by M J Engh
“It could be worse, Mr. Bond,” Leland Kitchener said. “There’s no taxes, anyway.”
There were no taxes, and no forced labor—except for the girls in the brothel. But there was the sunset curfew. There was the no-meetings rule. There was the soldier billeted in every home. Arslan hadn’t moved a one of them, but he had taken all the surplus Turkistanis—the ones from the camp. A few days later, about half the Russians followed, or anyway headed east. And District 3281 belonged to Colonel Nizam.
NOTICE. The following items are declared contraband: Wire, all types. Electrical equipment, all types. Engines, all types. Petroleum products, combustible.
By February, Nizam’s notices didn’t bother to include the instructions any more. Everybody knew the blacklisted items had to be delivered immediately to the school, the camp, or Nizam’s headquarters. Immediately (we had learned the definition the hard way) meant today. The notice would be up at daybreak; if you didn’t see it, or understand it, or have the means to comply with it, that was your hard luck. The next day, and unpredictably after that, there would be spot checks and sometimes sweeping searches. Possession of contraband was punishable (not always punished, though) by death. So we kept a sharp and early eye on the notice boards, and passed the word fast.
That had come to be the most obvious function of the Kraft County Resistance: to watch the boards, to pass the word, to help people shed their “contraband.” The KCR was an established fact of Kraft County life now, but it was an invisible fact. Everybody knew it existed—which meant we had to assume Nizam knew it—but nobody called it by name. It was always “they” or “people” or “somebody.” Keeping the membership secret was easier than I’d expected, for the very good reason that nobody wanted to know. “Somebody told me” was all the authorization needed, and instructions were passed along from neighbor to neighbor just as efficiently as gossip used to be. That first spring of Arslan’s absence, we had it down so pat that we could inform every household in the district inside of two hours. Then there would be a quietly frantic time. Definitions were matters of life and death. Was paraffin a combustible petroleum product? What about plastics? Did you have to cart your whole useless refrigerator to town, or was it good enough if you brought the motor? Did you have to take down your wire fences? What about phone wires and electric lines, that weren’t exactly in anybody’s possession?
We took down the fences. We climbed poles and took down the wires. We carted refrigerators. We ran regular wagon trains through the district all afternoon, picking up stuff. We tried to put ourselves in Nizam’s place and imagine what he had in mind (though that didn’t work entirely—one thing he had in mind was that at least part of whatever we decided would be wrong), and in cases of doubt we figured better safe than sorry. We also cached a few thousand feet of electrical wire, two generators, and about two bushels of assorted radio equipment.
Arslan had been satisfied to let us wither on the vine; Nizam went at us with an axe. You could say that Arslan had hit us like an avalanche, but after the dust had settled he really hadn’t tried to shake us any further. You might even say he’d been fair, according to his lights. At least he’d stuck by his own rules. But Nizam’s whole idea was to shake us and keep us shaken.
He had a little bit of a problem. Wherever Arslan was now, it was pretty evident he was still keeping a tight rein on his colonel. The look in Nizam’s eye told me very plainly what would happen to me if the choice were up to him. It wasn’t one of my biggest worries. Nizam was nothing if not scrupulous, and he had to play by Arslan’s rules, too. It was Nizam who assigned a loud-mouthed corporal to my house, making me as vulnerable to the billet rule as the Bensons had been; it was Arslan who must have decreed free medical service for all citizens, including inoculations against all the foreign diseases his troops might have brought in. It was Nizam who instituted a system of bribing informers with extra rations; it was Arslan who had seen to it that nobody would have to starve in District 3281.
Even working within limitations, Nizam showed himself an expert at pure, plain harassment. He was keeping the district in a state that varied from nervous tension through misery and frustration to panic. Not to speak of the families of the people who were shot.
That Petroleum products, combustible was a typical example. At one unexpected stroke it deprived us of all our lights. No kerosene for lamps, no paraffin for candles. The town went black—except for Nizam’s termite nest. Meanwhile every housewife was muttering unladylike things under her breath about the paraffin seals she’d had to pry off her jelly jars. It was a confiscation with no material excuse for it. If he wanted our kerosene, why wait till it was practically used up? If he wanted to deprive us of it, why not just wait a little longer, till we ran out? But about two weeks later, Nizam informed me that kerosene would be issued on a strict ration to selected households.
“We don’t need it,” I told him. Selected households meant collaboration and broken morale. Rationing meant black-marketing and dependence. I already had a little project started for the manufacture of tallow candles, and we were experimenting with sunflower-seed oil.
The households were selected and the kerosene ration authorized. Nobody came to the camp to pick it up. All the lucky families had received a message from the KCR the same day they got their notification. Everybody had lived without kerosene for better than two weeks now. Some of them really wanted it, but not badly enough to cast what amounted to a vote for Nizam and against America. Not when it was put to them clearly in those terms. And the first tallow candles were being distributed free. After that, it would be a commercial enterprise.
So we had our successes. We held the line. But it wasn’t only people we had to contend with. That year the bugs began in earnest.
Naturally Nizam had confiscated all the pesticide and herbicide and fertilizer he could find in the district for the troops’ use. And their fields looked to be in relatively good shape. I thought it was only relative. Because that summer was like nothing I’d ever seen before, unless it was Arslan’s advent. It was heartbreaking to see the potato bugs demolish a field in a day. People began to panic. We had worked hard the year before, but we had worked with confidence. Men had been masters of Kraft County for a long time, and just taking away their tractors didn’t change that. But this year we were fighting for our lives. It wasn’t possible there could be a famine in Kraft County, we kept telling ourselves. But we weren’t exactly Kraft County any more. And then another blow hit us.
The corn was blighted. The stalks had tended to be leggy and a little pale from the start, like a slight case of mineral deficiency—nothing to worry anybody much. But the ears just didn’t fill. What kernels did form were small and misshapen. Sweet corn wasn’t very much affected. But all the field corn was hard hit; and our precious hybrids, that the County Farm Advisor had literally made by hand on his seed plots the year before, were a total loss.
And it was right then, while I was figuring how many livestock we could winter on practically no corn, that Roley Munsey brought me the news of Evergreen.
Roley was the youngest Munsey boy. He would have been in high school if he hadn’t dropped out in his freshman year. As a matter of fact, he had just barely managed to graduate from eighth grade, a year behind his age. But he was a good boy—a good-natured kid, clever with his hands, and one who tried his best. And, very importantly for us, he had been a radio ham. Not Citizens’ Band stuff, but a real, licensed amateur. There had been some others in the district, before Arslan, but it was remarkable how many of them had been high school students.
What radio equipment we had saved from Nizam’s confiscations didn’t look too impressive, but it was plenty for Roley to work with. He had a shortwave receiver that picked up signals, sporadically, from all around the world. Unfortunately, not one of them in the past year had ever sounded like anything but the internal communications of Arslan’s organization. It was that fact, more than any other, that made me believe in the reality of Arsla
n’s Plan One.
“Mr. Bond, I hate to bother you when you’re busy, but I never heard nothing like this before.”
“Just sorry I couldn’t get here faster. Tell me about it.”
“Well, it was an American voice, no damn Turk. The only words I could make out was, ‘Both sunk. Sorry about that, Arslan. Evergreen signing off.’ But he laughed, see? He said ‘Sorry about that, Arslan,’ and he laughed. So I figure he got to be American.”
“Where did it come from?”
“East. I don’t know where from, only east of here. It come in clear enough.”
“Nothing else?”
“No, sir, nothing, not a thing. He just said ‘sunk.’ ‘Both sunk.’”
“Roley, you mean to tell me there are still American ships at sea? After nearly two years?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Bond, I sure don’t know. But I know he said ‘sunk.’”
“Well, if we heard it, Nizam must have heard it, Roley. You can bet Arslan’s organization knows a lot more about it than we do.”
Roley nodded, which he always did, but he rubbed the back of his head doubtfully. “Well, yeah, sure, Mr. Bond, but maybe not. Maybe not. Like if they wasn’t expecting it, they likely wouldn’t be listening on that band. If they wasn’t right there on the right frequency at the right second, they wouldn’t of heard it. That signal never lasted but half a minute.”
“Roley, you figure out exactly what you’d need to hook into Nizam’s power. We just might want to transmit a long distance signal. I’ll talk to you later. You boys be sure there’s one of you listening every second. Now get on it and stay on it.”
Evergreen. It sounded more like a code word than the name of a ship. I felt ten years younger. My mind was happily jumping to conclusions. Evergreen. It would be appropriate for, say, a nuclear-powered ship, or a group of them. What else could be still functioning? Hunt had told me, and it sounded plausible, that Arslan was destroying fuel production facilities. He would have taken over the navies as he had the armies, of course; but it would be a lot easier for a recalcitrant ship to hold out against him than a recalcitrant regiment. He could have starved out any conventional-powered ship by this time, for lack of fuel. But even if you commanded the combined fleets of the world, it wouldn’t necessarily be easy to track down one or two or a dozen nuclear-powered vessels, especially if some of them were submarines. And he couldn’t actually have the combined fleets of the world in operation; he must have felt the fuel squeeze himself, long since, plus all the maintenance problems that would intensify as he phased out industries or smashed them cold.
Evergreen. It would be appropriate, of course, for any unit of resistance that had survived the cold wave of Arslan’s first great sweep. Suppose a mosquito fleet of private boats had maintained itself in the creeks and coves of some ragged coast or island chain—motorboats that could operate for years on a few well-rationed barrels of oil, reconverted steamers burning wood, sailboats. It wouldn’t be much of a combat navy; but suppose there were a hundred such little fleets. It was the old, old story; no force, no force could destroy a popular movement, if it was popular enough. Not without destroying the population.
Evergreen … The fields looked naked, stripped, like burned-over ground. A potato plant or a beanstalk with all the leaves eaten off was awkward and obscene, not like the honest stubble of any harvested field. I knew it had gotten to me the day I found myself clenched up with fear, not for the county but for my personal stomach. The medicines that Doc Allard had kept me in shape with were all used up, and I had to depend on diet and willpower. If I couldn’t guarantee myself a supply of milk and cream—The thought sent me to bed, doubled up.
Well, that wasn’t only cowardly, it was un-Christian. And besides, it got in the way of doing anything.
It took plenty of effort and plenty of prayer, but I got my stomach quieted down—and not for just that day, either. The thing was, I had to live calmly. I had to rely on God in an ultimate way, not for little things like enough milk or a miracle to save the crops. I had to believe that everything I did, as long as I did my best, was for the best.
Livestock, after all, were a luxury. It was August, which meant we still had time, but not time for experiments and failures. We burned off the blighted and bug-eaten fields, plowed up some pastures, and planted what would do us more good: carrots, turnips, beets. Our oats were doing well, comparatively—compared to our wheat, for example—but it was too late to plant more oats this year. We slaughtered stock as fast as we could use the meat or put it up. We salted and pickled as much as we could spare the salt for, canned as much as we had cans to hold, dried as much as we had room to spread in the sun, and smoked the rest. Plenty of people protested killing the stock and plowing up the grass, and the Farm Advisor protested that smoking didn’t actually preserve meat; but we didn’t have time to let everybody follow their own whims. Later we would plant winter wheat and keep our fingers crossed. We’d have enough grain and hay to winter what few livestock we were keeping.
Evergreen … After all, it didn’t have to mean anything. Roley had picked up what sounded like American voices before, that had obviously been working for Arslan. Not a doubt in the world, whether I liked it or not, that Arslan’s Americans were in Russia just as much as Arslan’s Russians were in America. And it would be a miracle if some of those Americans didn’t make remarks like “Sorry about that, Arslan” now and then. Whatever were “both sunk,” they might have been anti-Arslan as well as pro. “Sorry about that”—there might have been an order to capture instead of destroy.
Yes, we would last the winter, and every spring was a new start. Kraft County wasn’t crowded—the population had been declining for years—and by the grace of God, or maybe the exercise of common sense, people just weren’t having babies these days. There were the troops, of course; but, if anything, they were an economic asset now. On the average, they not only took care of themselves, but produced a little surplus that found its way by various means into the hands of Kraft County citizens.
Even if we couldn’t do much farming, we could live. A few chickens for eggs, a few cattle for milk, a few hogs to keep up the breed; fish and game would be our staple meat sources. Every field abandoned meant that much more game-cover. And the game, like the bugs, thrived. The soldiers were permitted only very limited hunting privileges, but that didn’t apply to us.
“Franklin, how the hell are you going to shoot anything without guns?”
“Who said shoot?” We weren’t even allowed to have bows and arrows, but we did have traps and nets. It was a new style of hunting for us, but we learned it. The Indians had done all right in this territory, and maybe there was even more game now than there had been back then, when it was all deep woods. We held drives for the small game, rotating them around the district and learning as we worked. With good dogs, it wasn’t hard to walk quail and rabbits and even doves into a fine-mesh seine. Getting it closed on them was a little harder. We used the seines for what they were made for, too, and got all the fish we could use, not to mention cleaning out a lot of mud turtles while we were at it. We hunted coons and possums with the dogs, trapped muskrats, snared rabbits—snared deer, too, when we’d learned the trick. We had long enough to learn it.
CHAPTER 9
It must have been very near the fourth anniversary of Arslan’s departure when a boy I didn’t know came galloping into town with the news that a mechanized force was coming east on 460. His horse was still blowing when we heard their motors—a chilling sound these days, now that Nizam only used his vehicles for emergencies.
Starting home from the square, I saw a procession of jeeps and one truck draw up in front of my house. By the time I got there, the street and yard were swarming. Soldiers were prodding their way through the garden as if it were a minefield. The Russians were cheering from the school windows and popping out of the doors. My front door stood open, and a flock of women were trotting in and out helter-skelter, some of them carrying bundl
es and all of them chattering. One in a scarlet headscarf and a swinging blue skirt was directing operations, running from jeep to jeep, then halfway up the walk, then back to the street. Only one stood by silently, with a child in her arms. Arslan was leaning against the side of the truck, smoking.
I stopped beside him, and we eyed each other. He looked thriving. He might have put on a little flesh; otherwise he was the identical brash welterweight who had stridden out of my kitchen four years ago.
“Good morning, sir.”
“How’s Plan One going, General?”
He grinned. “Very well.”
“Then things could be worse.”
Luella stepped out on the porch. “Franklin, come here!” She sounded excited and glad.
“But first, sir,” Arslan put in smoothly, “you will meet my son.”
He dropped his cigarette and beckoned the quiet woman. I took a quick look at her face (she was on the far edge of middle age, and homely—definitely not the mother of Arslan’s son), and he took the baby from her.
The nape of my neck prickled. There he stood beside me—Arslan Khan, and Genghiz’s pyramid of skulls was no more than a steppingstone to him—there he stood, smiling, with a baby in his arms. “This is Sanjar,” he said.
I focused on the child. “Sander?”
“San-jar!” He rolled the name joyously, all but singing it.
Arslan’s son. He was either small for his age or advanced for it. From a distance I had taken him for no more than a babe in arms, but he had the bright boy-face of a three-year-old. Now he put his hand commandingly on Arslan’s mouth and said something that sounded very clear, though it certainly wasn’t English. Arslan chuckled, shaking his head away from the little brown fingers. He might have been any proud young soldier-father.