Forty signs of rain - Kim Stanley Robinson [124]
Holy shit, Charlie thought. So to speak.
He called up Roy and told him Phil had authorized the reintroduction of the Chinese bill. Roy was incredulous. “What do you mean, we went down big-time on that, it was a joke then and it would be worse now!”
“No not so, it lost bad but that was good, we got lots of credit for it that we deployed elsewhere, and it’ll happen the same way when we do it again because it’s right, Roy, we have right on our side on this.”
“Yes of course obviously that’s not the point—”
“Not the point, have we gotten so jaded that being right is no longer relevant?”
“No of course not, but that’s not the point either, it’s like playing a chess game, each move is just a move in the larger game, you know?”
“Yes I do know because that’s my analogy, but that’s my point, this is a good move, this checks them, they have to give up a queen to stop from being checkmated.”
“You really think it’s that much leverage? Why?”
“Because Winston has such ties to Chinese industry, and he can’t defend that very well to his hard-core constituency, Christian realpolitik isn’t really a supercoherent philosophy and so it’s a vulnerability he has don’t you see?”
“Well yeah, of course. You said Phil okayed it already?”
“Yes he did.”
“Okay, that’s good enough for me.”
Charlie got off and did a little dance in the kitchen, circling out into the living room, where Joe was sitting on the floor trying to get back into his diaper. Both adhesive tags had torn loose. “Good try Joe, here let me help you.”
“Okay Da.” Joe held out the diaper.
“Hmm,” Charlie said, suddenly suspicious.
He called up Anna and got her. “Hey snooks, how are you, yeah I’m just calling to say I love you and to suggest that we get tickets to fly to Jamaica, we’ll find some kind of kid care and go down there just by ourselves, we’ll rent a whole beach to ourselves and spend a week down there or maybe two, it would be good for us.”
“True.”
“It’s really inexpensive down there now because of the unrest and all, so we’ll have it all to ourselves almost.”
“True.”
“So I’ll just call up the travel agent and have them put it all on my business-expenses card.”
“Okay, go for it.”
Then there was a kind of cracking sound and Charlie woke up for real.
“Ah shit.”
He knew just what had happened, because it had happened before. His dreaming mind had grown skeptical at something in a dream that was going too well or badly—in this case his implausibly powerful persuasiveness—and so he had dreamed up ever-more-unlikely scenarios, in a kind of test-to-destruction, until the dream had popped and he had awakened.
It was almost funny, this relationship to dreams. Except sometimes they crashed at the most inopportune moments. It was perverse to probe the limits of believability rather than just go with the flow, but that was the way Charlie’s mind worked, apparently. Nothing he could do about it but groan and laugh, and try to train his sleeping mind into a more wish fulfillment–tolerant response.
It turned out that in the real world it was a work-at-home day for Anna, scheduled to give Charlie a kind of poison ivy vacation from Joe. Charlie was planning to take advantage of that to go down to the office by himself for once, and have a talk with Phil about what to do next. It was crucial to get Phil on line for a set of small bills that would save the best of the comprehensive.
He padded downstairs to find Anna cooking pancakes for the boys. Joe liked to use them as little frisbees. “Morning babe.”
“Hi hon.” He kissed her on the ear, inhaling the smell of her hair. “I just had the most amazing dream. I could talk anybody into anything.”
“How exactly was that a dream?”
“Yeah right! Don’t tease me about that, obviously I can’t talk anybody into anything. No, this was definitely a dream. In fact I pushed it too far and killed it. I tried to talk you into going off with me to Jamaica, and you said yes.”
She laughed merrily at the thought, and he laughed