by M J Engh
Then Hunt Morgan walked out onto the porch beside Luella. He’d been gone four years at the fastest-changing time of a boy’s life, but I knew him at once. I hurried up the walk to shake his hand, and Arslan followed.
He was taller than Arslan; almost as tall as I. He had grown a soft little fringe of beard, as dark as his hair, and with his big dark eyes and soft mouth he looked like a Persian prince out of the Arabian Nights.
“Hello, Mr. Bond.” His handshake was solid. He wore Turkistani fatigues, with a sheath knife at his belt.
“Franklin,” I corrected.
Arslan set down the child, who promptly trotted over to the porch rail and started trying to climb it. With a clatter of heels, the red-scarfed woman flashed up the steps, swooped him up in her arms, and whirled on Arslan. I stood back comfortably against the house wall and watched. Arslan as a family man was a spectacle I’d never thought to see.
Whatever you could say for her temper, there was nothing wrong with her looks. Halfway through her tirade, she jerked off the red scarf, underlining her argument with a long loop of auburn hair. Her crackling eyes were blue, though her skin was the color of buckwheat honey. Arslan stood rocking on his feet, laughing at her. The child struggled down from her arms and went back to his rail-climbing unnoticed. With a final burst, the woman spun away and stalked into the house. Arslan lit a fresh cigarette and turned to Hunt and me. He was obviously charmed with the whole affair.
“I am taking the same room for myself, sir,” he announced. “And the same room for Hunt. Sanjar and Rusudan will use the southwest room.”
“Nice of you to leave me my bedroom.”
I didn’t realize at the moment how nice it was. The southwest room wasn’t big to start with, and Arslan’s orders crowded into it not only the mother and child, but four of the attendant women. The others—there were three or four more of them—disappeared in the course of the afternoon, touching off a general flutter of protest from the rest and a storm from Rusudan (if she had any more name or title than that, I never heard it). This time Arslan was roused to shout back at her, and she retreated up the stairs, spitting defiance with every step. Rusudan—her harsh name matched the metallic timbre of her voice and her harridan temper, but her features were clear and sweet. Arslan stood with hands on hips and grinned after her.
Not one of the women seemed to speak anything that could pass as English, though Rusudan made one or two stabs at it. Luella had her hands full, getting them settled in. I walked out of the confusion early, and into what would be Hunt’s room again.
Hunt stood in the middle of the floor, gazing mildly around. “Welcome home,” I said.
He gave me a sharp look—not sure if that was meant kindly. “How have things been?”
“Not too good, Hunt, but we’re surviving. Your folks are well.”
His mouth quirked with humor. “Which of us invites the other to sit down?”
“It’s your room.”
“It’s your house. Let’s sit down, shall we?”
We did, he on the bed and I on the one chair. “Well, there’s a lot to fill in,” I said. “Where have you been, and what’s happened?”
He spread his hand, palm down, a foreign kind of gesture. “Bukhara.” That seemed to be the end of the sentence. He hunched forward confidentially, but he was looking at his hands, not at me. “I tried to kill him once.” He shot me a glance, smiled faintly, and lowered his eyes again. “Like old times, isn’t it? Except that this time I can say I really tried to do it.” Now he drew the knife from his sheath and laid it across his knees, stroking his fingertips along the steel. It was a very practical-looking blade. “Not with this one,” he said. “This one was his own; he gave it to me, afterwards.”
No doubt there was a very interesting story there, as well as a very romantic one, but I didn’t want to hear it—not right now. Hunt wasn’t talking to me, he was playing a role, and, from the sound of it, one he’d acted out in his head till he knew it by heart. “What did you see of Turkistan?” I asked him.
He raised his eyes to me. “The Black Sands are gray. The Red Sands are pink.” He made the motion of a smile.
“Were you disappointed?”
He shrugged, eyes drifting downward again. “It’s a question of viewpoint. You can walk up and down hill all day and think you’ve gotten somewhere; but if you fly over the same area at ten thousand feet, you see that it’s really only—”
“No, I don’t!” He looked up, startled. “If it is a question of viewpoint,” I said, “then you can forget about that ‘really.’ I don’t think much of the objectivity of anybody who spends his life on the ground, and then the first time he goes up in a plane he hollers, ‘Oh, that’s what the world really looks like!’ If he’d spent his life in the plane, then the first time he got down on the ground he’d say, ‘Oh, this is how the world really is!’ That’s all hogwash. Reality is whatever you’ve got to deal with.”
His eyes lightened a moment. Then he closed his hand on the knife hilt and stood up abruptly, sheathing the knife with a practiced motion. “I ought to warn you. In case you’re involved in any plots against Arslan, or happen to get involved, or happen to hear of any, don’t tell me. Don’t even give me a hint. I’m afraid there’s nothing I wouldn’t do to protect him.”
“If that were true, Hunt, you wouldn’t have warned me.” We smiled at each other cordially, without contact.
“Ah,” he said. “Do robots have souls? That’s the question, isn’t it?”
“You’re not a robot,” I told him. “Don’t flatter yourself with that idea. You’re a human being endowed with free will, and you can’t get rid of it.”
“Ah.” He was—what?—eighteen now. “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”
“That’s not what I mean,” I said. “I’m talking about responsibility. You’re still responsible for your actions. And your decisions.”
He tilted his head in polite incredulity. It was one of Arslan’s mannerisms. “Aren’t free will and responsibility distinct?”
“Not to me.”
He shrugged. “I don’t act. I don’t decide.”
“You can’t help it,” I said. “You’re doing both of them all the time. How do you know? You may have changed the course of history right here and now by warning me not to trust you with any plots. There are things you can’t control, sure, outside of you and inside of you; but you decide what to do about those things, and you act on that decision—whether you know it or not.” He was listening closely. Hunt had always been a courteous boy. “And not many people are decisive and active enough to try sticking a knife into Arslan.”
He couldn’t hold back a pleased little private smile at that. “Think about it, Hunt. And remember I’m always on your side. Your side, not Arslan’s.” I patted his shoulder once, and I left him.
I wanted information, not bungled assassination attempts. I wanted to know what Arslan had been doing to the world for four years, and what brought him back here now. And what, if anything, Evergreen had been.
He had been back three weeks, spending most of his time with Nizam, when the changes started. One morning there was an unobtrusive placard on the notice boards. Announcement, it said modestly. The curfew is abolished, effective immediately. By order of General Arslan.
There wasn’t any rush to take advantage of that order. For one thing, nobody wanted to be the first to test its validity. For another, people were used to the curfew; they stayed in after dark as much from habit now as from necessity. But gradually they began to try it—neighbors visiting in their yards a little later and a little later, people daring to go for the doctor when they got sick, and (because, after all, we were getting squared away for winter, and could make good use of the extra time) farmers and hunters working after dark.
By that time the billet rule was well on the way out. It was never officially suspended, but every week a few more of the billeted soldiers were withdraw
n. They went first to the camp. After a few weeks, a company of them marched north out of the district, and later another detachment, a little larger if anything, went south. There was no doubt but what the whole atmosphere of the district was relaxing. Compared to Nizam, Arslan was making himself look pretty good.
At first I hoped we might eat a little better that winter; but Arslan’s troops brought no supplies with them. They did bring something that promised to be more useful in the long run—seed corn that Arslan claimed was resistant to the blight. He kept his fleet of trucks and jeeps and armored cars serviced and ready to go, but he didn’t use them much. The whole district was geared to horses now. The remaining Turkistanis constituted a cavalry troop, and there was another all-Russian one. Horse-breeding and horse-trading had become important parts of the economy again, and there was constant friction between troops and civilians over horses. The floodlights on the schoolground had been dark for four years, like all the other electric lights outside of Nizam’s headquarters. Now Arslan formalized the situation by taking out the floodlights, and installed a windmill to supplement Nizam’s oil-burning generators. On the other hand, he imported generous supplies of liquor, coffee, and tobacco for his own use, in fact for the whole household. I didn’t mind having the coffee.
Arslan had set up shop in my office at school again, and he worked like any young-middle-aged executive bucking for a heart attack. His home life, to call it that, was something I couldn’t fathom. Rusudan’s appearance was generally the signal for a fight, which ended inevitably with slamming doors, but I would hear them laughing together in Arslan’s room, boisterous and innocent.
He wasn’t anything you could call a husband, but he was a real father. He took the child with him almost everywhere, and showed him almost everything. Nobody else was allowed to cross Sanjar in either the smallest or the most vital things; as a matter of fact, we were all under orders to obey (that was the word, obey) the child in everything. Naturally I paid no attention to that. Here was a bright, healthy, normal three-year-old boy, and of course he had no more idea of what was good for him than a hound pup. Luella was willing enough to spoil him, because she was starved for children, but she was always grabbing him away from the stove or out of her china cabinet or off the porch railing where he loved to climb; and every time Arslan caught her at it or heard about it, she was in trouble. I had to tell her finally, “Just look the other way when he gets into something.” Nobody had laid a finger on Luella so far, and I intended to keep it that way.
“I can’t look the other way,” she said. “I don’t care whose child he is. He’s always trying to take the stove lids off.”
“He’s got a father and a mother and a cavalry regiment to take care of him. If he wants to crawl in the oven, just hold the door open for him.”
Taking care wasn’t exactly it. Rusudan would play with him and fight with him by the hour, acting like a six-year-old herself, but if he needed to be fed or washed or bandaged, she called her women—or Luella. Hunt Morgan led him around by the hand (or rather he led Hunt), took him fishing when summer came, and corrected his budding English. The troops doted on him, and spoiled him every way they could think of.
It was different with Arslan. Sanjar might be climbing all over his father on the couch, getting his muddy little boots into the charts on the coffee table. “Sit still,” Arslan would say quietly, and the boy would slip to the floor without a murmur and sit there looking up with solemn eyes. And when, being a boy, he forgot again and started climbing onto the table, one sharp word from Arslan would set him back with a very chastened look on his face. He always spoke English to the boy now—at least, whenever I was within earshot—and Sanjar was developing a remarkable vocabulary. Most of it came from listening to Hunt read. Because, after all this time, Hunt was still reading to Arslan. I thought I understood that now. It was Arslan’s own continuing education, the liberal arts that the parvenu dictator’s son had never dreamed of; and now it was to be Sanjar’s, too.
It was Arslan, appropriately, who taught him about guns. He showed him why he shouldn’t pull a trigger by the simple, messy method of shooting a tame rabbit at close range with his pistol. After that Sanjar treated firearms pretty respectfully.
Still, by and large, Arslan with Sanjar was Arslan at his best. He fairly glowed with pride in all the child’s little accomplishments. It was really pretty to see how carefully he pointed things out to the boy. “Do you see it, Sanjar? Do you hear, Sanjar?” Dozens of times a day he would break off whatever he was doing to show Sanjar something. “Can you tell what color that bird is, Sanjar? Then go that way—you see? You need the light a little behind you … Do you see how the mare turns her ears, Sanjar? She is wondering if we will be her friends … Look, Sanjar; these are two different maps of the same place. Do you see, here is an island, and here is the same island on the other.” And the boy knew that nothing pleased his father more than for him to notice something and point it out. “Look, Arslan! Look, Arslan! You see the squirrel?” And Arslan would gravely follow the little waving finger and refuse to see the squirrel till it had been pointed out with bullseye accuracy.
Nobody ever disciplined Sanjar, but he had his hard lessons, and his punishments. The rabbit was only one of them. Arslan’s rule against gainsaying the boy meant that he had more than his share of accidents. In fact, it was a wonder he survived the year he lived in my house without serious injury. That spring and summer, especially, it was a quiet day indeed that passed without Sanjar’s shrieks of pain or fear, as he learned the hard way that mother sows will bite, that bulls will charge, that flatirons are hot and heavy, and a hundred other uncomfortable facts of life. None of these things disturbed Arslan; his only concern seemed to be that the boy should learn not to cry. “You sound like a woman,” he would say scornfully. “You sound like a baby.”
“It hurts me! It hurts me!”
And Arslan, hard-faced, hard-eyed, would shake his head. “Sanjar, listen; remember. If you are strong enough, and smart enough, and brave enough, nothing will hurt you. Nothing.”
It was this kind of thing that made Luella the most indignant. “He’s ruining that child,” she said to me. “He’s trying to make him into a soldier before he’s had time to be a baby.”
And she needed a baby to love. She should have been a grandmother by now.
You couldn’t see much of Sanjar—I couldn’t, anyway—without feeling a sort of fascination. I’d always hated to see a child completely alone in a world of adults. From what Hunt told me, Sanjar had never had a companion, or a rival, his own age. Naturally all good Kraftsville parents were careful to keep their children away from him. And it didn’t seem to occur to Arslan or Rusudan that their child might enjoy (still less need) the company of any little plebeians. But Sanjar would stop whatever he was doing to stare at every bunch of kids who happened along—stare awestruck and intent, his black eyes as full of concentration as his father’s and a lot more human.
Aside from acting as Sanjar’s tutor and escort, Hunt apparently had nothing to do. He drifted from my house to Nizam’s headquarters to school and back again. Information flowed through him like a wide-mesh seine.
“You can’t tell me he hasn’t run into a lot of active resistance movements, Hunt.” I knew for a fact he’d run into some. Roley Munsey’s receiver had picked them up and listened to them die. It was why I knew I’d been right never to let Roley transmit anything.
Hunt’s reaction to that kind of statement was likely to be literal: he wouldn’t tell me. But a little later on, he would give his own kind of answer. “It’s essentially a judo technique—use your opponent’s force and weight against himself. He’s a very eclectic wrestler. Have you ever seen him wrestle?”
“No.”
“No, of course.” He mused on his secrets. “He likes to use his own strength, too. That’s like a religion with him. It would be terribly interesting to see Arslan disabled.”
“Terribly.”
“Bu
t brute force is only the ideal. In practice, he follows the principles of judo. It’s not always easy, but it’s very economical. He invites the resistance to organize, you see, so he can crush it conveniently. He doesn’t object to resistance—only to organization.”
“What do you mean, ‘invites’?”
“Teases. Baits. It’s a kind of sport—resistance-baiting.”
I nodded. “So that’s what he’s been doing for four years—that and founding a dynasty.” Thank God, we had had the luck and the discipline to resist Evergreen. Still, it didn’t necessarily follow that the KCR was undetected. And Hunt wasn’t in a position to be trusted very far.
“It’s not a dynasty. A dynasty is an organization.”
“I never noticed him objecting to his own organization.”
“His organization is designed to be temporary. He’s going to phase it out as fast as possible.”
“I’ll believe that when I see it. And I’ll still call it a dynasty, Hunt. He’s not above setting up a monument to himself.”
“Why should he?” Hunt’s eyes went hot. “Do you think he wants to be remembered by posterity? Do you think he’d go down in history as Arslan the Good? Arslan the Well-Beloved? He’d be Red Arslan—Bloody Arslan—Arslan the Terrible.”
“Isn’t that the way he likes it?” From the sound of it, Hunt had savored that list of titles before.
He shrugged, mild again. “Perhaps the question’s a little academic.”
What the troop movements added up to was that about half the Russians and a smaller proportion of Turkistanis had been replaced by the new troops Arslan had brought in, which left us, numerically speaking, about where we were before. But in fact, things were a lot different.
It was probably a toss-up which of us was gladder to see Arslan—Nizam or me. I sympathized with Nizam, in a way; my hands had been as tied as his. The only thing that made District 3281 the possible site of an uprising was Arslan’s presence in it. If we’d ever tried to fight Nizam, it wouldn’t have made one bit of difference whether we failed or succeeded; the whole district could have been crushed from outside, like a flea between Arslan’s fingernails. Now we had the heart and brain of the whole juggernaut within our grasp, and we’d had four years to develop our organization.