Of course it didn't win the grand prize. These things tend to be funded by left-wingers; reality-based sf tends not to win...apart, of course, from the flaws in the story: it starts with a bit of a gross-out, it meanders through the elected official's seemingly unconnected encounters with different "influencers," it doesn't get into many levels of PAC-funded "influencing," and the aspect of it that's based on reality is sort of depressing.
Nevertheless I think it's worth posting if only for copyright retention purposes.
It needs an introduction, for some local lurkers who might feel themselves at a bit of a loss even in Rush Limbaugh's Rio Linda
...The points of this story are:(1) This story is set in the same hypothetical future, about thirty years before another science fiction story I wrote called "Kylene Has Two Children." Old Great-Aunt Briana doesn't belong to my generation; she belongs to The Nephews' generation. The suinovirus that's going around in this story is the plague that's thinned the population of Baltimore in the earlier story. The virus is a mutation that occurred in response to genetic modifications in hogs. The human population is at risk, and the economy is depressed, because of overcrowding.
(2) People are burning their own organic waste at home for fuel. That's not the problem. (Yes, when you burn cats' waste products they release a rich, savory, almost barbecued-meat-like odor, presumably from all the animal fat that smells so disgusting when it's decomposing in the litter box.) It's not just that old people are cooking over trash fires and maintaining their own roads by hand--in the reality of the story, that's become normal. It's that even the future Governor's great-aunt is doing that.
(3) Too many cars on the road are still a problem, in terms of pollution, traffic, and safety.
(4) The standard of living in the United States is lower. "Nzinga's Mealie Hut" is not just a food fad that's fictional because it's not real; Americans really are eating fewer hamburgers and more bowls of cornmeal mush. (And is there a real Nzinga, the way there was a real Wendy? Who cares?)
(5) In real life, when I've seen a good cause--school choice--defeat bureaucratic/corporate interests in the legislature, the process did involve a fine human being dying far too young. Virginia was leaning toward school choice before David Peters' accidental death, but the law that was signed, later that summer, could almost have been called "David's Law." So that's how the process works with passenger insurance in the story. Of course I'd like to see Virginia mandate passenger insurance and encourage car pooling just because congested traffic kills people and a lot of Virginians really are getting too old to drive. I would like that, and I would also like for you to send me a million dollars.
Now the story:
The Influencers
1
“Joel,” Matt hollered, “only two people live up there and I’d bet
neither of them’s even at home.”
“Looks like great footage,” Joel said, turning the campaignmobile onto
the back road.
“If you damage this car...” Matt let his voice trail off as a wheel
ground up over a stone, but the bottom didn’t scrape, as he’d expected. Further
ahead he saw another small pile of flat pebbles directly below another big
rock. The dirt-and-gravel road had washed badly after the last heavy rain, but
at least somebody had been working to minimize the damage. Maybe, if they’d
expected a campaign stop, they would even have paid for a few bags of cement,
he thought.
The sight of his Great-Aunt Briana was a bit of a shock. Not that she
looked bad for her age, considering...but Matt remembered her as a tall woman.
The woman who carefully straightened up from where she’d been bending over the
road, carefully arranging small flat pebbles below yet another jagged stone,
had lost three or four inches, mostly from the shoulders and neck.
“Matthew Farnham,” she said, “what’s the idea of driving that thing on this road?”
“Told you,” Matt said, nudging Bill.
“I see you know the Emerald Party candidate for Governor,” Bill
shouted, aiming the camera. “Could we take that as an indication of your vote?”
“Bill, you...!” Matt waved his hand to block the camera.
“You could,” his great-aunt relieved his discomfort, “even though I
usually vote Viridian. Now...”
"You're welcome to come
up for dinner," she said, "if you can take the time to park that
thing and walk."
Did they have the time? How
old was Briana? Would she invite Matt to dinner again? Matt nodded.
"Something smells
good," Joel said, eyes on Matt.
"Hah," said Briana.
She straightened slowly, and her first few steps were stiff. Then she was
marching briskly up the long hill, setting the young men a good pace.
"Slow down," said
Matt, eyes on the camera on Joel's shoulder. "We've spent most of the
summer in the capitol."
"They still have that
nice gym I saw when I was up there?" said Briana, scoring a point.
"What is that
delicious aroma?" said Joel.
"I hope you like vegetarian
jambalaya, which is what's in the pot..." Briana sounded as if she were
suppressing a giggle. "As much as you seem to like...dung."
"Oh, then it must be the
jambalaya I'm smelling," said Joel.
Briana turned to face him.
Drawing herself up to her full remaining 5'7" she said, "The
jambalaya is all covered up in an iron pot, down in the pit. What you're
smelling is the smoke from the fire. I used some paper and wood to get it
going, but most of what's burning under the pot is dung. Mostly cat."
"Would you like to turn
back now?" Matt looked at Joel.
"I'm all right,
thanks." Joel recognized a challenge when he heard one.
They walked past yet another
ditch below a stone jutting up in the road, filled in with more small flat
whitish stones. Above it they saw the source of the flat stones: another big
jutting rock practically shone white in the light,its surface rough and glossy
rather than smooth and gray.
"Lewis," Briana said
to Matt in a deprecating tone.
"He did that for
you?" Matt knew he was missing something.
"He didn't ask me before
he brought out the sledgehammer and started bashing at it. If he'd asked me I
would've told him to leave it. So he must've run into it, or been afraid he
would. So his eyes are getting worse. And his blood pressure's no
better. He left all that gravel where it fell."
They turned off the main road
and into a front yard of knee-high red clover.
"Does grass not grow
here?" asked Joel.
"Grass sprouts in between
the plants every spring," said Briana. "I dig it up until the flowers
grow tall enough to shade it out."
Turning sharply to the
side,she poked a stick onto a pit of smoldering ashes. At least, Joel noticed,
what she pushed off the top of the cooking pot--beneath the fine white ash on
top--still had the shapes of twigs, dry leaves, and paper. The pot rested on a
scrap of metal, which rested on a bed of hot coals. Briana used the stick to
lift out the pot by its handles.
"Driving everywhere is
bad for people's blood pressure," Briana philosophized, resting the pot on
a tree stump. From a bin on her front porch she took a stack of cardboard
cartons. "I hope you have time to wait, Matt; Lewis will want to talk with
you too. Why don't you sit down and tell me what you plan to do, as governor,
to reduce the number of motor vehicles on the road."
Matt closed his eyes, bowed
his head, and formally blessed the hands that prepared his carton of jambalaya before
he tried to answer. Briana gave him a little more time, saying, "I use my
spoon, and Lewis carries his spoon in his truck; these plastic ones are for
company. Bottled drinks, too. Cola, peach tea, lemon-lime, or bottled
water?"
Joel made sure to get some
footage of Matt ogling his bottle of "Fresh Hills Filtered Spring Water
from the Fresh Hills Municipal Water Supply," even reading the label aloud
for the convenience of blind news viewers, before slowly savoring a long drink
from the bottle.
Then, since nobody had taken
the opportunity to change the subject, he said, "Well, I'm sure you've
noticed if you've been in the city lately that the number of motor vehicles on
the road is dropping every year. Money is so tight, and so many people
in the cities are catching this suinovirus thing...I hadn't been campaigning on
the idea of breaking the automobile industry down any further. You
realize that even twenty years ago, the idea of an eighty-year-old American
woman having to cook on a dung fire..."
"Oh, 'having to'!"
Briana almost snorted. "Y'might try 'wanting to' keep the place
clean without paying any water or gas or electric bills. I'd been
wanting to do that for years before I moved back here. How long can we
go on dumping what nature intended us to burn? How long, for that matter, can
we go on burning coal?"
"Y'might thank the
electric company for keeping a few jobs open for the young men," Matt
said. But he didn't expect to see her again during his term as governor, if he
won, so he said, "I suppose you have a plan to reduce the number of motor
vehicles on the road."
"And robot cars,"
Briana nodded, "and incompetent drivers who can't afford robot cars, and
ordinary people who don't get out of the way in time. Like me. I know you were
wondering what happened to me. An incompetent driver did. I was actually
sitting at a table in Nzinga's Mealie Hut, y'know, on the mall, right in front
of the window. I heard a sound like a gunshot. I saw someone stand up
brandishing a pistol. And then it hit me, the car literally hit me. Next thing
I knew I was lying in a pile of broken glass and hot Mealie Meals. Let's just
say it shouldn't happen to anyone else. I spent only two nights in the hospital
but I was wheelchair-bound for months. When I could walk and work out
again, my bones were starting to
crumble. So I thought of a plan. And it doesn't have to cost a penny! In
fact it'd boost revenues for a year or two."
"Have you got it written
down somewhere?"
"Two words," she
said triumphantly. "Car pools."
"That's been tried, for
longer than we've been alive. People like driving their own cars...if they can
afford cars." He thought of the olden days when, according to contemporary
videos at least, it wasn't uncommon for even high school kids to own cars. Well,
most people still did own cars; some people lived in them; but actually
driving them anywhere was a splurge.
"Do they really?"
Briana beamed. "What if you eliminated single-user insurance discounts?
Everybody who drives is paying insurance on every seat, whether there's a body
sitting in it or not. Five'll get you ten you'll not see an empty car seat on
the road, in a year or two."
"And most people will
still want to keep a car just in case they need one..." Joel's wife sold
insurance. "I like it."
"That's my plan,"
Briana said. "I've seen yours in the mail, but if you want some footage
you're welcome to tell me more about it."
Matt had discussed expanding
the recycling scheme that seemed to be serving his district so well, and was
getting into the fine points of a corporate bid to reopen a hospital when a cat
squeaked and ran across the yard. Five cats had been quietly watching them eat.
This one walked toward the road, looked back at Briana, and seemed to
"meow" silently.
"Lewis?" said
Briana.
Another silent
"meow."
Joel stared at Briana, who
explained, "The cats can hear his truck before we can. If you're ready to
go when he stops for his lunch, he'll take you back to your car."
Joel folded his carton around
his rice. "Nice cats," he said. He did not, in fact, like cats; he
was glad they hadn't tried to join the people on the porch.
"They've learned to wait
for their share of a meal," she said. "Behave nicely, get treat. If
only humans could learn that."
2
In view of the amount the
Consolidated American Motor Company, ToyoHondaZuki, and Beemvobenz Ltd donated
to his campaign fund, Matt decided not to mention reducing the number of motor
vehicles on the road.
"Seventy-four verified
voter e-mails," a student reported to Matt one afternoon when he and Joel
were editing the next "Govlog" video.
"Any happy voters
out there?" Matt quirked an eyebrow at the student. Students usually liked
the way Matt, who was forty-nine years old, looked like someone who might be in
one of their classes.
"Do you ever get messages
from that aunt of yours?" Joel wondered.
"Not as many as I used to
get. She says she's learned to trust me."
"I'll bet she doesn't say
that often. But reducing the cars on the road? Nothing about that?"
"Make me feel
guilty." Matt grinned. "I don't expect she will. She's pretty
realistic about things. It's bad enough for the car people that people are
buying all these 'Wheels' gadgets."
"My wife gave me one for
my birthday," Joel admitted. "I wondered whether it would be
appropriate to ride it to work."
Matt looked out the window.
Three Wheels passed, one rider pedalling, one coasting, and one sitting on the
storage bench, while one car rolled out of a parking slot and down the road.
"Might appeal to the younger voters."
3
"Brenda, you lucky
girl!" Dinah squealed for her. "A full scholarship and five
thou a month and a company car, and it's a sleek car, too! Wait'll you
take it in, right?"
"I'm honored,"
Brenda Farnham said slowly. "I...thank you very much, Mr. Hrbovic. I think
I'd better talk to my parents before I take the job, if that's all right."
Back in the dorm Dinah
overheard enough to explain her roommate's cool reaction. "I think
Beemvobenz wants to own a piece of Daddy."
"They already do!"
Her mother's voice crackled out of the phone. "Take the job, baby! Get
those other companies bidding on pieces of us. Your Daddy has a shot at the top!
Don't you like Washington?"
"Mother, have you seen
Washington on the news lately? Like they're packing in the urns by dozens in
reopened graves there. So, no, I don't want Daddy to be there."
"The plague,
right...that'll be over before Daddy's term ends," Helen Barry Farnham
said optimistically. "You take that job. You've got three hundred thousand
in student loans to pay off. You see how much you can do with that five
thousand a month. When the company starts sending out bills, your little
friends will be living on peanut butter sandwiches, and you ought to be
able to pay the whole quarter-million by return mail."
"Is Dad there? Could I
talk with him?"
"He had a meeting. He'll
probably be late. But you take that job! I saw the offer on video, and, baby,
you do a lot for the look of that car."
4
Brenda Farnham, Physics
Princess, usually wore her tiara while driving; anything that helped keep those
thick ashwood-colored curls out of her face was good. She had spent a whole day
shopping for sunglasses that fitted her nose, didn't strain her eyes, and curved
harmoniously around her cheekbones. Meticulous about driving as about other
things, she wore cotton lace mesh mitts to keep her hands from sweating on the
steering wheel.
She would have felt a lot more
comfortable if they'd given her time to travel between schools by Wheels, but
she did enjoy the actual school tours. Brenda liked young children and loved it
when they swarmed onto her knees while she read aloud from The Phantom
Tollbooth or Cars. She sincerely admired their model aircraft; she
loved handing out the cheap little books and model-design apps with which the
Princessmobile was stocked. On the highways, she tried to hold on to the
emotional feelings of those things.
After idling for several
minutes, then hearing from the speakerphone that the traffic stalled ahead of
her was not expected to move forward for another twenty minutes, Brenda
carefully avoided watching the flash video of the injured driver the shearbots
were digging out of the wrecked car. She closed her eyes and relived the
feeling of the tiny five-year-old crawling from her knees up into the back of
her chair, carefully smoothing her hair with hands hardly bigger than her dog's
paws.
She did not hear the crash. By
the time the shearbots worked their way back to her, Brenda was watching the
blood clot on her left arm, feeling the pain as tissues puffed around the
broken bone, not feeling anything in her toes, and aware that that had been the
closest encounter she was likely to have with a child for a long time.
5
"I still can't wiggle my
toes," Brenda Farnham told her father. Paparazzi swarmed in the corridor
behind him and her mother, whose fixed faint smile showed no pleasure or
amusement.
"Don't try,"
Governor Farnham said. "The doctor thinks you might be able to walk again
if you can give your back time to recover."
"How...much...time?"
Matt Farnham had anticipated
this question and sensed, amidst his anguish, that an accurate answer just
might make him famous. "Brenda, the children at four hundred and
seventy-two primary schools are sending you electronic cards--almost every one
in every class--and this doctor reckons you're going to have time to watch all
of them."
Brenda's eyes closed.
"Baby, don't take it that
way," Helen said. "Take it like a princess'cos that's what you are.
Still. We discussed that with Hrbovic. You're going to be like the Sleeping Beauty
Princess--if you're willing to be. Beemvobenz is offering you a hand-controlled
camera you can turn on when you're ready, they're calling the Princess Cam, and
you can wave and smile and encourage those children every time one of'em gets a
good grade. Con Am has offered to pay off your college loans if you'll do just
one little video where you say something like 'American robot cars are
programmed to stop short of a crash.'"
"They said the robot's
programming had shorted out anyway," Brenda muttered.
"And ToyoHondaZuki is
building you a robot dog to fetch and carry things. They want video of it
bringing you a bunch of grapes and carrying back a plate with the twigs and
seeds, but they say it's built to do bedpans."
6
Brenda was a thoroughbred and a
half, Matt told his Great-Aunt Briana on the phone that night. "Not
one word about what a kid that age thinks about bedpans. You'd be proud of
her."
"I am," said Briana.
"Ask her if she wants the farm."
7
The worn-out car, a Hyundai,
"self-steering with user override," belonged to a survivor of
post-traumatic stress in Afghanistan. His name was Wayne Ratcliff and he'd been
on so many different medications for so long that nobody cared to guess at what
point he'd become insane. He admitted he'd been watching videos while the
worn-out computer system steered his car along the highway, and when an old
movie called Falling Down, starring Michael Douglas, had come on he'd
recognized it as a message from the Universe to guide the rest of his life. He
had overridden the self-steering function and gunned his car toward the
shoulder of the highway, regardless of the three lanes of bumper-to-bumper
traffic. From now on his rule was to take nothing from nobody, to get what he
wanted regardless of the cost. If a store overcharged him he'd wreck the place,
too, and if his landlord carried out that threat of evicting him from the
basement flat he rented, merely because he'd not bothered to pay the rent for a
few months, well sixteen months actually, he'd kill the landlord and maybe blow
up the building.
"You know he's not
guilty," Joel said, "by reason of insanity."
"I know he's intelligent
enough to be counting on that loophole," Matt said.
He had never really considered
the arguments against keeping the violently insane alive.
That the sentencing of Wayne
Ratcliff was some judge's job, and not his, pleased Matt. That budgeting
concerns were stirring up questions about the traditional sentencing practice,
that year, exacerbated his family's suffering. Some of the Viridian Party, a
strong minority, were circulating charts showing how much money the state could
save by ceasing to feed the violently insane. Some of the Emerald Party felt
the same way but party leaders, never inclined to let a good dichotomy go to
waste, stressed the humanitarian motif.
"A message about
forgiveness..." a party spokesman babbled. Matt looked out the window. The
only unfamiliar car parked outside was a Honda.
"Make one yourself,"
Matt said.
"If we could get one from
Brenda..."
"Out!" Matt said.
Nevertheless Brenda inevitably
saw at least one of the podcasts calling on her to make a video calling for
Ratcliff's pardon. Her response was to make a video calling for pardon for a
sixth grade boy who had built a guided missile that really exploded a small
smoke bomb in the principal's office, instead. She also spliced old images of
herself, pre-crash, into some fourth grade girls' music video about the
periodic table of the elements.
8
Meanwhile a blogger whose
screen name was Mortimer Snerd, and whose blog ranked 927th out of 1,924,938
blogs known to have been active for five years or longer, posted:
"I Remember Wayne
Ratliff.
Remember he never wanted to be
in a car pool. He spouted b*s* about his car being his best friend. If
challenged he'd say that actually he saved a lot on insurance not sharing his
car, which people would believe, and the truth was, don't ask me how I know,
but I know, he frequently lost control of his body functions and was afraid
he'd be thrown out for fouling somebody else's car.
Remember he used to hate small
animals, cats groundhogs possums turtles and especially small yappy dogs like
one that bit him on the leg once, he said, and he used to like to run over
them. He had a game going on his Facebook page, gave points. 50 points for a
cat, 100 for a dog, 25 for a deer or rabbit, 10 for a squirrel possum groundhog
snake or turtle. Points were supposed to add up to money but he gave that up
when someone was due to cash out.
Remember he used to pick real
serious fights about his sexual identity. He was bi but he said homo-hetero
wasn't the important thing, sadistic-masochistic was. He said anyone who
claimed to be neither sadistic nor masochistic was b*s*ing, and he was Saying
it Out & Loud, he was Sadistic & Proud, and if people didn't know which
they were he would take them home and clarify their sexual identity for them.
He clarified Fred Spofford's identity such that Spofford died the next day and
the family didn't want to know exactly why, so the obituary just said
misadventure. Bobby Hall died within a week also and Gillian Leonard committed
suicide.
Remember he used to go off his
meds and talk out of his head, fairly often when young as he disliked the way
the meds affected his sex life, but he never seemed violent, just crazy. Worst
thing he did when off his pills was lose jobs. He got a job as a city bus driver in
Atlanta for a while, then went off his meds and told a lot of people who
claimed they weren't even talking on the bus to leave the bus because their indecent
behavior was a public nuisance. When management spoke to him about this he said
one old lady had stripped off all her clothes, sprouted wings, and started
flying up and down the bus, bumping against the ceiling and spitting etc. on
other passengers' heads. So they just told him not to come back to work there
again, please, and that was the end of it.
Remember he later decided his
sex life was over, with or without meds, so was taking his pills every day, but
he talked a lot about lying about how he lost the bus driver job in Atlanta,
getting another bus driver job, and driving a bus into deep water, a cliff,
another bus, etc., so as to take the maximum number of people with him.
I think he meant to do that if
he were to lose control of his body while driving the bus."
A Viridian news site reported
that someone had shown the story to Wayne Ratliff, in prison, and he'd said it
was true.
During the next week the
hashtag #SoloDriversAreRatliff trended as high as thirty-fifth on several
social media.
During the week after that, an
old woman who'd been famous merely for being a millionnaire's daughter (in the
days when millionnaires were really rich) announced that she wanted to marry
Wayne Ratliff. A housing project whose waiting list had had five times as many
names on it as the project had flats, two years ago, became and remained
tenantless due to suinovirus. Sales figures indicated that 60% of the
population now owned Wheels. A survey of Wheels owners indicated that as many
as 80% still owned either a traditional car or a robot car, but seldom used it;
of these, 90% gave "expense" as a primary reason.
9
When the Princess Cam hadn't
worked for eighteen days Matt called the hospital. The nurse warned him that
Briana was "resting," then showed him a video. Her eyes were closed,
her pale face haggard, a dilated vein in her temple pounding the way it used to
do when she played soccer.
"What's the matter with
her?"
"I don't know! Nobody
knows! Some little infection going around, you know. It's flu season."
"Nobody gets the flu like
that when they're twenty-one!" Matt ended the call quickly,
not wanting to say the word "suinovirus."
Two days later, the doctor who
called to report that Brenda was conscious, resting, and rehydrating said the
word. "We don't know that it's incurable, or that some young people may
not be resistant. She has a good chance, if anyone has. She was healthy
as a kid could be."
10
At four o'clock in the morning
Brenda Farnham woke herself up by dancing in a dream, singing along with the
refrain, "Bop, bop, yeah, yeah." She felt twenty-one years old. She
felt like eating three sausage biscuits with a half-gallon of her trademark
blend of real orange juice and highly caffeinated citrus soda, like riding her
Wheels back to that town two hundred miles away where she'd discovered that
marvellous collection of real books in the library, and like dancing all night
with--oh, anybody would do. She'd never been really partial to any of her
admirers yet.
She remembered having been
awake for minutes at a time during what must have been two or three days. She
remembered having the thought, "I should drink that pineapple juice
now," and shaking the little cup, and lying back to rest before opening
the cup, and then waking up an hour or two later, for most of one day before
she'd found the energy to drink the juice. She remembered having found the
energy to tuck a few cups of juice into the little drawer before anyone tidied
them away. She opened the drawer and chugged pineapple, then orange, and then
mango-cranberry juice.
Then she called her parents.
"Brenda...oh, Brenda,
baby, how are you?" her mother said sleepily. "You know it's not five
o'clock in the morning yet?"
"Sorry," Brenda
said, grinning, "I feel too much better to care! I feel fine, grand, and
groovy! Is the video on? How do I look? Should I activate the Princess
Cam?"
"You look
wonderful!" her father said sleepily.
"You might want to wash
your hair and put on some makeup before you activate the Princess Cam,"
said her mother. "Oh, Brenda, it's good to hear from you."
Brenda talked to her parents
at length, getting a good news briefing. The election had been held; Matt
Farnham had won the popular vote. Her roommate had been accepted by Harvard.
Her dog had whined more lately than her parents could remember it doing in all
its fourteen years.
The breakfast she was offered
consisted of little bowls of fruit in juice, and little cups of juice. Brenda
inhaled it. She insisted on being wheeled into the shower, washing her hair,
and sitting up while it dried. She felt dizzy, sitting up in the wheelchair, but
it passed; she felt quite sure she could stand up if they'd let her. She sat up
in the wheelchair, catching up with news and podcasts, while her long thick
hair dried. When the nurse brought her makeup kit, she highlighted her facial
features for the camera and activated the Princess Cam.
"I feel fine, grand, and
groovy!" she told her fans around the state. "It's great to
be back on the same level of reality where youall are! I've missed you!"
The names of her child fans
came back to her mind, not every single one, but dozens. She greeted the ones
she remembered best.
"And, Docia," she
said, "I watched your mother's podcast, and I totally agree with her.
Y'know that driver that rammed into my car was obviously a case of homicidal
insanity, but we still have hundreds, sometimes even thousands, of people dying
every year because car parts or robot cars' computers wear out,because drivers
are tired or distracted, sometimes because drivers just aren't paying
attention. Y'know the day before I landed in this hospital, I had seen on the
news where a woman knew something was wrong with her car and didn't want to
drive, but her supervisor wanted her to come to the office, so she got into
this car with a worn-out sensor and a worn-out tire, and she said she was like
yanking on the steering wheel as hard as she could, but the car kept rolling
right over this man in a wheelchair. Hey! I'm in a wheelchair! Well, I mean,
that's pretty heavy! And she was like, 'I so wanted not to do this. I would so
much rather have been able to ride in the back of someone else's car, the way some
people used to do in the olden days? Only nobody I know had
passenger insurance.' And I just wanted to tell you, Docia, I think your mother
is so right to say that all vehicle insurance policies should have
passenger insurance! My Daddy, Governor Farnham, knows how I feel!"
Brenda talked on, saying all
the things her fans had been waiting to see and hear her say for three weeks.
11
"Obviously she was still
a little bit delirious," Hrbovic observed over $280 tureens of chicken
soup.
"D'you ever think about
this chicken soup thing?" Matt Farnham tried to change the subject.
"Chicken used to be cheaper than pork. But chickens are lovable. I mean,
they'd eat us if we happened to be helpless and have open wounds, and they'll
eat each other, but some people say they're capable of forming emotional bonds
and becoming pets. So now our farmers can't market chicken meat without forty
different certifications that the birds were fed on health food and tucked into
bed at night with a bedtime story. Hogs are dirty, ugly, and mean. Nobody cares
about them. So you can still buy a pound of pork for less than ten
dollars."
Hrbovic refused to defer to the
Governor's change of subject. "Well, we can't have the Physics Princess
babbling about passenger insurance."
Matt was known for his boyish
grin and good humor, but during his three years in private law practice he'd
perfected a look that had scared more than one criminal into confessing. He
gave Hrbovic that look. "You can discuss that with her when she's back in school.
Not before."
12
"Brenda wanted to see
you," Matt told his Great-Aunt Briana. "They can't guarantee when or
whether she'll be conscious again, but that day she was up and talking, she
said..."
"But you can't be in the
room with her," the nurse said. "Not with suinovirus."
"Whatever protection you
wear, I can wear," Briana snapped. "There's been no confirmed
case of a vegetarian coming down with that disease. In any case I am now
eighty-three years old. I have a right to live as dangerously as I
choose."
"But she's not likely to
be conscious enough to know you're there! The virus is destroying her
heart."
"Hah!" said Briana,
and she sat down beside Brenda's bed and ordered yarn and a pair of knitting
needles. During the next ninety-four hours she left Brenda's bed for brief meal
and bathroom breaks, only; for six hours each night she slept in the visitor
chair, and for most of eighteen hours each day she knitted. An aide commenting
on her "crocheting" was informed, "You're quite right; I normally
do crochet, which is why I'm knitting, now, as a meditative anchor."
"Don't you think it's
more important for her own mother to be there?" Helen asked on the phone.
"She can talk to you on
the Princess Cam," Briana rasped. "You're too young to live
dangerously, and you're not a vegetarian."
13
Keeping the Princess Cam
window open on his phone, Matt opened another tab and checked the state
legislature's web site. Five House Bills and four Senate Bills mentioned
mandatory passenger insurance. All five were sponsored by Viridians. Matt
sighed. For those of his constituents who took party loyalty seriously, it was
best to wait until at least two Emeralds had expressed support for a bill.
The Princess Cam came on for
the last time. "Matthew?" Briana said. "She's gone."
He threw his phone against the
window. It bounced. He picked it up, snapped the cover and battery back into
place, and punched out a few messages to a few state legislators he knew
personally.
Later, when they were alone at
home, he and Helen cried.
14
After Helen died, too, of
suinovirus, Matt later remembered having been told that his feeling about Helen
not having been allowed to sit by Brenda's bed had become an illness. He was
offered medicine. He took it. He didn't sign any bills into law, pardon any
criminals, or preside over any events, for several months of his first term as
governor. He barely even watched the news, on which, among other things, an
ever-decreasing body of medical researchers reported the discovery that
suinovirus was not airborne at all; it was transmitted directly to humans from
pork.
"You had it
yourself," a doctor told him."That was probably why you felt the
grief so much."
"Really? Thanks for
giving me antidepressants instead of antivirals!"
"But there's no antiviral
drug that works on suinovirus."
Mandatory passenger insurance,
he learned later, had been disputed for a few weeks before it became popular
bipartisan legislation. His official signature, when he felt fit to read and
sign bills, was a formality.
Briana nursed their cousin
Lewis, and several other people, through the suinovirus plague before
"really retiring" for the last time.
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