Chapter 10 The Limits of Public Approval
Paralegal Pinch flipped the parsley off her plate and poked her chicken with a fork.
“What effect does Reason think the book will have?” she said.
“She’s hoping for a lot,” said Bits Bitterly. “Dreams of it selling out of several editions and that everyone will have it and talk about it. The usual author’s daydreams.” He smiled knowingly.
With the two free fingers of her fork hand, Pinch waved this away. “That’s ephemeral, even if it happens. Who remembers the best sellers of several years ago? The Pride Story will pass away, even if it sees print. She really expects nothing more than that?” She began to make a satisfied note to herself, scribbling in the planner she had brought to the restaurant table.
Bits stared at the ceiling. “More? She wants everything. A city-wide revival of religion, a new mayor, Mr. Power in prison....”
Pinch looked up sharply. However sure she might feel of the City’s invincibility, such talk was a little unsettling. No one in the City should have such pipe dreams; that is, no one should be able to conceive of them. Thinking about a toppled Mr. Power ought to be as impossible as thinking about a dry ocean or a concave mountain. If Reason would think only of how to use Power—how to cut deals with him and outsmart him and hoodwink him—then the little Heavenite would be safely within the boundary lines of the City’s game. If on the other hand, Reason could conceive of the complete rejection of Power and all he stood for, well, there Pinch paused on the edge of the same abyss that had frightened Lawyer Pitfall.
She tapped her pen on the planner. “Mr. Power in prison? And who would bring that about, I wonder? Power controls the prisons, and without him there would be none. She might as well say that we’ll unplug the sun and warm the earth with matches.”
Bits nodded. “Ah, but who can control the dreams of a writer? She has a bit of the poet in her.”
“No, poets write about personal things,” Pinch insisted in a nasty tone, “things like love relationships and personal reactions to war and what the wind felt like at seven o’clock on a Wednesday night. Real poets don’t write criticisms of the Game because that would be nonsense. I mean, it would be playing God, trying to impose one’s views on others.”
“More importantly, it wouldn’t sell,” Bits said with a veteran’s certainty. “All my own poems, I may say, are personal reflections, with no authoritarian nonsense about them.” He met her eyes wistfully. “Not that they sell either.”
“Sells, doesn’t sell...!” Pinch muttered as she made another note. “Whatever! The point is, what is she capable of thinking?”
Bits shifted in his wicker chair. “I don’t think I follow you.”
“Good. We’ve always known you’re safe, Bits.” She looked at his plate. “You really aren’t going to have anything but sushi? Look, I’m paying, so you may as well have some salad or something.”
“No, this is all I want,” he said. “Special diet, you know.’
“Well, pardon me, but I find that stuff disgusting.” She took an envelope from her purse and handed it to him. “Here’s your money. Keep up the good work. And I want to know as soon as Reason and Dignity become really solidly disillusioned with the Heavenly Embassy. In that connection, have you gotten any friends into Grace House yet?”
“I’m working on it.”
“Fine.”
The conversation lapsed into small talk until they finished eating. Then Pinch gathered her things. ‘I have to get back to the office. Just one thing, though.” Her over made-up eyes were intent, and she clutched her purse and planner tightly. “Think back to when Reason said she wanted Mr. Power in prison. What else did she say about that? What was she driving at?”
Bits concentrated for a moment. “Oh, she’s always on her worn out soapbox, calling for a clean sweep of city offices and a new party in control.”
“Power controls all the parties,” Pinch said flatly.
“Yes, of course. I think she means the Heavenites.”
“Well, yes, there are the Heavenites, but the present administration has a consistently high public approval rating. Doesn’t she know that?”
Bits sighed. “It’s tragic. She just can’t face reality. But there’s a certain pathetic appeal to that sort of character, don’t you think? A sort of Eustachia Vye-ish unwillingness to surrender the ideal for the merely workable. ‘A grandeur of temper which cannot be objected to in the abstract.’ Isn’t that how Hardy put it?”
“Pardon me, but damn Hardy, whoever he is.”
“Well, it’s tragically beautiful,” said Bits. “She’s doomed, of course.”
“You make sure that she is,” Pinch said. “I really have to get back now. Have a merry Christmas, if I don’t see you before then.”
Back at the offices of Snare, Pitfall, Trial, and Temptation, Pinch worked routinely through half the afternoon and then accessed the Internet and logged on to the City’s site. She found the administration’s November public approval rating, an assuring eighty percent. She remembered that it had been eighty percent in October too. She also saw that it had been eighty percent for November of the previous year, a comparison conveniently provided. Three eighties were a bit of a coincidence.
With a creased forehead, Pinch clicked her way to the compiled monthly percentages for the year to date. Every month had been eighty percent. Hurriedly, and with growing alarm, she reviewed the previous years’ records. Last year had been the same, every month an eighty percent rating; and the same for the year before that, and the year before that. The computer’s records, she found, only went back fourteen years, but the administration’s public approval rating had stood exactly the same through all those years.
She rolled back her chair and went to the next cubicle, surprising a fellow worker. “Coggy, where are the paper files with the old polling results?”
Lawyer Pitfall was at his desk, scanning through a typewritten manuscript and erupting from time to time into his peculiar backfiring chuckle. He looked up. “Miss Pinch! Come in and sit down. I was just going over something here, a partial book manuscript called The Glories of Reinhabitation. Subtitle: Beyond Collapse and Demolition, A New Hope for You! We have Mr. Blindfold fairly churning out the chapters these days. Because, you know, it has to be done by the twenty-second when his house goes down and the Hellites relocate him.”
“Will he make it?” Pinch asked.
“Yes, he should just make it if he continues to push himself. The funny thing is he’s so intent on the writing that he’s oblivious to the state his house is in—drooping roof, buckling walls. He really doesn’t know that his little author’s career is almost over. He’s a hoot on the telephone, babbles about the best seller list and what he’s going to do with his fat royalty checks.”
“Which he’ll never see,” Pinch laughed.
“No. But the book will be a posthumous best seller. We’re seeing to that.” Trial shifted to face her. “What do you want, Pinch? Do you have a progress report?”
“No, sir.” Pinch’s narrow face became serious as she opened an age-spotted manila folder that she had brought with her and laid it on the desk between them. “I’ve noticed something curious about the administration’s public approval rating. It’s remained steady at eighty percent for some, um, seven thousand years. You see this is from the year 500 B.C., when we were writing in ancient Babylonian. There it is, eighty percent. I have a whole pile of folders in my cubicle showing the same percentage for our Akkadian period, the Roman, and every other.”
Pitfall looked bored. “Oh, so you fear some inaccuracy?”
Pinch shook her head a fraction of an inch. “No, it’s accurate. You see, I also discovered that we keep records of which citizens have been bought off to support the administration: bought with bribes, promises, sweetheart deals, amnesties, tax breaks. Not to mention blackmail. It’s called the leveraged rate.” She
pointed to another figure. “The leveraged percentage was very high in 500 B.C.—eighty percent.” She looked up. “It’s also been eighty percent every other year. Yes, every other year.” She shrugged as if to say that she hesitated to reach a conclusion.
“I see,” said Pitfall.
“And what I—”
“And what you want to know is?”
“Well, one can’t jump to conclusions, but...one wonders if the polls are reflecting these same people. That is, are these eighty percents the exact same people in both cases?” She laughed nervously. “Of course, I’m not saying that. Actually, if it weren’t for the numbers remaining constant and—”
“Miss Pinch, is this troubling you?” said Pitfall. “If you want an answer, well, of course the two groups are exactly the same. How else can we keep up public approval but by handling people?”
Pinch tried to keep her face expressionless.
“You will ask,” Pitfall went on, “why we don’t just go the whole way and buy off the other twenty percent? That, of course, is the plan. But we are straining all our resources to the limit as things stand. Without a fresh influx of revenue, we will have to be content with a high public approval but not the ideal. But eighty percent is really very workable.” He noticed that Pinch had twisted the file folder in her hands. “What is it?”
She forced a smile. “Nothing, probably nothing. You see, it requires some extrapolation, and you’ll accuse me of mental gymnastics, but couldn’t the data be interpreted differently? Somehow, no one who isn’t controlled by us ever tells the pollster that he approves of us. If our percent of leveraged citizens were reduced, say to fifty percent, then our public approval rating would also—”
“Would also drop to fifty percent,” Pitfall cut in. “Yes, Miss Pinch. And your point?”
“May I speak freely, sir?”
Pitfall got up slowly and closed the door. “All right, what is it?”
Pinch stared at the ancient report on the desk. “I’m theorizing that our public approval rating is actually, and always has been, zero percent. Left to themselves, the public doesn’t want us.”
Pitfall was unmoved. “Want us? What are you dreaming about? Isn’t it everyone’s wish to be free of us? If you think our polls should reflect an impartial approval, then of course, we’d never register a point. If on the other hand, you want to go about the practical business of running a city—”
“Then everyone’s against us,” Pinch interrupted, still staring at the desk top.
“That,” Pitfall said sternly, “is never to go outside this office.”
“Yes, sir. Of course not.”
“And now that you understand it, you should be all the more diligent to do your work well, as we exert ourselves to keep the lid on the box. Don’t be disturbed; the lid is on firmly and has been these many thousand years, as your review of the records shows. No rebellion will take place. It’s unthinkable.”
Pinch agreed.
Back in her cubicle, however, she sat in a numb trance. So only a tissue of promises and threats maintained the administration? That was why the few Heavenites in the city, with their forbidden thoughts, had to be nailed, nailed every time, turned aside. Subverted into the Game. But even if that were done every time, how spindly the City’s foundations looked! No, it was worse than that.
Pinch clutched her desk as if she expected to drift up toward the fluorescent lights in the ceiling. It was worse than that. Call it mental gymnastics if you would, but the City appeared to have no foundations at all.