Politician (35 page)

Booker grabbed the top of his box with his left hand and lifted it off. “It's just an empty box,” he said, showing it to the camera. “I couldn't afford the makings of a real bomb.”

I turned to the camera. “The siege is over,” I announced. “Please have an attorney come with the police, to represent Mr. Booker. One competent in medical law.”

Booker looked at me. “You knew it was a bluff!”

I approached him, bringing Shelia forward with me. “See her screen, señor ? Beneath her chair she carries a metal detector with a computerized image alignment. It told her you had no bomb in there. But I didn't come to give away your secret; I came to help you decide what was best for you. I think you will receive justice now, señor .” We shook hands.

“I knew I could trust you, Hubris.” Needless to say, that incident made a good many more headlines than one of my routine campaign speeches would have. I had gambled and won—again. I cannot claim that there was not a healthy element of luck in this, but this is the nature of winning politics. Unlucky politicians lose.

So it went. There were no more direct attempts on my life, or at least none that could be demonstrated to be the result of organized malevolence, but we knew that Tocsin was not about to let me challenge him for his office with impunity. It was not a purely personal thing with him; he simply worked to see that no serious threats to his power developed. There were other candidates for the nomination, and awkward or embarrassing things happened to them with suspicious frequency, but nothing was ever traceable to the source. I had survived most successfully, partly because I had planned well—Megan remained invaluable for that—and partly because I worked hard and had several formidable assets. Spirit was matchless on supervising the nuts-and-bolts details of the campaign, and my staff was competent and dedicated. I made good progress.

Then we came to the hurdles of the primaries. Over the centuries there had been attempts to reform the confused primary system, but each state fought for its right to have its own, so nothing was ever done.

The first was in the small state of Granite, and it generally had a disproportionate effect on the remaining campaign season. The polls favored me to come in third, but I suspected that I had more support than that, because, though my political base was not great and I lacked the money for much advertising, my voters should be highly motivated. If not, I would be in trouble, so it was nervous business, and I spent as much time in the bubbles of Granite as any candidate.

I did not win it. But I came in second, significantly stronger than predicted. That, in the legerdemain of politics, translated into an apparent win. Suddenly I was a much stronger candidate than I had seemed before, and the media commentators were paying much more attention to me. In their eyes I had become viable. They had much fun with the Hispanic candidate, but my issues were sound, the unrest of the populace continued to grow, and the aspirations of those who were sick of the existing situation focused increasingly on me. I showed up more strongly in the next primary, becoming a rallying point for the disaffected, and the third one I won. Then I was really on my way.

The party hierarchy did not endorse my candidacy, but I came in due course to the nominating convention with significant bloc support, and former President Kenson made a gracious speech on my behalf. The polls of the moment suggested that I had a better chance than the other candidates to unseat President Tocsin, because of my strong appeal to women and minorities, and that was a thing we all wished to accomplish. There was the customary interaction of overlapping interests, but Megan and Spirit and my staff handled that, so I won't go into detail here. The hard-nosed essence was that though the party regulars were not thrilled with me, I had the most solid grass-roots support, and my ability to take the sizable Hispanic vote away from Tocsin without alienating the general populace was decisive.

We did not make an issue of my female staff, but every woman was aware of it; I did not have to make promises to women any more than I did to Hispanics or Blacks, because they knew I would do right by them. I also picked up strong union support. As the convention proceeded a powerful groundswell of public sentiment buoyed my candidacy. The handwriting was written rather plainly on the wall: If the party regulars opposed me openly, they were liable to become irregulars, and the nomination would still be mine after a divisive battle. That could cost us all the election. It was to their interest to move graciously with the tide and to accept the first Hispanic nominee.

And so it came to pass. I chose as my running mate my sister Spirit, and there was massive applause from the distaff contingent for this innovation, and stifled apoplexy elsewhere. It was not the first time a woman had been selected for this office, but it was the first for a sibling of the presidential candidate. Oh, I knew the party regulars preferred a ticket balanced geographically and philosophically, but my argument was this: It was pointless to have a vice-presidential candidate whose major recommendation was that he did not match the locale or philosophy of the president. I wanted a running mate who understood and endorsed my positions exactly, so that in the event of my death in office my program would be carried out without deviation.

No person, male or female, fitted this definition better than did Spirit. There was grumbling in the back rooms, but this was my will, and it would not be denied. Many of the wives of delegates made their will known unmistakably to their spouses; what might seem a liability with male voters was an enormous asset with female voters. We seemed to have, on balance, a stronger ticket than the conventional system would have provided. There was one half-serious complaint: a delegate from Ami muttered that I had chosen the wrong sister. Faith was in attendance, of course; she demurred, blushing, looking prettier than she had in years. The Ami contingent, of coarse, had been absolutely solid for me from the outset of the campaign.

Now I was the official nominee, going into territory where no Hispanic had gone before. Now I had comprehensive party support, financial and organizational. I addressed monstrous and enthusiastic crowds. But the popularity polls were sobering; though my chances were indeed significantly better than those of any other nominee would have been, I remained six percentage points behind Tocsin. He was, after all, the incumbent, and had a secure base of power, seemingly unlimited funds provided by the special interests, and the name recognition and power over events of a sitting president. These were truly formidable assets. In addition, I knew, there remained sizable conservative and racist elements—the two by no means synonymous, as Thorley had shown me—that did not take to the halls to demonstrate but would never vote for a liberal Hispanic. Six points might not seem like much, out of a hundred, but when it meant that Tocsin was supported by forty-five percent of the responding population, and I by thirty-nine percent, it meant deep trouble. I had to campaign hard enough to make up the difference.

I did. I continued to use the campaign train; it had become a symbol. Now it had many more cars, for the Secret Service men, the big party supporters, and the media reporters. They all seemed to take pleasure in riding the same train with the candidate, and perhaps, to a degree, they shared the fascination with trains. On occasion Thorley was present, shuttling between my campaign and Tocsin, trenchantly torpedoing me at every turn. But I couldn't help it: I liked the man, and I did owe him for two significant services. When I could discreetly do so, I had him in to the family car for a meal and chat; Megan, Spirit, and Hopie liked him also. He never commented on this in the media, though he now had the leverage to put anything into print he wished. It is possible for people to be personal friends but political adversaries, and very few others realized the full nature of our friendship or adversity. Spirit continued to provide him full information on our campaign, honoring my agreement; we kept no secrets from the press.

Indeed, this agreement was to prove fundamentally important and open the way for Thorley's third significant service to me. One matter occurred that did have to be secret, and so we had to trust Thorley and even ask his cooperation. I do not claim that this was the proper interaction of politician and journalist, but it was necessary. I owed Thorley for a life and a reputation; now my career itself was to be put into his hands.

It happened in this manner. In the course of two months my campaign succeeded in drawing me up almost even with Tocsin despite his advantages, forty-two percent to forty-three percent. The election was now rated a dead heat; no one was certain which of us would win. It was my magnetic presence on stage that did it, my talent relating to ever-larger audiences, turning them on. As I gained, Tocsin pulled out all the nether stops, as was his wont when pressed. In addition to a phenomenal barrage of hostile advertising, there were anonymous charges against me, each with just enough substance to give it a semblance of credibility: I was a mass murderer (that is, I had killed a shipful of attacking pirates), I was a notorious womanizer (I had known many women sexually, as was required by Navy policy), I had been charged with mutiny as a Naval officer (but exonerated), and I had adopted a child who resembled me suspiciously. All these were subject to detoxification by clarification of the circumstances; I ignored them except when directly challenged, and then I answered briefly. With one exception: the last. That one I addressed by means of a challenge: “Show me the mother of this child.”

Would you believe it, three different Saxon women came forward, each claiming to have been my paramour fifteen years before and to have conceived by me and to have given up the baby for adoption by me because I had paid her to do so. But none could produce evidence of such payment, and when we had them blood-typed, two were shown to be impossible as parents of Hopie. The third was possible, but a search of her employment record showed that she had not missed a day in the critical period, and an old photograph of her in a bathing suit showed her definitely unpregnant when she would have had to be in the eighth month. Medical records concurred: no baby had been delivered of her in that year. “It is evident,” Thorley commented wryly, “that the girl's mother has sufficient discretion to avoid publicity.” This was, I believe, the only period he remarked publicly on my family situation, because it had for the moment become legitimate news.

“But what does it matter?” I asked, bringing fifteen-year-old Hopie to a news conference and putting my arm around her. “She is my daughter now , and I will never deny her.” Indeed, the blood tests showed I could have been her natural father, and her resemblance to me in intellect as well as the physical was startling. I was so obviously pleased by this that the effort to smear me by this avenue came to nothing.

Perhaps it was that every man has his secrets, and this was the kind that anyone can understand. What really finished it was Thorley's interview with Megan, in which he asked her point-blank why she had agreed to adopt this child, who could not have been her own.

“I love her; she is mine now,” she said, echoing my own response.

“But surely you have wondered about her origin—”

“I know her origin. That's why I adopted her.”

“And yet you have no misgivings about your husband?”

“None. I married him for convenience, but I came to love him absolutely.”

“Yet if—”

“I love him for what he is,” she said firmly. “That has never faltered.”

Thorley shook his head eloquently. “Mrs. Hubris, you are a great human being.”

And that closing compliment, so evidently sincere, coming as it did from my leading political critic, effectively closed the issue. The public seemed to feel that if my wife could so graciously accept the situation, no one else had the authority to condemn me. Certainly I had done right by Hopie.

So Tocsin's most insidious efforts had been insufficient to blunt my progress; perhaps they had even facilitated it. But we knew that he would not allow me to gain any more without drastic reprisal; there was no way he would voluntarily leave office. It was rumored that he had even commissioned a private survey to ascertain public reaction should the upcoming election be canceled; evidently such action had proven unfeasible, or maybe he had concluded that he could win without such a measure. But we did not know precisely how he would strike. I was now just about assassination-proof; there was no way he could arrange for that without betraying himself. He had to be more subtle, and he was the master of subtle evil. We were all concerned.

The first signal of trouble was the Navy. A formidable task force approached the planet Jupiter for extensive maneuvers, with battleships and carriers hanging over individual cities as if targeting them. The public was assured that it was only a routine exercise, but it was a massive and persistent one.

I talked to my old Navy wife Emerald, who was now in easy communication range because she commanded one of the wings. She was an admiral now, her brilliance as a strategist, proven in my day, having enabled her to rise impressively.

“What's going on up there, Rising Moon?” I asked forthrightly. This was a private channel, but there really could be no secrets between us now; certainly Tocsin would know. I called her by her nickname, taken from her personal song, “The Rising of the Moon.” “As a candidate for the office of commander-in-chief, I believe I should be advised if the Navy has any problems.”

Her dusky face cracked into a smile. She was a Saxon/Black crossbreed, once routinely discriminated against in the Saxon-officered Navy, but that was a thing of the past. I knew that she remembered the details of our term marriage as well as I did. She had always been a sexual delight, not because of any phenomenal body—she had been well constructed but relatively spare—but because of her determination, energy, and enterprise. She had regarded sex as a challenge; to make love to her was to ride a roller coaster around a planteoid. She was older now—forty-nine, like me—and had put on weight, but still I saw in her the seed of our savage romance of a quarter century before. I was otherwise married now, and so was she, but I knew that were things otherwise we could still step into bed together and enjoy it immensely. It did not detract one whit from her subsequent marriage, to an admiral now retired, to know that she still loved me.