Politician (8 page)

But the more serious threat is from the pirates themselves—such as the drug runners—when they discover your intent. All politicians express themselves against organized crime, but few are truly serious.

You are. See to your own security, Hubris."

I shrugged, unworried. “When someone takes a shot at me, I'll take steps to prevent recurrence. I have faced threats before.” I lifted my case. “You will want this.”

She got up and fetched a similar case. “And you want this.”

We exchanged cases. They looked identical; she had seen even to this detail. Then I leaned down and kissed her.

She stood unmoving, accepting it. On the holo shows female intelligence agents are invariably young and voluptuous, therefore a real pleasure to pursue. Reba had to live with reality—but for that moment, perhaps, she dreamed.

Then I returned to my apartment, and Spirit opened the case. It was filled with computer printouts and fax clippings relating to Megan.

Was Reba jealous of Megan, the woman I had never met? Or did her vicarious fulfillment encompass this, too? I concluded that I would prefer not to know.

We got to it. Megan, it turned out, had a considerable history. In her youth she had been a singer; in fact, she had been a musical star. Then she had entered politics and run for Congress. She had served three terms as congress-woman, then run for senator—and had the misfortune to run against another congressman who was completely unscrupulous. Megan was a liberal, concerned with human values and the alleviation of poverty and oppression on the planet, and her political record reflected this. Her opponent, an aggressive man named Tocsin, was a creature of the affluent special interests. He promptly denounced her as “soft on Saturnism,” that being the dirtiest political accusation it was possible to make.

Theoretically the government of Saturn represented the comrades of the working class; actually it was a leftist dictatorship that suppressed the working class as ruthlessly as did any other system. Megan certainly had not supported that; she believed in human rights. But Tocsin hammered away at it, equating social conscience with Saturnism and therefore making Megan appear to be, if not a traitor to her planet, at least something of a fellow traveler. It was a scurrilous tactic, an open smear campaign—but it worked. Tocsin won the election. Megan, appalled that such innuendo and misrepresentation could deceive the majority of the voters, retired from public life. She had supposed that competence, experience, and goodwill should carry the day; she had been brutally disabused.

“That woman was raped,” Spirit murmured.

I knew what she meant. I felt anger that Megan should have been abused like this, though there was nothing I could do about it, two years after the event.

Megan was now thirty-six years old-six years my senior. That hardly mattered to me. Helse had been my senior, too. Megan had been beautiful; in fact, this literature quoted a remark that she was “ The ten most beautiful women of Jupiter.” An interesting description! Today, she remained a most handsome woman, said to have a dramatic presence. I had no difficulty picturing her in my mind as Helse, as she would have been, had she lived to her thirties. Yet appearance was only part of it. The more I learned about Megan, the more I knew QYV had read me correctly; this was the woman I could love.

Megan lived in the glittering huge city-bubble of Langel, in the state of Golden—over a hundred thousand miles around the planet from Ybor. She was a pedigreed Saxon while I was a mere Hispanic refugee and discharged military man, recently enfranchised. She was a glorious dream, and I, a mundane reality. I had never met her, and she had surely never heard of me.

Nevertheless, I intended to marry her.

Of course there were a few details to attend to first. I had to arrange to meet Megan. I tried to call her, but her phone was unlisted, and the phone company declined even to admit she had a number. I would have more respect for such companies if they elected to tell the truth about such things; institutional lying is as bad as individual lying. I sent her a letter, but it was returned refused. She was evidently reclusive and not interested in being contacted by strangers. After her political humiliation I couldn't blame her, but I was not to be denied.

We took an airplane to Golden. This time we were suitably blasé about the experience; it was, after all, our second such trip. We checked in at a hotel in Langel, rented an autobubble, and blew out to the suburb where Megan resided.

She lived in a very restricted neighborhood: a spoke village. This was not a bubble but a framework like a spoked wheel, turning in the atmosphere. Sixteen spokes radiated from its hub, each tipped with a minibubble about thirty feet in diameter; completely separate individual residences. Access was via hub and spoke; we had to park in the low-gee center and enter the airlock and formally check in.

The hub-guard was meticulous in verifying our identities. Did we have an appointment? No? Well, he would call the condo owner and pass us through if she cleared us. Otherwise we would have to depart.

He was very polite but very firm. I knew from my reading of him that he was not bluffing; it was his mission to protect the privacy of the residents, and he was dedicated to it.

He buzzed Megan's unit, got an answer, and frowned. “I am sorry, sir. She does not care to see you.”

“Please,” I said. “This is important! At least let me speak to her on the com.”

“As you wish, sir.” He regarded it as a challenge to maintain absolute courtesy in the face of persistent intruders. He buzzed her again. “The visitor wishes to address you via this unit, ma'am. Will you accede?”

This time we heard her voice, though we could not see her face in the dark screen. “I do not talk with strangers, Mr. Bruce. Thank you.”

He looked up again. “She declines, sir. Please depart now.”

Desperately I cast about for some lever of acquaintance. I knew that once I talked with her I could impress her with my sincerity, but first I had to get her attention. What could I say to a woman who refused to listen?

“She was a singer,” Spirit murmured.

I grasped at that straw. “Tell her Captain Hubris will sing her his song!” I exclaimed. “She need only listen, then I will go. Surely she will grant this much to one who has crossed the planet to meet her.”

Mr. Bruce, plainly impatient with this nonsense, nevertheless buzzed her once more. “Ma'am, he is insistent. He promises to depart if you will listen to his song.” There was a pause, then he repeated,

“Captain Hubris.” He was evidently answering her query. “He says he has crossed the planet to meet you. There is a woman with him.” He paused again. Then he glanced at me. “Sing your song, sir.” At this point his emotions were mixed. It was obvious that he did not approve of this, but it did offer relief from the dullness of the routine; he would be able to regale associates with the story of the intruder who insisted on singing to a resident who didn't want to see him.

I sang my song. In the Navy I had required every person in my command to master one song, the song that identified him or her. This one was my own: Worried Man Blues .

It takes a worried man to sing a worried song

It takes a worried man to sing a worried song

It takes a worried man to sing a worried song

I'm worried now, but I won't be worried long.

I sang all the verses and refrains without response. Had she disconnected? Was she listening? I could only hope. Hope was very much my name now.

When I stopped, the guard listened to the com, then looked up once more. “Who is the woman with you, Captain?”

“My sister, Spirit Hubris.”

“Does she also sing?”

For answer Spirit sang her song:

I know where I'm going, and I know who's going with me;

I know who I love, but the dear knows who I'll marry.

When she stopped, we heard Megan's voice clearly. “Miss Hubris, you love your brother, don't you?”

“I do,” Spirit agreed.

“I will see them, Mr. Bruce.”

“As you wish, ma'am,” the man agreed gruffly. He was startled by this abrupt reversal.

We took the shaft down, riding the lift within the spoke, feeling the twisting gee increase as we descended, exactly as if we were in a city-bubble. There was a landing at the bottom, and a door. We knocked on it. It opened; we entered and found ourselves at the top of a flight of archaic stairs. We stepped down these and arrived at the residential floor of an old-fashioned apartment. There were pretty pictures of operatic scenes on the walls, and there was deep, plush carpeting on the floor. To one side was a mini mock piano, the kind that was electronic but was crafted to resemble the historical article. In the center stood the regal figure of Megan.

I remembered her picture, made when she was sixteen. Now she was twenty years older, but the beauty of her youth had not paled; it had matured. The more recent pictures in the material QYV had given me had suggested it; life confirmed it.

“It is not often I am visited by military personnel,” she remarked.

“Retired,” I said. “We are civilians now.”

“Do sit down.”

We settled into stuffed chairs. This could almost have been a room in Victorian England of Earth, some seven or eight hundred years ago.

“So you knew Uncle Mason,” she said.

“Only briefly,” I said, surprised. Evidently we were not complete strangers to her. Perhaps the scientist had mentioned the episode before he died. “I was with... Helse. She... looked like you.”

“Of course,” Megan said, as if it could have been no other way. She had that certain presence that facilitated this. “But that was some time ago.”

“It's still true,” I said, gazing at her. Indeed it was true, in my vision. The sight of Megan was casting a spell over me, as I had known it would.

“Where did you learn your song?”

“Among the migrant harvesters,” I said. “I spent a year with the pickers, going from one agricultural bubble to another. The migrants took me in, and I remember their ways.”

“You still identify with the working class?”

“I do.”

She nodded. As a politician she had sponsored social legislation; she was a friend of the working class, though she had never been part of it herself.

“Yet you achieved a certain notoriety as an officer in the Navy, I believe.”

“I helped make peace between the migrants and the farmers,” I said defensively.

“Indeed you did,” she agreed. “At one stroke you forged a settlement and set a precedent none of the rest of us had been able to arrange in years.”

I was surprised again. “You... were watching that?”

She laughed, her animation making her steadily more lovely. “My dear Captain, it was the headline of the day! I knew that you would be going far.”

I was trying to read her as we conversed, but it was difficult because my own burgeoning emotion got in the way. I had known that she was beautiful and intelligent and motivated; now I had the confirmation, and it was like color holography compared to a black-and-white still picture. Megan was, indeed, all the woman I had ever desired on every level. My talent was rapidly being blunted, and I had to depend on relatively obvious signals. She was relaxing, beginning to enjoy herself—and it was evident that my record was no stranger to her. “You were aware of me before then,” I said.

“Uncle Mason had mentioned you,” she said, confirming my supposition. “He said it was like seeing me again, as I had been in my youth... that girl with you. I was then in my early twenties.”

Spirit made a half-humorous sigh of nostalgia: the notion that a woman in her twenties was beyond her prime. Megan responded with a smile, and it was evident that the two women were coming to like each other.

“Then when you showed up at Chiron,” Megan continued, “which I know was a very ticklish situation, I recognized you. Naturally I was curious. But I hardly thought you were aware of me . You caught me quite by surprise, coming here like this. Perhaps I should have realized that a military man normally takes direct action.”

“But if you recognized my name why did you refuse my letter?”

“Did you write? I'm so sorry. I refuse all mail from strangers because of the hate mail.”

“Hate mail?” Spirit asked, surprised.

“Let's hope you never have occasion to understand about that,” Megan said. “I knew I had no acquaintances in Ybor. I'm afraid I didn't really look at the name.”

“But you recognized it when it was announced just now,” I persisted. “Yet you refused to see me.”

“Captain Hubris, I have put that life behind me,” she said firmly. “I knew the moment I heard your name that you were here on a political errand. I shall not suffer myself to be dragged into that mire again.” She grimaced in a fetching manner. “Then you sang, and it was a song of the working class....”

“But you were wronged!” I protested. “You should not let one bad experience deprive you of your career!”

“Didn't you, Captain?” she asked.

I had to smile ruefully. I had just lost an extremely promising military career because of political machinations within the Navy. “But I have retired only from the Navy, not the fray,” I said. "I had already done most of what I could do in space. Now I want to see what I can do planetside in the political arena.

I need your help."

She frowned. “Setting aside for the moment the fact that I have absolutely no intention of getting involved, what makes you suppose that a discredited former congressperson has anything to offer you in that arena?”

“First,” I said seriously, “I know next to nothing about planetary politics and will surely fail badly if I don't have competent guidance from the outset. Second, you have had the experience I lack, and you are not otherwise engaged at the moment. You can guide me as well as any person can, and I hope you will. It will be a full-time occupation.”

“My dear man, whatever makes you suppose I would do such a thing?”

“I'm sure you are loyal to your principles and your family. Therefore—”

“But we are not related!”

“Not yet,” I murmured.

She looked at me directly, and I warmed to the glory of her gaze. “What are you trying to say, Captain?”

“I want to marry you, Megan.”

Her mouth actually dropped open. “Have you any idea what you're saying?”

“You are the only living woman I can love,” I said.

She was stunned but rallied quickly. “Because I once resembled your childhood sweetheart? Surely you know better than that!”

“It is not precisely a logical thing,” I said carefully. “I have had three pseudowives in the Navy, and they were all excellent women in any capacity you might care to define, but I did not truly love them. They were worthy of love without question, and I think they loved me, but for me there was a certain barrier, so that while perhaps at times I thought I loved, in retrospect I know it was not so. I can love no one except Helse—and you. This is the way I am structured.”

Megan looked at Spirit. “You are his sister, and you love him more than any other. What do you make of this?”

Spirit shook her head. “I'm not sure you would understand.”

“I suspect I had better understand! Describe to me his nature as you appreciate it.”

Spirit dropped her gaze, frowning.

“Tell her, Spirit,” I said.

She sighed. “Hope Hubris is a specially talented person. He reads people. He is like a polygraph, a device to record and interpret the physical reactions of people he talks with. He knows when they are tense, when they are easy, when they hurt or are happy, when they are truthful and when lying. He uses his insight to handle them, to cause them to go his way without their realizing this. He—”

“You are describing the consummate politician,” Megan exclaimed.

“So we understand,” Spirit agreed. "But that's not what I'm addressing at the moment. Hope... is loved by others because he understands them so well, in his fashion. The men who work with him are fanatically loyal, and the women love him, though they know he can not truly return their love. But he—his talent perhaps makes him inherently cynical, emotionally, on the deep level. On the surface he is ready to love, but below he knows better, so he can not. Except for his first love, Helse. She initiated him into manhood, and there was no cynicism there. But having given his love to her, he could not then give it elsewhere—with one exception.

“He was with Helse when he saw your picture, which so resembled her. She saw it, too, and your Uncle Mason helped them both; helped our whole bubble to survive when he really didn't have to. Mason was a generous man, and we owe our lives to him and will never forget the debt we owe him. He is dead now, so we can never repay him directly. But you are his kin. He loved you as his niece, and he helped Helse, perhaps because she seemed to resemble you. In Hope's emotion there is a connection, and I cannot say it is a wrong one. His happiest time with Helse was also with your uncle. So the cynicism of his talent does not apply; it is preempted by the love he bears, which has no other place to go. You are the symbol of his onetime happiness; he believes, emotionally, that he can recreate his love of Helse only through you.”

Megan dabbed at her forehead with a dainty handkerchief, as if becoming faint from overexertion. “But he doesn't even know me.”

“He doesn't need to,” Spirit said. “This has nothing to do with knowledge. It has to do with faith.”

Faith... Coincidentally, the name of our older sister, lost among pirates. The most beautiful member of our family.

Megan shook her head. “You were right. I don't understand.”

“I think you do,” Spirit said.

For answer Megan quoted from a poem by Edgar Allan Poe:

I was a child and she was a child,

In this kingdom by the sea:

But we loved with a love that was more than love—