Dreamsongs, Volume I by George R. R. Martin Page A

would notice him in a crowd. Fewer still would look closely enough to recognize the dead man who once had been Maximilian de Laurier.
    A half smile flickered across the dead man’s lips as he read one of the first-page stories. The headline read “De Laurier Fortune Liquidated” in prim gray type. Below, in smaller print, a somber subhead observed that “English Millionaire Vanishes; Friends Believe Money Deposited in Swiss Banks.”
    Yes, he thought. How appropriate. The man vanishes, but the money gets the headlines. I wonder what the papers will say a year from now? Something like “Heirs Await Reading of Will,” perhaps?
    His eyes left the article and wandered upward across the page, coming to rest on the lead story. He stared at the headline in silence, a frown set across his features. Then, slowly and carefully, he read the article.
    When he finished, de Laurier rose from the chair, folded the paper carefully, and dropped it over the rail into the murky green water that churned lustily in the liner’s wake. Then he shoved his hands into his jacket pockets and walked slowly back to his stateroom in the economy section of the ship. Below, the newspaper tumbled over and over in the turbulence caused by the great liner’s passing until it finally became waterlogged and sank. It came to rest at last on the muddy, rock-strewn bottom, where the silence and the darkness were eternal.
    And the crabs scuttled to and fro across the fading front-page photo of a stocky, square-faced man with bushy eyebrows and a crooked sneer.

    T HE PROPHET SWUNG E AST WITH A VENGEANCE, FOR HERE WAS THE homeland of the false seers who had led his people astray, here was the stronghold of those who opposed him. No matter. Here his crowds were even greater, and the sons and the grandsons of the immigrants of the last century were his to a man. So here Norvel Arlington Beauregard chose to attack his enemies in their own lair.
    “Ah’m for the little man,” he said in New York City. “Ah support the right of every American to rent his house or sell his goods to whoever he so chooses, without any interference by briefcase-toting bureaucrats and egghead professors who sit up in their ivory towers and decide how you and me have to live.”
    And the people cheered and cheered, and they waved their flags and said the Pledge of Allegiance, and chanted “Beauregard—Beauregard—Beauregard” over and over again until the arena rocked with the noise. And the Prophet grinned and waved happily, and the Eastern reporters who covered him shook their heads in disbelief and muttered dire things about “charisma” and “irony.”
    “Ah’m for the working man,” the Prophet told a great labor convention in Philadelphia. “And Ah say all these anarchists and demonstrators better damn well quit their yappin’ and go out and get jobs just like everybody else! You and me had to work for what we had, so why should they get pampered by the government? Why should you good folks have to pay taxes to support a bunch of lazy, ignorant bums who don’t want to work anyway?”
    The crowd roared its approval, and the Prophet clenched his fist and shook it above his head in triumph. For the Word had touched the souls of the workers and the laborers, the strainers and the sweaters, the just-haves of a nation. And they were his. They would follow false gods no longer.
    So they all stood up and sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” together.

    I N N EW Y ORK, M AXIM DE L AURIER CAUGHT THE FIRST BUS FROM CUSTOMS to the heart of Manhattan. He carried only one small suitcase packed with clothing, so he did not bother to stop at a hotel. Instead, he went straight towards the financial district, to one of the city’s largest banks.
    “I’d like to cash a check,” he said to a teller. “On my bank in Switzerland.” He scribbled in his checkbook sloppily, ripped the page loose, and shoved it across the counter.
    The teller’s eyebrows shot up slightly as he noticed