Victoria: A Novel of 4th Generation War

by Thomas Hobbes

  Cascadia had yearly elections to its governing body, a 3,000-member General Assembly that met only once, to elect a thirteen-member governing board called Paleopitus. For the rest of the year Paleopitus ran the show. The election of 2031 put four Deep Greeners on the Paleopitus. That year, Cascadia introduced an annual Air Tax of 20 percent of total assets, in return for which the taxpayer got a license that allowed him to breathe. It adopted the French Revolutionary calendar, in which the names of the months reflected the seasons and all Jewish and Christian holidays were eliminated. All cars except those propelled by electricity or pedals were banned, and by law, if a car hit an animal, the car had to be destroyed. One amendment even ordered the removal of all automobile windshields on the grounds that they killed beneficial insects.

  In 2032, the Deep Greeners attained a majority on the Paleopitus and the gloves came off. All killing of animals was forbidden and the sale, possession, or eating of meat was outlawed. Anyone caught “carnivoring” was executed with a sledgehammer blow to the head. Pedestrians were compelled to sweep the sidewalk in front of them lest they step on a bug. Worship of the Earth Goddess, Gaia, was made Cascadia’s state religion. People who refused to dance around the sacred Maypole had their children taken from them to be reared as Gaian Vestals—boys as well as girls—while the parents were condemned to slave labor demolishing Cascadia’s dams, its only remaining source of electricity. The dams, it seemed, were offensive to fish.

  By 2033, Cascadian cities and towns were organized into “goves” where everyone was encouraged to denounce everyone else for the crime of “Ecocide.” Swatting flies or mosquitoes, pulling weeds, or owning a flush toilet all counted. Trial came before Green Courts where animals made up the jury. A seer interpreted their votes, which were always guilty. The automatic penalty was revocation of your breathing license, followed by tying a plastic bag over your head.

  The bag, of course, was reusable.

  That summer, at the Solstice Festival, the eleven Deep Green members of Paleopitus pushed the two remaining Light Greeners into the grizzly bear pit, annulled the elections as a waste of paper and announced they were gods. The official pronouncement of their divinity stated that “all creatures are filled with the Goddess, but some are fuller than others.” There was no hint of irony, probably because humor had been outlawed as a Waste of Air.

  By this time, a majority of Cascadians had learned their lesson about environmental ideologues. They were cold, hungry, and frightened. But they had another lesson yet to learn: getting rid of totalitarians is a great deal harder than inviting them in. The Deep Greeners had created an efficient police state, enforced by stooges who received “Gaia’s Offerings” of fuel, warm clothes, food—including meat—“given by a Nature grateful for their worship.” In Cascadia as in Stalin’s Russia, mass deprivation was itself the most effective tool for control, because anyone exempted from it was utterly loyal from the understandable terror of being hurled down again amongst the hungry masses.

  The winter of 2033-2034 was a harsh one in the old American Northwest, and mass suffering graduated into mass starvation. Except for the gods and their Deep Green enforcers, no one had power, heat, or fat in their diet. As in a POW camp, the fat got thin and the thin died. There weren't many fat people after a half-decade of Deep Green rule, so the deaths were counted by the thousands. The government began distributing protein packs of flat, flabby “nutrients.” Guessing its origin, people called it Soylent Green.

  Normal tyrants might have eased up at this point. But the gods of the Paleopitus were not satisfied by thousands of human sacrifices. Humans were, after all, still a cancer on the Earth. The Western World, to which Cascadia had once belonged, had “criminally deprived their brown and black brothers on Gaia of a rightful share of Gaia’s gifts.” The goddess was still angry over this injustice. So Cascadia would pay reparations. Her remaining resources—her timber, old and new growth, her minerals, her agricultural products—were offered as gifts to whatever Third World countries would take them.

  That winter, the stripping of eastern Cascadia began. Work parties of starving men and women began hacking down the trees, digging up the earth (topsoil being one of the natural gifts on offer), packing up the apples and other produce and hauling it in man-drawn carts to Cascadian ports. There, Chinese ships were waiting to take it away–all of it. There was no Spring in Cascadia that year. There was nothing left to bloom.

  The tiny elite at the top of the ideological heap still lived well. It soon became known that Cascadia’s riches weren’t actually going to her brown and black brothers. The ships in Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver harbors were all Chinese for a reason. Cascadia had been sold to China, for gold. The gods of the Paleopitus all had Swiss bank accounts. Absolute power had once again corrupted absolutely.

  Ideology had come full circle, as it always did. Communism promised a classless society and created a ruling class unparalleled in its selfishness, greed, and brutality. Nazism promised the mastery of the Herrenvolk and ended up with Germany incinerated and occupied. Deep Green promised a natural paradise and turned a beautiful country into one vast, hideous strip mine, a place of dust and ashes. A Shire had become a Mordor.

  People resisted as best they could. They ran away from the labor parties, or else did as little work as possible. Everybody stole what they could. Tools broke or disappeared. People raised illegal chickens, even cows, and bribed the inspectors with butter or eggs. Above all, people fled. Cascadia’s borders were heavily patrolled by the EPA, renamed the Environmental Police Agency and de jure as well as de facto, but the countryside was wild and escape and evasion were relatively easy. The only thing that kept most people from walking out of Cascadia was physical weakness, the product of their scanty vegetarian diet.

  One day in March of 2034, a party of high mucketymucks from Portland went out into the woods west of the Willamette to spur on the clear-cutting. Time was money, and Chinese ships didn’t like to wait. Since the journey was easy and the weather fine, one of the goddesses of the Paleopitus deigned to go along. She led the mere mortals through the forest, giving clear orders about what was to be cut and how soon. Her tone did not encourage delay. Coming upon one stand of old growth, her petulance turned to anger. She specifically remembered ordering it cut down two months ago. The gold from that timber was destined for a statue of Ceres which was to adorn Seattle harbor. It was a matter of particular interest to her, since Ceres’s face would be modeled on her own.

  Turning to select a victim, she found herself alone. Furious, she started back down the trail, thinking blood. At the first bend she found it. Her chief attendant lay dead with an arrow through her throat. The feathers on the arrow, she noted, had come from a spotted owl. That wasn’t surprising, since the owls were plentiful, but touching one was a capital offense nonetheless. Someone would pay.

  It took half a minute for the goddess to realize that her own immortality might soon be put to the test. Running now, she found the rest of her entourage, slain the same way, spaced by bends in the trail. The column had been picked off one by one, from the rear, the last man falling as soon as his predecessor had turned out of sight. Arrows are silent, and the throat shots had prevented any cries.

  The search party found the goddess just before evening. She, too, had died with an arrow through her throat. She had also been skinned, and her hide splayed and tacked up on a large tree just as animal skins had once been nailed to barn doors for drying.

  Had the Cascadian Paleopitus possessed the slightest shred of wisdom, or even a morsel of healthy fear, they would have hushed the whole thing up. But, as tyrants will, they had cut themselves off from any hint or suggestion that they were less than wildly popular. Certain the citizens of Cascadia would rise as one person in horror and outrage over the vile crime, they trumpeted it from the housetops. But no one answered the trumpet’s call.

  Instead, a despairing people found hope. Resistance spread. Work parties plunged their picks into the b
acks of their guards instead of the earth. Firearms were scarce—gun control had been near the top of the Green agenda, since guns killed furry little creatures—and bows required skill, but crossbows filled the gap. They were easy to aim and shoot, and secret armories were soon turning them out in numbers. Ambushes became common.

  The Paleopitus stripped Cascadia faster, now trying to deprive guerrillas of cover as well as earn a quick renminbi. The Deep Green's shock troops had always been kids, who were brought up on environmental ideology from their first day in kindergarten. Now, those teenagers were making environmentalism itself the object of their rebellion. So the Paleopitus began importing Green mercenaries from Europe. There, the movement hadn’t gone so far as to expose its real nature, and a combination of ideological appeal and payment in gold sucked in Czechs, Spaniards, and Swedes. They called the foreign units “John Muir Brigades.” And Cascadians learned why the Diet of Worms was what most Germans ate during the Thirty Years War.

  High summer is wonderful in Maine. The mud’s dried up, the black flies are slowing down and for at least a month you can ignore the depleted state of the woodpile. Some days you can even go without long underwear, so long as you don’t have to spend too much time in the barn early in the morning.

  The high summer of 2035 found me enjoying the squire’s life in Hartland, working in my fields in the morning and on the campaign history in the afternoon. The sergeant who was helping me with the documentation even knew how to cook. Life didn’t get much better than that, at least for those of us who like to think big but live small.

  Still, I was not unhappy when Bill Kraft called. We’d both been watching events in Cascadia, and Bill shared my fears. The N.C. already had one brush with the Deep Greeners, and the fact that Deep Green made a mess of Cascadia didn’t eliminate the danger. Ideologies so blind those who swallow them that facts don’t matter, and they move across borders easier than other plagues. If Bill wanted me to head West, I was ready to go.

  He did. The resistance in Cascadia was mostly leaderless resistance, because that was the hardest kind for totalitarians to fight. But the local groups were beginning to coordinate. They had set up a support network in Montana and Idaho, both of which had remained orderly and democratic thanks to long established and self-disciplined militias. That network had contacted us and asked for our help.

  The train ride from Waterville down to Augusta on July 8 gave me time to think. The more I considered the situation, the more I realized the strategic center of gravity might lie further west than Cascadia itself.

  So long as the Deep Greeners could export Cascadia’s resources, they could get foreign exchange. So long as they could get foreign exchange, they could import mercenaries. The 21st century offered plenty of armies for rent. In this as in many other things, post-modern was pre-modern. So long as the gods of the Paleopitus could import troops, the best the Cascadian resistance could hope for was some sort of stalemate. I had no interest in fighting for a stalemate, so as I saw it, the problem couldn’t be solved locally. The enemy’s hinge was the link to Chinese money, and the way to strike it was from the other end.

  I had arranged to meet the governor over dinner on July 10th. This time, I wanted Bill to be in a receptive mood, which meant a good meal, a decent wine, and a late hour. July 9 was my birthday, and when Father Dimitri, our indefatigable Russian ambassador, heard I was in town he invited me for dinner. Over a summer meal of iced vodka, cold borscht, and cucumbers in sour cream I laid out the Cascadian situation as I saw it. If we were going to act in Asia, we would need Russian help.

  “One of our Tsar’s highest priorities is restoration of Russia’s land, water, and air,” he replied. “The Communists were pigs, and like other pigs they uprooted, dirtied and stank up everything. The first pillar of the Russian state, now and always, is the Russian Army. The second is the Russian land. He restored the first, and now he is bending every effort to restore the second.”

  “At the same time, he is deeply worried about this other environmental poison, the poison of Deep Green ideology. Better than any other country, we know the price ideology exacts. Russia is a Christian nation, and the Tsar’s guiding concept is Christian stewardship, not environmentalism. People should respect the land and its creatures, but these exist for people, to serve people. Man has lordship over creation, under God. Man is not a cancer, but God’s highest creation, for which He sent His only Son to die on a cross.”

  “Give me a day to think about this,” Father Dimitri concluded. “Perhaps there are some ways we can help.”

  “Will you join me tomorrow for dinner with Bill?” I asked.

  “Of course,” the good priest replied. “I had a tin of caviar ready for you tonight, and then I remembered your fond feelings about fish. We will put it to good use tomorrow instead.”

  When I got to the governor’s house at the appointed time of 18:30—a fashionably late dinner hour by Maine standards—Father Dimitri was already there. Bill was in a jovial mode, thanks to the caviar. I gave the Ambassador a look that said, “Good prep fire,” and he smiled.

  As Bill ladled out the iced cucumber soup that was one of his favorites, he looked at me and asked, “All ready to travel west?”

  “I’m ready to travel, but I think I need to go in the opposite direction,” I replied. One of Bill Kraft’s virtues was that he was always open to unusual, counterintuitive approaches to problems. His expression told me to go on, so I laid out my view of the strategic situation.

  He grasped my point at once. “You’re right,” he said. “I hadn’t seen it that way, but you’re absolutely correct. If we can cut off the exchange of Cascadian resources for Chinese money, the Deep Green leadership’s whole game collapses. The question is, how can we do that? Our navy has no such reach.”

  “But Russia’s navy does,” I said, looking toward Father Dimitri.

  “The Tsar would be extremely reluctant to confront the Chinese,” Father Dimitri replied. “Remember, we share a long border with China, and we want that border to be a friendly one. Moreover, we and the Chinese are cooperating extensively to confront the Muslim threat we both face. Islam is an even greater danger than the Deep Green ideology, and we would not be so short-sighted as to sacrifice a greater objective for a lesser one.”

  “I’m glad to hear the Imperial government is wiser than in the days of Bezobrashoff and Izvolsky,” Bill responded.

  “The Tsar learns from the experience of others” Father Dimitri replied.

  “But without Russian aid, I see no way we can interrupt the exchange between China and Cascadia,” I said. “Are we back to square one?”

  “I did not say Russia would not assist,” the Ambassador answered. “I only said she would not do so by confronting China. I think there may be another way.”

  “As you are aware, China and Japan are now bitter rivals,” Father Dimitri continued. “Especially they are rivals for raw materials. In the time of the United States, the American Pacific Northwest was a primary source of raw materials, especially timber, for Japan. That is why Japan financed the U.N. effort to preserve the federal union. The Japanese are angry at the loss of those resources. Worse, those same materials are now flowing to her main competitor, China, and China is getting them at less than the world market price. Japan is losing her ability to compete, and MITI is not happy.”

  MITI, I knew, was the most powerful ministry in the Japanese government, more powerful even than the Finance Ministry. MITI effectively controlled Japanese industrial and trade policy.

  I also knew that in a naval confrontation, Japan would have the advantage over China. Since the beginning of the century, both countries had built powerful, blue water fleets. But the Imperial Japanese Navy was a real navy, one that could go places and do things. Japan was by geography a maritime country, and the Japanese were first-rate sailors. The Chinese navy was merely a collection of ships. It spent little time at sea and Chinese naval officers still found oceanic navigation something of a c
hallenge. The Chinks were lubbers, and as history had shown time and again, it’s the people that count, not the ships.

  “Why haven’t the Japanese already done something?” I asked Father Dimitri.

  “That would be too direct,” he replied. “Remember, we’re talking about the Orient. The indirect approach is the preferable approach.”

  “Where do we come in?” Bill Kraft interjected.

  “You provide the flag,” the Ambassador replied.

  Bill and I both had to think about that one. He got it first. “Are you suggesting we rent the Japanese navy?”

  “Precisely,” Father Dimitri answered. “In today’s world, what military isn’t for rent, if the price is right?”

  “What might the price be in this case?” I asked, thinking that our entire treasury might suffice to rent one gunboat.

  “My guess, and it is only that, is one Pine Tree dollar–and the understanding that Cascadia would resume its previous place in the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.”

  International law, if the term still had any meaning, now recognized forces hired on contract as belonging to the country that contracted for them. Usually, such forces were provided by private entrepreneurs. But states had rented out parts of their own militaries—“Hessians” was again the term of art—and the rule still applied: the state that had contracted for them was responsible for their actions, not the state that supplied them. A Japanese fleet under the Pine Tree flag of the Northern Confederation was legally an N.C. Fleet.