Read Online The Rift by Walter Jon Williams - Free Book Online

come from? Back when I grew up in Texas, none of ’em had chins, and they all had puzzel-guts and weighed three hunnerd pounds. And that was just the women.”
    The President cast a professional eye over Omar Paxton’s chiseled features.
    “David Duke’s good looks came from a plastic surgeon,” he said. “He looked like a little weasel before Dr. Scalpel and Mr. Bleach made him a blond Aryan god. But this gent,” nodding at the evening news, “I believe he just has good genes.”
    “The man was made for television,” sighed Stan Burdett, the President’s press secretary, and who, with his bald head, thin lips, and thick spectacles, was not.
    “He was made for givin’ us shit,” the judge proclaimed. “That fucking weevil could cost us Louisiana in the next election.”
    “We kicked him out of the Party,” the President offered.
    “We’ll be lucky if he don’t take half the Party with ’im.”
    The President sat with his two closest friends in one of the private drawing rooms in the second floor of the White House. He had never been comfortable with the formal displays of antiques and old paintings so carefully arranged in much of the public White House— he felt uneasy living in a museum, and privately cursed Jacqueline Kennedy, who had found most of the antiques and furniture in storage and spread them throughout the house, so that every time he turned around he was in danger of knocking over a vase once owned by Mrs. Rutherford B. Hayes, or a pot that James Monroe might have pissed in.
    So he had filled his own apartments with far less distinguished furniture, comfortable pieces which, even if they might date from the Eisenhower Administration, were scarcely refined. Even Jacqueline Kennedy couldn’t reproach him for putting his feet up on this couch.
    The President settled comfortably into his sofa and reached for his Pilsner Urquell. “So,” he said, “how do you stop Party members from bolting to Omar Paxton?”
    “Discredit him,” Stan said.
    The judge cocked an eye at the younger man. “Son,” he said, “we’re talkin’ ’bout Louisiana. Nothing makes the Louisiana voter happier than casting a ballot for someone he knows is a felon. If Jack the Ripper had been born in Plaquemines Parish, they’d have a statue to the son of a bitch in the statehouse in Baton Rouge.”
    Stan was insistent. “There’s got to be something that’ll turn his people against him.”
    “Maybe if you get a photo of Omar there in bed with Michael Jackson,” the judge said, then winked. “But I don’t guess he’s Michael’s type.”
    “What part of Louisiana is he from, anyway?” Stan asked.
    The President smiled. “The part where they name their children ‘Omar,’” he said.
    It was one of the President’s rare free nights. Congress was in recess. Nobody in the world seemed to be dropping bombs on anybody else. There was little on the President’s schedule for the rest of the week other than a visit to an arts festival at the Kennedy Center. The First Lady was in Indiana making speeches against drunk drivers, a cause with which she had become identified— and a politically safe issue, as Stan had remarked, as there were very few voters who were actually in favor of drunk driving, and most of those were too inebriated to find a polling place on election day.
    Since everything could change in an instant, the President reckoned he should take advantage of the opportunity to relax while it was offered.
    It was characteristic of him, though, that his idea of relaxation consisted of spending an evening watching CNN, drinking Bohemian beer, and talking politics with two of his cronies.
    The President removed a briefing book on economics that sat on his couch— the G8 economic summit in London was coming up in a few weeks— and then he put his feet up and raised his beer to his lips. “We can hope that Omar over there is just a fifteen-minute wonder,” he said. “He’s just some deputy lawman