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Callan watched Paulsen walk up .the aisle. Saintz was next to him, babbling in relief at his ad having been approved. "Boy, that was a close one," Saintz said. "I thought we'd lost the account for sure. Times are tough in the ad business these days; seems people change their agencies like they change their socks."
Callan nodded distractedly. "Everyone is expendable, after all. That's what BuReloc's all about."
Saintz didn't respond to that one, just excused himself to join the other celebrants. Callan sat looking at the blank screen for a long time.
POLITICS OF MELOS
SUSAN SHWARTZ
It is desirable to be free if you can. It is natural that the stronger power will subject the weaker. These are not matters of right or wrong but of logic, cost, and benefit. The Limits of Empire, Benjamin Isaac (Oxford University Press, 1990).
Maenads' shrieks from Lilith, dedicating a song to "brothers, sisters, and citizens!" tore through Wyn Baker's lecture yet again.
"You must think of the Fifth Book as more a dialogue than a history," she said anyhow. "Think of two speakers, a voice of Melos and a voice of Athens."
"Equality now. EQUALITY NOW!" brayed from a bullhorn in the square below.
Eight thousand students disentangled themselves from bottles, borloi, and each other to bellow agreement. Then electronic guitars and keyboards clamored, and Lilith shrieked once more.
A few notetakers, clustered near the front of the hall, recorded her statement. No doubt they were intent on grades, on wi
People like her might teach in a university in taxpayer country, fiscal and intellectual aristocrats. These days, the best a Citizen-turned-scholar might hope for was a position as major domo, a kind of na
"Awright, bros and sisters. We're go
Another orgasmic scream from the students lying on the green four floors below. Hell of a way to nave to teach. Her mind fleeted longingly to the dark wood and stained glass of Harvard's Memorial Hall.
Her colleagues would laugh at her if she gave up and went back in mid-semester. "What did you think, Wyn? That you could pretend you were doing settlement house work? This is LA, not Phillips Brooks."
No matter. It was her duty to teach them, and no Baker or Winthrop (her father had wanted two sons) shirked duty. "Think of it as tri-v, in which characters . . ." she had wanted to say "disclose and reveal themselves" but she revised fast . . . "tell you how they feel." Her voice sounded reedy even to herself, lacking all conviction against Lilith's passionate intensity.
"Two voices," Wyn had lectured. "The voice of Athens, harsh, authoritative . . . 'For we would have dominion over you without oppressing you, and preserve you to the profit of us both . . .' and the voice of Melos, a lesser state threatened with war unless it paid tribute . . . paid a bribe not to be attacked. 'But how can it be profitable for us to serve?' "
Outside, an amplifier malfunctioned. The bleeding electronic scream forced a groan from the protestors. The students nearest the window flinched.
That did it. Never ceasing her practiced flow of speech, Wyn stepped down from her platform, stalked to the window-her soft-soled shoes and long, jogger's stride eating up the distance-and reached for the catch, which hadn't been closed (or cleaned) in years. In the grimy surface, she confronted herself: tall, with what would have been a scholar's stoop if she permitted. Cropped, pale hair and an old suit that firmly resisted the Angeleno craving for the new and violently colored.
Wyn exerted the strength that forty summers of te
She thought of black ships, armored Athenian marines landing at Melos and ringing it. Hopeless, hopeless, as the Melians knew; hopeless to lecture at these students; but she' read out the passage anyhow. "Men of Athens, our resolution is none other than what you have heard before; nor will we, in a small portion of time, overthrow that liberty in which our city hath remained for the space of seven hundred years since it was first founded." And more hopelessness in their counteroffer-"But this we offer: to be your friends, enemies to neither side."
To her surprise, the students nodded. But then, they knew from gang warfare: to be neutral was to be dead.
"Think of it as if it were today," Wyn said, her voice falling out of the trained, platform speaker's cadence she had learned almost as soon as she was allowed to join her parents at the di
The Sovworld? The CoDominium with its marines and its expatriates and its weight of distrust? Or her own life in the rearguard of privileged Cambridge? Answer that yourself, she ordered herself, and came up with no answer. She wondered what answers her students might have, if they dared to speak, or bothered.
Heads raised from the desks, and the notetakers laid down their styluses and recorders. Attention flashed to the windows, then back to Wyn.
"I made a mistake shutting the window," Wyn told them. "You don't study history by shutting out the world. Go and open it again. Look out there, listen-and tell me! Who is speaking with the voice of Melos now?"
She saw the way their eyes kindled with hope. Am I doing this right? Does this all mean something that I can understand?
The boy nearest the window sprang up to obey her. Wyn felt a shiver as she always did when her instincts told her she had caught a class's attention. The shiver deepened. The boy cried out in Spanish and leapt back as the window shattered and the building shook.
"Are you all right?" Wyn had run for years, but she had never moved as fast as she did then, brushing glass from her student (hers! how dare anyone touch him?) and blotting the blood on his hands with her scarf despite his protests that she'd ruin it. She comforted him in the Castilian she'd learned traveling with her parents.
Smoke and screams poured in the window. Beyond the square, a black column of smoke rose: the gate-control shack. Again, the building shook. Bomb or an earthquake?
The door opened, slamming against the wall with such force that two people cried out. Apologizing to the boy she held, Wyn strode toward the university rentacops. Real police muscle stood behind them.
"Taxpayer . . ." An imperious flare of her eyebrows drew a snicker from one student and made the rentacop correct himself. "Professor . . ."
"Ms. Baker," she identified herself crisply. In her world, everyone was a Taxpayer, and so many people were professors or had some such tide that it was vulgar to use any of them.
"Begging your pardon, but we . . ."
"We've had a bombing. We're evacuating the building and moving our own forces in," said the policeman behind University Security, such as it was. He snapped up the dark visor of his helmet long enough that she knew it for a salute, then pushed it down over his eyes again. His riot shield and stick hung over arms and belt.