The Lights of Skaro

by David Dodge

  The rokos never said a word. When the cart was as empty as they wanted it, one nodded curtly and made a flicking motion with his fingers; go along. The peasant began to reload his cart. The rokos walked over to us, followed by the squad of soldiers.

  I had got out of the truck. There was a small opening in the back of the cab through which we could look back at the girls, but all I could see through it was bare legs and ankles. It wasn’t enough to tell me what was going on. With the steaming radiator as an excuse to move around instead of sitting there watching my hands shake, I brought a can of water from the roadside ditch, then another, and afterwards went round feeling the treads of the thin tires. I did that partly to restore the dirt that had washed off my hands, partly to keep my head down. For a time I considered crawling under the truck to peer at the transmission, but boldness was our cue, not furtiveness. I tried to feel bold.

  The girls were singing ‘Brotherhood and Unity’ again. Cora had already picked up the words and sang with the others. The rokos looked into the truck cab, staring silently and ominously at Piotr for half a minute, then came around to where I crouched by a wheel and turned the same stare on me.

  It made sweat crawl down my back, although I knew the long, wordless, menacing look was only routine. They had no reason to expect abnormal fear reactions from two men with a Party truck. They passed me by to stare at the girls. It was a different kind of stare, this time.

  The girls had Cora boxed in the middle of the chorus. Karsta flanked her on one side, another big girl on the other. Sidik and Fatma, the two prettiest of the lot, stood in front of her at the tail of the truck, selling their song, and themselves, directly to the rokos.

  The rokos’ slow look crept over bare legs and arms and half-exposed breasts, inch by inch. Watching them, I thought of slugs crawling on naked flesh. The girls smiled and flirted and teased to hold their attention. Sidik wiggled her round hips in time to the music. One of the rokos, the larger of the pair, said something in an undertone to his partner. It was not a joke.

  The soldiers were grinning and whispering, nudging each other and enjoying the leg show as any squad of soldiers would have done anywhere. The fun was normal, harmless. The big roko’s fixed stare at Sidik was neither.

  He was a particularly ugly man even for a roko. Most of them, for all their size, were lean, rock-hard. This man was gross, with a big belly and rolls of fat cushioning his neck. His hands were enormous, broad, and fat-fingered. His face was as huge and round and blubbery as the rest of him, but bulging fat jowls and a narrowness of cranium between the eyes gave it the pear-shaped outline of an orang-utan’s muzzle. The ape resemblance was even more pronounced because of his flat nose and abnormally wide, abnormally thin-lipped mouth. Only his eyes failed to match. They were lizard eyes; small, cold, bright, unwinking. They saw nothing but Sadik, the tantalizing sway of her hips, the movements of her slim young body as she sang and postured and flirted to hold attention away from Cora.

  I saw what was going to happen while the orang-utan was still making up his mind. I wish I had not seen it. It did something to me from which I can never recover.

  Piotr, still in the cab of the truck, could not know what was going on. Had he been standing beside me it would not have made any difference in the outcome, with two of us against two rokos and four armed soldiers. But the decision would not have been wholly mine to make. When the rokotook his first slow step forward, following with his gross animal being the magnetism that already fixed his lizard eyes, I knew he was going to pull Sidik out of the truck. Nothing could stop him once he reached for her with those blubbery paws; certainly nothing I could do. It would be like throwing myself against a tank. All I could win by attacking him was a beating and our betrayal. We would all – Cora, Piotr, the girls and I – go down together into what Sidik faced alone. I could not possibly save her, by any stretch of imagination. Yet the alternative was to stand there, sickly cringing, and watch that sub-human creature pull her out of the truck, overpower her struggles while he flicked his contemptuous dismissing ‘go along’ at me with his thick fingers, then climb cravenly into the truck cab to tell Piotr I had abandoned Sidik to the sub-humans to save the rest of us. How he might react was not part of my dilemma. It involved only my own manhood, not his. IfSidik screamed when we drove away and left her, would her screams be any less agonizing because she screamed alone instead of together with the rest of us? Could I, having made the decision to abandon her, listen to her screaming with any less agony because the decision was more sensible than throwing myself and nine other people away in a futile, hopeless, senseless charge at the monstrous animal who was moving towards her?

  I didn’t know. I couldn’t answer. I could only cringe, waiting for the animal to take the few steps that would force decision.

  4

  The decision was never mine to make. The second roko had better sense, or more caution, than his partner. The monster had only begun to move towards the truck before the other man caught his arm. I heard him say, “… the Party, fool!” and “…both shot!—” but the monster paid no attention. He was an animal pulling against a leash. Still with his cold lizard eyes fixed on Sidik, he tried to shake off the restraining hand. His partner, unable to hold him back for more than a moment, jerked his head at me: Go!

  It was the only time I ever co-operated willingly with a roko. I ran round to the front of the truck and spun the crank. Piotr was alert. The engine caught. The truck was moving before I jumped into my seat. We rattled out on the bridge with the girls still singing ‘Brotherhood and Unity’. I doubt that Sidik, or any of them, had even seen her danger.

  I wiped my wet face. My hands were shaking again.

  Piotr said, “What happened?”

  “Sidik almost overdid it. One of the rokos was getting ready to drag her out of the truck.”

  “How did you stop it?”

  “I didn’t. The other man gave me the sign to go before it happened. It was close.”

  Piotr didn’t speak for a while. In time he said, wearily, “Sometimes I wonder if non-violence, by itself against beast minds—” He shook his head. A moment later he said, “Sidik is my sister.”

  We spoke no more about it.

  When we bumped across the cobbles of the town square the loudspeakers were booming ‘Politika’, the music that usually preceded an important announcement from the capital. I wanted to hear what was coming, but Piotr didn’t think we should stop. He was a true peasant, uneasy in a big town. I argued, trying not to hint at too much, that the announcement might concern us directly, and that it was important for us to hear it.

  The girls had picked up ‘Politika’, and were singing with the speakers, making a lot of noise. While Piotr was still scowling, unwilling to stop before he reached the safety of the countryside, a traffic cop waved us down and shouted at the singers to shut up and pay attention. Comrade PresidentRadovič was about to deliver a message to his people.

  There was a scurry in the back of the truck. Cora, kneeling, put her face into the little opening between Piotr’s shoulder and mine.

  “Did you hear that?”

  She spoke in English. I answered in English.

  “It’s only another recording.”

  “I know it. But if it’s important enough to use his voice, it’s important. Tell Piotr to stop.”

  “The traffic cop told him to stop. We have to listen, whether we like it or not.”

  We listened.

  That speech, the first major political pronouncement to come over the loudspeakers in three days, was a shocker even to Cora and me, who were half expecting it. To the citizens of the Republic it was crushing. We saw it in Piotr’s face, and in the faces of people who stopped in the town square to listen to Radovič’s old, tired, but still magnificently compelling voice speak the words that had been put into his mouth and mouthed by him into a recorder, preserved for use as snake venom is preserved in a vial. For six months the same voice had been promising the Republic a
new future: peace and understanding with the West, renewed friendly international relations, relief from the burden of a crushing military establishment, relaxation of the restrictions that bound them at home, all the benefits that were to flow from the Party’s new attitude towards the rest of the world. There had been real hope and promise in the voice when it announced the few meagre first concessions of the new order: Yoreska’s suspension of night-time arrests, an amnesty for a few classes of political prisoners, cancellation of some rationing. There was no hope in the voice now, no promise. Only the rolling, familiar words of hate.

  “… slave owners, these terror plutocrats, these dehumanized bandits of the West, and the scum dregs of humanity ... carrion vultures of predatory imperialism dedicated to their unending attack on the camp of peace and brotherhood … despoilers of living men and violators of culture, bandits, hypocrites, and bloodsuckers ...”

  Piotr put his head down on his arms, which were folded on the steering wheel, and seemed to slump. There was no sound but the boom of the voice from the speakers, no movement in the square. The traffic cop who had stopped us stood at rigid attention. Other people in the square shifted their feet now and then. They looked at the ground, never at each other. No one walked away.

  The voice continued.

  “… accepting, with one hand, the freely offered clasp of friendship, striking treacherously with the other at ourdefenseless backs … spies, agents provocateurs, fascist lackies, mass butchers … infiltrating the People’s Free Federal Republic to sabotage, destroy, and kill … murderously envious of our progress, striking at our gains … have produced a dangerous crisis.”

  The voice paused. Its weariness was engraved on the recording with the words it spoke.

  “A crisis, comrades. We are in danger. We have been betrayed by those in whom we placed our trust, by traitors of our own blood, working hand-in-hand with a loathsome pack of international gangsters. The traitors have paid with their lives. The spies, saboteurs, and agents of pitiless hate they brought within our borders to poison your minds and bodies still survive, a cancerous growth in our national bosom. Drastic counter-measures will be necessary to hunt them down and root them out; flesh, even sound flesh, must feel the knife and the pain of the cauterizing iron so that the whole body can survive. I call upon you, comrades – you who have followed me in the past, you who struggled and fought and bled with me to build the shining towers and brave hopes of the People’s Free Federal Republic – rally to me once again. Accept with fortitude the burdens which must be laid upon your shoulders. We are fighting for our existence! Steel your wills! Close ranks behind your leaders! Strike without pity at those who speak the words of defeatists, apologists, diversionists, spies, and saboteurs! Our salvation lies in iron discipline, obedience to authority, and undying hatred for the enemies who would destroy us. Together in this stern resolve we will survive! Long live the Party of the common man! Long live the People’s Free Federal Republic!”

  There was a click from the speakers, a hum, another click, music. The song was the ‘Internationale’: Arise, ye prisoners of starvation; arise, ye wretched of the earth.

  The traffic cop came out of his stiff attention, waving us to go on. People began to move across the square.

  Piotr lifted his head.

  “Tell the girls to cheer,” he said.

  Cora passed the word. The girls cheered Comrade President Radovič, Brotherhood and Unity, the Republic, the Party, farm collectivization. The last cheer got us beyond the town limits. There was no cheering afterwards, nor singing.

  Cora brought her face again to the little opening between Piotr’s shoulder and mine. Piotr kept his eyes steadily on the road, paying no attention to either of us.

  The speech had hit him hard. All the life seemed to have gone out of him. He must certainly have realized by then, if he hadn’t known it before, that he was helping a couple of the spy-saboteur-fascist-mass-butcher-criminal-gangster group, and recognized the real extent of the danger we were to him and his girls. But that wasn’t what depressed him.

  He said at last, slowly, “Before I was Djakovo’s man, I was Radovič’s man. I fought with him in the revolution. Before I saw the wrong in bloodshed, I killed men for his cause.”

  Cora said, “It was a good cause when he led it, Piotr.”

  “It was never a good cause. And he still leads it. I helped put him in power.” Piotr’s big hands tightened on the steering wheel. “By shedding blood, gospodična. Do you know what it is to listen to a man speak like that and realize that you have killed other men to put him where he is? Do you wonder now why I follow Djakovo and hate violence?”

  He was doing a terrible penance behind his wooden impassivity. It wasn’t fair to him to let him go on believing what he did. I could see no real danger, to him or to us, in telling him the truth about Radovič. Cora, from her expression, felt the same.

  We were a working team now. Nobody led, nobody followed. I said, again in English, “What do you think?”

  “He ought to know. He must know, Jess.”

  “You’re the only one who can tell it properly.”

  “I can’t tell it from here. My knees—”

  The truck hit a bump. She winced at the shock to her bare kneecaps where she knelt on the planks of the truck bed.

  I said, “She has something to tell you, Piotr. Can she come up here?”

  He thought about it and shook his head.

  “It isn’t safe. The next town is forty kilometers from here, but if we pass a Security patrol they might stop us. Your two faces side by side could give you away. Also, gospodična, you must remember that whatever knowledge I share with you—”

  “You’ve got to share this!’ Cora answered fiercely. “You asked for the truth about Djakovo! You’ve got to listen to the truth about Radovič!”

  I think I began really to admire her, as a woman and a human being, during the half hour she knelt there in what must have been extreme discomfort, even pain, so she could tell Piotr the story of Janos Radovič. The story might have waited for a more convenient time and place. But we were never sure from minute to minute how long we were going to last, and what she knew was the only thing that could cure Piotr’s sickness of mind. She gave up the skin on her knees to do it. If it sounds like a small contribution, anyone who is inclined to write it off cheaply might try kneeling barelegged for ten or fifteen miles on the banging, poorly-sprung, brutally-punishing hard bed of an old truck travelling along a bumpy road, without so much as a sack or a coat or an extra garment available to protect knees from splinters, and no other position possible except an equally uncomfortable and more precarious squat on blistered heels. Cora earned her news beat retroactively, even if she had not earned it when she made it.

  In a way, I set the beat up for her. Involuntarily, of course. We were still competing at the time.

  Censorship clamped down tightly on the Republic after Djakovo’s escape. News stopped flowing either way, In or Out. Except for Oliver’s fast action with his airmail letter to me, none of us inside would have known about the storm of feeling against the Republic that was brewing outside. Djakovo’s story, his obvious honesty and lack of bitterness when he told of the oppression he and his followers had fought with their peaceful weapons, stirred up feeling in America and Western Europe that cost an important pro-Party French cabinet minister his job and set off hot debates on the floor of the United States Senate and the British House of Commons about the decency of resuming friendly national relations with a government composed of thugs. The minute the story broke, A.N.A., A.P., Reuters, Ullstein and France-Presse began firing useless confirm confirm confirm cables at us, trying to crack the censorship.

  None of the cables got through. None of the news, not even the fact of the escape, leaked into the Republic’s controlled press, which continued to sell peaceful co-existence and the extended hand of friendship to the West. I was probably the only man in the Republic, except for Yoreska and Bulič, who had any
idea of what was boiling. Cora, through Danitza, learned only that Djakovo had got out of the country, without details, although she was shrewd enough to guess a connection between what he must have said for publication, the reaction it would have produced, and the counter-measures Yoreska took immediately. As I did, as any reporter would have done, she kept what she knew or could guess to herself. Heinz, Léon, and Graham didn’t hear of Djakovo’s break until Yoreska called another press conference to tell them, us, and the Outside about it simultaneously.

  The Inside heard a different message. One thing which the Party never permitted in any circumstances was a dissemination of news demonstrating the failures and incompetence of the Party hierarchy. Members of the hierarchy lost their jobs, and their heads, from time to time, but never as true Party members. Before the axe fell it was always discovered that they were secret saboteurs in the pay of anti-Party foreign powers, invariably responsible for whatever disasters befell the Republic. Djakovo’s escape, from the Party viewpoint, was such a disaster. Had news of it been made public Inside, heads would have had to roll. Bulič’s head would have been one of them, and Yoreska was not prepared to write Bulič off. He must have given Bulič a terrific tongue-lashing, but it was done in private. Beyond that, Yoreska ignored Bulič’s failure and worked like a master to overcome its effects.

  His effort was a full-dress production number. He brought Radovič out of wraps to make a speech in the flesh.

  Ordinarily Radovič’s public appearances were not occasions for speech-making. They did better with him on a recording machine, because when he faltered in the delivery of the words they wrote for him to read, the tape could be cut and pasted together to preserve the continuity of his fine voice after they had taken whatever steps were necessary to cure the faltering. On this occasion the damage Djakovo had done to the Party program was so great that they had to wheel out their strongest weapons for a counter-attack. A live speech by President Radovič in the presence of representatives of the foreign press was one of the weapons.