Politician by Piers Anthony
We thought we were now safe from the storm, but we were wrong. We watched on holovision as the approach was recorded. Small bubbles were rocking like chips on a wave of liquid, and large ones were being shoved from their normal positions. The city-bubble of neighboring Pete was struck first. We watched with awe as the cloud layer broke up, dropped down, and enveloped that bubble, lightning radiating. A report from within showed debris scattered across the central park. “Tremendous vibration,” the announcer was saying. “Spin is affected; we’re precessing as the winds fight our rotation. Gee is down, and power is low. But the hull is tight. Repeat: The hull is tight.”
It was a necessary reassurance, for if the hull leaked, the whole city could be afflicted with five-bar hydrogen atmosphere, exactly as the stricken car had been. That would mean hundreds of thousands of deaths.
The holo switched to another locale. “One of the suburbs is moving out of control!” the announcer exclaimed. “It’s starting to drop. Power seems to be out—” Then, with open horror: “The gee-shield’s failed!”
We watched, appalled, as that small bubble, about the size of Pineleaf, started its fall. Nothing anybody could do could save it now as it spiraled down into the immense and deadly gravity well of the planet. All its occupants were doomed to implosion and pressure extinction.
Megan cut off the holo. “Oh, I wish I had stayed in Golden!” she cried, distraught. I did not argue; at this moment I wished I had stayed in space. The deep dread of the crushing pressure of Jupiter tormented me. How was it that puny man had dared to try to tame the Lord of Planets?
There was a shudder through the city. The walls creaked. We were encountering the high winds. Suddenly it was much easier to believe that the hull of the city-bubble could crack and leak, or that the gee-shield could fail. I felt claustrophobic. How much better it was on a moon or planetoid, where gravity was so slight it had to be enhanced.
The power flickered, causing us both to start. “Oh, Hope, I’m afraid!” Megan cried.
So was I. But I had a job to do. “It’s just turbulence,” I said reassuringly. “Nothing to worry about.” But neither of us believed that, and neither did little Hopie; she was squalling with nerve-racking penetration.
I simply didn’t know how to cope with this. In the Navy all personnel were trained and tough, knowing death was part of combat. But this was civilian life. I hated to see Megan like this; suddenly she was looking very much her age. Violence terrified her, and all my skill of analysis was useless in the face of the storm.
“Let me take Hopie,” I said gruffly. Wordlessly Megan gave up the baby and huddled alone on the bed. I paced around the room, holding the screaming baby, no better at comforting her than I had been with Megan. Seldom had I felt this inadequate.
Then the door alarm sounded. “Not more bad news,” I breathed, and went to answer it.
It was Spirit. “I would have come sooner, but the traffic—” Then she saw our situation. She reached out her arms, and I handed Hopie to her. “You take care of your wife,” she said, holding Hopie close.
I went to Megan and took her shivering body in my arms. “Spirit is here,” I said, as if that made everything all right.
Megan sat up, listening. “Hopie—”
Hopie had stopped screaming. “She’s with Spirit,” I explained. “Now relax.”
“Yes…” she agreed, relaxing.
Spirit was supporting Hopie close to her bosom and singing her a lullaby. Why hadn’t I thought of that? Of course, that was the way to soothe a baby, as Megan had done so often before. I had forgotten my common sense in the pressure of the moment. My sister had retained hers and acted on it, as she had during combat situations as a refugee and in the Navy. We were indeed in combat now, the foe being the raging storm. Our weapons were not ships and lasers but understanding and song.
“Sleep, my child, and peace attend thee,” Spirit sang, “all through the night.”
Megan heard. Suddenly she became animated. She sat up and joined in, her fine voice filling the room. “Guardian angels God will send thee, all through the night.”
I joined in, too. Soon we were singing other songs, including our Navy identity songs. How clearly I remember Spirit singing “I know who I love, but the dear knows who I’ll marry,” while the baby slept blissfully. I realized at that moment what I had not chosen to understand before, that Spirit had found love—and could not marry. She had been as fortunate in love as I had been but not in marriage.
And so we spent the tense night, Megan with me on the bed, Spirit with the baby on the chair. Perhaps it was my imagination, but the force of the storm seemed to abate after Spirit arrived, and we knew things were getting better. Maybe it was just that when Hopie’s crying stopped, things seemed more positive. Maybe it was that Spirit has always been my mainstay in crisis of any kind; she really is stronger than I am, in ways she seldom cares to show. It is a secret between us, this aspect of our relationship.
In the morning Spirit looked tired but relieved. She gave the baby back to Megan and went her way. I doubted that she had had much sleep, but she could handle that too. We cleaned up, ate a quick breakfast, and checked out, nervously eager to get back to Pineleaf.
The press of traffic was much less, but the highway was just as grim: defunct bubbles littered the route. We did not pause to peer into any, knowing there could be nothing inside we would want to see. A devastating battle had been fought here, the carnage no less awful because the enemy had been the weather. About halfway along we encountered a wrecker-bubble hooking on to a car; the cleanup was commencing. Soon all would be as before, except for the relatives of the casualties.
The Pineleaf bubble was intact. “We could have stayed here,” I said, aggrieved. Megan didn’t answer, but the little grim lines deepened on her face. No, we couldn’t have stayed here; she had had to have the security of a major bubble. Pineleaf ‘s survival was mere chance; a gust could have swept it away.
Our apartment was in a shambles; this bubble had evidently received a worse shaking than had Ybor. It would not have been at all comfortable here, physically or psychologically. In my mind I saw the other suburb-bubble plummeting to its ghastly doom, and I shuddered. Jupiter was a monster!
But the storm was past, and we had survived. That was what counted. Now I would have to see what I could do as a state senator to alleviate the problems of those who had suffered more than we had. At least I had a notion how they felt.
• • •
In the last year of my four-year term Megan discussed strategy with me for my next effort. “You are now forty, which is coming into prime time for a politician, and you have good, solid credits and a loyal constituency. It is time for your first try for governor.”
“My first try?”
“You will lose,” she said matter-of-factly. “Your support statewide is too thin. But you can make a creditable showing, and that will prepare you for the second try, which should be more successful.”
“I would distrust a commander who planned to lose the first battle, to gain experience for the second.”
“Fortunately, few political campaigns are run by military men.” She kissed me warmly. Over the years our relationship had ripened, and our love had become correspondingly strong. I had always known I would love her but had not been certain she would love me. That concern had abated. Though her love had been glacially slow in its development, it had also been glacially certain. It had flowered at last with something less than volcanic force—metaphor-mix permitting—but persisted like hardened lava. There are those who suppose that a woman in her forties is not worthwhile as a love object, that her form and fire are gone. The truth is that a literate, feeling, competent woman is never past her prime. There is, to put it colloquially, one hell of a lot more to a woman than sex appeal, but in Megan I had that, too. She was, indeed, the ten most beautiful women, and well worth the wait.
It was more complicated, running for governor, than it had been running for the re
“A campaign car,” Megan said. “It may seem a trifle quaint today, but it is feasible and it makes sense.”
“A what?” I asked blankly.
“In the old days politicians campaigned from trains,” she explained. “It was convenient and cheap and it got the job done.”
“I’m game,” I said.
Spirit returned to be my campaign manager for this effort. Megan remained as my strategist, preferring to take no overt part, but she consulted frequently with Spirit. My secretary Shelia knew exactly how much money we had to work with and where our contacts were. My bodyguard and my gofer were drafted again to handle the details of campaigning; this was the way it had to be, for a lean campaign. Together, these five women decided where I should go and how I should spend my time. It was reminiscent of my time as captain in the Navy, when women had mostly run my show.
I should explain that a train, in the Jupiter atmosphere, is not the same as the archaic vehicles that roamed old Earth on metal rails, but does have its affinities. Indeed, those affinities were deliberately strengthened by the transport companies, who played upon the vested nostalgia of our culture. A train is a chain of transport bubbles linked by means of special flexible airlocks and towed by a tug. It takes relatively long for such a string of beads to accelerate to effective velocity, but a good deal of freight can be transported in that manner cheaply. There are special train routes established between major cities, marked by glowing buoys, and the trains have the right of way over any other vehicles that may intrude on such routes, because the trains are unable to halt or maneuver rapidly. It can be quite comfortable aboard a train, however; in fact, train travel was once considered to be the ultimate in luxury. I was intrigued.
What we could afford, it turned out, was a rental unit. This was an old dining car converted to residence after being retired from active duty and now used mainly for novelty occasions. It was shaped like a cylinder rounded off at the ends, so as to be aerodynamic; that was important for any vehicle traveling rapidly in atmosphere. It was so narrow I was sure rotation would be unfeasible; how would it provide gee?
The answer was obvious: It used natural planetary gee. Its gravity shield deflected approximately sixty percent of Jupiter’s gravitrons, leaving enough to provide precisely Earth-normal gee. What prevented the car from plummeting down toward compression and destruction? The buoyancy of the other cars in the train. Inanimate freight required no weight and was easier to handle in free-fall, so full gee-shielding was used in them. It was the same principle as dirigibles, or passenger balloons that once floated in old Earth’s atmosphere; the relatively large volume of diffuse balloon provided buoyancy to offset the small volume of dense payload, and so the whole was suspended stably. Only the freight cars were not gaseous; they were absolutely solidly filled, with the gee-shielding making them as light as balloons. I remember a minor historical note about the buoyancy of lead-filled balloons on Earth that did not float well. Today, of course, lead balloons readily float, with null-gee.
There is another intriguing parallel to the old times of Earth: the railroad discovered that freight was more lucrative and easier to handle than people, as freight did not complain about delays and didn’t even require oxygen to breathe. It could simply be loaded, sealed, and shipped. But the railroads were subsidized by the government, because of the great expense in starting up, so were expected to cater to public need. As a result, they served that need nominally but with increasing ungraciousness, trying to discourage voluntary passengers. The prices of tickets moved up; delays were so common that trains hardly ever arrived at their destinations on time, and personnel were discourteous. But such was the society’s romance with the concept of trains that it took many decades for the companies to discourage a significant fraction of their passenger market. Even today, there were those who, contrary to all common sense, insisted on using this form of transport. I, it seemed, had become one of these.
The car, inside, was reasonably sumptuous. There was room for our family and several staff members. Spirit saw to the room assignments, and Megan kept Hopie out of mischief. There were cabins for Shelia, Ebony, and Coral. I was, in a manner of speaking, just along for the ride.
Of course we had to align our timetable with that of the railroad. That was awkward, because the freight trains were not scheduled with political campaigns in mind, or, indeed, with any living folk in mind. But it was cheap. The cheapest possible way for a party our size to travel the state, in style.
We worked it out. We set up a campaign route that meshed with convenient freight-train schedules. We hooked on to the first freight train, paid the rental, and headed for a date with Ami, across the state.
The start was slow, as the distant engine cranked up. It was an old-fashioned chemical burner that spewed its exhaust into the atmosphere, leaving a trail of smoke that slowly dissipated behind. We watched from the old-fashioned observation windows; since the car did not spin, such apertures were feasible. We saw the buoys flashing by for a while, faster and faster as the train slowly accelerated, until they were pretty much of a blur, and the route seemed almost enclosed in the fashion of the netted highways. But this soon got boring, even for little Hopie, and we turned our attention back inside. Travel really wasn’t all that exciting, not when the surroundings were largely featureless.
In Ami I encountered something new, unfamiliar, and disturbing. Several men in the audience periodically yelled terse objections to my points. They were not reasoned refutations, merely opposition, such as “Says who!” or “That’s bull!” They put me off my verbal stride.
I got through by ignoring the gibes, but I was disturbed. After the speech I consulted with Spirit and Megan.
“It’s heckling,” Megan explained. “Every politician suffers it eventually. It’s a sign of success.”
“Success! They were interfering with my speech!”
Spirit was more practical. “I gather this is a tactic of the opposition?”
“Of course,” Megan said. “Such men are for hire, relatively cheap. But a candidate who is sure of success does not bother with such a minor tactic.”
“I still don’t like it,” I said. “How can I stop it?”
“Let me consider,” Spirit said.
Megan glanced at her. “I don’t think I want to know what you are going to come up with,” she murmured.
My next address was in Kyst, the southernmost bubble of the band. We drove down through a long highway that was a scenic wonder. It followed the five-bar contour, but the dynamics of the planet and the fringe of the band caused the cloud cover to dip, so that first it loomed low, then intersected the route, so that special fog-cutting buoys were necessary. It was like an eerie tunnel through foam that seemed always about to stifle out. As usual, Spirit and I gawked, while the Jupiter natives of our party ignored it. Little Hopie, now a pert four years old, sat in my lap and shared my enthusiasm; she liked traveling. She was a charming child, and increasingly people were remarking how much she resembled me. We had not made a secret of the fact that she was adopted but did not advertise it, either, so most people assumed she was ours by blood rather than by choice. That hardly bothered me.
The clouds dropped below the highway, so it was like emerging from some nether realm to the surface. The light was stronger here, and because there was a fracture zone in the next cloud layer above, s
Kyst was a delight, seemingly perched on the last major cloud-isle of the series, overlooking the southern reaches of the planet. Some distance farther along, I knew, was the giant Redspot, but here nothing like that showed. Jupiter is big, and thousands of miles can separate adjacent territories. We had traveled at quite high velocity, our auto-bubble boosted by special jets, but still the drive had taken several hours.
The hecklers had also made the trip. I had two speeches scheduled here, on consecutive days, and the hecklers were present in force at the first. News must have spread that I was not apt at dealing with them, and so they swarmed like the proverbial stinging flies. I suffered through, not daring to take any overt notice of them, for fear I would be drawn into a type of exchange I could not profit from. But my audience became increasingly restless as their interference went unchecked.
However, I saw the personnel of my staff quietly taking pictures of the culprits, so I knew Spirit was working on something. Ebony was stalking each one with her camera. That reassured me.
After the program Spirit explained, “Now we know exactly who they are. As they enter next time we’ll touch them with mustard-six. You will have the activator at your podium.”
Slowly I smiled. Mustard-six was the colloquial name for a rather special, if minor, preparation used in Navy training drills. It burned like fire when activated by a particular electronic signal but was otherwise quiescent. It was considered a nuisance device, not a dangerous one, as it lost its effect only after a few seconds of activation, but no victim ever forgot those seconds. I remembered it from my time in officer training school; I had had to infiltrate a mock enemy position, and every time I blundered into an activation zone, I regretted it. “Just remember,” the training officer had reminded us. “In real action those errors will cost you more than burns. Then the antipersonnel agents will be real.” The lesson had been effective.