“We have to do better, think harder, more creatively. Look how much we’ve done already, never forget how much we’ve done.”
After almost a decade of this, only six of the original ten were left. The diehards, as mad as Gerald. Even Major looked on him with that calculating light in his eyes. Did Gerald even realize that Major’s passion was for tactics rather than outcome?
“Opportunities abound, if we have the courage to see them. The potential for good, great good, manifests everywhere. We must have the courage to see it.”
Rallying the troops. Clare sighed. How many times had Gerald given variations of this speech in this dingy warehouse, hidden by spells and out of the world? They all sounded the same. She’d stopped being able to see the large patterns a long time ago and could only see the little things now. A dropped napkin in a café. She could only change the course of a few small lives.
“There’s an assassination,” said Gerald. “It will tip the balance into a hundred years of chaos. Do you see it?”
Fred smiled. “We can stop it. Maybe jam a rifle.”
“A distraction, to throw off the assassin’s aim.”
“Or give him a hangover,” Major said. “We’ve had great success with hangovers and oversleeping.” He glanced at Clare with his starry smile. She beamed back. Fred rolled his eyes.
“Quaint,” Gerald said, frowning.
The game was afoot. So many ways to change a pattern. Maybe Clare’s problem was she saw them as people, not patterns. And maybe she was the one holding the rest back. Thinking too small. She wasn’t part of their pattern anymore.
This rally was the largest Clare had ever seen. Her generation had grown up hearing grandparents’ stories of protest and clashes (civil war, everyone knew, but the official history said clashes, which sounded temporary and isolated). While their parents grew up in a country that was tired and sedate, where they were content to consolidate their little lives and barricade themselves against the world, the children wondered what it must have been like to believe in idealism.
Gerald’s target this time was the strongest candidate the PTP had ever put forward for Premiere. The younger generation flocked to Jonathan Smith. People adored him—unless they supported the RLP. Rallies like this were the result. Great crowds of hope and belief, unafraid. And the crowds who opposed them.
Gerald said that Jonathan Smith was going to be assassinated. Here, today, at the rally, in front of thousands. All the portents pointed to this. But it would not result in martyrdom and change, because the assassin would be one of his own and people would think, our parents were right, and go home.
Clare and Major stood in the crowd like islands, unmoving, unfeeling, not able to be caught up in the exhilarating speech, the roaring response. She felt alien. These were her people, they were all human, but never had she felt so far removed. She might have felt god-like, if she believed in a god who took such close interest in creation as to move around it like this. God didn’t have to, because there were people like Gerald and Major.
“It’s nice to be saving someone,” Clare said. “I’ve always liked that better.”
“It only has to be a little thing,” Major said. “Someone in the front row falls and breaks a bone. The commotion stalls the attack when Smith goes to help the victim. Because he’s like that.”
“We want to avoid having a victim at all, don’t we?”
“Maybe it’ll rain.”
“We change coach horses, not the weather.” But not so well that they couldn’t keep an anarchist bomb from arriving at its destination. They weren’t omnipotent. They weren’t gods. If they were, they could control the weather.
She had tried sending a message about the government building behind Gerald’s back. He would have called the action too direct, but she’d taken the risk. She’d called the police, the newspapers, everyone, with all the details they’d conjured. Her information went into official records, was filed for the appropriate authorities, all of which moved too slowly to be of any good. It wasn’t too direct after all.
Inexorable. This path of history had the same feeling of being inexorable. Official channels here would welcome an assassination. The police would not believe her. They only had to save one life.
She wished for rain. The sky above was clear.
They walked among the crowd, and it was grand. She rested her hand in the crook of Major’s elbow; he held it there. He wore a happy, silly smile on his face. They might have been in a park, strolling along a gentle river in a painting.
“There’s change here,” he said, gazing over the angry young crowd and their vitriolic signs.
She squeezed his arm and smiled back.