Victoria: A Novel of 4th Generation War

by Thomas Hobbes

  We had a network, established in the 1990s by the Marine Corps, that tied us into scientists who were specialists in biological warfare and genetic engineering. I immediately pulled a team together to go to Boston and figure out what we were facing. If it was genetically engineered, we needed to find out how before we could develop a vaccine.

  Meanwhile, the black returnees continued to die. We had comm with them, of course, so the picture was clear. Just as in the Middle Ages, the houses filled up with dead, the living too weak to drag out the bodies. Some dropped in the street, where the dogs and rats feasted on them.

  We sent every medicine we had, but none made any difference. Some white doctors and nurses went in as volunteers. Since this plague took at least six weeks before symptoms appeared, they could relieve some suffering before they too went down. By then, we hoped to have a cure.

  The scientists worked frantically, but without success. The problem was, there were many ways bubonic plague or any other disease could be genetically engineered to get around the usual vaccines and medicines. Finding which genes had been altered and how took time–too much time for those who had been infected. By the end of September, they were all dead, including the local residents who had remained and the volunteers who had gone in to succor them. Roxbury was a cemetery.

  Yet even as they died, those black Christians accomplished something. They did not rage or rail or issue demands. They prayed together, and died together, quietly helping bear one another's burdens to the end with a Christian patience that inspired us all. In so doing, they worked powerfully to change many whites' late 20th century image of blacks from whiners who always demanded something for nothing or punks with guns to an older, truer picture: a good, faithful people who suffered without complaint and humbly served both God and their neighbor. In a society that was beginning once again to accept such qualities as virtues, that was no small legacy. It did much to ensure that blacks had a solid future in the Northern Confederation.

  Nor did their deaths go unavenged. In the Muslim countries where Boston's blacks had been sold as slaves, the buy-back program had slowly gathered them in camps, in preparation for the POW exchange. There, they had been injected with the engineered plague. The Islamics thought this safe enough, since the disease took about six weeks to manifest symptoms and was not contagious until it did. That was plenty of time for them to be shipped off to the infidel.

  Only now it wasn't because we had halted the exchange. So the plague broke out in the camps. There, too, the blacks died, but in the process they infected their guards. Arab countries not being noted for their efficiency, their quarantines had holes in them, and the bacteria crawled through. Soon, plague was raging through the slums of Cairo, Istanbul, Tehran, and Islamabad. By the Fall of 2029, thousands were dead or dying and hundreds of thousands were infected.

  We still held the Islamic POWs, and I thought turnabout was fair play. I asked our scientists to come up with a different genetically engineered variant of plague, one that would mimic the symptoms of the Islamic variant but not respond to the same vaccines or treatments. Genetic engineering had become all too easy in the 21st century. Some teenagers working in a basement in Stockholm cooked up one bug that gave a week-long case of diarrhea to anyone who ate either rutabaga or herring, thus wiping out Swedish cuisine. We had the right stuff in a couple weeks' time, and as soon as we had inculcated it in the POWs by mixing it with their hummus, we sent them home. Our blacks were dead or dying, so the POWs were no longer of any value to us as commodities.

  The Islamics took us for fools, welcomed their heroes with open arms, and ended up with a mix of plagues it took them three years to sort out, at the price of millions of dead. It was a small lesson in not playing games that advanced, disciplined societies could play better.

  Governor Kraft's gut instinct had saved us from a similar catastrophe, but it had been a close call. The lesson, once again, was that closed borders were essential to survival. It wasn't just movements of people that had to be controlled. It was easy enough to send a bacillus by shipping container or mixed in a bulk commodity. Foreign trade fell drastically throughout the world as every import had to be quarantined, examined, and tested. Only what was local was safe, and even at home we developed a neighborhood watch to report any suspicious basement laboratories. This didn't require a police state. People were eager volunteers, because they knew the mortal danger genetic engineering posed to everyone.

  It was funny, at least for those with a sense of irony, the way Americans in the early 21st century had howled about the stupid mistakes of earlier generations in pursuing “better living through chemistry” and similar scientific great leaps forward. As they scorned their forefathers, they made the same blunder on a vaster scale. Genetic engineering rolled Frankenstein's monster, “The Fly,” and the Black Death all into one, yet they hailed it. Computers reduced their operators to mindless androids while hooking them on the drug of virtual reality, yet they were the miracle machine no one could do without.

  It wasn't a case of those not knowing the past repeating it. They knew, yet they repeated it anyway. That's what brings civilizations to their end.

  We in the Northern Confederation were lucky, once again. We figured out early what everyone who survived earned eventually. Just because a technology exists doesn't mean you have to use it. Those who depart from the ways of their ancestors do so at their peril.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  By the 21st century, America had become a country of many universities and little education. Her colleges were mostly diploma mills crossed with asylums for the politically insane: howling Bluestockings, inventors of Afrocentric history, mewling advocates for the blind, the botched, and the bewildered. Frequently, these defectives pooled their neuroses and formed a coalition that took over the campus, turning it into a small, ivy covered North Korea. Any student who dared dispute their ideology of cultural Marxism swiftly felt the hand of revolutionary justice.

  Students still arrived, despite appalling tuition bills, because they needed the sheepskin. America had come to value credentials over performance, so anyone without a college degree remained a bottom-feeder for life. Universities were a classic socialist set-up: a monopoly that produced crap at high prices. Many were little more than vending machines; insert your $250,000, pull the lever, and get your diploma.

  Inflation proved the ax that finally killed the silly goose. The American republic’s final hyperinflation wiped out college endowments, destroyed the middle class that footed the tuition bills, and finally made worthless the massive government grants and subsidies most universities had come to depend on. The professors were still paid, but in money worth so little a month's paycheck couldn't cover lunch. It got so bad some of them had to go out and get jobs.

  The break-up of the union and the fall of Washington closed the doors of every college and university. Young people had real work to do, and no state government had spare cash to fund phony education. Frankly, nobody much missed institutions that had long since abandoned their function, which was passing the higher elements of our culture on to the next generation. So it was something of a surprise, in early September, 2029, to see students once again matriculating. The way it happened was even more surprising.

  Sometime in March, an organization based in Zurich called the Foundation for Higher Learning had approached the former presidents of Yale, Harvard and Dartmouth and asked whether they could start their schools going again if funding were provided. They said they could, and immediately found themselves with a hundred million Swiss francs each–an enormous sum in our poverty-stricken economy. Lured by huge salaries, their professors re-gathered. Students were offered full scholarships, plus stipends that amounted to enough money to feed a whole family. People without much cash realized their college-age son or daughter could be their main wage-earner, and applications poured in.

  At the time, I'd been occupied with both the Boston problem and our succession crisis, and I hadn't paid the
whole business much mind. Three hundred million Swiss francs was an economic Godsend, because it enabled us to increase our money supply. It was many times what we were earning in foreign exchange from all our exports put together.

  I had gotten a nose full of political correctness at Bowdoin, so I guess I should have known what to expect. But that seemed ages ago, and I figured reality would impress itself on campuses just as it had on the rest of our society.

  I was wrong. Quickly, all the old games started up again. The course catalogues were filled with crap like “Women in Judeo-Christian Societies: Three Thousand Years of Phallic Oppression and the Symbolism of the Bagel,” “The African Origins of Chaos Theory” (a course which was quickly denounced as insensitive and withdrawn), and “Salons in the Camp: Lesbian Contributions to Line and Column Tactics in 18th Century European Warfare.”

  An informal contest developed among the three colleges to see which could be the most PC. The Harvard faculty collectively led a love-in that “introduced students to the richness of man-boy relationships.” Yale countered with an “auto-da-fe” in which every heterosexual male student had to choose a sin from a PC list – “sexism,” “homophobia,” “good table manners,” and so forth, and parade around campus wearing a signboard bearing their confession. Dartmouth erected a Temple of Artemis in the center of the green and forced all male students to prostrate themselves before the goddess, on pain of expulsion it they refused.

  Seeking to establish itself as the best of the worst, Dartmouth called a faculty workshop for October 12, Columbus Day, “to discover means for reversing Eurocentrism and white male domination over the North American continent.” Faculty leaders from Yale and Harvard were invited to attend.

  On October 2, I received a note from Governor Kraft me to asking meet with him the next day and to bring along Ron Danielov, head of our Special Operations forces. We gathered in his small office that afternoon.

  “Are you both familiar with what is happening in our so-called institutions of higher learning?” Bill opened.

  “I guess everybody is,” Ron replied. “It's in all the newspapers. I can tell you, people aren't happy about it. We all thought we were through with this kind of crap.”

  “We soon will be,” Kraft replied. “As usual, there is more to it than meets the eye. Do you know where these colleges are getting their funding?”

  “From some foundation in Switzerland,” I said.

  “That's a front,” Bill replied. “Some friends in Europe did a little sniffing around for me. The real source of the money is the UN, specifically UNESCO, the UN’s cultural branch. It’s been a den of vipers for as long as anyone can remember. Now, with UN money, it hopes to poison us the same way it's poisoned so many other places. Only that's not going to happen.”

  “Where do we come in?” I inquired.

  “Conveniently, the worst malefactors are gathering at Dartmouth College on October 12,” Bill answered. “They are meeting in Dartmouth Hall, in room 105, which is a small auditorium. I'm going to be there.”

  “Do they know that?” I asked.

  “No, and they won't until I walk in,” Bill replied.

  “Mightn't that be a bit dangerous?” I cautioned.

  “I intend it to be dangerous–for them,” Bill answered.

  “Here’s my plan, and here’s where you come in, sergeant. About mid-morning, I will crash their meeting. I’m simply going to barge in, march up to the front and grab the mic. There, I'll explain what political correctness really is and why we will not tolerate it, or its advocates, in the Northern Confederation.”

  “Sergeant, I need two things from you. First, I need snipers concealed in 105 Dartmouth where they can cover the stage. If any of the freaks, phonies, or faggots try to rush me or shout me down, I want them shot. They are going to hear this speech whether they want to or not.”

  “No problem,” Ron replied. “I hope you don't mind if I’m one of those snipers myself. I’d enjoy taking a few of those bastards out.”

  “Be my guest,” Bill answered. “But you still need to be able to run the second part of the operation. Once I've said my piece and left the stage, I want a massacre. I don’t want a single one of those idiot-logues to leave that room alive.”

  “Press will be there, so you can't just blow the building up,” the governor continued. “I want to kill the people who’ve earned death, but no one else. And I want the media, including television, to record and report the whole thing, in every detail.”

  I was taken aback by Kraft's sudden bloodlust. In the past, we had generally been careful to minimize casualties, especially among people who were at least nominally our countrymen. Knowing a General Staff officer has no right to keep his opinions to himself, I spoke up.

  “Excuse me, but there’s something here I don’t get,” I said. “When the Vermont Deep Greeners led an actual revolt, we made every effort to avoid killing them. Now we've got a bunch of crazy professors just holding a meeting, and we’re going to slaughter them like so many pigs. Why?”

  “A good question, captain,” Governor Kraft replied. “It has two answers.”

  “First, the Deep Greeners were deluded, but they were not deluders. They had swallowed the poison of ideology, but they did not know it as such. They thought what they were doing was good. And a proper concern for the environment is good. We Christians call it stewardship. They had simply gone too far, in both their goals and their choice of means.

  “Because they erred, they had to pay a price, and they did. The price was banishment. Had we set their lives as the price, we would have gone too far. It is useful to remind ourselves that we are all fools on occasion.

  “It is otherwise with the slime now oozing its way toward Dartmouth College,” the governor continued. “These people are not the ensnared, but the setters of snares. They are the deluders, the tricksters, the deceivers who serve the One Deceiver.

  “They know political correctness is bunk, and deconstruction a mere parlor game with words. Why do you think they devote their efforts so assiduously to youth? Young people have not seen enough of life to tell what is real from what is not. So they drink the poison unaware.

  “This mutilation of innocence in the service of death, the death of culture and the death of truth, deserves death. That is what it shall receive. Let it be to each according to his works.

  “And that leads into the second answer to your question,” Kraft went on. “By giving each what he has earned—which is to say, by acting justly—we make the point that at least in the Northern Confederation, our culture, Western culture, is recovering its will. We are no longer afraid to act on what we know is right. You know Von Seeckt's saying, captain: Das wesentlilche ist die Tat.

  “Oh, we've known, most of us anyway, that what was preached in our universities was garbage. Most of the students themselves have known it, ever since political correctness reared its ugly backside in our faces in the late 1960s.

  “But we were cowed. We were frightened out of acting on what we knew, because we were told it wasn’t nice, it wasn’t tolerant, it didn't respect the rights of others. Those arguments were themselves provided by the politically correct, to create the opening wedge for an ideology that, once empowered, showed not the slightest shred of tolerance for any dissent, or dissenters.

  “But that's all done with. We're becoming men again. Men have the will to act. This act, I promise you, will speak in a voice no one can misunderstand. This trumpet will not sound uncertain.”

  The governor turned to Danielov. “So then, can you give me my massacre?” he asked.

  “Easily,” Ron replied. “Our snipers are good enough to take out the right people and not hit the wrong people, even in a melee, which this will become as soon as the first shots are fired.

  “But I think there’s a better way,” he continued. “You want to send a signal that we are recovering our will. Killing our enemies does that, but I think how we kill them can make the signal stronger.

>   “In killing, the hardest thing to do, the greatest challenge to the will, is to kill up close, with cold steel–to plunge your sword or bayonet or dagger into your enemy’s guts and twist. Will you allow us to do it that way here?”

  “I like it. Yes!” Governor Kraft replied. Let the trumpet sound loud and clear.”

  “What about the women?” I asked.

  “These women despise anyone who looks upon them as women,” Kraft responded. “They spit on the word lady. If a man opens a door for them, they kick him in the shins. They demand to be treated equally. Let it be unto them according to their wish.”

  Ron knew what was wanted, so I left it to him to make the arrangements. Precisely because I still wasn’t comfortable with the idea of a massacre, I felt a need to be in Hanover on October 12th. I needed to show myself that I could do what I was ordered even when I was uncomfortable with it. On the other hand, I didn't want Danielov to think I was looking over his shoulder, and I knew I’d be recognized. The targets might suspect something if they spotted the Chief of the General Staff wandering around town.

  In the end, I decided just to go home to Hartland, where I could get a better sense of the public’s reaction. I wasn’t at all sure our folks were ready for this. Up home, I was still just “that Rumford kid,” and people would let me know in a hurry what they were really thinking.

  On the morning of the 12th, I hitched up the wagon and headed into town. The general store had a generator, powered by a turbine in the stream that flowed by the tannery, because they still had a good-sized freezer. The ice cream in the freezer plus a television made the store the town social center. There’d be enough of a crowd that I’d get a good sense of public opinion.

  The PC congress at Dartmouth was well known to folks, since the papers had been talking about the affair at some length. When I got to the store around 9:30, a good crowd had gathered, and they had hard words for the goings-on. Time had not dimmed their memories of what was worst about the old USA, and this political correctness crap was at the top of the list. More than one neighbor said we ought to take the lot of ‘em out and shoot 'em. I took that as a good sign, but still wasn’t sure how people would react when we actually did it.