Politician

  “Am I being corrupted by power?” I asked Megan in some distress. “I am doing the very things I once condemned.”

  “You are not being corrupted as long as you retain your ideals and strive to achieve them,” she reassured me. “What you are doing now is coming to terms with the realities of government. It is a somewhat debasing process, but necessary, like cleaning up after a sick animal. I had to do it when I was in office. Do the best you can and broaden your base of acquaintance, but never lose sight of your ideals.”

  There was the formula, of course. I knew that the moment I started accepting money or privilege for special-interest legislation, I would be on the road to corruption. I swore to myself never to do that.

  Meanwhile I had another problem: earning my living. My Navy stipend halted when I won election, for I was now employed, and there were laws against so-called “double-dipping” that had been passed by reformers like me. Spirit had elected not to take any paid position in my office, so her pension remained, but I was not seeing much of her at present. I knew she could take care of herself and would return the moment I truly needed her; I was not concerned. But the job of state senator was part-time, and the pay was not enough to sustain a family in the manner a public family needed to be sustained. So I had to moonlight: that is, get another job. The term dates from centuries past, when people worked on Planet Earth and the light of Earth’s relatively huge moon shone down at night. The term doesn’t apply well in the present situation but remains because of its usefulness as a concept. There was nothing illegal in getting other work; it was standard and open practice, justified on the basis of not soaking the suffering taxpayers unnecessarily. I agreed with the principle, but how was I to hold a full-time job without shortchanging my constituents? There was a lot less glamour in holding office than I had fancied.

  Megan again had the answer: I would become a consultant. “Use your talent, Hope,” she told me. “There is a great need for expert advice on the employment of key people in industry, and you need to establish statewide contacts beyond the legislature.”

  “Statewide contacts?”

  “For the time when you run for governor.”

  Oh. She had never lost sight of the stages of my political career, however embroiled I might be in the problems of the moment. I had married her, theoretically, for that, and she was delivering. The fact that I loved her was presumed to be secondary.

  I knew now that the political program that Spirit and I had envisioned before we went to Megan would never have worked. We had asked Megan whether she wished to be a part of my drive toward the presidency, but I now know that without Megan there could never have been such a drive. Megan, of course, had known it from the outset but had joined me anyway.

  “Why did you do it?” I asked her.

  She understood me. “Your sister was persuasive.”

  “But our program was hopelessly naive. We had no notion of the nature or magnitude of the task.”

  “It was her love for you that was persuasive,” she clarified. “I suspected that if a woman of her caliber could love you, then perhaps you were worthy of it.”

  “But she’s my sister. We Hispanics are very close—”

  “She is more than your sister. Do you not have another sister?”

  I nodded soberly. “Faith, my senior by three years. But she is gone, perhaps dead.”

  “But when you were with her, were you as close to her as to Spirit?”

  “No,” I admitted. “Spirit has always been like part of me.”

  “She is a very special woman, and I would do more for her than perhaps you appreciate. She is strong where I am weak, but I sought to understand what she saw in you, and I think I have not been mistaken in the effort.”

  “I don’t think I understand,” I said.

  She kissed me. “Of course you don’t, Hope. But we shall make you president.”

  And so I became Hubris Consultations, Inc. Here, Megan’s national contacts helped. She spoke to friends of old, who spoke to other friends, and some fairly large companies began soliciting my advice. I knew they were doing it mainly as a favor to Megan, but I responded seriously. I traveled to home offices and interviewed personnel and prospective personnel. I was quickly able to perceive who was competent and who was not, and who was motivated and who was not, and who was honest and who was not, and I made my recommendations accordingly. In one case I had to tell the man who solicited me as consultant that he himself was not fitted for the job he held. “You are honest and trying hard, but the sustained tension is destroying you,” I said. “Thoughts of suicide are coming to you, and your family is suffering. I recommend that you step aside, accept a non-decision-making position, and relax. It may save your life.”

  He stared at me. “You have read me like an open book!” he exclaimed. “But it’s an executive rat race! How can I ease up without being destroyed?”

  I showed him the company chart of responsibility. “Promote this man to your present position,” I said. “He is hard-driving and competent—and he never forgets an affront or a favor. Do him this big favor, and trust him to protect you in the future. I believe you will be secure.”

  He frowned. “But what of this man?” he asked, pointing to another name on the chart.

  “He is embezzling from the company. Fire him.”

  “How can you possibly know such a thing? You’ve only been here two days.”

  “It is my private skill. I can read the guilt in a person. Verify the facts in your own fashion. Have a surprise audit made now.”

  “I will,” he agreed. “Though it tears me up to do it—”

  “That is why you must step down.”

  “But if you’re wrong—”

  I was not wrong. Within a week the personnel changes I had recommended were made, and news spread through the business community. My business picked up. This was something I was good at. My financial concern was over; I was starting to get some fat fees. My income rose, and I entered a higher tax bracket. I began to understand why wealthy folk objected to the graduated bracket system. Through my own effort and skill I had made my business a success; the government had contributed nothing. Why should the government take a larger cut?

  In the second year of my office, something quite different and significant happened. A baby appeared. Spirit had been away on separate business for some time, but she returned to consult privately with Megan, and Megan consulted privately with me. It seemed that Sancho had obtained this newborn infant from a mother who could not keep her, as the mother was single and the father was married. The child was a Saxon/Hispanic cross, difficult to place. What was to be done?

  “Hope, you know I cannot bear a child,” Megan said.

  “You decided long ago never to bring a child into this System,” I agreed. “I understand that and accept it.”

  “I want to adopt this one.”

  I knew her well, but this surprised me. “Are you sure?”

  “Completely sure.”

  My wife was a generous woman, but it had not occurred to me that she would be generous in this way. “Why this one?”

  She looked at me as if I were hopelessly naive. “Hope, you know why.”

  “But you know what people will say. That baby is Hispanic!”

  “And Saxon,” she said. “Hope, I never wanted to be a mother, but now I do. For this one baby.”

  Amazed and gratified and more than slightly discomfited, I acceded. We undertook the necessary paperwork and the foundling became ours. We named her Hopie Megan, because we wanted her to be ours as completely as she could be, in name as well as in law. We became a full family.

  It took me some time to adjust to the idea of being a father, but Megan seemed to know what to do. She handled the feeding and changed the diapers and whatever else was required; I was permitted to hold the little thing for a few minutes at a time, and that was about it. Still, my outlook changed significantly, for now there was someone to follow me. When I aged and passe
d on, she would remain, and perhaps remember me fondly. That made the prospect of eventual extinction less objectionable.

  • • •

  Trouble cropped up on the political front. A court decision struck down the system of districts on which the last election had been based and required redistricting with a more equitable division of population. The districts were supposed to be even, within a couple of percentage points, but they were not. The bubbles of Ami, Ybor, and Pete had grown much more rapidly than the state’s average, and now my district was a good twenty percent overpopulated. The state legislature had to redraw the lines.

  The lines were redrawn in a heated sequence, but in the process I was gerrymandered out of my district. What had been mine was now split between two new districts and incorporated parts of what had been in other districts. My four-year term was cut to two years, and I was forced to run again, for a new four-year term.

  They hadn’t had to do it that way, but I was short on tenure and had little clout, and I was Hispanic, which was sufficient reason to make me the odd man out. I seethed at the injustice of it, but I had no choice; if I didn’t run again, in a district that excluded half my natural constituency, I wouldn’t have my office at all.

  I ran again. Thorley’s caustic pen followed my progress. If we had respect for each other—and we did now—it didn’t manifest in public. He pilloried my positions as “bleeding-heart liberal” and “knee-jerk Hispanic,” as I suspect they were.

  But I was an incumbent now, of a sort. I had a constituency and notoriety and name recognition, and I had learned some things about campaigning. I did not bother to appeal to the Hispanics; I knew, with necessary cynicism, that they were in my pocket. Instead I campaigned for the support of the Saxons, and I had treated them fairly, too, in my tenure. I had mastered my positions and was ready to argue any one of them effectively. Never again would an opponent catch me flat-footed in debate, in the manner Thorley had. Thorley had really done me a favor by showing me my vulnerability.

  I had the advantage, so my opponent challenged me to a debate. Here was a direct test of my attitude: It would be to my advantage to decline, but in so doing, I would be turning my back on my ideal of fair campaigning. I didn’t even need to consult with Megan; I knew where she stood. I accepted—and destroyed him on stage. Thorley commented wryly on the ethics of mismatches but concluded that I had evidently benefited from competent instruction.

  I still did not accept special-interest contributions, so my campaign was lean but honest. I picked up several media endorsements, including that of Thorley’s own newsfax; it concluded that there was something to be said for having a token Hispanic in the Senate.

  I won the special election handily, pulling in almost as great a percentage of the Saxon contingent as the Hispanic, and a fair proportion of the Black vote, too. It seemed that women noted my recent adoption of a foundling and also favored my all-female staff. I had become the candidate of all the people.

  Now I had a bit of standing in the State Senate. I was no longer the most junior member; several new ones had appeared around the state, from other new districts, and several old ones had been gerrymandered out. My standing was greater because I had overcome the gerrymander; a number of senators were sympathetic. I introduced a revised literacy bill designed to give Hispanics a fair chance—not a gift but a fair hearing—but I also pushed for reform of the graft-ridden highway-construction funding apparatus. The surveying and netting of the shifting atmospheric currents was assigned to major contractors on the basis of competitive bids, but the process was notoriously corrupt. I lost my Hispanic bill, but my drive at the construction irregularities stirred up so much commotion that a certain measure of reform eventually passed. Even Thorley grudgingly admitted it: “More should have been done, but Senator Hubris’s half-loaf is better than none. Too bad a competent conservative didn’t initiate this one.”

  Meanwhile, at home, little Hopie was a surprising joy. Megan, who had no more planned on motherhood—at age forty-one— than I had planned on fatherhood, discovered that she liked it. She believed in woman’s rights, and so did I, but she claimed with some justice that I was only marginally competent at important things like formula mixing, midnight feedings and lullaby singing, so she reserved those privileges mostly for herself. All mothers, it seems, are good at singing to babies, but Megan was professional; I tended to listen with much the same rapture that the baby did. To my mind no one ever sang anything as well as Megan did. But I was permitted to bounce the baby on my knee; it seemed that men were considered minimally competent for that sort of thing. As a result it was mostly playtime I spent with my daughter, which had the perhaps ironic effect of causing her always to be happy to see me. She would chortle and hug me with her fat little arms and sometimes burp milk over my suit. Who says men can’t burp babies? All it takes is a good, clean suit. We got along famously. I could hardly imagine how I had gotten along all these years without a baby.

  Not all my crises were political. Periodically the state of Sunshine suffers fierce storms that rise from the fluxes between planetary bands and drift to intersect settled regions. They seldom, if ever, penetrate to the central section of the equatorial band, but Sunshine is at the southern fringe and can be ravaged. Of course, storms vary in size and intensity; any day, anywhere, there can be fleeting perturbations that cause rain to drive against bubbles. Technically Redspot is a giant storm, so big and stable that it has assumed the status of a band and is occupied in much the same manner. The citizens of Redspot fancy red-hot peppers and sauces and trace their genealogies back to the ancient Earth country of Mexico. Big stable storms aren’t our problem; we know their paths and can handle them. But little spinoff storms that happen to plow through our territory can be terrors.

  I learned about this the hard way. Remember, I was not raised planetside; there are no storms on airless Callisto and none of this kind in space. I had heard about them, but that’s not the same.

  “Storm watch,” Megan announced, viewing the news while she fed Hopie her bottle.

  “Watch?”

  “It could strike this area within thirty-six hours.”

  “It can’t hurt this bubble, can it? A little rain?”

  She didn’t comment. She just tracked the weather reports.

  Next day it was a storm warning. “It could strike within a day,” Megan said worriedly. “I think we had better take refuge in Ybor.” She sounded genuinely concerned, so I humored her. We packed the auto-bubble for overnight, checked out of Pineleaf, and blew out to the highway leading to Ybor.

  I began to appreciate Megan’s concern. Bubbles jammed the route, and the netting was twisting slowly like a giant python. The current of wind was irregular, as if disturbed by some unseen force. The cloud layer above was thick and restless, forming goblin-faces that glared momentarily before dissipating. Tendrils of cloud descended, with spinoff cloudlets. Occasional flashes of lightning illuminated large patches of cloud. It was indeed ominous.

  I drove while Megan held little Hopie in her arms. The baby evidently picked up the tension, for she began to cry and would not be pacified. But we were stuck for the drive, however long it took. The traffic was slow, and I watched nervously as other bubbles crowded closer to ours. The velocity of the highway current changed, causing the bubbles to jam in closer yet. I saw one bubble try to pass on the outside; it bounced off the net and struck another bubble. Suddenly there was a mayday call on the emergency channel: “Collision—crack in hull—need immediate repair!”

  A police vehicle answered. “All units occupied. A repair unit will be with you in fifteen minutes.”

  “Can’t wait fifteen minutes,” the damaged vehicle replied. “That crack is creeping!”

  “We’re tied up with four separate accidents and a hole in the net,” the police replied. “Get to you soon’s we can.”

  “Four separate accidents,” Megan said, appalled. “And a hole in the net! That means a car crashed through and is lost
.”

  For the reaches of the Jupiter atmosphere were so vast and turbulent that any bubble going out of control off the highway was very likely to disappear into the swirl. It might be rescued if its radio-beacon operated, but the chances diminished when the police were already fully occupied. This was ugly.

  We moved on, trying to ignore the repeated pleas for faster service by the stricken bubble; there was nothing we could do. Hopie bawled more loudly, adding to our tension. “There just aren’t enough traffic police for a situation like this,” I said. “After the last budget cut—”

  “It’s leaking!” the stricken vehicle cried.

  “Emergency vehicle now being dispatched,” the police reported. “What magnitude leak?”

  There was no answer. We knew what that meant: Once the leak had started, it had widened, and suddenly the bubble had been filled with hydrogen at five times Earth-normal pressure. We didn’t care to think about what that would do to unprotected occupants.

  We blew on, and finally we reached the giant bubble of Yhor. The wait to enter was interminable, and Hopie cried incessantly. I felt as if I were in a space battle, only more helpless.

  Inside, we had to pay a ruinous price for a hotel accommodation; naturally prices had been jacked up for this emergency. I smoldered. Gouging those who came here for safety reminded me of pirates preying on refugees. “There should be a law,” I muttered. But then I thought of Thorley, raising his eyebrow eloquently as if to inquire, “A law for every little detail of human existence?” and I knew I could not defend that position. The free market had to be given play, even when elements of that market abused the situation.