Ma’am is actually very out of date indeed, but Miriam decided not to mention her uncompleted premed to him. She merely smiled tensely. “What’s his prognosis? Days or weeks?”
“Ah, well.” Porter looked faintly relieved. “Well, the First Man may not be as close to death’s door as you believe. You met him at his worst last week. He’s currently responding well to a combination treatment—fluorouracil and cisplatin—and radiation as well. I will not mince words with you: his prognosis is terminal. But while one can never rule out sudden setbacks, he might hang on for as long as six months.”
Fluorouracil and cisplatin were 1970s chemotherapy drugs, but the Commonwealth was nowhere near ready to begin production of monoclonal antibody and epigenetic interference therapies. And Adam himself had refused, point blank, to consider a discreet trip to a private Brazilian clinic in time line two. “It is my duty to stand by my people and, if necessary, to suffer as they do,” he’d pointed out to Erasmus when they’d come to visit his bedside the day before. “If there’s an easy escape for the likes of us, when will we ever develop the indigenous technology”—he’d glanced at Miriam, eyelids fluttering—“to rescue our people?”
Sixteen years ago, Sir Adam had swallowed her two-phase proposal completely—so completely, he was willing to die by it. She’d lobbied to establish a ministry to use world-walkers to import knowledge and ideas and spread the spoils via educational establishments. But it was essential that they use these tools only to develop native infrastructure, from schools and universities to research establishments and factories. The Commonwealth must stand on its own, rather than becoming addicted to a steady drip of illicit imports from another time line, as the Gruinmarkt had. It had seemed like a really good idea at the time, she thought—not without bitterness—until the saintly Father of the Nation decided they were words to live and die by.
“‘Setbacks.’” Miriam tried not to scowl, not entirely successfully. “Well, Doctor. While I appreciate your doing everything within your capabilities to help keep the First Man going, I was … shall we say, taken aback? As you might understand, the state of his health ultimately affects my commission. And my husband’s”—it still felt strange calling him that, even after fourteen years—“duties, too, as Commissioner of Propaganda. We both have necessary and sufficient reason to be added to the distribution list for his daily updates.”
“Um, ah.” Dr. Porter looked unhappy. “If the First Man consents, of course. Otherwise power of attorney in respect of his physiodynamic needs rests with the Secretary to the Inner Party.”
Oh hell. Miriam failed to suppress a twitch this time. Nor did she miss the tension that suddenly appeared in the set of Erasmus’s shoulders. “Then I will take this up with the secretariat,” she assured Dr. Porter. Standing, she turned to her husband: “I think we’ve heard enough, dear.” Erasmus rose, and offered her his arm. “Thank you, Doctor.”
Dr. Porter, too, rose, and bowed and ushered them out of his office with old-school formality.
“Well, fuck,” Miriam whispered as they passed through the waiting room, which was crowded with no small number of Deputy Commissioners, Secretaries, and a handful of nursing orderlies and junior doctors. The Manhattan Palace was sprouting medical facilities, as if engaged in a bizarre bid to rival the teaching hospitals of New London. “We’ll have to soft-soap Adrian,” she confided in Erasmus.
Her husband’s face was a closed book. “I trust our friend the Secretary as far as I can throw him,” he hissed.
“Can’t be helped. Have to confront him sooner or later. Better now than in cabinet when Sir Adam’s too sick to keep up the pretense anymore.”
Outside the palace medical center they picked up their respective retinues of clerks and administrative assistants, and proceeded by common consent toward what had once, before the Revolution, been the Empress’s Chambers. They walked together: two distinguished-looking politicians, formally clad in the subdued version of the finery that courtiers had once deployed—austere gray and black tailoring over white silk—rather than the prerevolutionary efflorescences of crimson and purple over explosions of lace. Like magpies surrounded by the crowlike figures of their attendants, they made their way toward the center of the web ruled by the Party Secretary, Adrian Holmes.
Holmes was indeed home this morning. They passed through an outer office, in which clerks rattled the keys of no fewer than six computer terminals (wired, no doubt, to one of the municipal government mainframes that formed the beating heart of the Commonwealth Cybernetic Agoric Allocator, the real-time central planning system that ran the state). Then they were ushered into the windowless inner office, and the presence of the New Man himself.
“Ah, the Commissioners Burgeson!” Adrian Holmes hauled himself to his feet, beaming with a bonhomie Miriam suspected he cultivated only for high-ranking visitors: he could certainly switch it on and off like a lightbulb. A tall man, dour of disposition, he was also a supremely effective administrator. Which was why Adam had elevated him to the Party Secretariat at such a young age—he was barely forty.
(“A bloody Robespierre,” Olga had spat when she heard the news. Miriam had pretended not to notice, but over time she’d come to suspect that her younger protégé might have been right when she’d said, “You mark my words, my lady: give him his head and he’ll reap all of ours, even if he has to build his own guillotine.” Erasmus had not quite agreed. “Not a Robespierre,” he’d said gloomily, “but he might grow into Stalin’s shoes.”)
“And what can I do for you today?”
“It’s the boss,” Erasmus said, affecting a slight nasality in his voice that elevated his tone but left it just short of a whine. It made him sound slightly stupid. He’d developed the trick, Miriam had learned, while on the run before the Revolution—as a way of convincing the political police he was harmless. “Nobody told us…”
“We want to be added to the daily distribution list for Sir Adam’s medical status,” Miriam added. “Our commissions have definite need to know.”