The Merchant's War (23 page)

When the next morning’s summons to Mitzi’s brainroom came along, Mitzi herself was in it —red-eyed, looking as though she hadn’t slept well, the frown lines deeper than ever between her eyes. She silently pointed to a chair, flicked on the secrecy screen and sat with her elbows on the desk and her chin in her elbows staring at me. At last she said, “How did I get into this with you, Tenny?”

I tipped her a wink. “I’m just lucky, I guess.”

“Don’t make jokes!” she snapped. “I didn’t
ask
for you. I didn’t want to fall in l— … in l—” She took a deep breath and forced it out: “In love with you, damn it! Do you know how dangerous all this is?”

I got up to kiss the top of her head before I said seriously, “I know exactly, Mits. What’s the use of worrying about it?”

“Sit down where you belong!” Then, relenting as I retreated to my chair, “It’s not your fault that my glands are messing me up, I guess. I don’t want you hurt. But, Tenn, if it ever comes to a point where I have to choose between you and the cause—”

I raised my hand to stop her. “I know that, Mits. You won’t ever have to do that. You’ll be glad to have me aboard because, honestly, Mitzi, you clowns don’t know what you’re doing.”

Hard stare. Then, sullenly, “It’s true all this stuff revolts us too much for us to be really good at it. If you could supply some expertise—”

“I can. You know I can.”

“Yes,” she said reluctantly, “I guess I do. I told Des that limbic stuff was hopeless, but he didn’t want to let you in on the real plan. All right. I’m taking the responsibility. What we’re doing is political, Tenny, and you’re going to do it for us. You’ll run the whole campaign—under my direction and Des’s.”

“Fine,” I said heartily. “Here? Or—”

She dropped her eyes. “For the beginning, anyway, here. Now are there any questions?” Well, to begin with, there was the question of why it was going to be here instead of in the loft over the grommet works, but that didn’t seem to be one of the ones she wanted to answer. I said slowly, “If you could just start by filling me in on what’s going on—”

“Yes, of course.” She said it as though I had asked directions to the men’s room. “The big picture is, we’re going to wreck Earth’s economy, and the way we’re going to do it is by taking over the governments.”

I nodded, waiting for the next sentence that would make that all clear. When there wasn’t any next sentence I asked, “The what?”

“The governments,” she said firmly. “Surprises you, doesn’t it? So obvious, and yet none of you hucks have ever had the wit to see it, not even the Conservationists.”

“But Mits! What would you want to take over the government for? Nobody pays any attention to those dummies. The real power’s right here in the Agencies.”

She nodded. “So it is, de facto. But, de jure, the government still has eminent domain. The laws have never been changed. It’s just that the Agencies own the people who write the laws. They get their instructions. No one ever questions them. The only difference is
we
will own them. The dummies will go right on taking our orders, and what we order will plunge this planet into the damnedest, worst depression the human race has ever seen—
then
let’s see if they can still screw around with Venus!”

I goggled at her. It was about the craziest idea I had ever heard. Even if it worked, and all conventional wisdom swore to me it couldn’t work, was that what I wanted? An economic depression? Mass unemployment? The destruction of everything I had been taught to revere …

And yet—humility said—who was I, failure and addict, to criticize? Heaven knew my principles had been rocked and shaken so many times in the past few roller-coaster months that I couldn’t pretend to know anything. I was floundering—and Mitzi seemed so sure.

I said, feeling my way, “Listen, Mits, since some of our Earth ways are so unfamiliar to you—”

“Not unfamiliar!” she flared. “Rotten! Criminal!
Sick. “

I spread my hands, meaning, “No argument”—especially since I seemed to be changing sides in that argument. “The question is, how can you be sure this will work?”

She said fiercely, “Do you think we’re illiterate barbarians? It’s all been gamed and dry-run a hundred times. We’ve had input from the top brains on Venus—psychologists, anthropologists, poli-sci think tanks and war-plans strategists … hell,” she finished glumly, “no. We don’t know that it will work. But it’s the only thing we’ve come up with that might.”

I sat back and gazed at my brassy lady. So this was what I had committed myself to—an immense and lethal conspiracy, planned by eggheads, conducted by zealots. It was comically hopeless, baggy-pants farce, except that it wasn’t very funny when you thought of what it meant. Treason, Contract Breach, unfair commercial practices. If it went sour, the best I could hope for was a return trip to the Polar Penal Colony, this time on the wrong side of the bars.

The expression on Mitzi’s face might once have belonged to Joan of Arc. She seemed almost to glow, eyes lifted to the sky, the brassy-lady face transmuted through bronze to pure, warm gold, the twin frown lines harsh between her eyes …

I reached across the desk and touched them. “Plastic surgery, I guess?” I inquired.

She came down fast, glowered at me (the frown lines reinforced now with real ones), pursed her lips. “Well, hell, Tenny,” she said, “of course there had to be some plastic surgery. I only looked a
little
like Mitsui Ku.”

“Yeah,” I said, nodding, “I thought that was it. So the idea was,” I added conversationally, “you’d kill both of us in the tram station, right? And then you’d announce that through Herculean efforts and the skill of Veenie surgeons you’d pulled at least Mitzi through? Only it would really be you?”

She said harshly, “Something like that.”

“Yeah. Say,” I inquired interestedly, “what’s your real name, anyway?”

“Damn you, Tenn! What difference does that make?” She sulked for a minute, and then said, “Sophie Yamaguchi, in case it matters.”

“Sophie Yamaguchi,” I repeated, tasting the name. It didn’t taste right. “I think I’ll go on calling you Mitzi, if you don’t mind.”

“Mind? I
am
Mitzi Ku! I spent
seven months
practicing to be her, studying the surveillance tapes, copying her mannerisms, memorizing her background. I even fooled you, didn’t I? Now I hardly remember Sophie Yamaguchi at all. It’s like Sophie died instead of—”

She stopped short. I said, “I guess Mitzi’s dead, then.”

The false Mitzi said unwillingly, “Well, yes, she’s dead. But she wasn’t killed by the tram. And believe me, Tenny, I was glad! We’re not assassins, you know. We don’t want to hurt anybody, unnecessarily. It’s just that the objective realities of the situation … Anyway, they hustled her away for, ah, retraining.”

“Ah,” I nodded. “The Anti-Oasis.”

“Sure she went there! And she would have been all right there, too. Either she would have come around to our way of thinking or, at least, been kept there alive and out of sight. But she tried to escape. Ran out of oxygen or something in the desert Tenny,” she said earnestly, “it was nobody’s
fault “

“Well, whoever said it was?” I asked. “Now, about what you want me to do …”

When you come right down to it, I guess nothing is ever anybody’s fault, or anyway nobody ever thinks it is. You have to do what you have to do.

Yet, going back to Bensonhurst that night, I looked around me at the tired, sad-faced commuters hanging to their harnesses as the filthy tunnel walls flew past, the smoggy wind blowing us around, the lights flickering. And I wondered. Did I really want to make the hard life of these consumers harder? Wrecking Earth’s economy wasn’t an abstraction; it meant concrete things, a concrete loss of a job for a file clerk or a Brink’s cop. A concrete downgrading for an adman. A concrete cut in the food budget for the family I lived with. Well, sure, I now believed that Earth was wrong in trying to sabotage and overpower Venus, and it was right to join forces with Mitzi, the false Mitzi, that was, and put a stop to that wickedness. But what degree of wickedness was appropriate to achieve that nonwicked end?

To all my troubles and worries and dilemmas I did not want to add the only one I hadn’t much suffered from yet: guilt.

Nevertheless …

Nevertheless I did the job Mitzi had given me. Did it damn well, too. “What you’re going to do, Tenny,” she had ordered, “is
elect.
Don’t try anything complicated. Don’t try to get
principle
into the campaigns. Just do your huck damnedest to make our people win.”

Right, Mitzi. I did—my damnedest, and tried not to let myself feel damned. One of the people she’d stolen from Taunton, Gatchweiler and Schocken was my old flunky, Dixmeister; he’d been jumped up to take my job and was gloomy, but resigned, to be jumped down again. He brightened when I told him he could have more authority this time; I let him set up all the casting calls, even let him pick possible candidates from the first screenings. I didn’t tell him that I was keeping an eye on the screenings through the closed-circuit TV to my office, but then it wasn’t necessary—left on his own, having had the benefit of my training, the kid was doing all right.

And I had more important things to do. I wanted
themes.
Slogans. Combinations of words that might or might not mean anything (that wasn’t important) but were short and easy to remember. I put the Research Department to work, digging up all the themes and slogans that had ever been used in political campaigns, and presently my monitor was flooded with them. “The Square Deal.” “54-40 or Fight.” “The Moral Majority.” “The Forgotten Man,” “Mink, Stink and Pink.” “Get Government off the Backs of the American People.” “Cuba 90 Miles Away.” “I Will Go to Korea.” “Truth in Advertising”—well, no, that one didn’t have the right ring. “I Am Not a Crook”—that one hadn’t worked. “The War on Poverty.” Better, though that one, it seemed, hadn’t won the war. There were hundreds of the damned things. Of course, most of them had no bearing on the world we lived in— what could you make of “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too”?—but, what I used to tell my copy cubs, it isn’t what a slogan says that matters, it’s what people can read into it that somehow touches the subconscious. It was hard, slogging work, not made easier by the fact that I had lost something. What I had lost was the feeling that winning was an end in itself. It
was,
in this case—Mitzi had told me so. But I no longer
felt
that.

All the same I came up with some beauties. I called Dixmeister in to see them, all beautifully calligraphed and ornamented by Art, with theme music and multisensual background by Production. He gaped at the monitor, puzzled.

“‘Hands Off Hyperion’? That’s truly superb, Mr. Tarb,” he said by reflex, and then, hesitating, “but isn’t it really kind of the other way around? I mean, we don’t want to let go of Hyperion as a market, do we?”

“Not
our
hands off, Dixmeister,” I said kindly. “
Veenies’
hands off. We want them left alone by
Veenies. “

His expression cleared. “A masterpiece, Mr. Tarb,” he said raptly. “And this one. ‘Freedom of Information.’ That means no attempts at censoring advertising, right? And ‘Get Government Off the Backs of the People’?”

“Means abolishing the requirement to post warnings at Campbell areas,” I explained.

“A work of genius!” And I sent him off to try the slogans on that day’s crop of candidates, to see which of them could say them without stumbling or looking confused, while I got busy setting up a spy system to check out the other Agencies’ candidates. So much to do! I was working twelve, fourteen hours a day, losing weight slowly but consistently, sometimes almost falling asleep and losing my grip on the hang-on in those long subway trips to Bensonhurst. I didn’t care. I had made my commitment and I was going to see it through, whatever it cost At least the pills were still working; I hadn’t had even the desire for a Moke in a long time.

I hadn’t had much of a desire for anything else, either—for almost anything else—for anything but the one thing, anyway, and that one thing was not the sort of famished physical craving the green pills anesthetized so well. It was a head-yearning. It was a memory-desire, a longing to feel again the sweet touch of bodies as we slept and the sound of breathing that came from a warm, soft body wrapped in my arms. It was Mitzi I wanted.

I didn’t get much of her. Once a day I would report to her brainroom. Sometimes she was not there and it was Des Haseldyne who shifted his huge body irritably in the chair and scowled through my sitrep, never complete enough or fast-moving enough to please him, because Mitzi was off at some other meeting. Sometimes the meetings were far away. I knew there was much going on that I was not privy to, as they tried to patch and shore up the rickety scheme that I had committed myself to. It was just as well I was anesthetized. The pills didn’t keep away entirely the sweaty nightmares about Fair Commercial Practices hit squads storming my office or Bensonhurst pad, but they let me live through them.

Even when Mitzi was there we didn’t touch. The only difference between reporting to Mitzi and reporting to Des was that once in a while she called me “dear.” The days went on …

And then late one night I was rehearsing one of our candidates in the traditional moves of debate: the cocked eyebrow of humorous skepticism; the clenched jaw of resolution; the indignant thundercloud frown of disbelief— the sudden glance of astonishment and the edging away, as though the opponent had just, grossly and unforgivably, broken wind. As I was coaching the dummy in the various demeaning possible mispronunciations of his opponent’s name, Mitzi came in. “Don’t let me interrupt, Tenny,” she called as she entered. And then, coming closer, she said softly in my ear so that the dummy couldn’t hear: “But when you’re through— Anyway, you’re working too hard to take that long trip to Bensonhurst every night. There’s plenty of room at my place.”

It was what I would have prayed for, if I had prayed.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t very satisfactory. The pills had not only grayed down the environment, they had grayed
me
down. I didn’t have the passion, the zest, the overwhelming hunger; I was glad we were doing what we did, but it didn’t really seem to matter all that much, and Mitzi was nervous and strained.