Politician (11 page)

My captors had not merely made corruption possible for me; they had made it compelling. Even knowing what I did, thanks to my Megan memory flash, I felt the temptation to do... what I would have to do. I had somehow believed I might play along by rote, my true face averted; now I knew I would have to answer to my wife not only for my body, but also for my mind.

But not yet. These things took time, and I intended to take all the time I could that was consistent with my situation and my presumed situation. First Dorian and I had to get to know each other.

We sat together in her hammock and talked in whispers, exchanging histories. I told her of my upbringing on Callisto, of my two sisters, and of the problem that had led to our abrupt departure to the peripheral society of the Jupiter Ecliptic—the Juclip—my year as a migrant worker in the agricultural belt, and my entry into the Jupiter Navy at age sixteen. “I don't know how long I remained in the Navy,” I concluded. “Maybe I'm still there.” That was a lie, but I could not tell her of my Megan memory, which put a cap on my military experience. “I don't even know how old I am, but I suspect I am twice your age.”

She laughed. “But I don't know my age, either. Maybe I'm middle-aged.”

It was my turn to laugh. "If so, you will go down in history as possessing the secret of eternal youth.

Your body is twenty."

“You are an expert in bodies, Don Hope?” she inquired archly.

“I don't know,” I admitted. “But I am certainly capable of appreciating what I encounter.”

She took my hand, drew me to her, and kissed me. There was a certain fragrance about her, perhaps this time enhanced by some perfume, and her hair was like a velvet curtain. I was sure that she was experienced at this; her every motion and mannerism was completely seductive. Oh, yes, she knew what she was doing. But she, too, was constrained by her role; she had a part to play, and she had to play it well enough to deceive me. So we were deceiving each other.

She was, she said, a refugee from the Communist colony of Ganymede. She had been born five years after that revolution occurred and the leftist premier assumed power, but her parents had never accepted the new order. (I should clarify that revolutions, like elections, occurred frequently in the System, as they had on old Earth; Ganymede had changed governments and types of government many times following its colonization. Each change was welcomed by some and detested by some, and there was generally a certain attendant unpleasantness.) Her family had been especially concerned about her schooling, not wanting her to be indoctrinated into the Communist ideology. So they had joined the bubble-lift of 2640, which was their first opportunity to flee the planet, and came to Jupiter.

I was startled. 2640? That was six years, no, eight years after my most recent memory. I had had the (misfortune to be born at the turn of the century, so that my age always matched the date. I had, as well as I could reconstruct it, served in the Jupiter Navy from 2616 to 2630. I would have been forty years old at the time of the bubble-lift that Dorian Gray spoke of, and that was evidently some time in the past.

“I was but fifteen then,” Dorian said. “Much of my education was already behind me, but I had resisted the indoctrination. Of course, I had to learn English and adjust to the Saxon culture, and it was hard at first, but I did complete my schooling, and...” She paused. “And I don't remember.”

So she remained memory-blocked from the time she was seventeen to the present, according to her story. She was lying, but only about the mem-wash; her dates were otherwise accurate, according to her body signals. I judged her to be about twenty-two, which would make the present date 2047, and my own age forty-seven, with an error factor of as much as three years. I was older than I had feared. I was indeed over twice her age, and a great deal more of my own history remained forgotten. She had perhaps given me more valuable information than she knew.

If I was forty-seven years old, with about fifteen missing following my Navy career, what had I done in that anonymous time? It must have been something to make me worthy of being captured and mem-washed and trapped by drugs and sex. They wanted to have a firm hold on me, to change my way of thinking. What could possibly be worth the trouble they were taking?

“You are silent,” Dorian murmured.

I started. “Sorry. I was thinking.”

“I would offer two cents for your thoughts, if I had any money.”

I considered quickly. There seemed to be no reason I couldn't tell her my thoughts this time. “With your help I have now calculated my age as between forty-five and fifty, and I wonder what I have been doing in all the missing years since I was sixteen, to warrant being here.”

“That's a good thought,” she said, unsurprised by my age; she had known it. “There must be good reason. Did you work in some sensitive military job where a seemingly minor decision could make a big difference?”

“I wish I knew,” I said.

“Maybe you knew too much about something in the Hispanic sphere.”

“Maybe. I just don't remember.”

“I don't, either, though I suppose less of my life is missing than yours. It must be pretty important.”

“It must be,” I agreed. “Perhaps if you reviewed the major System events that occurred during your life, which falls in the period of my life that has been washed out, I could remember—”

She put her hand on mine. “Hope, since you came to me yesterday, I've been thinking about you so much. I was alone—no one to meet except my torturers—and suddenly I saw your face across the hall—part of your face—and then I touched you. You gave me something to live for just by existing. In one day it's as if I've known you all my life.”

I knew she was playing a part, and I noted how adroitly she had diverted my suggestion about catching up on System events; but she played that part very well. I had had in mind obtaining some information from her, not only to try to trigger more of my memory, but also to account for any slip I might make about the period I did remember, such as Tocsin's rise in politics. Obviously Dorian was under orders to tell me nothing of this period. I had to admire the finesse with which she distracted me; it would have been easy to believe she was sincere. Now I knew it would be hard to come up with some excellent reason to distract her forthcoming physical advances very long. This trap was closing on me. “I think time dilates in a situation like this,” I said.

She nudged closer. “I don't even know whether I'm married,” she said. “But I don't think so, though I'm not a virgin. I feel so close to you, though we are of different ages.”

That was my cue to confess that I didn't know my own marital state and to deny that age made a difference. She had let me know the state of her availability. I had to think fast. “I—I think I was married, in the Navy. I remember a girl I shared residence with. Her name was Juana.”

“Hispanic?”

“Yes. She was a really nice girl.”

“But those service liaisons are impermanent,” she pointed out. “Only for the duration of an assignment.”

“True. So I suppose it didn't endure.” I tensed, as if just thinking of something. “Maybe I'm involved in some sexual scandal!”

She laughed. “No, it's not that!”

“You know?”

She retreated hastily. “I overheard once... about a prisoner who was a politician. I think it must have been you.”

“So it's something political!”

“I suppose so.” I knew she regretted her slip. Now I knew that she knew why I was here. Could I get that information from her? Surely not by asking for it. But perhaps if I turned the ploy and seduced her emotions....

But that would take careful management. First, I had to show some mettle of my own. “I'll ask them,” I said.

“Don't do that!” she exclaimed in genuine alarm. “They'll torture you!”

They probably would. “Well, maybe I'll just argue with them and force them to show what they really want of me.”

“I don't like this,” she said. “You are flirting with real trouble.”

“Some things just have to be done. I'll tell you what I find out.”

“Can't I talk you out of this folly?” she asked, moving very close to me.

“If I could be talked out of folly,” I said firmly, “I probably wouldn't be here.”

To that she had to agree. “Be careful, Hope. I don't want anything to happen to you.”

And with that we separated, for too long a stay was risky. The seduction was forgotten for now. The ironic thing was, she was now genuinely concerned for me. She had her mission, but she was coming to respect me as a person.

Next day I implemented my decision. I had more than one reason for my course. I wanted to impress Dorian with my character, to reassure her that I trusted her. Of course, she would tell my captors, so

they would be prepared, but they would not give her away. They, too, would know that I trusted her, and that she was doing her job. This trust and reinforcement of positions was important in a project like this. But also, I wanted to be punished by being returned to my original cell. I was sure they wouldn't leave me there long, for that would interfere with Dorian's subversion of my emotion. They would incarcerate me just long enough to bring home to me the consequence of my unreasonableness.

We were discussing taxation. My textbook recommended the so-called flat tax, a concept that had existed for centuries, perhaps for millennia, but somehow had not become established. It consisted of a personal deduction for each person in a family, certain necessary business deductions, and a set percentage of taxation on the remainder of earned income. It was quite simple.

“What's wrong with the present system?” I demanded. “It's worked well enough for centuries, hasn't it?”

Scar demurred. “It has bumbled along for centuries. There are three serious flaws in it. First, its immense complexity, which forces every taxpayer to spend interminable time merely calculating what he owes and requires many to seek some kind of professional help to draw up the required forms. Second, its loopholes, which enable clever or unscrupulous people to escape without paying their proper share, thus shifting the burden of payment to others. Third, its graduated stages, so that the person who earns more pays a larger percentage of his income to the government. That discourages initiative and penalizes the hardest or most efficient workers.”

“It's not complex for the average wage earner,” I countered. “ He has no loopholes. It's only fair that he pay the lowest rate; he barely has enough to survive on as it is. When I was with the migrant workers—”

“He would be no worse off with a simple flat tax,” Scar pointed out. “In fact he would benefit by—”

“No!” I exclaimed unreasonably. “The old system's good enough for me. I won't listen to anything else!”

He looked at me and sighed. “I'm sorry to hear you say that.”

The session was over, I was conducted to my dark, filthy original cell, which had been saved unchanged.

The smell almost gagged me as the hatch slid open. This was my punishment for being recalcitrant, and I knew that if my attitude did not improve, I would face more sessions with the pain-box and deprivation of the drug-beverage. Two of those were real punishments, and the third I would have to honor as if it were equally effective. Oh, yes, it was easy to reconsider my position with my self-interest so obviously in the balance.

But now I was where, ironically, I wanted to be. I needed more information, and this was where I could get it. I squatted in the grime and supported myself with my hands, and slowly I slid my fingers under the muck, feeling out the next set of symbols. I had an irrational fear that the scratches would be gone, but they were there:

which meant 7, counted off from the N in ABANDON, or T.

, which was 19, counted off from the

space following ABANDON, or H.

meaning 8, counted from the H in HOPE—oh, the new

significance of my name!—or O. , 4, from the O, or R.

, 34, from P, or L.

, 1 from E, which, of

course, was the same letter, E.

, 34 again, this time from the comma following HOPE. I wrestled with that and decided that most likely the order of punctuation in the font was space, period, comma; on that basis it came to Y.

, 1, which was a space, translating itself into itself, a space. I had my word.

I assembled the letters mentally, so that I could appreciate them as the word, so that my second memory-vision could commence:

THORLEY.

I quickly learned how naïve I had been about politics. I had thought I would simply pick an office, run for it, and win it. Megan disabused me: rarely could a newcomer to politics pluck the office of his choice from the electorate. The great majority came up through the grass roots, building their constituencies before emerging as serious contenders for the favor of the voters.

What were these grass roots? She sent me into the turf to find out. The process reminded me of Basic Training in the Navy, though the education was not physical.

I had to join a citizen's activity organization and do my homework. This was the Good Government Group, better known as GGG, or Triple-Gee, or 3-G, whose stated purpose was to accelerate the existing government into conformity with the needs of the citizens. The present government, GGG said, was seriously out of phase, and hardly represented its constituency at any level. The result was corruption, inefficiency, and despoliation. A monthly national publication, Gee Whiz , pinpointed specifics on the planetary scene, and a state publication, Sun-Gee , covered the local issues. Everything was covered: the nefarious influence of special interests; the ongoing weapons development race; sloppy accounting practices by the government; the Saturn hot line that was supposed to keep interplanetary communications open in times of crisis; the perennial Balanced Budget Amendment; controversial subsidies for agricultural interests; wasteful use of chauffeured autobubbles by bureaucrats; tax reform; the campaign for the G-l Space Bomber that threatened to bankrupt the planet before it was produced; the question of monopolistic mail service; an attempt to enable Congress to overturn Supreme Court decisions; protection of the atmospheric environment; the Equal Opportunity drive; pros and cons of subsidized bubble-housing; the revised Planetary Voting Rights Act; another routine administration scandal; the problem of continuing monetary inflation; unemployment; neglect of the elderly; restrictive construction codes; prison reform; retirement reform; the activities of the Jupiter Medical Association; the Jupiter Weapons Association; the ethics of drafting citizens into the Navy; athletes making commercials; huge cost overruns on military contracts; a bill to subsidize private schools; the problem of organized crime; a survey on the ages of members of Congress; research for new applications of contra-terrene matter; an antidrug campaign; city-bubble pollution; ways to prevent interplanetary war, or at least postpone it. There seemed to be an endless array of issues, and Megan assured me that most of them had been around for centuries in one form or another without any real resolutions. “But how can I make sense of all this?” I asked plaintively. “We were never faced with such matters in the Navy.”

“You have led a sheltered life,” she replied grimly. I found that statement ironic, but, of course, I knew what she meant. I had been exposed to the problems of survival in space but not to the problems of planetary political interaction. “This is the cesspool of civilian life. Keep reading and thinking, and it will start to fall into place. You must acquire a sensible grasp of every significant issue, for the one you do not master will become your Achilles' heel. It has happened many times to politicians before you. A single ignorant statement can finish you.”

“Like a pinhole leak in a space suit,” I murmured.

“Meanwhile, focus on one particular issue, the one you feel is most important, and learn what you can about that. Become active in that one area, become expert if you can—and when you are satisfied that your position is correct, you will be ready to tackle the next issue.”

“But there are hundreds of important issues,” I protested. “I'll never have time to master them all!”

“Now you perhaps appreciate why public officials occasionally make ignorant statements or do foolish things,” she said. “The perfect candidate knows everything about everything.”

“But in the Navy my staff—”

“True. And you will have a political staff, too, and use it similarly. But first you must grasp the basics yourself.”

I delved back into the myriad issues, and so did Spirit, as if we were two students in school, seeking the one I could deem most important. It was a headache, for they were all important in one devious way or another.

Meanwhile, our limited activity had not gone unnoticed. The political columnist for a local newspaper was a man who signed himself simply “Thorley.” Between elections he was evidently short of material, so minor things warranted comment.

“Guess who's coming to town,” Thorley wrote conversationally, showing by this signal that this was not a subject to be taken too seriously. “Remember the darling of the bleeding-heart set in Golden, Megan? It seems she married the gallant of the Jupiter Navy, Captain Hubris, a man some years her junior. Rumor has it that one of them has political pretensions.”

“That's insulting,” I said angrily. “What right does he have to—”

“We are, or were, public figures,” she said. "Our names are in the common domain, his to play with at will. He tosses them about as a canine tosses a rag doll, entertaining himself. You will have to get used to this sort of thing if you wish to survive in politics. Words become as heated and effective as lasers.

Perhaps you can better appreciate, now, why I was not eager to return to the arena myself."

I took her hand, which was as much of a gesture as I felt free to make at this stage of our marriage. She was exactly the woman I needed her to be. “I confess that the political knives are more devious than the military ones, but I will master them.”

“I rather fear you will,” she agreed. “Just remember that any publicity is generally good news.”

“Bleeding-heart set?” Spirit grumbled, unappeased.

“Those who favor liberal social legislation to alleviate the ills of society,” Megan explained.

“Conservatives generally hold such ideals in contempt. I certainly qualify as a bleeding heart. I'm not sure about you.”

“Social reform ,” I said. “I've already seen enough to know that there is an immense mountain of reform required. If that makes me a bleeding-heart... well, I may arrange to make some other hearts bleed before I'm through.”

“There speaks the military mind,” she said, smiling. She was, of course, against militarism, but she was coming to understand me, so she smiled to signal that she was not condemning me personally. She was very diplomatic in little ways like that, and I appreciated it. If I had not been programmed to love her, I would have found myself falling in love with her now. Helse had been my ideal love, in that kingdom by the sea, but now I understood that Megan was to Helse as a nova is to a star. “Just keep in mind that though Thorley is at the opposite end of the political spectrum, he is a competent journalist and an honest man.”

“You would find good in the devil himself,” I charged her, also smiling.

“That might be a slight exaggeration. But Thorley is no devil. His beliefs may be wrong-headed by my definitions, but he is no demagogue. He will not compromise his principles, and that is to be respected.”

“I see no principle here!” I snapped, staring at the item. But I knew it was useless to talk back to a piece of paper.

Gradually the underlying currents came clear. Politicians as a class were not noted for their integrity, but they ran true to form in certain ways. All of them were interested in money, because they required huge amounts of it to publicize themselves, and publicity was the lifeblood of politics. All had to solicit money from their constituents, but none ever had enough. This was not greed, it was the breath of political life.

The politician who spent the most to promote himself usually prevailed, when the contest was in other respects even. Of course, it was seldom even; the incumbent always had an enormous advantage, because he was already known to the electorate, and his office generated natural publicity. To unseat an incumbent, a challenger needed to spend much more money, but the incumbent had much readier access to the sources of money.

“How can any challenger ever prevail?” I asked as I contemplated the statistics.

“Now you can see why some campaigns get dirty,” Megan responded.

Of course. Dirt was relatively cheap. A little money could purchase a lot of dirt and muddy the waters so that the dirt-slinger might have a better chance. Obviously this was a strategy that Megan's nemesis Tocsin had mastered. I liked Tocsin less as I got to know his ways, but my understanding was growing.

It was like guerrilla fighting on backworld settlements; the government had overwhelming resources, so the opposition had to resort to stealth and terrorism. It wasn't nice , but it evened the odds somewhat.

Politics followed similar rules, but the evidences were more subtle. Tocsin had not fired a laser into Megan's back during their campaign in Golden; he had circulated a bogus description of her positions on issues, the paper tinted a delicate pink. This was, for complex and irrelevant reasons the color associated with the Saturnists. Thus he had implied that she was a traitor to Jupiter. A laser in the back would have been cleaner.

The main supplier of money was the community of special interests. This amounted to institutionalized bribery. The small-arm laser manufacturers contributed to candidates who promised to prevent any legislation restricting the manufacture or distribution or sale or use of hand-lasers. The agricultural interests contributed to those who believed in higher price supports for vegetable bubbles. The military-industrial complex contributed to those who argued for a strong planetary defense. Special interests abounded, and the aggregate of their contributions to politicians was huge. Evidently it was cost-effective, for by means of contributions of thousands of dollars, they could reap legislation that returned them millions. Out of those millions in profits came the contributions to subsequent campaigns, and those contributions were tax-deductible. The common taxpayer always ended up paying for it.

Some politicians tried to be honest: they turned down special-interest money. They generally lost their elections. Thus victory went to the ones who were most freely for sale. It was open, legally sanctioned corruption, causing the entire government to be corrupt, because it was hard to get really clean government from those who became members of it only by committing themselves to minority interests for money.

I concluded that this must be the fundamental evil of the system: the pervasive influence of special-interest money on the governmental process. Stop that flow of money, and much of the inherent corruption would lose its motivation. Some campaigns had solved the problem by providing for public funding; the campaign for the highest office, the Presidency, was that way. But those for Congress were privately funded, and the purchase of elective offices was chronic.

Campaign finance reform—there was my special project. That was the starting place, for the government and for me. I familiarized myself with it. I commented on it in Triple-Gee meetings. I made contact with and developed associations with those who had a similar concern. I became known as a campaign finance reform activist. There were tax-reform activists and racial-integration activists and defense-freeze activists and education-upgrade activists; in this I was one of the crowd. But I was learning about the political system.

That system was worth learning about, from the grassroots vantage. Structurally, the States of North Jupiter were collections of floating bubbles in the currents of the mighty atmosphere, linked by systems of physical travel and networks of communications. It was a mighty and amazing system of colonization, impressive in its concept, execution, and technology. But the social politics comprised a similar network, as intricate in its fashion as the physical-one. In fact, it was a seething cauldron of special interests—the fount from which the moneyed interests drew. In the circles I moved in, the people tended to be active and liberal, politically, but—I perceived that there were equivalent circles of opposite persuasion. It was all part of the mix. Jupiter truly was a melting pot of political dissension, which most of us agreed was one of its great strengths.

Columnist Thorley had another comment in print: “Captain Hubris, he who tightened the Belt, has been delving into the arcane lore of Campaign Finance (his caps, not mine). Could he be interested in something of the sort himself? Stranger things have been known to occur in the murky bypaths of the liberal establishment.”

I was improving; it took me only five minutes to get my temper back under control. I even managed, after Megan's strenuous urging, to refrain from buzzing out a nasty rejoinder about the murky conservative bypaths of the wealthy.

Time passed. I don't mean to imply that what I have summarized occurred in a day or a week. I was three years in the undercurrents of the social maelstrom. I assumed the chairmanship of a committee to monitor the campaign finances of the elected representatives of our locale. Theoretically all campaign finances were open; in practice we had to struggle to get our hands on some of the records, which were treated like classified material and kept from the ordinary citizen. We managed to get printouts of the lists of all their contributors, and we checked the names and amounts against the requirements of the law. We did not discover any significant violations, but the patterns of contributions emerged.

One office holder was known to favor increased price supports for milk, which was, in space, an inefficient industry. Foliage had to be grown, fed to cows, and thus converted to milk, when the original foliage would have fed many more people than the milk did. The dairy industry contributed strongly to that office holder, and his position became even more favorable to that industry, despite the expense to the government. He preached economy, but he did not practice it in such cases. I saw how a number of employees of a particular farm-bubble gave identical and significant gifts of money, though they were themselves low-paid. How could they afford this? Why didn't they use the money for their families?

Megan explained it: "Their employer is making one large gift. Since that amount violates the legal limit for an individual, he splits it up into legal-sized segments and donates them in the names of his employees.