A Creed for the Third Millennium (21 page)

Her childhood had been a
middle-of-the-road case of hardship, poverty and emotional deprivation;
had her situation been slightly worse, the
state would have removed her to a kinder environment; had it been slightly
better, she might have managed to preserve a little of the softness that is
surely born into every human baby. Ten years older than Dr Joshua Christian, and
moulded by far crueller circumstances, she was the third-last of thirteen
children born into a Pittsburgh family just about the time the steel industry
had gone into total and permanent depression. Her name then had been not
Carriol, but Carroll. Looking back on those years from the pinnacle of her adult
accomplishments, she decided that the plethora of children her parents had
spawned (she could think of no other suitable verb to describe the process as
carried on in the Carroll household) was far more the result of laziness and
alcoholism than the lip-service Catholicism they professed; certainly the home
atmosphere was more redolent of cheap whiskey than piety. But Judith survived,
the only one of those thirteen children who did, though none of them actually
died. Not then, at any rate. And she survived because she refused to consider
anyone's plight save her own. At twelve she had begun to find part-time work and
she continued to work all through her high school years; she kept herself clean,
virtuous and healthy, and because she could spur her body to work as hard as her
mind, she kept whatever work she found for as long as she wanted to keep it. To
her family's pleas for handouts she turned a resolutely deaf ear, and they soon
learned that not even physical torture could wring from her the secret place
where she hid her money. In the end they left her to her own devices, despising
her, tormenting her, but fearing her too. When she achieved a near-perfect score
on her SAT's and was offered a full scholarship to Harvard, Chubb, Princeton — a
half dozen Ivy League schools — she told her family she had accepted to Harvard
and went to Princeton instead. The first thing she did was change her name. And from
that day forward she had made it her business never to discover what had
happened to the rest of her family back in Pittsburgh.

The Delhi Treaty had preceded her
graduation summa cum laude, but not by so much that its upheavals were old hat.
She had taken a double major in psychology and sociology and she walked over the
intense competition into a slot in the brand new Department of the Environment,
a slot complete with doctoral opportunities. She also became an indefatigable
worker for Augustus Rome and the new programmes he set the nation; no one feared
and detested large families more than Dr Judith Carriol. While President Rome
talked incessantly to his people of the utter necessity of falling into line
with the rest of the world concerning the one-child family, she studied its
implementation. She went abroad, to China, pioneer in the art since 1978, to
India, achieving the same end from the opposite and bloodier pole, to Malaysia,
Japan, Russia, the Arabicommune and the Eurocommune, and many other places. She
even went to Australia and New Zealand, who had also signed the Delhi Treaty on
condition they (like Canada and the U.S.A) would be left severely alone in every
other way from military invasion to passive immigration. She followed the teams
of Chinese around a dozen nations, watching and listening as they taught,
demonstrated, advised.

The Environment think tank had been her
home from her first day in the Department, and she was in the forefront of the
massive efforts the Department marshalled to overcome one-child-family
opposition and noncooperation. Of course they had followed the Chinese pattern
of appealing to good sense, patriotism and the pocket, rather than the Indian
method of enforced sterilization. That the programme worked was undoubtedly due
to all the other enormous blows the country had received and still reeled
from; that it worked was due also to the personal efforts of President Rome, who
luckily was a natural one-child parent; and that it worked finally and
continually was definitely due to the unassailable fact that an ice age was
coming rapidly, and nothing could be postponed until a more favourable
day.

So her enormously successful career had
not helped her overcome the emotional desert in which her soul wandered, for it
had reinforced her conviction that she was indeed superior in intelligence and
courage to the vast bulk of her fellow men and women. Thus she could never be
convinced that what she thought and did might contain serious flaws. And she was
quite incapable of taking into consideration such picayune factors as the
stirrings in a heart, the vapours stealing in a mind, the erosion in a backbone.
She was of course a purely reasoning thinker, and reason was her god; whatever
might come to endanger reason was anathema.

Which placed her in a precarious position
when dealing with a person as instinctual, illogical and mystical as Dr Joshua
Christian. She didn't know it, except in that corner of her mind where she was
wont to inveigh against what she saw as his sheer cussedness. How could he not
see his own perfection for her purpose? And when he did see it, as see it
eventually he must, how could he not be moved to thank her, to like her, even to
love her?

Thus this moulder of men, this purrer in
the shadows, this grey eminence, sat hour after hour day after day looking at Dr
Joshua Christian in the most sacred moments of his most sacred privacy, and felt
no qualm of conscience, nor questioned the right she had to do so. She knew he
picked his nose, she knew he did not masturbate, she knew he sang and giggled
and pulled comical faces while he sat to produce his morning motion of the
bowels (she even knew he had no tendency to constipation), she knew he
talked to himself (sometimes with fantastic passion!) whenever he was alone, she
knew he had difficulty in getting to sleep and no trouble at all in getting up,
she knew he most genuinely loved his mother, his brothers, his sister and his
sisters-in-law; she even knew, alas, that the sister-in-law he called Mouse was
deeply and despairingly in love with him, and that his sister loathed him. And
her knowledge did not stop with him; it extended through his entire family in
the selfsame intimate, distressing way.

At the end of the sixth week, John Wayne
at her elbow as always, Dr Judith Carriol finished compiling all her evidence,
including a rough draft of
God in Cursing: A New Approach to Millennial
Neurosis,
by Joshua Christian, Ph.D. (Chubb).

Separately she called in Dr Samuel
Abraham and Dr Millicent Hemingway and obtained from each a report about the
candidates each had vetted to finality. Then she thanked them and put them to
work on the special aspects of relocation Dr Moshe Chasen had cut off from the
main flow of his own research as better handled independently. At that time it
did not occur either to Dr Abraham or to Dr Hemingway that Operation Search had
a finite purpose.

She notified Harold Magnus that she was
ready, and Harold Magnus notified President Tibor Reece.

The meeting the three held was at the
White House, the President's security force feeling that two members of
Environment, even if one was its head, were less likely when travelling to
attract the attention of the lunatic fringe than the President of the United
States of America. Dr Carriol didn't like the venue, feeling that she would
rather put her trust in a security she knew than rely on men and women she
didn't know and therefore couldn't trust. She suspected Harold Magnus was of a similar frame of
mind. Who was to say how many microphones and spy holes they had wired and bored
into the White House's conference rooms, and for what purposes, and even who
'they' were? Her own activities in the matter of Dr Joshua Christian were
undertaken for the most unimpeachable of reasons, but she was sure she could not
say the same for some of the surveillance freaks who frequented the corridors of
State, Justice and Defence.

However, superficially this was just
another rather drab meeting between the President and two of his departmental
heads, chickenshit stuff the President would undoubtedly have preferred to hand
over to someone else, except that every so often he had to make a personal
gesture. Therefore just pray the guard dogs in State and the bloodhounds in
Justice and the mastiffs in Defence were lying peacefully sleeping beside their
own fires, immune to the scent of that modern butt of all national rancour,
Environment.

She was not afraid. She was not even
nervous. It suited her to have to do all the talking, for she knew her audience
extremely well. Harold Magnus might claim that Operation Search was his baby,
but she knew it was her baby, and she was not prepared to yield up control of it
to anyone, least of all to her bosses. They didn't know it yet, but they were
not going to make the decision. Her applecart was exquisitely stacked; no matter
which piece of fruit they picked up to inspect, it would have Dr Joshua
Christian's name on it. She had every advantage, of course. She knew exactly
what was on the agenda where they did not. She could plan a method of attack
where they could not.

As a matter of course they would be
expecting to see only one serious contender for the job, namely Senator David
Sims Hillier VII. Magnus wanted Hillier passionately, but of Reece she was not
so certain. Where Reece was concerned Dr Carriol had
two things on her side. One, the glaring fact that this job carried fantastic
power in its train; if it went to a U.S. senator with executive aspirations it
might end in direct danger to the present tenant of the White House. The second
fact was interesting because of its sheer randomness; there was a fortuitous
physical resemblance between Tibor Reece and Joshua Christian, both too tall,
both too thin, both very dark in colouring, both cadaverous of face. Of course,
genetically they came from not dissimilar stock; Dr Christian was Russian,
Armenian and Nordo-Celt, President Reece was Hungarian, Russian, Jewish and
Celt.

Naturally Harold Magnus was aware of
Tibor Reece's strong reservations about Senator Hillier, and so would have his
own attack well planned. But Tibor Reece was aware of Harold Magnus's awareness,
and in his turn would undoubtedly also have evolved a plan of attack. If she
could make her presentation a direct hit upon Tibor Reece, she knew he would
pick Dr Christian over Senator Hillier; what she had to accomplish was to make
the President see that in choosing Dr Christian he would not be putting his own
interests ahead of the country's, which he would never do. With complete faith
in Tibor Reece as the rightful next President, Augustus Rome had chosen him for
the slate during his last term in office, and when it came to divining what was
in a politician's heart as well as in his head, old Gus Rome had been a past
master. Therefore doubt not Tibor Reece's integrity.

The President welcomed Secretary Magnus
and Dr Judith Carriol very warmly, and showed how much importance he attached to
the outcome of Operation Search by informing them that he had not put a time
limit on the duration of this meeting. So Dr Carriol had perforce to wait,
tongue darting and long fingers creeping, while Tibor Reece and Harold Magnus
said the usual litany of wives, children,
friends, enemies and problems. In an age bracket where the siring of progeny had
been left entirely to the discretion of the individual, Harold Magnus possessed
two sons and two daughters; but Tibor Reece, in his late forties, had not
married until his middle thirties and therefore possessed only one child, a girl
who was mentally retarded. His wife had tried with might and main to secure a
second child, bombarding the Second Child Bureau with applications so
frequently, publicly and frantically that she became a nuisance and an
embarrassment. Luck had nothing to do with the fact that she never had got
lucky; her husband had seen Harold Magnus on the quiet and deliberately arranged
her ill luck. Julia Reece was therefore the only case in the history of the SCB
where in fact strings actually had been pulled. Julia Reece was offered up as a
sacrifice for the good of the country. For had she drawn a winning red ball in
the lottery, no one from highest to lowest would ever have believed strings were
not pulled; Tibor Reece knew he did not dare take the chance. But he had paid
for it. Julia hadn't exactly gone mad; she merely became mad for men, which was
an even greater embarrassment to her husband than her unabated dinning at the
SCB door.

Naturally the litany carefully skirted
sensitive topics, and ritually wound itself to a conclusion. The President
buzzed and the coffee tray was promptly removed. Dr Carriol could get down to
business at last.

They were sitting in the Oval Office,
which this occupant of the White House adored. Dr Carriol had asked for and got
a single videotape player with a remote-control panel she could hold in her
hand. Thus she was able to orchestrate her visual presentation without a
technician's help. There was an audio player on a side table which she hoped she
would not have to use, feeling that the mere sound of words after watching faces utter them could not
decisively influence the outcome. However, it was better to be fully
prepared.

First she went briefly through the
salient facts about seven of the nine final candidates, passing a photograph of
each smoothly to the President as she talked, not pausing to check whether he
passed them in turn to Harold Magnus. Mr Magnus was quite capable of looking
after himself.

'And now,' she said, 'we come to the dark
horse. Dr Moshe Chasen inherited Senator Hillier as a unit in his caseload. But
Senator Hillier was
not
his prime choice. There was one person who
outscored Senator Hillier in every important category. In view of this surprise
development, I undertook to vet Dr Chasen's three candidates myself, and I too
came to the conclusion that the dark horse won hands down, even over Senator
Hillier.'