Generations

First Intermediary Willis Wardman de Blount

I do my weekly TV address on Tuesdays. That’s the bottom of the week, when the animals need to be thrown some new bone to get them through to the weekend. Marta and Heinrich were prepping me for it when a page brought me another letter from my father.

I didn’t greet it with joy. It had been nearly a week since the last one, and I had almost begun to hope that he had given up on me. Or died. Or at least fallen into some kind of irreversible coma, but no such luck. What was left of the physical body he had been born with was still hanging on, and that old brain was still working away.”What’s that?” Marta asked, not taking her eyes off the tan she was mixing for my cheeks. Sometimes she forgets herself, but when I gave her a look she paled and fussed harder over the mixing palette.

She probably did know, when she sneaked a look at the folded paper. It was written in my father’s unmistakable crabbed hand. As well as everything else he has lost, he doesn’t have much in the way of vocal cords any more, so he can’t dictate like a normal person. That doesn’t keep him from being my most dependable correspondent. He doesn’t actually have a lot of choice about that, since he isn’t allowed to correspond with anybody else, just lucky me. I don’t usually read his letters. There’s no reason to, because they all say pretty much the same thing, so I just flame them and go on with whatever I’m doing. This time I said, “Give me a match.” Heinrich always has one, or something like it, because he’s smoking again. He listened to the bone I threw almost a year ago, when I informed the people that our scientists were pretty sure that by the end of the decade they’d be able to repair the alveoli that cigarette smoke damages. He went right out and picked up a carton of Old Golds—they say you can get them on any street corner, but I never thought it worthwhile to ban them entirely. Then he went shopping. God knows where, maybe some antique store. Anyway he got himself a solid gold cigarette lighter that still worked.

It made a nice flame, and he held it out to me. I started to shove Dad’s letter into it and changed my mind. “Let’s get the goddam hair done,” I said, sticking the letter into a pocket. “Don’t you know I’m speaking to the people in ten minutes?”

Marta took a chance. She didn’t look up from her work, just said, “And they love you for it, First Intermediary.”

Well, they do, kind of. The trouble is a day later they forget what I’ve done for them, and then they always want more and more. It’s so unjust. I won their goddam war for them, didn’t I? You’d think that would be enough all by itself. But no. They want more and more and more.

And I give to them, because I’m afraid of what might happen if I stop. “Less talk,” I said, “and more getting me ready there, Marta.”

What I promised the animals that week, I think, was more public executions on TV. Not just killing somebody by shooting or electrocuting, the way we’d been doing it, either. We’d make a little crime play for it. Like we’d find some photogenic criminal and cast him as a spy from the Arab war, and the good guys catch him when he’s trying to get away across the frozen, let’s say Hudson River, and they shoot him. Just wounding him, though. Then he falls into the river and can’t get out. Then the last scenes are him trying to scratch his way out from under the ice as he’s drowning. Powerful stuff. Only when that greaseball Hemphill suggested it I said, “For God’s sake, how are you going to get any felon to volunteer for it?” And he had an answer for that. We’d shoot a kind of a pilot where the convict would do all his apparent dying by the special-effects way Hollywood had always done it, morphing and computer-generating and like that, so nobody’s really getting hurt. Then we’d tack on a little trailer showing how we did it with the special effects, and we’d have the con sitting in the screening room and looking proud as Punch at seeing himself on the screen. And then, Hemphill said, well pleased with himself and grinning like the asshole he was, we’re going to reshoot those last scenes, only this time we don’t do any special effects. The con really dies. And that’s the version that goes up onto the satellite for the animals to gawk at. But then, see, when we make another one we show the next con we’ve picked the fake version, and we tell him when it’s over he’s going to get a pardon and freedom and a new identity so as not to spoil it for the audience. Then he’s happy to volunteer for a starring role of his own.

Worked, too. Hemphill had a lot of ideas. I didn’t like him having so many of them, though, especially when he began taking bows for them. So now he’s retired for health reasons, in the same hospice as my Dad.

Of course, I didn’t explain any of that in my broadcast. It went well, according to the instant reads. And then I went back to the war room for a staff conference with my cabinet.

I’m not a micromanager. When it comes to agriculture or manufacturing or crime suppression I leave it to my lieutenants. They do a good job, because they know what would happen if they didn’t. What my cabinet is supposed to do is think up exciting new programs for me to promise the people every Tuesday.

They’re good at it, sometimes maybe a little bit too good. Hemphill isn’t the only pain in the ass on my so-called “A Team.” Danny Kirsten is just as bad. Maybe worse. He’s the one I put in charge of Rites and Rituals, which is a big part of the Beloved Experimenter code. Which he knows. And therefore feels free to interrupt almost any team meeting with his inspiration of the week, like right after that broadcast: “First Intermediary! Hey! Listen to this! Suppose we teach kids to count, one to a hundred, using the periodic table instead of numbers. Like hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium instead of like, one, two, three, four.” And when everybody had a good laugh about that, then, “Okay. Then how about this. When somebody’s done something bad like, I don’t know, murdering somebody or stealing something, maybe we don’t just put them in jail the way we do now. What we do is, get this, we shun them. You know? The way the old Amish used to do? So they’ll die, all right, because nobody will give them food or even sell it to them, but we’re not exactly killing them, you see, because—”

I stopped him there. “Shut up, Danny,” I said. “Has anybody got any real business?”

Then Larry Willett stood up. “Talking about prisons, they’re having a lot of trouble in them,” he said, not that we all didn’t know that but just so as to lay the groundwork for what came next. “Guards are getting killed, every con has a weapon or two, the cons are pretty nearly running the prisons. I think I know what could straighten that out in a hurry, First Intermediary. How about if we give one of them a little of your thousand-to-one treatment? Lock one of the prisons up, get all the guards and civilians out and then pow!”

I knew what the “pow” was.

I should. I invented it. It was the way I had won the war against the Arab terrorists. For every one of our guys who died, I let the Arabs know, I would bomb, gas, or biokill a thousand of them. Since the Arabs didn’t come in convenient thousand-person packs I waited until maybe a hundred or so of ours had been killed by snipers or suicide bombers or whatever. Then I wiped out some Arab town of, say, a hundred thousand.

I mean, after all, the one thing we had plenty of was things to kill people with. I admit that the plan didn’t work right away. The whole war escalated. But after I’d done Cairo, Baghdad, Ryad, and, hell, I can’t remember all the others, their killing began to stop. It wasn’t so much that we defeated them in any military way. It was just that we could kill a lot more people than they could, and we made them see that there was a real chance, if this kept on, that sooner or later they might just run out of Arabs.

I encourage discussion, within limits. Maurie Haglaund was the first with his hand up. “What if we can’t get all the guards out?”

“Cost of doing business,” Willett said complacently. “We’ll pay indemnities to their families.”

“But some of the cons will be there for minor crimes, or some of them getting close to parole. Do they get killed with everybody else?”

Willet spread his hands. “Fortunes of war,” he said. “And what are you worrying about? Didn’t you ever hear of collateral damage? In the War a lot of the Arabs we killed were women, seniors, and babies. We didn’t let that stop us, did we?”

There was an immediate silence while the others waited to see how I would respond to that. I wasn’t angry at Willett, though. I had heard worse. I had been called a mass murderer and a genocider, which I guess I was, though mostly by people who were now in one of those prisons. “Cost it out,” I said. “I like it. And that’s about enough for today.”

And then, back in my own quarters, waiting to see if any of the individual Team members would show up as petitioners, I remembered Dad’s letter. I knew what it would more or less say, because all the others had said just about the same thing. All the same I took it out of my pocket, poured myself a decent shot of twenty-year-old Scotch and opened it up.

It said:

“Billy, suppose when you go to sleep tonight an angel, or perhaps just me, your father, appears in a dream and says, ‘Look. If this alien experimenter wanted to make a complete model of a universe wouldn’t he make it really complete? Including, let’s say, God? And a heaven? And a hell?’ And, dear Billy, are you really so sure he didn’t?”

Some petitioner was knocking on the door by the time I finished it. It was not a good time for me to be petitioned. My father was a crazy old fart, all right, but after all these years he could still make me blow my top with rage. I crumpled the letter up and tossed it toward the fireplace, and then I opened the door.

It was that greatest of all shitheads, Danny Kirsten. “First Intermediary,” he said, ducking his head and smiling up at me, “I just want to say how much I hate that idiot, Willett. And I’m sorry to have wasted your time. But what I wanted to ask is, what do you think, could I appear at your side next time you talk to the people? And would you be willing to wear vestments?”

I wouldn’t have thought anything could make me madder, but he did it. “God damn you, Danny,” I said—I guess, shouted, “the answer is fucking no. To that. To anything else you might ask, and to anyone else who might come by this evening to ask for anything at all.” And because I didn’t want to actually kill him I turned around and left the room, and I slammed the door behind me.