“Just to talk. I work for CIC, and my job is to gather intelligence.”
“I need a fucking drink,” Chuck Wrightson says.
The Towne Hall is a big inflatable building in the middle of the Snooze ’n’ Cruise. It is Derelict Las Vegas: convenience store, video arcade, laundromat, bar, liquor store, flea market, whorehouse. It always seems to be ruled by that small percentage of the human population that is capable of partying until five in the morning every single night, and that has no other function.
Most Towne Halls have a few franchises-within-franchises. Hiro sees a Kelley’s Tap, which is about the nicest trough you are likely to find at a Snooze ’n’ Cruise, and leads Chuck Wrightson into it. Chuck is wearing many layers of clothing that used to be different colors. Now they are the same color as his skin, which is khaki.
All the businesses in a Towne Hall, including this bar, look like something you’d see on a prison ship—everything nailed down, brightly lit up twenty-four hours a day, all of the personnel sealed up behind thick glass barriers that have gone all yellow and murky. Security at this Towne Hall is provided by The Enforcers, so there are a lot of steroid addicts in black armorgel outfits, cruising up and down the arcade in twos and threes, enthusiastically violating people’s human rights.
Hiro and Chuck grab the closest thing they can find to a corner table. Hiro buttonholes a waiter and surreptitiously orders a pitcher of Pub Special, mixed half and half with nonalcoholic beer. This way, Chuck ought to remain awake a little longer than he would otherwise.
It doesn’t take much to make him open up. He’s like one of these old guys from a disgraced presidential administration, forced out by scandal, who devotes the rest of his life to finding people who will listen to him.
“Yeah, I was president of TROKK for two years. And I still consider myself the president of the government in exile.”
Hiro tries to keep himself from rolling his eyes. Chuck seems to notice.
“Okay, okay, so that’s not much. But TROKK was a thriving country, for a while. There’s a lot of people who’d like to see something like that rise again. I mean, the only thing that forced us out—the only way those maniacs were able to seize power—was just totally, you know—” He doesn’t seem to have words for it. “How could you have expected something like that?”
“How were you forced out? Was there a civil war?”
“There were some uprisings, early on. And there were remote parts of Kodiak where we never had a firm grip on power. But there was never a civil war per se. See, the Americans liked our government. The Americans had all the weapons, the equipment, the infrastructure. The Orthos were just a bunch of hairy guys running around in the woods.”
“Orthos?”
“Russian Orthodox. At first they were a tiny minority. Mostly Indians—you know, Tlingits and Aleuts who’d been converted by the Russians hundreds of years ago. But when things got crazy in Russia, they started to pour across the Dateline in all kinds of different boats.”
“And they didn’t want a constitutional democracy.”
“No. No way.”
“What did they want? A tsar?”
“No. Those tsar guys—the traditionalists—stayed in Russia. The Orthos who came to TROKK were total rejects. They had been forced out by the mainline Russian Orthodox church.”
“Why?”
“Yeretic. That’s how Russians say ‘heretic.’ The Orthos who came to TROKK were a new sect—all Pentecostals. They were tied in somehow with the Reverend Wayne’s Pearly Gates. We had missionaries from Texas coming up all the goddamn time to meet with them. They were always speaking in tongues. The mainline Russian Orthodox church thought it was the work of the devil.”
“So how many of these Pentecostal Russian Orthodox people came over to TROKK?”
“Jeez, a hell of a lot of them. At least fifty thousand.”
“How many Americans were in TROKK?”
“Close to a hundred thousand.”
“Then how exactly did the Orthos manage to take the place over?”
“Well, one morning we woke up and there was an Airstream parked in the middle of Government Square in New Washington, right in the middle of all the bagos where we had set up the government. The Orthos had towed it there during the night, then took the wheels off so it couldn’t be moved. We figured it was a protest action. We told them to move it out of there. They refused and issued a proclamation, in Russian. When we got this damn thing translated, it turned out to be an order for us to pack up and leave and turn over power to the Orthos.
“Well, this was ridiculous. So we went up to this Airstream to move it out of there, and Gurov’s waiting for us with this nasty grin on his face.”
“Gurov?”
“Yeah. One of the Refus who came over the Dateline from the Soviet Union. Former KGB general turned religious fanatic. He was kind of like the Minister of Defense for the government that the Orthos set up. So Gurov opens the side door of the Airstream and lets us get a load of what’s inside.”
“What was inside?”
“Well, mostly it was a bunch of equipment, you know, a portable generator, electrical wiring, a control panel, and so forth. But in the middle of the trailer, there’s this big black cone sitting on the floor. About the shape of an ice cream cone, except it’s about five feet long and it’s smooth and black. And I asked what the hell is that thing. And Gurov says, that thing is a ten-megaton hydrogen bomb we scavenged from a ballistic missile. A city-buster. Any more questions?”
“So you capitulated.”
“Couldn’t do much else.”
“Do you know how the Orthos came to be in possession of a hydrogen bomb?”