"...Your greedy corporations ... Surely, it's obvious to even our three solicitants, that the empire of America can not sustain itself for long."
"There's that word again," Buford growled, "What are we selling?"
Buford saw Henri creep a hand over to the tip of the boot, her stealth blocked from the podiums and the audience. Buford saw everything-That's what it felt like, anyway. No one else was watching her-no one except his mother-as Henri found the boot and probed the inner edge.
Pictures of early Americans came up, of the pious and steadfast Pilgrims. And Armani turned to the colonials with a frown.
"What happened to those Americans? Your government routinely liquidates and tortures all over the world to destabilize for reasons lost to logic, while at home it teaches the American people to hate, so that you allow the establishment to spend billions and billions on more weapons and more killing. You've become very naughty beasts indeed..."
A rhizome, it had no assembly, it had no hierarchy, no points of entry or exit. It was instinctual. And so Buford wasn't surprised at all when Henri went on instinct, lunging...
With the cold steel in her hand, she soared right into him like a hawk in a swamp, Buford and Tiffany right behind her. And the spring in the blade popped right open for her, as she dived onto him, pressing the still sharp blade into his throat. And now they were all back at the fort, surviving, doing what had to be done-The killing, the bleeding; it was an imperative; it came naturally now.
"What if I puncture a carotid artery?" Henri whispered to the microphone on his lapel, her voice resonant in the arena, "Would that be disappointing?"
No laughter, no applause-The hijack of events happened in such a blink they generated from the crowd only hushed whispers. And Buford waited; he'd anticipated something as such. After all, they'd eaten, and now they were excusing themselves, though he couldn't help throwing a guilty glance back at the table-He had better manners than to eat and run...
But the Naughty Beasts were a team, and the team was leaving. Their exit strategy, however, was a mystery, as was the question of how much blood would have to flow. And as if to highlight the tension of the moment, the orchestra in the small pit at the foot of the stage began a dramatic version of God Bless America, while the colonists half-dragged their startled Russian host away from the podium and right up past the wispy dancers to the lip of the stage that dropped off into the center aisle. The music, mostly tight violin strings, and with a lone spotlight, followed the colonial escape, as they shuffled to a stop.
Buford could see the audience better now, near a thousand people, rooted breathlessly in their chairs, watching, studying...
Then it started-From the back of the room, like a huge wave it came, and then it broke over them in one cohesive, congruent roar of appreciation-the Rhizome, applauding the impulsive encore!
"Bravo!" they shouted, and Buford heard some woman squealing his name in the same mispronunciation as at the debut in May: "Booford!" "Booford!"
Henri seemed to pause in indecision: There were no steps, and the drop was a good two feet from the stage-though she still pressed the blade tightly into his throat, and he grumbled in Russian, or their new Proto Speak, as small droplets of his blood made their first appearance.
"You can't leave yet," the Russian said.
But that wasn't what the three-some wanted to hear; the blade went deeper toward the artery. Now he coughed in his discomfort.
"You must stay for the Q and A!"
Henri cut deeper, and she knew just how to cut. And he weakened and wobbled in her arms. And then they heard the new voice:
"You showed team work, Mommy, in your final month you showed them!"
It was a child's voice-her son, probably, two years in the grave, "You exhibited exemplary teamwork behavior that resulted in cohesion and strength-And that's why you have been promoted to the next level, Mommy-Congratulations!"
They all listened, because they had to. And her knife, and their captive, fell as one, and dark shapes rushed to Armani and hovered over him. A cordless microphone found its way over Buford's neck, and there was a noisy shuffle as the audience jostled to line up behind a microphone stand in the middle aisle.
"Excuse me..." A demure young woman said to Buford at the microphone, "Would you agree with our research that suggests teams encompassing at least two separate points of view on a particular question make better decisions when the pressure of the minority forces the majority to think more complexly and consider diverse evidence?"
An English voice gently reprimanded from the speakers in the rafters, "Please simplify the question-The subject is not in an academic frame of mind."
She tried to rephrase the question, but too late; she was shoved aside by a fat Asian woman behind her.
"I'm a very big fan, Buford," she began with pining eyes, "we were examining the relationship between political beliefs and the balance of power within your group. And then we correlated the nature of decisions you made... If you're ever in Singapore, I'd love to get together and go over the data with you, personally..."
The omnipotent voice cut in again, this time in the new language, its admonishing tone clear, and the large woman got elbowed aside by an elderly Latino man.
"Do you believe that stopping the project at Thanksgiving allowed enough time for adequate observation and data collation?"
They expected an answer, because they didn't understand their power. But Buford glowered silently, as Henri fell softly onto her buttocks, suddenly looking smaller, her strength taken from her, with her dead child's voice no doubt ringing in her head-the boy she'd killed, leaving him to die a horrible death with his father in the ice crevasse at ten thousand feet. Shit, things didn't get much worse than that-But even they can't bring back the dead any more than Lindsey's deranged mother, who's having supper with something that belongs in a wax museum.
But to hear the voice of your dead boy-it was enough to suspend Henri's lethal instincts, and Buford didn't like that at all. And then Tiffany dropped to the edge of the stage with her, and the two women sat there, swinging their legs in the dark like playful children.
Buford addressed his audience: "I killed a man-a cop, a white cop-because he was a bad man, he was abusing his authority. I made him pay a penance... a permanent one. And I did it without remorse, because I was right-He was wrong ... But now I'm thinking, who's right, who's wrong? It all depends on how you see it going down; it's subjective... Killing someone for what you call the greater good... Well, that's just according to the side that survives. Any way you turn it, if you're killing people, all you got is bad gumbo."
He continued to stand, bracing, expecting censure.
"I really liked your fort," someone said, "and that was a very cute flag... But my question is actually for Tiffany Trang ... Many of us are studying the psychology of your power networks. Do you believe it's possible that the dynamics of relationships among people who work together in groups are a stronger determinant of their behavior than personality?"
They were a social-sciences experiment, something to be probed and reckoned by a pulsing hive of academic geeks, whose need for information was incessant, so that the hive would grow stronger. And the bees were all around them, but Buford sensed no danger-The bees were placid now.
And so was Buford-He sat next to Henri, indifferent when they passed his mic to Tiffany.
"I certainly feel," began Tiffany, "that when groups in a democracy make decisions, the level of complexity in their thinking depends more on group dynamics than on personal ideological preferences."
Her responses were thoughtful and articulate, and Buford realized later that it was this performance that earned Tiffany her promotion. He didn't begrudge her the advancement.
The voice of God spoke again: "Modern Americans are too individualistic. You now lack the communal work ethics that developed your great country. If you had worked out a plan together, even now, it may have been effective... However, there are reasons why you survived the ordeal. One of them is that you took the time to appreciate the wonders of the nature around you. On your long walks, Henri, you stopped and you knew that there were things far more God-like than yourself all around you. And you felt it-the humility. And this was a key to your survival, for all of you. You knew you had to be the ones to adopt-because your environment wasn't going to be the one to adapt to you. You were all appreciative and down-to-earth. Nature simply obliged you."
On some mysterious cue, the leggy ice sculptures and the eclectic dancers scurried back onto the stage, and a soft tune began.
"We still can learn from a select few solicitors; we need to learn more from your spontaneity, your resourcefulness, your resilience, your humility. These are qualities to be admired, and we wish you to model it further. Will you, Americans, help us to open the doors? Will you join the Rhizome?"
They waited, everyone waited.
Henri slowly looked up: "I'm a bad painter, a better masseuse ... I heal people, and I won't play your death games. You squitter-wits-Just let me go home."
And then the Goatwench, his leader, she wept, crying softly next to him like a little girl.
The dancers, and the ice sculptures, and the many suited men and women in the orchestra pit, and even the thousands of members seated in the arena that frigid November night, all ready to jump into a rousing and celebratory version of something, all sagged in their disenchantment and in their anticlimax.
The Goatwench had disheartened them all.