Good grief, Chic thought, this man was your husband.
You were in love with him. You slept with him, lived with him, knew all there was to know about him — in fact knew him better than I can, and he’s been my brother for longer than you’ve been alive. Women down underneath, he thought, are tough. Terribly tough.
‘I, uh, have to get to work,’ Chic said, nervously.
‘Is that coffee you have on for me, in there?’
‘Oh yeah. Sure!’
‘Bring it here, then, will you, Chic?’
He went to get the coffee, while she dressed.
‘Did old Kalbfleisch make his speech this morning?’ Julie asked.
‘I dunno.’ It hadn’t occurred to him to turn on the TV, although he had read in the paper last night that the speech was due. He didn’t give a damn what the old man had to say, about anything.
‘Do you really have to trot off to your little company and go to work?’ She eyed him steadily and he saw, for what perhaps was the first time in his life, that she had lovely natural colour in her eyes, a polished slab texture of rock-smoothness and brilliance that needed the natural daylight for it to be brought out. She had, too, an odd, square jaw and a slightly large mouth with a tendency to turn down, tragedy-mask like, with her lips unnaturally red and lush, drawing attention away from her rather drably-coloured hair. She had a nice figure, rounded, pleasant, and she dressed well; that is, she looked splendid in whatever she wore. Clothes seemed to fit her, even mass-produced cotton dresses that other women would have difficulty with. Now she stood wearing the same olive-coloured dress with round black buttons which she had worn the night before, a cheap dress, really, and yet in it she looked elegant; there was no other word for it. She had an aristocratic carriage and bone-structure. It showed her jaw, her nose, her excellent teeth. She was not German but she was Nordic, perhaps Swedish or Danish. He thought, as he glanced at her, that she looked fine.
It seemed to him certain that she would hold together well over the years, not deteriorate; she seemed to be unbreakable. He could not imagine her getting sloppy or fat or dull.
‘I’m hungry,’ Julie said.
‘You mean you want me to fix breakfast.’ He perceived that; no doubt, there.
‘I’ve fixed all the breakfasts I’m going to fix for any man, you or your dumb kid brother,’ Julie said.
Again he experienced fear. She was being too harsh, too soon; he knew her, knew she was this way — but couldn’t it be glossed over, at least for a while? Was she going to bring to him whatever her last mood with Vince had been? Wasn’t there going to be a honeymoon? I think I’m in trouble, he thought to himself. I’ve got hold of just too much here; I’m not up to it. God, maybe she’ll move on; I hope so. It was a childish hope, very regressive, not grown-up, masculine. No real man ever felt this way, he realized that.
‘I’ll fix breakfast,’ he said, and went into the kitchen to do so. Julie stood at the bedroom mirror, combing her hair.
Curtly, in his usual brisk tone, Garth McRae said, ‘Shut it off.’ The Kalbfleisch simulacrum stopped. Its arms struck out rigid in their final gesture, the withered face vacuous. The simulacrum said nothing and automatically the TV cameras also shut off, one by one; there was no longer anything for them to transmit, and the technicians behind them, all of them Ges, knew it. They looked to Garth McRae.
‘We got the message across,’ McRae informed Anton Karp.
‘Well done,’ Karp said. ‘This Bertold Goltz, this Sons of Job man, makes me nervous; I think the speech here now this morning will dispel a little of that, my legitimate fear.’
He glanced timidly at McRae for confirmation, as did the others in the control room, the simulacrum engineers from the Karp Werke.
‘This is only the start,’ McRae said presently.
‘True,’ Karp agreed, nodding. ‘But a good start.’ Walking up to the Kalbfleisch simulacrum he touched it gingerly on the shoulder, as if expecting it, prodded, to resume its activity. It did not.
McRae laughed.
‘I wish,’ Anton Karp said, ‘that it had mentioned Adolf Hitler; you know, comparing the Sons of Job to the Nazis more directly, comparing Goltz to Hitler.’
‘But,’ McRae said, ‘that would not have helped. True as it may be. You’re not authentically a political person, Karp; what gives you the idea that ‘the truth’ is the best story to stick to? If we want to stop Bertold Goltz we don’t want to identify him as another Hitler simply because in their secret hearts fifty-one per cent of the local population would like to see another Hitler.’ He smiled at Karp, who looked worried, who looked, in fact, tremulous and apprehensive.
‘What I want to know,’ Karp said, ‘is this: is Kalbfleisch going to be able to handle the Sons of Job? You have von Lessinger equipment; tell me.’
‘No,’ McRae said. ‘He won’t be able to.’
Karp gaped at him.
‘But,’ McRae said, ‘Kalbfleisch is going to go. Soon. Within the next month.’ He did not say what Karp at once wanted him to say, what Anton and Felix Karp and the entire Karp Werke instinctively inquired into as a first reflex, an immediate query of primary magnitude.
Will we build the next simulacrum? Karp would have asked, had he dared, but he was afraid to speak. Karp was, as McRae knew, a coward. His integrity had long ago been emasculated in order that he be capable of functioning properly within the German business community; spiritual — moral emasculation was a present day prerequisite for participation in the Ge class, in the ruling circles.
I could tell him, McRae thought. Ease his pain. But why? He did not like Karp, who had built and now maintained the simulacrum, kept it functioning as it had to function — without even a trace of hesitation. Any failure would have betrayed to the Bes the secret, the Geheimnis, which distinguished the elite, the establishment of the United States of Europe and America; their possession of the one or more secrets made them into Geheimnistrager, bearers of the secret, rather than Befehltrager, mere carry-outer of instructions.
But all this to McRae was Germanic mysticism; he preferred to think of it in simple practical terms. Karp u.
Sohnen Werke was capable of building simulacra, had as an example built Kalbfleisch and done a good job of it, as well as a good job of maintaining this der Alte during his reign. However, another firm would construct the next der Alte equally well, and by eradicating the economic ties with Karp, the government cut the vast cartel out of participation in the economic privileges which it now enjoyed … to the government’s loss.
The next firm which built a simulacrum for the government of the USEA would be a small firm, one which the authorities could control.
The name which came to McRae’s mind was Frauenzimmer Associates, an extremely small, marginal firm barely surviving in the field of sun-con: simulacra construction for planetary colonization.
He did not tell Anton Karp this, but he intended to open business discussions with Maurice Frauenzimmer, the head of the firm, any day now. And it would surprise Frauenzimmer, too; he did not know either.
Karp said thoughtfully, eyeing McRae, ‘What do you think Nicole will say?’
Smiling, McRae said, ‘I think she’ll be glad. She never really liked old Rudi.’
‘I thought she did.’ Karp looked chagrined.
‘The First Lady,’ McRae said acidly, ‘has never liked a der Alte yet. Why should she? After all … she’s twenty-three and Kalbfleisch was, according to our informational poop-sheets, seventy-eight.’
Karp bleated, ‘But what does she have to do with him? Nothing. Just appear at a reception very seldom, just every now and then!’
‘I think that Nicole in general detests the old, the outworn, the useless,’ McRae said, not sparing Anton Karp; he saw the middle-aged businessman wince. ‘That is a good shorthand description of your chief product,’ he added.
‘But the specifications — ‘
‘You could have made it a trifle more — ‘ McRae searched for the word, ‘fascinating.’
‘Enough,’ Karp said, flushing, knowing now that McRae was merely tormenting him, that all this was simply to drive home the point that as large and powerful as it was, Karp u. Sohnen Werke was a servant, only an employee, of the government; it did not really influence it, and even McRae, who was simply an Assistant Secretary of State, could take a stand of this sort with impunity.
‘If you ran things once more,’ McRae drawled reflectively, ‘how would you alter matters? Go back to hiring concentration camp victims, as Krupp did during the twentieth century? Perhaps you could obtain and use von Lessinger equipment for that … letting them die even faster, as your employees, than they died at Belsen-Belsen — ‘