by M J Engh
I had thought long and hard before I told Sam about the gun in his field. But he was a reliable man, the kind who could shoulder a risk like that, and I felt justified in giving it to him. If there was going to be any real Resistance at all, quite a few people would have to take quite a few risks. And, by God, there was going to be a Resistance.
That was why I had planted some rumors within a week of Arslan’s banquet. People needed something to hang onto, if it was only a name or an idea, and they needed it right from the start. It didn’t hurt that there was nothing to back it up at first—you couldn’t arrest a name without a body. The real organization developed very slowly. It had to be solid. It had to be built man by man.
Naturally, there was a lot of resistance, with a small “r”, to Arslan, and not everybody had the patience to wait for a solid organization. There were other names besides ours going the rumor rounds, names with “Freedom” and “America” in them. It was partly by talking to people who seemed to be getting themselves involved with those things that I had gotten my reputation, in certain circles, as a collaborator. Some of those people were the gun-owners I had informed on, as Arnold chose to call it. But I’d managed to discourage others before it was too late—good people who didn’t need to throw away their lives for nothing.
The would-be patriots hadn’t found much to do but talk—except, of course, that some of them were responsible for the death of Howard and Mattie Benson back at the beginning of spring. There hadn’t been any noticeable investigation of that incident. Arslan—or Nizam—apparently felt the deterrent effect of promptly enforcing the billet rule was enough, and apparently he’d been right. But one night at the end of August somebody tried to set fire simultaneously to the stable, Nizam’s headquarters, and my house. Nizam’s men were not only waiting for them with open arms; before the night was over, they had also arrested not just the entire membership of the particular organization that had undertaken the arsons, but every other resistance movement in the district. Except, of course, the Kraft County Resistance.
CHAPTER 7
It was mid-October when I came upstairs one evening to find my door open and Hunt sitting listlessly on the windowsill.
“Take a chair, Hunt.” He stood up hastily—remembering his manners—and I closed the door and waved him towards my armchair.
“Thanks.” He sat down awkwardly and gave me a smile as an afterthought. One thing Arslan had done for him was destroy his gracefulness. He had been one of those easy-moving boys that take to bikes and horses and skis as if they’d been born in motion. Now he acted like somebody who’d been bedridden and hadn’t quite got his muscles under control yet. It made me wonder sometimes how much sheer physical abuse he had to put up with.
I turned my desk chair around to face him, sat down, and stretched out my legs. Hunt had never visited me in my room before, and it obviously meant something to him, but he wasn’t going to open up without some priming. So I began to talk, about what I’d done that day, about the weather prospects, about the dogs and the cats and the monkey.
“I hate the damned monkey,” he said suddenly. He hated something, all right. His voice shook and his cheeks flamed. I nodded. He dropped his eyes. “I’m going to kill him.”
“Well, you know, a monkey can’t really help itself.”
He sank back in the chair, turning his face half away—wondering, I realized, whether it was worth the trouble to disabuse me. “I didn’t mean the monkey,” he said. “I meant him.”
Well, there it was. I heaved a sigh. No, under the circumstances, I didn’t think he was going to kill anybody. Hunt had been building up steam for nearly a year now, and with a little bit more, maybe he would have killed Arslan, or tried; but now he had let it out in words. And, after all, he was only fourteen. He was breathing deeply now, and his face was exhausted and calm.
“Why tell me about it?” I asked gently.
“I thought you might want to make preparations.”
“Thank you.” He looked at me at last, rolling his head against the chair back, and smiled wanly. I took a deep breath and leaned forwards. “Hunt. Just what preparations do you think I could make that would save Kraftsville from absolute destruction? I’m not God.”
“Neither is Arslan,” he offered mildly.
And on that cue the door opened, quietly but not stealthily, and Arslan stood leaning against the doorframe. He had a bottle under his arm and a roll of papers in one hand. He looked as if he might have been there a while.
We were as still as mice. Gently Arslan lifted his hand and tossed the papers, and they splayed out across the bed and onto the floor at Hunt’s feet. He took the bottle by the neck, hefting it thoughtfully for a minute as if he was considering it as a weapon. Then he tossed it after the papers. It bounced softly on the bed. “I am tired, sir,” he said matter-of-factly.
I looked hard at his face and the set of his body. Was it possible for Arslan to be tired? His eyes were bloodshot and a little puffy, and there were lines around them, but the rest of his face was smooth and fresh-looking, neither drawn nor drooping, a very youthful face. There wasn’t a trace of slump in his leaning. He was relaxed like a coiled copperhead or a dozing cat—comfortable, but ready to kill on a split second’s notice. Still, he would probably look like that if he was about to drop from exhaustion. It was no wonder Arslan ate so much; he must have used up a lot of energy just standing around.
He lit a cigarette, took one drag, looked at it, and pinched it out, dropping it back into his shirt pocket. “Africa and South America may be the most difficult problems in the end,” he said conversationally, “but Asia is of course the most massive problem.” He turned his steady, humorous gaze on me. Yes, I thought he looked tired. “It is probable that I shall fail in Asia.”
Probable. It would be silly to forget that everything he said had a purpose. But all the same, that one word probable lit a little blaze of hope. If he failed anywhere, he failed everywhere; unless every wall stood, his house of cards would come tumbling down.
He came on into the room, shouldering the door shut behind him, leaned back against it, and surveyed us. “I give myself six years. Six years. Then, if I have not succeeded, I will apply my second plan.”
I nodded involuntarily. I’d seen too much of Arslan to be sure his grand scheme would fail, but on the other hand, I couldn’t really imagine it succeeding; and when it failed, Arslan wasn’t the man to go home to Bukhara and raise sheep. There figured to be a second plan, and I had a kind of an idea what it would be.
“Plan Two is also difficult,” he went on, “but it is more practicable, and also more permanent.” He straightened himself, and smiled coolly at me as he crossed over to the bed. “You have refused to drink with me in your kitchen and in your living room, sir. Will you drink with me in your bedroom?”
“I don’t drink,” I told him for the twentieth time. “Anywhere.”
He stepped over my feet, swept the scattered papers to one side, and settled himself on the bed, with my pillow tucked behind his shoulders and his shoes on Luella’s clean bedspread. “Strong drink is raging,” he said, carefully opening his vodka. “You have promised to explain Christianity to me, sir. I am ready to listen.” He tilted the bottle with loving care and took a long, slow swallow.
“I don’t think so.”
He lowered the bottle long enough to shrug, and drank again, drew a deep breath, and prodded his papers with the butt of the bottle. “These are the messengers that tell me my failure is probable,” he said. “Hunt, pick up those.” Hunt stooped and gathered up the papers from the floor; he looked blankly across Arslan as he laid them on the bed, and met my eyes. “The current demographic analyses. Always they insist upon this message. I cannot make them change their story.” He smiled to himself. You could literally see the liquor hitting him. Something like a shudder went down the length of him, as if he were settling more comfortably into his skin; the lines around his eyes smoothed out, and his face flushed.
“Hope,” he said thoughtfully. He drank deep again, and then suddenly he collected himself like a cat going into a crouch. He turned to me, leaning hard on his elbow, his face and voice indignant and venomous. “You are not a child, sir. You have seen something of life and death. Tell me, are they what you have pretended them to be? You call yourselves a Christian people; and that, sir, is a lie, and you are wise enough to know that it is a lie. You would have called Kraftsville a safe and pleasant place to live, before I came, would you not? But answer this for yourself, sir. How many households do you know personally in Kraftsville? Two hundred, perhaps—three hundred? How many of these are free of serious evil—serious evil, sir? Aggression, exploitation, cruelty—lust to possess, lust to destroy—hatred, envy, deceit—have not these been always commonplace in Kraftsville? I did not import pain, sir; it is a local product.” His mouth tightened emphatically. He went on staring at me with remote eyes while he bit at his underlip. “And yet it is true,” he announced sternly. “It is true that Kraftsville was a safe and pleasant place, in comparison with other places. Your hungriest paupers have been better fed than the chiefs of towns. Your people have slept in security. They were free, they were healthy, as human health and freedom go. They had never suffered war. But you know that in most of the world, sir, there has been war and war again, and again, and again war, so that every generation learns again. Strange. It is very strange.” He shook his head like a man in real puzzlement.
“What is?”
“More than one hundred years without war. A strange way of life.”
“What do you mean, without war? My God, we’ve—”
“You have made war, you have not suffered it! Your nation, sir, has been perhaps the happiest to exist in the world. And yet consider its history. The natives despoiled, displaced, cheated, brutalized, slaughtered. The most massive and the most cynical system of slavery since the fall of Rome. A civil war spectacular in its dimensions. A century of labor troubles, of capitalist exploitation and union exploitation. And in the very ascendancy of your power, disintegration! The upheaval, the upswelling, of savagery, of violence. Not revolution, sir, for revolution requires coherence. Not eighteenth-century France, but fifth-century Rome. The exposure, the revelation, of that all-pervading rottenness that is the fruit of your hypocrisy.” He pursed his mouth like a disapproving old woman. “Grotesque, sir, this combination of a primitive puritanism and a frantic decadence; very like the Romans whom you so much resemble. Name me a happy nation, sir!”
“Switzerland,” I hazarded.
“Ah, Switzerland! The parody of Protestantism! All lusts sublimated into the pure lust of cleanliness and profit. The prudent, virtuous nation fattening upon the viciousness and greed and folly of all the world. Would you exchange your own life, sir, your life now or a year ago, for the life of those pious, prosperous people?” He shook his head dogmatically. “I tell you, sir, not even the Japanese have been more rigidly inhibited.”
I wasn’t entirely surprised at this tirade. After all, as he’d said himself, you didn’t conquer the world for fun—nor for theory, either. There had to be some kind of emotional force powering Plan One. Why it came out now, this particular evening, was understandable enough, if he was really tired, if his plan was really in trouble, if he’d just heard Hunt plotting to murder him.
He leaned a little towards me again, blazing at me like an evangelist on fire with his message. “Sir, you have been shocked by things I have done in Kraftsville, by things my soldiers have done. But I tell you we have been restrained, my soldiers and I. I tell you—and, sir, you know this already, you have known it for years—all these things, and worse, much worse things than these, have been done every day, in every country, all over the world, for thousands of years. You knew this, sir; your history, your newspapers, your eyes, your brain, your body and blood have told you. Were you shocked then? Was your Christian faith shaken? Did you vow vengeance for those wrongs?”
He leaned back abruptly against the pillows and drank again. It was my turn. “All right, General, let me tell you something. You don’t shake my faith, either. Sure, I know about the hell that goes on in this world. That’s the whole point of Christianity—to keep from sinking into it all the way. It takes all the strength a man has, to deal with evil—that’s nothing new. But that’s what we’re alive for. And let me tell you something else, General; we can win. You’re trying to tar the whole world with one brush; you’re saying it’s all bad, and that’s a lie. Kraftsville certainly wasn’t perfect before you came, but it was paradise compared to what you’ve made of it, and it was a better and happier place than a lot of other places.”
“Yes, sir, yes!” He was smiling his triumphant, now-you-understand-how-right-I-was smile. “Have you read Candide, sir? Three hundred pages of catastrophe and misery and injustice, of which the moral is, ‘We must cultivate our garden.’ Was not this the virtue of Kraftsville, that it cultivated its own garden? Sir, I am trying to reduce the world to Kraftsvilles.”
“‘Reduce it’! You’re reducing it, all right, reducing it to a wasteland. You think you get gardens out of ashes?”
“No!” he cried gladly. “Out of death and excrement. Out of garbage and corpses. You cut the weeds before you sow the crop, do you not? Consider the world as it was before I came, sir. Throughout Asia hunger, disease, fear, tyranny of landlords or of rulers, and war or the threat of it. In Africa, chaos and corruption. In South America, unconquerable poverty breeding still new revolutions. And everywhere, dread of nuclear war and busy preparation for it. Was this a happy world, sir? A safe and pleasant place to live?”
His voice rang and throbbed, a parade-ground voice—except, I realized, he wasn’t actually speaking very loud. His eyes burned. He looked as if he’d hit anybody who dared to answer one of his rhetorical questions. On the other side of the bed, Hunt was watching him with a kind of motionless frenzy—frozen on the verge of some explosion.
“And this was not an accident of the times. What came before, sir? Colonialism; and I assure you—I assure you, sir—that the evils of colonialism have not been exaggerated. Before the Second World War, the First. Before that, more than half a century of revolutions, and the Industrial Revolution that powered them all. Before that, the wars of Islam and the wars of Christianity. How far back do you wish to go, sir? Do you remember the Chinese general who took Canton in fifteen-hundred and gave that perfect order to his troops: ‘Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill’? Can you smell the stink of the galleys, sir—the most elegantly efficient means of transportation for twenty centuries? An invention of the Romans, sir, those famous practicians. Do you remember the battle of Lepanto, which saved the West for Christianity and proved the virtue of heavy firepower? Was there a really significant difference between the stench of the Turkish Moslem galleys and the stench of the Spanish Christian galleys? On the one hand the smell of Christian slaves and Moslem convicts, on the other that of pagan slaves and Christian convicts. There were still galleys in the nineteenth century, sir; and the latest belonged to France, that most humane flower of Western civilization. Which do you prefer, sir? That holy St. Vladimir of the Russian church who used cavalry to drive his subjects to the river to be baptized or drowned; or that holy Emir of my country who kept a snake pit into which uncooperative ambassadors could be lowered; or those prudent American pioneers who massacred a village of Christian Indians as a preventive measure; or those loyal Vietnamese patriots who tied their Communist neighbors together in live bundles and dropped them into rivers—a technique they may have learned from a study of French history? An English soldier of Cromwell’s army was surprised to see the little children of a woman dead of starvation eating the flesh of their mother’s corpse, and yet th
ere is a natural logic in this. Passing over gas ovens and human vivisection, penal colonies and sharecropping, you have heard of the battered-child syndrome?” He gave me a blank ghost of his angelic smile. “A worldwide, an age-old phenomenon, though perhaps especially a modern American one. Are these things tolerable? Clearly yes; they have always been tolerated. But there are more important things. Consider, sir. It is natural to man to build a civilization, and it is natural to civilization to destroy itself and to wreck the world.”
“You think so?” I broke in roughly.
He glared at me a moment, and then half-relaxed—remembering, no doubt, that he was talking to humans. “I think so, yes. If war were not natural to man, there would be no wars. And what is natural is inevitable. Do you know the fable of Venus and the cat? No?” He laughed. “Read it.” He waved his hand impatiently, disposing of the human race with a gesture. “Man is a mistake of evolution. He is too potent. Any species will foul or exhaust its habitat in time, unless it is checked by counterforces.” He wiped his hard palm across the mouth of his bottle and drank in violent gulps. Something seemed to have given way in Hunt. He sat docile and still now, his eyes following automatically every movement Arslan made. “Counterforces,” Arslan said, “internal or external. When the food supply is inadequate, the does drop fewer fawns. But man, man is too strong. He fouls and exhausts too rapidly, and nothing checks him for long. There is only one end for such a species: extinction; quick extinction. It only remains to be seen if the end comes by holocaust or by poisoning and starvation.” He chuckled. “A bang or a whimper.”
I started to speak, but again he crowded in ahead of me. “Is this important? Not in itself, except to those who die. But man has taken all the world as his habitat. Therefore this is important. Not man alone, but the whole world is dying. Your scientists have spoken of the web of life. Yes. It is a web, in four dimensions. And man hangs in the web above the void. But man has strained and twisted and torn the web. Man has pruned the web to make for himself a cozy hammock, and now”—he snorted a contemptuous laugh, or maybe it wasn’t a laugh—“now he dangles, now he feels the runs and ravels in the fabric, and the void is so cold, so cold!” He drew a harsh breath through his open mouth, and nodded dogmatically. “Yes, sir. The natural is the inevitable.”