A Creed for the Third Millennium Page 9

  'Very sensible! When do you expect to go?'

  She sighed. 'I dunno, mister. Johnny's gotta find a job there first, and it's gotta be some place where there's room. We've got our application in. Now — I guess we just wait'

  'What does Johnny do?'

  'He's a plumber with the Hartford city plant physical.'

  Dr Christian threw back his head and laughed. 'Then he'll find work somewhere warmer, never fear! Even the machines which replace men don't like dealing with drains.'

  She looked brighter, chirpier; it would be days before she stopped telling her family and friends about the real nice man she waited on in the motel dining room.

  The coffee was good and the cognac a VSOP Remy Martin, and the waitress was attentive about replenishing both cup and glass. Warmly replete, Dr Christian found himself wishing for a cigar, a sure sign that he had found a rare degree of pleasure in dining. But smoking indoors was anathema, and outdoors tonight was no summer evening. So he contented himself with admitting to himself that it did him good to get away from the confines of home and clinic occasionally. A pity he found so little enjoyable in professional conferences; but no man could enjoy an environment rife with ridicule and contempt, all directed at himself. Whereas a murder trial — it fitted the bill very nicely.

  He got to his feet a little regretfully, having added a generous tip to the bottom of his cheque, and wended his way slowly out of the room without remembering to look in the direction of the dark-haired woman he obviously ought to know from somewhere.

  Behind him, lingering in the company of Mayor d'Este, Dr Judith Carriol thought about the conversation she had shamelessly eavesdropped upon between Dr Christian and his waitress. Most interesting! He had spoken to the girl so very kindly. An ordinary enough passage of civilities, but he had endowed it with real meaning, and the waitress had visibly blossomed. Charisma. Was that what it was? Was that what Moshe Chasen thought it was?

  She frowned, but inwardly only; Dominic d'Este was in the midst of a monologue about the relocation programme, the thrust of his argument a vigorous defence of continued federal funding of winters-only relocation. All he required her to do was nod occasional encouragement, so Dr Carriol's mind was free to stray where it wanted. Charisma. This candidate most definitely did not have charisma. Warm and charming and personable though he was, he also had a tendency to be downright boring once he climbed aboard his hobbyhorse. As now. However, be thankful for small mercies, she told herself wryly; at least he wasn't one of those people who made sure their audience listened properly!

  Senator Hillier was over and done with, an easy subject for one in her Washington position to get to meet without a meeting seeming odd. He had impressed her, but she had fully expected to be impressed. A most dynamic, intelligent, caring man. Brought up from silver spoon infancy in the old American tradition of public service without personal gain. And yet, and yet — Dr Carriol had come away from a most enjoyable afternoon spent in his company with a profound conviction that Senator David Sims Hillier VII was deeply in love with power. Patently he neither needed nor craved the money power could bring any more than he did the status power could bring. No, he wanted power for power's sake only, and that to Dr Carriol's way of thinking was infinitely more dangerous. Also, she agreed with Dr Moshe Chasen; Hillier quite lacked charisma. The man had to work to capture those who swung into his sphere, you could see the cogs and wheels and gears churning nonstop behind his eyes. Charisma was definitely an effortless phenomenon.

  By coming to Hartford she was killing her other two birds with the same stone, though the Mayor was not actually the reason she had come to Hartford. Dr Joshua Christian had proven as difficult to get close to as she had felt he would be after reading his file for the first time. It was John Wayne who thought of putting private detectives on his tail. Brilliant! Not ten minutes after Dr Christian had made his bus booking and his motel booking, Dr Carriol was in the process of getting herself from Washington to Hartford.

  And, hey presto, Mayor d'Este as well! Of course he would attend the Marcus trial; Hartford was a northern city, and his television programme Northern City' would be able to use the footage shot in Hartford for several different purposes throughout the season besides for airing the Marcus dilemma. So today she had devoted to the Mayor, scraping acquaintance through their mutual friend Dr Samuel Abraham. Dominic d'Este knew enough of her to want to get her on-side, thinking she might come in handy during his perpetual struggles in Washington to secure work for Detroit. Thus Dr Carriol had not found it hard to prolong her initial overture into an afternoon watching him direct his television crew, and then dinner a deux.

  Good. The Mayor was finished with, undoubtedly. From now until May first she could concentrate entirely upon Dr Joshua Christian, who in her mind was steadily acquiring the status of heir apparent to the outcome of Operation Search.

  The following morning Dr Christian came early to the courthouse, with Dr Carriol a discreet distance behind him all the way from the motel. She waited until he had chosen a seat three rows from the back and in the middle, then she strolled into the same row, but remained on the aisle. She was careful not to glance in his direction. As people entered the row she merely moved up each time a little closer to her quarry. He had struck up a conversation with two women in the row in front of him, and from the way he was talking it was obvious they were the widow and mother-in-law of the murder victim. Only when the court rose to commence the session did he cease talking to Mrs Bartholomew and Mrs Nettlefold and direct his attention towards the podium; by which time Dr Carriol was sitting right next to him.

  It was a small courtroom with good acoustics because it was old and liberally bedizened with plaster excrescences, hanging lights, niches and differently textured surfaces; therefore it was a pity that the morning's proceedings were so dull. Such a room was made for vocal fireworks. The jury had been picked and sworn in the previous day without real opposition from the Defence, and now there seemed to be a mass of inconsequential technicalities to get out of the way; finally the Prosecution rose to commence a long preamble presented not by the Prosecutor himself, but by an underling. Everyone dozed in the relative warmth except Dr Christian, who gazed everywhere save towards the woman alongside him, eagerly drinking in every facet of this new experience.

  When the luncheon recess arrived in due course, Dr Carriol turned to face Dr Christian quite naturally, as if assuming he was going to move out of the row in the direction away from her, and she intended to leave the same way. Her start of surprise was well done. She emitted the sort of noise loosely called an inarticulate exclamation, and looked searchingly into his face with the same expression she had used on the previous evening.

  'Dr — Christian?'

  He nodded. 'That's me.'

  'You don't remember? But why should you, indeed!' she said, the second part of her speech following too hard on the heels of the first to permit him to begin edging away.

  He stood looking down at her politely, his attention caught by her eyes; they reminded him of the pond in West Holloman Park, murky amber water overlying thick green weed. Fascinating eyes which might harbour anything from crocodiles to drowned ruins.

  He smiled back at her very warily, understanding that he was in the presence of a peer. 'I have seen you somewhere,' he said slowly.

  'Baton Rouge, two years ago,' she said.

  His face cleared. 'Of course! You gave a paper, didn't you? Dr — Dr — Carriol?'

  'That's right.'

  'It was a good paper, I remember. The social problems peculiar to Band C towns. In fact, I thought you had a really excellent grasp of the logistics, but not much deep insight into either the spiritual problems or the answers.'

  His frankness took her aback; she blinked heavy white eyelids but was too good at concealing her thoughts to show more. No wonder his colleagues didn't like him! And could anyone so blunt possibly have charisma?

  'I'm not alone in lacking deep insight,' she said ev
enly. 'Is it a quality you possess?'

  'I think so,' he said, not in the tones of an overweening conceit, but quite matter-of-factly.

  'Then how about having lunch with me, Dr Christian, and filling me in on what's wrong with the Band C towns?'

  He had lunch with her, and he filled her in.

  'The Band C situation is only one aspect of what I call millennial neurosis, but it's perhaps the most severe one. More severe certainly than the Band D situation, where people admittedly have to face the trek back north each spring too, but have their love of the land and their land-based occupations to sustain them. I know I'm not telling you anything you don't already know when I say that the Band C relocatees are industrial transplants from the poorer parts big northern and midwestern cities, and truly I'm not trying to patronize you. But have you considered the poverty of their inner resources? For one thing, they're not spiritually linked to the changing seasons the way the Band D people are, nor do they have the national togetherness of the Canadian Band E relocatees. And there are only so many ball games and hockey games and mardi gras they can attend during those idle months in winter quarters. They're not permitted a car for longer than a month out of the four they spend in the south all told. Bread and circuses didn't work all that well for the Romans, so why should they work any better now? Our urban proletariat is far better educated and more sophisticated than any other in the history of the world, including the present time. It needs direction. It needs a purpose. It needs to feel — wanted! Yet what it feels is utterly unwanted. The Band C people are poor, yes, but the bulk of them are not egalitarian at heart, they're genuine American elitists. In many ways they took the worst blows to pride and honour when we signed the Delhi Treaty. They've certainly taken the worst blows to comfort and convenience! Oh, sure, their winter quarters are undoubtedly more luxurious and better planned than their homes in the north and midwest, but I think they feel as if they've simply been bought off.'

  'So what's missing?' she asked.

  'God,' he said simply.

  'God,' she echoed.

  'Consider their circumstances,' he said, leaning forward eagerly. 'In the last hundred years these are the people whose exposure to God has kept on shrinking. Fewer and fewer religious vocations, more and more churches closing — they lost the very real contact with God they had always enjoyed. All the major religions of the western world went through massive internal upheavals during the last century, designed by the various church higher-ups to make the churches more appealing to the masses. But the result was exactly the opposite. Church attendance went on falling, so did vocations. Only in smaller or more affluent communities were there any gains that may have lasted. Now they blame education of the masses, they blame increased prosperity of the masses, they blame television, they blame slackened morals — you name it, they blame it. There's a bit of truth in it all. But the chief blame lies within the churches themselves, for failing to be flexible, for changing outwardly while refusing to change inwardly, or for changing too late. Many people had gained an awareness of their own intrinsic goodness, and maybe that came out of education, out of a broadening world. People didn't want to hear any more how evil they were, nor were their lives so grindingly poor that the prospect of living in paradise in the next life was all that kept them going in this one. They had more, they wanted more, they felt entitled to more. In this life! Yet everyone betrayed them. Their churches, by not even trying to understand what they needed. Their governments, by curtailing their liberties, curbing their spending power, and subjecting them to all the nightmares of nuclear war threats. That, incidentally, is where you'll find if you dig the only upsurges in church attendance — when the possibility of nuclear war increased. But people shouldn't have to turn to God out of fear! They should turn to God as naturally as a child turns to its mother.' He sighed. 'Well, the Delhi Treaty was a great leveller. Because in the end it was the very planet we live on that betrayed them most The threat of nuclear war disappeared, so too did really irresponsible government. I think what happened between 2004 and the present time is so novel in many respects that no one has understood it well enough to deal with it positively. A great many of the nightmare situations which have dogged Man since the beginning of the race have actually diminished to relative unimportance — the prospect of mass annihilation, territorial usurpation, even starvation. People are looking at living, not dying! But the living is so strange. And they've lost God. The third-millennial world is a totally new kind of world. By its very nature it can't be hedonistic for anyone, yet it can't be nihilistic either! And we're doing the same old thing with the people — applying yesterday's concepts to tomorrow's realities, imposing yesterday's facts on tomorrow's unrealities. Hanging on to the past, Dr Carriol!'

  'This isn't Band C you're talking about, Dr Christian,' she said. 'It's everyone.'

  'Band C is everyone.'

  'You're not a psychologist, you're a philosopher.'

  'They're both just tags. Why do we have to tag anything, even God? Millenial neurosis is the result of the fact that the tags don't fit the goods any more. People don't know where they're going, or why they have to go. They're just wandering in a spiritual desert without the Godly star to guide them.'

  Her gut was crawling, shivering horrific tides of joy washed higher and higher up the shores of her mind. A new sensation for Judith Carriol, physical as well as intellectual. That was what he did to his audience. But how? Not the ideas themselves, interesting though they were. A something in the man. A power. A huge — oh, what was the word? Was there a word? It was his eyes, and his voice, and the way he moved his hands, and the tension in his sinews, and — and… When he talked, you believed him! He made you believe him! You looked into his face and into his eyes and you heard what he said, and you believed him. As if he had command of the universe. Or could have had, had he wanted.

  'Let's get back to the Band C situation,' she said, keeping her voice cool and level. Oh, what an effort that was! 'You said you had some answers, and I'd like to hear them. I'm very much involved in relocation.' 'Well, first off, relocation has to be reorganized.' She laughed. 'People have been saying that for years.'

  'And rightly so. The problem stems from the fact that there was a big — I might almost say a mass — movement of people out of the northern and midwestern cities long before official relocation was even thought of. It started back about 1970, when the cost of winter heating began to drive industries south to places like the Carolinas and Georgia. Take my town, Holloman. Holloman isn't a victim of increased glaciation and the Delhi Treaty and relocation! Except for Chubb, Holloman was already dead by the turn of the third millennium. Every one of its factories had moved south. Downtown Holloman was boarded up ten years before I was born, and I was born at the end of the year 2000. The first people to go were the ghetto people, the blacks and Puerto Ricans. Then followed the working-class whites and the middle-class whites — Americans of Italian, Polish, Irish and Jewish extraction. The bulk of the elderly disappeared to Florida, the waspier elderly to Arizona. The young — including many with Ph.D.s who couldn't even find jobs as cashiers in supermarkets — followed the work. And the sun was where it all was at. One of my patients is an old man from East Holloman. I call him a patient, but I suppose these days he's more an institution with us than an actual patient. I can never bear to discharge people from the clinic if they continue to need us even after they're cured. This old man is just lonely, and we fill a gap in his life there's nothing else there to fill. Now his family had lived and worked in Holloman for five generations. He was one of five children born around the 1950s. By 1985 the father was dead, the mother had gone to live in Florida, his brother was in Georgia, one of his sisters was living in California, a second sister was married to a South African and living there, and the third sister was in Australia. That, he assures me, was typical of his neighbourhood all through the last quarter of the twentieth century, and I believe him.'

  'I don't quite follow what t
his has to do with the plight of the Band C relocatees,' she said, smiling to take the sting out of her words.

  'What I'm trying to say,' he said patiently, 'is that for the Band C people, official relocation did not come like a bolt out of the blue. They had already been relocating themselves for years. The difference is that when relocation became a function of the government, they lost the option of choosing where they would go. Had those decades of voluntary relocation not gone before, I doubt they would have submitted. But glaciation and the Delhi Treaty were simply frosting on a cake they'd already been chewing so long they didn't notice the taste any more.'

  'But it isn't that we want to offer them no option,' she protested. 'It's just too big! Later on—'

  'No, you mistake me. I'm not accusing Washington or anyone else of heartlessness, and I do understand very well the size of the task. The way relocation was planned was well-meaning enough, and all approaches to the problem were hypothetical. But splitting up the permanent and the winter-only people into different communities was the wrong thing to do. I understand why it was done — it's hard to trek back north in April if your neighbour's settled permanently in your and his new southern town. But the crux of the problem with the Band C people is their homelessness. What is home? Where is home? Is home the place where they rest between November and April? Or is home the place where they work between April and November? I can tell you what I think. I think the northern and midwestern cities already too cold to support industries without massive shoring up should be closed down altogether. Detroit, Buffalo, Chicago, Boston, the rest. I think with the possible exception of the Band D rural folk, all relocation towns should be made over into year-round centres where people can settle properly, live and work. I also think there should be a complete shakeup, full integration of Band C people with everyone else, on the same new streets in the same new towns. The old stratifications aren't necessary and shouldn't be perpetuated — nor should we be creating new ones. Everyone from highest to lowest suffers the SCB and lack of winter fuel and lack of private transport. Almost everyone has enough in common with everyone else these days to make it possible for everyone to get along together.'