"You just made my day, Val", she said, pushing her way through the donation seekers again.
They emerged from the crowd, where another policeman made sure the donation seekers didn't step out into the "sidewalks" and grass of the Mall.
"When can I see the senator?" Valentine asked.
She consulted a clock projecting from the wall ahead. "They're in session for another hour. Want to watch from the senatorial gallery?"
Valentine shrugged. "I could use a shower".
"You can use the one off my unit. Staffers have to share bathrooms, though".
They passed an overlarge team of gardeners taking care of a set of trees and
she took him to another elevator bank. She showed her card to the operator inside, who punched a button for 26 and the elevator descended.
The tunnel level 26 was a good deal rougher, about fourteen feet high and still circular, painted in a cheery soft yellow that had gone dingy, with exposed conduits and pipes running the ceiling. This part was not as well lit; only one light in three even had a bulb. It snaked along in a long bend of about three degrees, Valentine guessed. Seven-foot-high blue cubicle separators closed off by shower curtains divided the tunnel on either side. Some had "roofs"; others were open to the tunnel ceiling.
The cubicle panels were decorated with family pictures, cartoons, even old pictures taken from what Valentine guessed to be calendars.
"This is mine", she said, stopping at a roofless cubicle. Her "door" was a quilt of old materials, mostly faded logos from T-shirts. A Rodgers and Hammerstein Oklahoma! poster decorated the outside, a 2016 Broadway production with the cast either rootin' or tootin' energetically in splashy colors. She also had a semifamous black-and-white photo of a tired-looking guerrilla, his back to an old oak, keeping watch while an old man, a woman, and two kids slept in a huddle.
"Hope you live here alone", Valentine said.
"I do, unfortunately. Marrieds and cohabitants get more space - families even get their own toilet. But this is really pretty nice. Downstairs the service staff really just gets a barrack bed with some privacy curtains hanging down. Yeah, the cubicle paneling smells musty, but it absorbs noise like a sponge. I could never sleep in a barrack".
"Consider the criticism withdrawn", Valentine said.
"Let me just grab you a towel and some soap". She ducked into her cube.
It was hard to say which was rougher, the towel or the grainy soap, but Valentine made use of them in the common shower room, a tiled-wall area in a dimple off the main passage. At least the water was deliciously hot. She gave him a tour of the rest of "her" level. They passed other dimples along the way - one had a television and four
battered lounge chairs. Valentine was shocked to recognize Kurian Zone programming.
"Actually, their stuffs popular, not that any of us have much to compare it to. We do our own news, of course. Majoritarian news at five and nine, Minoritarian at five thirty and nine thirty. Every now and then they show a movie or a TV series from the Old World, but I don't like to watch those. Shallow, stupid stuff. The real old movies are better. Have you ever seen Gone with the Wind?"
"I like it. Don't knock shallow. Any culture that can put that much effort into entertainment about who is dating whom has all the big Maslow-sized problems pretty much solved".
She pointed to an old magazine cover on a staffer's cubicle. "Everyone was so pretty back then. About the only way we look like them is thin. Thin we can do".
They traveled back up in another elevator with a yawning attendant and she took him to the end of the Mall. After another ID check and search they went up another escalator to a sports and meeting arena, a vast open area under reinforcing girders.
The Senate held court from a ring of upholstered club chairs circling a wooden floor with old basketball markings. Little groups of three and four people down on the first level sat together, talking or listening to the senator addressing chambers from a round platform in the center with a podium that slowly rotated. The nonsenatorial watched from the old plastic chairs; every now and then one was missing in the rows, giving the audience area a gap-toothed look compared with the last arena Valentine had been in, the horror show under the Pyramid in Memphis.
The senators had real clothing, it looked like, complete with ties and shined leather shoes.
"One faction in the House wants to set up basketball league play again", Ducks said quietly. "The Senate keeps killing it, says having the Senate break for a game would destroy the dignity of the chamber".
"They're just scared because basketball would draw a bigger crowd", a man a couple of rows behind said.
"Mount Omega can't raise chickens for anything, but we can sure breed cynics", she muttered.
Valentine tried to catch the thread of the speech. The young man kept pausing and saying "hummmm", from beneath a generous overbite.
"McCaffee isn't much of a speaker", Ducks said. "But he is a third-generation senator, and half the Majoritarians owe his family favors".
"So those are senators in the big chairs?" Valentine asked. "They're not thin".
"Privileges of constitutional office".