleasure as always, Mr. Feinstein," she said.

"I'm sorry to drop in on you unannounced," he said, "but I hoped that I could have just a moment of your time." Belatedly, he remembered to take off his silly hat and then he fumbled with the right way to hold it, settling for dropping it to his waist and upending it. She thought he looked like a panhandler in a Charlie Chaplin movie and she suppressed a smile. His curly hair had been gelled into a careful configuration that reminded her of the glossy ringlets of a black poodle.

"I suppose we can do that," she said. She turned to her other visitors. "Who's got a 3PM deadline?" she said. Two of the print-reporters held up their hands. "You then you," she said. "Who's got a 5PM filing deadline? 6PM? 10PM?" She triaged them all, promised to meet the think-tank man for dinner at an Ethiopian place in Adams-Morgan, and led Rainer into her office and closed the door.

He looked at her embedded reporter and cocked his head.

"Sorry, Rainer," she said. "I have a shadow for the duration. Just pretend he isn't here. You don't mind, do you dear?" she said to the reporter, who was very young and very bright and missed nothing. He shook his head and made some notes.

"The bill's dead," Rainer said, after he'd sat down.

"Oh really?" she said.

"Just heard from Senator Rittenhouse, personally. He takes the position that this should be in Commerce, not Judiciary, and is calling hearings to make that happen."

Rittenhouse was another powerful committee chairman, and this wasn't good news. What's more, he was in the pocket of the network operators and had been for a decade, so much so that editorialists and talk-radio types called him "The Senator from The Internet."

Still, it wasn't catastrophic. "That's interesting," she said, "but it's a far cry from killing the bill. It's pretty standard, in fact. Just slows things down." She smiled at him. He was just a kid sometimes, so out of his depth here. He reminded her of the Relatives she'd met that day, the little boys in their miniature suits running on the beach.

He shifted in his seat and fondled his hat-brim. "Well, I guess we'll see. My press-liaison has set up a post-mortem debate on one of the news-networks tonight, and I thought you might want to represent the other side?"

She smiled again. He was twice the rhetorician that she was, but he had no idea how to play the game. She'd have to be careful to bruise, not break him.

#

"We, as a society, make trade-offs all the time," Rainer said. He was wearing a different suit this evening, something that Trish had to admit looked damned good on the studio monitors (better than her frumpy blouse and wool winter-weight trousers). "We trade a little bit of privacy for a little bit of security when we show identification before going into a federal building --"

The ewok held up his paw. "But how much should we be willing to trade, Ms. McCavity?"

She looked into the camera, keeping her eyes still, the way she'd been told to if she didn't want to appear tourettic. "Wickett, when Franklin said, 'Those willing to give up a little liberty for a little security deserve neither security nor liberty,' he wasn't spouting empty rhetoric, he was laying the groundwork for this enduring democratic experiment that we all love. Look, we're not opposed to the use of autonomous networks for
some
applications, even
most
applications, with appropriate safeguards and checks and balances. No nation on earth has the reliance that we do on these networks. Are they an appropriate way of advising you on the best way to get to the mall on a busy Saturday? Absolutely, provided that everyone gets the best advice the system can give, regardless of economic status or influence. But should they be used to figure out whom the FBI should open an investigation into? Absolutely not. We use judges and grand juries and evidence to establish the sufficiency of a request to investigate a private citizen who is considered innocent until proven guilty. We learned that lesson the hard way, during the War on Terrorism and the Ashcroft witch-hunts. Should we trade grand juries and judges for ant-colonies? Do you want the warrant for your wiretap issued by an accountable human being or by a simulated ant-hill?"