John Brunner - The Squares of the City

His eyes shone suddenly, like a crusader’s faced with the first glimpse of Jerusalem. Like the crusader, too, his fire was somewhat quenched by the fact that his imagined ideal city was far from divine in appearance. But I had no chance to press the questions further; Cordoban, who had been following our talk with an air of repressed boredom, crumbling a roll on his dessert plate, seized his opportunity to interrupt.

“Chess, doctor?” he proposed, and Mayor turned to him with a sardonic expression.

“You wish to try again, Francisco?”

He did not wait for an answer, but snapped his ringers at a passing waiter, who cleared the table and deposited a board and pieces on it. Senora Cortes and Rioco shifted their chairs and bent forward with an air of expectancy which I found it hard to emulate—though a mediocre player myself, I had never found watching chess so fascinating. Obviously, though, these two were old opponents; their first half-dozen moves chased across the board. Then Cordoban, with a smug expression, made a pawn move that departed from the established pattern, and Mayor blinked and rubbed his chin.

“You learn, Francisco—piece by piece you learn,” he rumbled approvingly, and took the pawn. A series of exchanges as devastating as machine-gun fire cleared the board down to essentials, and then the pair of them settled to a long, thoughtful end game with three pawns apiece.

That part of chess had never seemed to me much more enthralling than checkers; obviously, though, Senora Cortes and Rioco did not share my opinion. They were as tense with excitement as fans at a Shield match waiting to see if the third wicket of a hat-trick would fall or not.

It fell. After fifteen or so more moves, Mayor rubbed his chin, shook his head, and indicated the square next to his opponent’s king. The significance of the gesture was lost on me, but the other two watching sighed in unison and Cordoban sat back with a crestfallen expression.

“What you should have done—” said Mayor, rapidly setting an enemy pawn back one square and bringing its neighbor forward. “So!”

We all stared at the board in silence for a few moments. Then Mayor grunted and got to his feet.

“Manana esta otra dia,” he said comfortingly to Cordoban. “That is enough for today, I think. But there will be another time. Hasta la vista, Senor Hakluyt,” he added, turning to me and putting out his hand. If you have time to spare before you leave Aguazul, perhaps it would interest you to pay another visit here and see how our transmitting system operates.”

I shook hands. “Certainly,” I said. “Thanks for the invitation.”

And that was an invitation I would take up, I told myself. Moreover, from now on I was going to look out rather carefully for proof of these assertions Mayor had made— about Aguazul being the most governed country in the world. It sounded to me like wishful thinking; the system, if indeed it operated at all, could hardly be faultless, if only because it was still necessary to call out the police to break up a riot brewing in the Plaza del Sur on the day of my arrival. Possibly it was true compared with the country’s neighbors or with its own past; I didn’t see that this precision to which Mayor made claim was borne out in practice. Unless—and this possibility I found peculiarly disturbing—unless the government did things like turning out the police simply because the people expected it of them. In that case the underlying assumption was that, if it chose, the government could abolish the meeting in the Plaza del Sur without anyone feeling the need for them afterwards.

Could it be like that? Could it? Angers had said something about Vados’s regime taking seriously the saw that a government stands or falls by its public relations…

I checked myself. I was building a dizzy tower of speculation on secondhand evidence. The only solid facts I had to go on were the fact of my being here, the nature of the job I’d been given, and what I had been able to find out with my own observation. And those combined to indicate that—Mayor’s assertions to the contrary—the government of Aguazul was a reasonably beneficent authoritarian regime, competently administering a rather prosperous country without treading so hard on anyone’s feet that people felt it worth the trouble of changing it. Twenty years’ duration testified to the success of the formula they used—Mayor’s, or whoever else’s it might be.

But “the most governed country in the world”? That was to be taken with a grain of salt.

“So you starred in a television program yesterday, Senor Hakluyt,” said a quiet, husky voice near me. I looked up from the paper I was reading with my breakfast coffee in the lounge of the Hotel del Principe and saw Maria Posador.

“Buenos dias, senora,” I said, indicating the empty chair beside me. “Yes, as a matter of fact I did. You saw the program?”

She sat down, unsmiling, not taking her eyes from my face. “No, I only heard about it,” she said. “It is too dangerous to watch television in Aguazul.”

“Too dangerous?”

She nodded. “You are a stranger in Vados, senor. I cannot blame you for that. But there is information I think it is my duty to give you.”

I searched her exquisite face for a hint of the real meaning behind her obscure words and failed. “Go ahead,” I shrugged. “I’m always willing to listen. Cigarette?”

“If you don’t mind, I prefer these of my own.” She slipped her gold case from her handbag; I held my lighter for her. Then she sat back in her chair and regarded me fixedly.

“You doubtless know,” she began, “that our Minister of Information and Communications is one Alejandro Mayor—a man of certain notoriety.”

“If being the author of a theory of government is a claim to notoriety, I suppose he qualifies,” I agreed.

“No longer a theory only,” corrected Senora Posador, and looked for a brief instant extremely unhappy. “A practical form.”

“It always seemed to me that he had something, when I read his stuff in college.”

“The senor will forgive a personal remark, but I judge that he is about in his late thirties, and his university studies would have been fifteen to twenty years ago, no? Much has changed since then. It would be best if you could read Mayor’s recent books, but they are substantial and very technical, and I do not believe any have been translated into English for many years. He has been too taken up with his duties in Vados— and in any case in most countries speaking English his precepts would be without value.”

“How come? It struck me that he spoke in pretty universal terms.”

“Oh, to some extent one may say so…” She delicately deposited ash in a tray at her side. “But—let us take this program on which you appeared yesterday. Did you find that it impressed you? Did it appeal to you, excite you?”

“I thought it was very well done and presented the facts in a balanced manner.”

She studied me again with those rich violet eyes. At last she shrugged. “There are indeed things you ought to know. Do you have one hour to spare, Senor Hakluyt? Unless I have badly misjudged your good nature, it will be of great interest to you.”

I couldn’t see what all this was leading up to; I said so. “And,” I added, “if you’re going to try to persuade me that what was said on TV last night was nonsense, you’re out of luck.”

She gave a wan little smile that penetrated her natural sophistication and made her seem suddenly appealing in a little-girl way. “No, I assure you—that is not my aim.”

Like tumblers spinning in a fruit machine, facts were clicking together in my head about this woman. But when they had meshed, they still failed to explain a lot of paradoxes: why she was a friend of Sam Francis, for example; why Angers had specifically warned me to steer clear of her.