Interface (With George, Frederick) (v1.0) by Neal Stephenson

Author:Neal Stephenson
Format: epub, mobi

31

Eleanor was in the middle of cleaning out her office. This wasn't much of a job since she had barely moved into it and the empty boxes were still stacked conveniently in the corner. Bent over with both hands in a file drawer, she didn't notice Caleb Roosevelt Marshall coming into her office until he got her attention by tossing a keychain on to her vacant desktop.

"I'm taking you on a ride, lady," he said.

She straightened up, startled to see him standing right in front of her, dressed in a blue work shirt and chinos, leaning on a cane. "I have my best conversations when I'm driving flat out into the mountains," he said, nodding at the keychain. Eleanor picked it up; it was a set of keys to a rented Cadillac. "But now I'm getting too old to drive. Can't even see the goddamn hood ornament."

"Allow me, then," Eleanor said.

It was a nice Cadillac, a convertible, parked in the Senator's private space in back of the Alamo. The Senator had apparently dismissed his security detail, so Eleanor offered her arm and helped him out of the building and into the passenger seat. Then she got in and cranked it up. The car had a nice sound system with a tape player, and although the Senator complained that he wanted to get going, Eleanor decided to rummage around in the hollow center armrest for one of his tapes.

"What are you going to play? Rap music?" he said as she popped a tape out of its case and shoved it into the dashboard.

"Resurrection Symphony," Eleanor said, as the opening bars came from speakers hidden all over the car.

"Good," Marshall said. "I been listening to it a lot. Figure I'd better become expert in the subject. Now let's get going, damn it."

The Senator had a particular, highly detailed route he wanted to follow through Denver and up into the mountains. He eschewed the newfangled foolishness of freeways in favor of a devious route that took them down alleys, through parks, along curvy residential streets. For a while, as she followed his barked and seemingly improvised instructions, she was afraid that he had gone completely off his rocker and was getting them hopelessly lost. But they never got stuck at a slow stoplight, never had to make an impossible left turn, and in time the city began to spread out and undulate as the landscape awoke from the thousand-mile slumber of the prairie.

"Thanks for saving my ass," Senator Marshall said, when he wasn't giving directions.

She smiled. "I was wondering whether you'd see it that way."

"Course I do. I'm not senile," he said. "Sooner or later a senator has to rely on someone like you."

"How do you figure?"

"A senator has a big staff. He has to, in order to carry out the basic functions of his office, and to get reelected. Normal people don't take those kinds of jobs. If I could take people off the street, I would. That's how I got you.

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