Politician by Piers Anthony
“I do not think she wants that baby anymore,” the premier said wryly.
“Yet I promised. Will you fetch that baby and deliver him to me? You surely can ascertain the one I mean.”
He nodded. “You will have him, señor. I do not know what he will cost you.” He faded out.
I returned to my audience. “The woman helped me recover my memory, after they mem-washed me. I owe her more than ever, now that my act has cost her her life.” I paused, trying to fend off the tears that threatened to overwhelm me, and succeeded partially.
Then I got down to political business. “We know who is responsible for this outrage,” I said savagely. “Only one person plainly profits from my failure as a candidate. He would have been revealed, had those on the sub survived to give their information. So he destroyed them. But we know! We know he is completely unscrupulous, that he will stop at nothing, not even kidnapping and murder, to secure his reelection. Is this the man you wish to preserve in office?”
It was, of course, a rhetorical question, and my true audience could not respond directly. But even some of the reporters, shaken by the destruction of the sub, reacted. “No!” one murmured.
“It is time that this sort of criminal corruption was rooted out from the government of Jupiter!” I proclaimed. “This great planet must restore its reputation in the System for truth, justice, and equality!” The reporters were nodding affirmatively.
“The government of Jupiter has turned away from the needs of the citizens,” I continued. “Children go hungry, education declines, and there is a rising tide of crime, so that today no citizen is safe—not even a candidate for president!” And someone among the journalists forgot himself so far as to murmur “Amen!”
“It is time to put an end to all this,” I repeated. “It is time for the great planet of Jupiter to return to the greatness it has known.
It is time for the restoration of decency, honor, and joy!” Pure rhetoric, but my cynical local audience was swept up in it, and I knew that at this point even the citizens of Saturn would have voted for me. My magic had taken hold.
“Tomorrow is the election!” I thundered. “You now know how to vote!” And in pure rhetorical style I worked my audience up to a righteous fever, ready to march to the polling places. There would be very few against me at this moment. In the hours before the election sanity would return to a great many, but still I should have a clear advantage.
As I finished, the technicians played back a news item showing the reaction in the great cities of Jupiter. Massive crowds were gathered in the parks, chanting, “Hubris! Hubris!” They were not just Hispanics.
The trap Tocsin had so carefully laid for me had been reversed because of my special talents, because Dorian Gray had helped me regain my memory, because Thorley had helped me regain my freedom, because my friends on Ganymede and in the Navy had supported me, and because I had seized the moment. Now at last I could relax.
I took a deep breath-and fainted.
CHAPTER 19
WIVES
I woke in a hospital in Ybor. It seemed I had suffered more during my captivity than I had realized. By the time my body threw off the sedation they had loaded me with, the election was over and I was the president-elect. But I remained disoriented, and Spirit decided that I should spend a month or so in private recuperation. I was glad to do so; for one thing, it gave me leisure to write this narrative of my political experiences.
In fact, this has been a vital occupation. My system does develop immunity to drugs of all types, but it cannot act retroactively to cancel all the damage they may have done. I could no longer be memory-washed, but that first wash really had obliterated many years of memories for a time, and I was concerned that some parts would never return unless I made a special effort to recover them now. My life through my Navy experience has been covered in my prior diaries, but not the past twenty years, so it was important that I get on this before the distractions of the presidency overwhelmed my attention. I don’t know how others feel, but to me, memory is almost as important as the present or the future; I value all my life and want no part of it lost, not even the painful portions.
Just as the key words I had planted for myself in the slop-cell had triggered major segments of my missing memory, so now my effort to record that experience amplified those segments of my memory. I cannot honestly say that I relived those parts of my life in the manner I have described; my memory returned in complex flashes rather than in an orderly, narrative, holo-type format suitably edited for relevance. Still, those flashes did the job; they made me aware of what I needed to know in order to restore my perspective and enable me to foil the plot against my candidacy. But it was the writing of the manuscript that made my life real again. In a sense, my life formed as I recorded it; the effort of searching out the details and feelings I had, had made them substantial. It took me a month to write them out, but when that job was done, I was satisfied that I knew where I had been and what I had been doing.
In that month exterior events did not cease, of course. There were some matters that couldn’t wait on my literary convenience. In a manner my life consisted only of these scenes and my manuscript memories.
There was the evening I was home with Megan and Hopie. My daughter flung herself into my arms and sobbed; she had feared I was dead, and now at last she could relax. She was close to fifteen years old now, but at this moment resembled a tiny, frightened child. Spirit had explained to me, on the way from somewhere to somewhere, that she had put out word that I had retired from active campaigning for a time to organize coming responsibilities such as researching the best appointments and preparing a major address. She had, in effect, covered for Tocsin’s crime, knowing that my life would be forfeit if she did not. We had taken an enormous chance—to reap an enormous gain. She had carried on in my stead, giving my speeches and in general showing that she was indeed competent to stand in lieu of me, never showing her natural concern for me. So my campaign had proceeded without visible falter, and at the time of my reappearance the odds remained fifty-fifty. My concluding address had been critical indeed.
“If Tocsin had been smarter,” I told her, “he would have kidnapped you instead of me!” It was not really a joke; Spirit was competent at all the necessary details I ignored. She had been running my campaign throughout, based on Megan’s strategy, and this had not changed during my absence. The campaign had survived my absence; it could not have survived her absence.
Then I was alone with Megan, and it was difficult. “About Dorian Gray—” I began.
“I understand,” she said quietly.
“No, I mean—”
“You were memory-washed,” she said firmly. “Your system fights off drugs, but it takes time to develop specific antibodies, and so at first you remembered nothing, not even your marriage. They put you with a comely young woman—”
“I remembered you,” I said. Another person might have found it expedient to deceive her on this point, but there was no way I would lie to Megan. “But—”
“But you realized that if your captors realized that, they would have killed you,” she said. “So you had to do what they wanted. Hope, it isn’t as though you have never had a relationship with another woman. You had four wives before me.”
Four wives. She was counting Helse, who had died on the verge of our marriage, and Juana, my first Navy room-mate, and my two formal term-wives. It was true I had had enduring and loving relationships with those four, and sexual liaisons in the Navy fashion with many others. “You are very understanding,” I said.
“Hope, I love you,” she said, as if making a point.
I took her in my arms and kissed her, and she was all my desire. I was just shy of fifty years old, and she was in her mid-fifties, but what I felt for her would have been completely comprehensible to folk in their twenties. Or their teens. But when I thought to go further, she demurred.
I let her go immediately, knowing that despite her intellectual unde
But then she turned back to me, and her face was washed in tears. “Oh, Hope!” she cried, and fell back into my embrace. She gave me everything, then, forgiveness and all, with a kind of desperation reminiscent of that of our daughter, though on a distinctly different plane. Her love had overwhelmed her reserve.
Still, I knew those two strikes remained, and I knew I could not afford a third one. I loved Megan and she loved me, and because it was no casual relation we had, any damage to it was not casual, either. Forgiveness and forgetting may come most readily to those whose real feelings are only lightly committed.
I swept to victory on election day; it was evident before the polls closed that I had a planetslide. I was tuned out at the time, of course, but it interested me when I learned of it later. Analysis indicated that I had ninety-seven percent of the Hispanic vote, with a record turnout; ninety-two percent of the Black vote; seventy percent of the Saxon female vote; and thirty percent of the Saxon male vote. Overall it came to fifty-five percent, a very comfortable margin.
But Tocsin refused to concede defeat. In fact, he acted as if he had won. The arrogance of the man was amazing.
Then I found out that the campaign was not yet over. The United States of Jupiter, almost alone among contemporary republics, retains what is termed the Electoral College. Over the past six centuries or so, one variant after another had been tried, but the dynamics of politics generally interfered with the simple ratio of one citizen, one vote. At present each state was allocated a block of electoral votes in proportion to its population, and that entire block went to whatever candidate had a plurality in that state. This tended to leverage the voting, giving the large states a disproportionate weight in the Electoral College. Indeed, it was possible for a candidate to win the national popular vote and lose the electoral vote. In addition, in a number of states, the electors aren’t technically committed to the candidate who won the state.
They were expected to vote as the ordinary voters had, and normally they did, but they didn’t actually have to. Now it became apparent that special pressure was being brought to bear on some electors to break ranks and vote for the wrong candidate: Tocsin. His campaign had a staggering amount of money available, and it seemed that bribes were being proffered that were quite substantial, as well as promises of political patronage.
In addition, the results were being challenged in several key states. A sophisticated kind of gerrymandering was systematically excluding Hispanics and Blacks from important aspects of the recounts, so that the results were bound to shift to my disfavor. Somehow my strong supporters were being shunted to regions that were already solidly in my camp, leaving the borderline regions to tilt marginally the other way. A margin was as good as a mile for this purpose; I could lose whole states, and all their electoral votes. This process was illegal, of course, but private money does talk, and evidently it was talking persuasively. We really had to scramble to keep abreast of it, challenging the challenges, and forcing re-recounts, lest we forfeit states we had actually won. Had Tocsin had his way unchallenged, he would have shifted enough electoral votes to achieve a scant majority in the College. As it was, he did abscond with some but not enough. Our dike held, and I was confirmed. I felt as if I had won a second election, and in a way I had.
Then a bill appeared in Congress, concerning something routine—in my scramble to plug the leaks in the dike (though really Spirit was doing it, and my staff; I was merely watching nervously) I never really ascertained what—bearing an obscure amendment relating to the political process. The bill passed shortly before the turn of the year, and the nature of the amendment became belatedly clear. It was a “clarification” of the requirement for holding major office in Jupiter. Above a certain level it was now illegal for any foreign-born citizen to hold office.
Spirit and I were foreign-born, technically, as we had come from the independent satellite of Callisto and had been naturalized as full Jupiter citizens when we left the Navy. Suddenly we were barred from taking the offices to which we had just been elected.
Naturally we challenged this bit of skullduggery on several grounds. We pressed for a rehearing and revote in Congress but were stonewalled; by the time we got through that, the day of taking office would be past. So we sued and got an expedited hearing before the Supreme Court itself, a week before the deadline of January 20; 2651. This was highly unusual, but the entire situation was extraordinary. Only direct access to the highest court could settle this in time.
The technical question was whether Congress had the right to pass ex post facto legislation affecting a candidate already elected. We argued that this was inequitable at best, and a mockery of the entire election process at worst. The opposition argued that this was not properly considered as new legislation but was merely a clarification of existing policy and therefore was valid. They succeeded in obfuscating the real issue—that of who was to be president—to the point that it became a question of my fitness for the office. I actually was required to summon character references on my behalf. Naturally Tocsin summoned character-assassination witnesses.
So while the twelve Supreme Court Justices listened in seeming passivity, Spirit and I suffered through the ordeal of being publicly judged as persons. All manner of innuendo was brought out in an evident effort to make us lose our tempers. We survived that—our Naval combat experience helped—but we were almost torpedoed by our friends.
My first Navy roommate, Juana, now a master sergeant, testified to my excellent character and confessed that she and I had met in the tail—i.e., Navy institution of sex, the complement to the head—and had subsequently lived together as de facto man and wife for two years before moving on to other assignments. Cross-examination established other partners in sex that I had had. It was, of course, the Navy way, neither right nor wrong, but it was a way that was not generally understood in civilian life. Emerald gave similar evidence, except that she had actually married me, until it became expedient for her to go to another officer in order to obtain his expertise for the benefit of our unit. Again it was the Navy way; again it was damaging in the present context, as was the fact that Emerald had obvious Black ancestry. The Navy strove to extirpate racism from its midst by civilian directive, and mixed marriages were accepted without question, as were interracial liaisons in the Tail. But the civilian sector had not applied similar discipline as strenuously to itself; interracial marriages, though legal, were socially problematical. Twelve old Saxon men were listening; were they free of the taint of covert racism themselves? I had to pray that it was so, but I doubted it. Three of them had been appointed by Tocsin himself, and they were recognized as ideological rather than quality selections; no hope that they would rule against him. Three others had been appointed by his predecessor Kenson, who were of superior merit. The six remaining were similarly divided, so that there was an even conservative/liberal split and no great certainty that merit would be the deciding aspect of any particular case.
Then we came to the last of my Navy liaisons. Admiral Phist (Retired) and his wife Roulette, Ambassador from the Belt, were brought to Jupiter, to the court in the bubble of New Wash. They were cross-examined like criminals by the lawyer from the other side. “And isn’t it true that you are a pirate wench?” the lawyer demanded of Roulette.
Roulette was now a striking woman of thirty-nine, retaining fiery hair and a figure that caused even the venerable heads of the Supreme Court Justices to turn.
“Objection!” our attorney protested, but Roulette waved him away.
“I can answer for myself,” she said. She turned disdainfully to the interrogator and fixed him with a gaze that actually made him step back. “Yes, I was a pirate wench—until Captain Hubris made a woman of me.”
“And how did he do that?”
“He beat me and raped me,” she said with pride.
The attorney straightened up with over-dramatic shock. Obviously he had been fishing for exactly this response. “He what?”
Some character witness! The twelve Justices seemed somewhat less sleepy now. But Roulette was not about to let this drop. “Same thing you’d like to do, if you had the chance,” she informed the man, shifting the angle of her sculptured bosom.
The attorney was speechless for a moment; evidently she had scored. But he quickly recovered himself. “And did you press charges?”
“For what?” she inquired archly.
“For abuse!” he said with relish. “For rape.”
She laughed. “That gentle man? He never abused me!”
“But you said—”
“Of course. But he didn’t really want to rape me. We made him do it.”
The lawyer knew he was losing the thread. “We?”
“My father and I.”
“Your father—and you—made Hope Hubris rape you?”
“And his staff. We really worked on him. And finally he did it. I had a knife. I stabbed him in the shoulder. But he—”