First Citizen (49 page)

“But it was empty, so empty,” Gran said. “So much white marble and pink granite, cold and stiff, like icing on a cake after they’ve cancelled the wedding.”

It was not until 2024 that Corbin felt strong enough to call for congressional elections, and he did it from Columbus, Ohio, because the capital was still officially closed to him. However, by that time his popularity with the rest of the country was so great that they fought over where he was to campaign. They were throwing roses at his feet, as Major Sanders had predicted.

Corbin could take his pick from more than fifty-six districts that assured him a landslide if he would only put his name on the ballot. In 232 other districts, the write-in campaign was at least eight points ahead of the nearest official candidate in the polls. However, he could not run for them all himself. So he plotted it carefully, making sure the candidate of his choice was known—and that the man or woman so favored understood it. For his own seat, he ran from his old district in West Texas.

“Purely sentimental reasons,” he told the nation with a mock humble smile. And he let it be understood that he meant it as a salute to Texas, which had first welcomed him under the threat of impeachment. Actually, it was for political reasons, as we on the inside knew. By representing only sagebrush and armadillos, Corbin limited the number of strings on himself and could isolate himself from local interests.

When the 117th Congress was called to order in January 2025, the Corbinites held 342 of the 620 seats in the House. Among them was Mike Alcott, who had easily taken his former district in Massachusetts; he was working hard to help heal the breach in the East. Gabriel Ossing, Corbin’s nephew, had also won a seat, in Maine. That election was full of loopholes, however, because the boy was still in his twenties, technically under age for a congressman, and although his mother was an American, he was technically a Canadian citizen. In their enthusiasm, the voters of Maine had waived all that, but one could still question whether local statute should take precedent over constitutional law.

Alcott was totally Corbin’s man now, his whip in the House. Alcott shaped up the vote that made Corbin Speaker. Alcott marshaled support for most of Corbin’s bills and proposed the extraordinary measure that was to install him as Speaker for a guaranteed term of ten years. Even the most faithful Corbinites hesitated over that one. It was a completely unprecedented law, surely counter to the Constitution, and would certainly be challenged in the Supreme Court. Only the fact that Corbin had just named six new associate justices and the chief justice—the years of civil war and confusion having been hard on an already elderly Court—gave the bill any hope at all.

The measure presumed that Corbin would win the next five elections and keep his district. But considering where he was running from, that was no problem.

There was also the presumption, among the other congressmen and -women, that Corbin would meet any challenge with military force. He had done it once. And they had also seen how quickly, as Speaker, he had signed commissions in the FSF for Alcott and me. I got three stars, Alcott two.

That became a sore point, later, when we finally decided to mop up Rupert I and bring Montana back into the Union. I had thought the job would be mine.

“Can’t spare you, Billy,” Corbin said, in what was to be our last interview.

“What?” I was shocked. “Do you know how little I have to do these days? Just fly around the country, inspect bases, review fitness reports, poke my nose into rocket silos, and run a gloved finger across mess-hall griddles. Just personnel and public relations work. All protocol.”

“A necessary job, considering our tenuous position,” he nodded.

“Tenuous? Well, yes, but the fight against Rupert is going to be the last grand act of the civil war. I have worked for it, Gran. I want it. It should be mine.”

“That’s not how military decisions are made, and you know it.” His eyes never got much higher than my campaign ribbons.

“But, Gran—”

“The decision is made, General.”

“May I know who is going to direct the action?”

“That’s really no … General Alcott.” Still he would not meet my eyes.

“Mike! But you need him in Congress, he is—”

“He has done his work in Congress, and now I need him in the field against King Rupert.”

“I see.”

And suddenly I did. That was Alcott’s payoff, the quid-pro for his work as Gran’s whip.

My own career, my years of service with Granville James Corbin, somewhere had taken a wrong turn. Maybe I should have run for Congress. Maybe I should have left him in California and marched on Baltimore myself. Maybe I should have been born a white man—a full white.

I asked to be dismissed and left his office. That very afternoon I folded my nice, newly printed commission three different ways, so the corners stuck out, and sent it to Corbin. He never acknowledged it.

All this was years ago.

I went back into the business that I know best—sludge. The technologies had progressed in groundwater reclamation, and there was a steady market for it in Louisiana, where the deepest water wells were bringing up a Hell’s broth of refinery chemicals. I took my back pay, bought a small detox outfit, and started in. This was honorable work, helping people living healthier lives. In its way, it was clean.

Granny Corbin, reaching his moment of greatest power, had developed what my people call the Custer sickness. He saw himself as a kind of natural force, a power to move people and shape the Earth itself. He thought his actions and decisions constituted some kind of law. And he did not see consequences.

The best of my people laid down their lives fighting such men. The lesser ones, the weak ones, my ancestors, laid down their weapons and lived. It is for them—and for me—that I am ashamed.

Chapter 22

Granville James Corbin: MARCH 14, 2028

[From the WWY-CV Archive]

Take apart with a hammer. Rebuild with tweezers.

That’s the instruction manual we have followed in restoring the country, reuniting the eighty-three States into a working nation. The last five or six years have been a real scramble.

Simply getting to the stage where we could hold the 2024 elections, I had to keep a lot of people happy. That meant making promises as fast as I could talk, handing out psychological blank checks by the fistful: concessions, special considerations, rights to levy new local taxes and repeal old ones, Federal licenses and monopolies and charters to issue and rescind, sons and party faithful to favor. We needed a cyber to backtrack the trail of my agreements with State governors, legislators, party bosses, community organizations, business groups, military officers. And sometimes, in keying up the totals, the outgo was maybe more than we had in hand to offer. But I never told a deliberate lie, never gave both A and B the same cookie, when I could help it, and never incurred a debt I had no intention of repaying.

Things went faster after the elections. My friends and followers had enough political clout that we could order the priorities in Congress. However, I very quickly discovered that being the political linchpin in the Federal government didn’t mean a whole lot. Not when that government was, in most people’s lives, merely an economic inconvenience, a club of political cronies in Baltimore to be paid off with a few user fees, while the separate States operated on wholly libertarian doctrines and held the real power. This still wasn’t a nation but a patchwork quilt of regional interests. Civil war had burned over them like a fast prairie fire, scorching the grass but hardly touching the deeply tangled roots.

Luckily, fierce anti-Union feeling still existed in pockets like South Florida, Louisiana Free Port, and the lands of the late King of Montana. During the months immediately before the elections, I had sent our best G.V. units in to probe their defenses and gauge their war-making capability. But we soon figured out that another series of military victories wouldn’t reunify the nation.

So we changed the agenda. By placing stories with the right correspondents and providing some exciting video footage, the final, later-stage mopping-up operations could be made to look more dangerous than they might actually, tactically, have been. A few sponsored editorials, appearing in the media of neighboring States, declaimed against the threat to public safety. And Rupert I and his Aryan Legions did the rest, giving us enough material to carry the whole campaign.

When my agents introduced the “Petition to Ensure Domestic Tranquility” in forty-four State houses, all in the same week, the emotionally exhausted and now frightened legislators fell on it with glad little cries. The primary purpose of this artfully vague document was contained in the resolution that I be “empowered to form a stronger, more vital Union.” Whatever that meant. On my terms.

So I proposed to reorganize the national economy. Those loyalties our hopscotch wars had not been able to bind, the dollar would stitch together with links of steel.

Also, for the first time in a dozen years, we could attend to the country’s international trade relations. From the vantage point of Baltimore, I could peel back the concessions that foreign traders had demanded from the individual States, or taken outright, like Colombian oil rights in Louisiana offshore tracts, Asian drug traffic in California, the English coal cartel in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, and Russian soybean policy in Mississippi. I closed up those proprietary U.S.-Them Trading Associations that had been forced on our soil—and kept those trading rights in the name of the Federal government.

When the local interests protested, I pitched the argument in terms of selfish profiteers who would rather sell their product to foreigners than serve the needs of the nation. And I made sure that our newsats colored the story that way.

Oh yes: After the elections, I put the satellite networks directly under Baltimore’s control. It was all done quietly, no dramatic changes in staffing or programming, but the people at the top were mine, and so were the budgets.

I reorganized Federal policy on commerce. The former practice had been to fill the treasury in Baltimore by granting sweeping Federal monopolies to existing sectors, trade groups, and companies. That had tended to eliminate competition and confirm the regions’ traditional economic strengths: heavy manufacturing in the Northeast and Ohio Valley, bulk farming in the Midwest and Old South, defense contracting and specialty crops in the West, timber in the Northwest.

Instead, I encouraged competition and broke up regional interests by offering attractive licenses and limited monopolies to companies and entrepreneurs who would operate outside each area’s sphere of expertise. With the free cash in the Federal coffers, I made sure that the necessary infrastructures could be built—new roads, new energy supplies, technical training, universities, water resources, health care, et cetera, et cetera.

This policy not only revitalized the local economies but also, by the way, just in case you didn’t notice, increased their dependence on Federal administration of these programs.

Of course, to keep this new economic structure stable, I also had to reorganize our policies on finance and banking. I set up a series of cross-subsidies. Heavy user fees—and even a new issue of Federal taxes, small ones at first—were settled on the established businesses. And these provided new cash resources that the Federal Reserve loaned out at special low rates to new, multi-state banks and brokerage houses, which in turn could offer attractive loans to the new ventures and buy securities from them with long-extended redemption dates.

It has been my policy never to make these moves compulsory, never to revoke statutory freedoms or civil rights. But I was always clever enough to find the point of leverage that made a deal attractive, voluntary—and unavoidable.

Of course, individuals had to be encouraged to move into these new business sectors. In the wake of the war, and to bleed off our standing G.V. troops as well as the State militias, I offered a great many Federal service contracts. The
quid
in these contracts is payment, for a term, of life maintenance, relocation expenses, individual retraining, and apprentice fees. The
pro quo
is a period of personal service or labor, at or below local wage levels, in the part of the country and at the company that the individual’s Federal case officer directed.

There was some grumbling over these contracts. But they were perfectly legal and, considering the chaotic state of the country as I found it …

Oh, I would say there have never been more than about seventy million individuals under Federal contract at any one time. That’s less—certainly, isn’t it?—than the clientele served with entitlements in the later years of the twentieth century.

International relations—I mentioned those, didn’t I? Yes. Well, I refurbished Cheyenne Mountain, updated the weapons the FSF would have to work with, put new and more powerful satellites into geosynch, and announced an official foreign policy of “Don’t Tread On Me.”

Last year, I launched a fleet of 200 hunter-killer submarines to patrol along our coasts, with their electronic senses angled offshore. I have plans to annex Guatemala as a buffer State, despite the political fallout from the Bottom Thirty-Two, as some people now call Old Mexico. Then, we will dig an atomic ditch ten kilometers wide across the isthmus, following the borders with Honduras and El Salvador. It’s a wide stretch, mountainous, a bad place for a canal. But we have
a lot
of nuclear devices.

After that, we may still trade with Canada. If they’re nice about it.

I’ve already had one opportunity to demonstrate the effectiveness of this foreign policy. The NATO signatories—that grinning, shambling, clanking remnant of the Cold War—protested our withdrawal of troops from Europe at the height of the Civil War. From some archaic, kneejerk impulse, they felt they had to
punish
the United States for
treaty violations.
England and Germany—who were about the only members left—tried to work economic sanctions on us. When those failed, they sent a small expeditionary force of about 5,000 men to land on Fire Island. Too late for the active phase of our war.