Arslan

by M J Engh

  The problem the KCR had to face now—or I had to face for the KCR—was simple enough, but the answer still wasn’t. As long as Plan One was in operation, we couldn’t afford to make any mistakes. I knew enough now to be sure Nizam wasn’t the only commander who would take it personally if anything happened to Arslan. And the new Turkistani battalion had the unmistakable look of an elite unit—hard and polished and too damned proud of themselves. There was no way the KCR could move, even now, without unleashing more hell than I wanted to be responsible for—no way but one. The only defense Arslan had been able to come up with against the threat of kidnapping was to tell me he wouldn’t let me do it. That had been valid enough in the front seat of a Land Rover, with one gun between us, but it didn’t apply any longer. Only we had to be very careful.

  There was no lack of information and misinformation in the air, and Hunt wasn’t the only source of it. Things had solidified under Nizam—petrified into a humdrum daily desperation. Now we were free enough to breathe and think. Things seemed fluid again, and stale old bits of information from the Russian camp suddenly began to branch and bloom.

  “Of course he got the Russian government first, Hunt. But what the devil could he threaten them with—or bribe them with, either?”

  There was a faint, abstracted frown he used for hypothetical problems. “If the lever is long enough, it doesn’t take much force to move the world.”

  “It’s got to have been some kind of a trick. They must have thought they were using him. But from there on, it’s all downhill work. Somebody just picked up the hot-line phone and told Washington they could either fight a nuclear war or turn over the armed forces to Arslan. And all I can say is, everything we ever heard about Washington must have been true, the way they caved in. I suppose it doesn’t matter much now whether they were traitors or just chicken. After that, he just started shifting troops around.”

  Hunt nodded absently. “That’s approximately right.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “At least, that’s approximately what he told me.”

  It was no use getting mad at Hunt. “Told you how long ago?” I asked him as mildly as I could.

  He considered. “About six years.”

  “In other words, right after he got here.” And the whole town—the whole world—dying to know, buzzing with bewilderment and pain, while Hunt Morgan sat mum with his nice-little-boy face of ravished innocence. For six years. “All right, how did he get the Russians to cooperate?”

  “Magic?” he suggested. He met my eyes for a second, and hunched forwards in a movement of contrition. “He didn’t really tell me much,” he said seriously. “I’m sorry. Would it have helped?”

  “I suppose not. Forget it, Hunt.” His shadowy smile flickered, and it annoyed me. He was so damned determined to be an exile, cultivating every little irony like an orchid.

  But it was in midsummer that the real revelation came, and everything crystallized into a new solidity. Luella tapped on the bedroom door and peeped in. “It’s Dr. Allard,” she said. “He wants to talk to you.” Her manner added, privately.

  Jack Allard was already making his ponderous way upstairs, like a tired bear. Luella ushered him in and left us alone. “What can I do for you, Doctor?” I motioned him to the armchair and turned my desk chair to face him.

  He settled himself thoroughly down into the cushions. He didn’t look cheerful. “Torey McArthur and two of his kids are sick.”

  “What about it?”

  “Well, it looks to me like typhus. Not that we have typhus in Kraft County, but these new troops could have brought it in.” There had been troop movements—little, piddling ones, like fine-tuning adjustments—in and out of the district for the past two months.

  “Didn’t the McArthurs get their shots?”

  “Oh, they got them, all right. Typhus—that’s the one thing Nizam’s boys were the keenest about. They let me do the flu and the cholera, but they insisted on giving the typhus inoculations themselves. You know they’ve been through this district door to door.”

  I nodded. “So what are you saying, Doctor?”

  He took out his pipe and looked at it. “Well, nothing gives one hundred percent immunity. I’m not saying anything.”

  “If the vaccine doesn’t work, how do we keep it from spreading? Quarantine?”

  “Quarantine, sanitation. It’s louse-borne, you know. Shouldn’t be much of a problem if I can have the authority to stop people from living like pigs.”

  “You just take all the measures you need to, Jack, and if anybody objects, send them to me.” I looked at him. “All right, what else is on your mind?”

  “I tried to get some more vaccine or some serum from Nizam’s boys, so I could at least revaccinate the rest of the family. Nothing doing. They not only claim they don’t have any—they obviously don’t give a damn that there’s typhus in the district. Which strikes me as odd from the same bunch who were so steamed up a couple of years ago about everybody getting protected against typhus—especially women and children.”

  “Jack,” I said, “tell me one thing. How long since there’s been a baby born in the county?”

  “That’s the right question. It’s very close to a year. The last was Pearl Miller’s baby girl.” He leaned forward, playing with his pipe. “Oh, I could tell you some interesting things.”

  “Such as that the birth rate started dropping fast about nine months after Arslan first got here?”

  “Well, not quite that soon. But you remember how Nizam inoculated about half the population right away and then ran out of vaccine? And didn’t get enough to finish the job till last year? Well, I’ve been going over my records since this McArthur thing turned up, and I can show you that every maternity case I’ve had in the last three years has been a woman who missed the first round of inoculations.”

  I was pacing the floor by this time. Relax, relax, my little automatic warning system was telling me stupidly. “Jack, is that possible? Is there a shot to induce sterility?”

  “Well, I’m not the world’s leading authority on the subject.” He tried to light his pipe, and failed. “The Pill’s a very temporary thing, of course. There’s quite a spectrum of drugs that’ll prevent conception in various ways, but the effect is ephemeral, or the dosage required is massive, or the side effects are pretty bad. But a lot of people have been working on it. Somebody was bound to come up with something like that sooner or later. And it looks like it was sooner.”

  He sat silent, looking down at his hands and his cold pipe, while I paced down the room, and back, and down and back again. I stopped. “Anything else, Jack?”

  He glanced up and shook his head.

  “Okay. Thanks. Be sure you keep me up to date.”

  I found Arslan alone in one of Nizam’s side offices, drinking coffee and dictating into a machine like any normal businessman. Lieutenant Z had brought me to the door with some trepidation, but I was admitted promptly, and Arslan greeted me with his blandest silence.

  “General, are you aware that there’s typhus in the district?”

  He looked interested. “Who?”

  “Torey McArthur’s family. They’re poor and they’re dirty, but they’ve had your typhus shots. The whole district’s had your typhus shots, General; and now we’ve got typhus. What we don’t have are any babies.” His smooth face didn’t change. He only looked at me and waited. “Is this Plan Two, General?” He began to smile, just a little. “Was there ever a Plan One?”

  He stood up, putting out his cigarette in his cup. “Plan One was obsolete before it could be applied,” he said easily. The smile broadened all at once. “Your country, sir, has been one of the easiest to deal with.”

  Relax, relax. But I had held the gun on him, and thrown it away for the children’s sake. And now the only children would be Arslan’s. “What is it?” I asked him. “How did you get hold of it?” How far has it gone? was what I wanted to know.

  “It is a virus.”

/>   “Virus? You mean it’s contagious?”

  “Minimally, if at all. You will understand, sir, that there has been little time for research. But no cases of natural transmission have been observed. It was developed in a Chinese government laboratory.”

  “Chinese?”

  He nodded. “Yes, it is true that the Chinese were very loud in praise of fertility. They developed the virus as a weapon, and I have used it as a weapon. The report of the virus came to me in Kraftsville, sir, in the first month of my stay here.”

  So the night he had crossed his dirty boots on my bed, the night he had expounded Plan One with such blazing eyes and vibrant conviction, it was already a discarded shell. “What makes a country easy to deal with, General?”

  “Organization and centralization. The more centralized, the simpler to capture. The more organized, the easier to control.”

  “So a lot of other places are giving you more trouble.”

  He shrugged. He crossed his arms and leaned comfortably against the wall. “There are problems of logistics and security. Colonel Nizam has been invaluable to me.” He smiled. “District 3281 is totally sterile, sir. There is no harm in your knowing, now.” He tilted his head with that juvenile cockiness. “North America is totally sterile.”

  “Including your family?” I asked viciously.

  The look that came into his face was the look of a snake drawing back upon its coils. “I have a son, sir,” he said. “I do not plan to have more; but I reserve the power of choice to myself.”

  “And what about your son? How much power of choice are you reserving for him?”

  The black eyes stared expressionlessly. “None.” He straightened up and fished a cigarette out of his pocket. “No, sir, I have not sterilized my son. If I fail, he will have his choice. But if I succeed, there will be no woman able to bear his children.” He lit his cigarette, and repeated, as if it was a mild joke, “His children.”

  “I imagine one of your logistical problems is just producing enough of your—your—What do you call it?”

  “Vaccine,” Arslan said savoringly.

  A warm wave of relief went over me. I knew, as surely as if I’d seen the documents in Arslan’s own handwriting, that it wasn’t only his son he hadn’t sterilized. One entire sex, he had said that night in my bedroom. Vaccine, yes; he was trying to vaccinate the human female against pregnancy. “How do you know it’s permanent?” I asked him.

  “What is knowing, sir? I have never seen an absolute proof of anything, but I have seen conclusive evidences. I conclude that my vaccine is permanent in effect. You, of course, are at liberty to hope otherwise.” And he grinned at me confidentially.

  “It’s none of your Evergreens and Resistances that’ll solve the problem,” Jack Allard said to me, later. “It’s medical research, if it’s anything.”

  “You think so?”

  “I’m convinced of it. After all, it’s a medical problem. And you know as well as I do that there are physiologists and geneticists and virologists and biochemists and plain old general practitioners all over the civilized world working on a hundred different approaches to it right now. Somebody’s bound to find an answer—most likely, several answers.”

  “You know the trouble with that, though, don’t you, Doctor?”

  “Oh, sure. Insufficient time and inadequate communications. Oh, sure.” He sucked his pipe. “But somebody will find it somewhere, and apply it somewhere, and that’s all it takes. The human race has had setbacks before—take the Black Death, there’s an example for you. The human race is going to outlive Arslan by at least a few centuries, don’t worry. He may even have done us good in the long run.”

  Well, that was the faith Jack Allard solved his part of the problem with—and it was about as unrealistic as any I’d ever heard. Conditions all over what had been the civilized world didn’t figure to be exactly ideal for scientific research. And if one of those suppositious somebodies did find one of those hypothetical answers, how in God’s name could it be put into practice? Logistics was on Arslan’s side now. He was over the hump.

  Now that I knew about his virus, it was a lot easier to make sense out of his maps and messages. What he had in mind, and in progress, was pacification with a vengeance. He certainly hadn’t divided the whole globe into county-sized districts to start with. Instead, he had sealed off key areas, divided them, and sterilized them. After that, it was a matter of annexing new districts, so that his sterile areas spread like patches of leprosy. The chilling thing was that he had started with America, Russia, and Western Europe.

  But he was forging a chain that had to reach around the world, and every new link increased the chances of its breaking. How many of his officers would really push Plan Two to the end? How many of his men would go along with it at all if they realized what they were doing? If they could be offered an alternative at the right time, everything might change in a hurry. That was why he feared organization. It would be no civilian resistance that would ever break him; it would have to be an organized movement that could detach whole units of his patchwork horde. No, what we needed now wasn’t faith, but works. And that was my business.

  CHAPTER 10

  In spite of everything, Hunt was my best source of information, or anyway my most valuable one—and Arslan himself was a pretty close second. It was worthwhile talking to the Russians, too, and up to a point they were very informative. And not even all of Nizam’s talents had kept a few facts from seeping across the border.

  Arslan had told a piece of the truth when he called himself the leash that held back his wolves. Only what most of them were probably raring to do was hurry back where they came from. Of course there would be officers with private ambitions, ready to carve out their own little principalities or just to fill their own pockets. That was one danger—bad enough, but not too serious in the long run. The other was the officers who would stay loyal to Arslan. But Arslan’s conquest itself was living proof that most armed forces would obey whoever spoke through the chain of command. And, this time, that would be us.

  In fact, what we were preparing wasn’t exactly a revolt; it was a coup d’état. One thing about Arslan—one thing that would work for us, finally—was that he was a very personal commander. That meant the ones who were loyal would be under our control by the simple law of blackmail, once we had Arslan, and the ones who were merely obedient would go on obeying. Furthermore, we would have the communications to bypass any uncooperative links in the chain.

  It meant incidentally that he couldn’t keep his hands off the adjacent districts. He was forever dashing across the border in one direction or another to handle some new problem. That was fine with me. It didn’t make my work any easier—Nizam was less of a problem when Arslan was in town—but it was a weakness in a man who was trying to run the world, and any weakness in Arslan was something to hang onto.

  He had been gone since early morning, presumably into the next district west, the day Rusudan disappeared. About five o’clock that afternoon, she had started out for a stroll with two of her women. It was just turning dusk when they got back. She had sent the women upstairs, walked through the kitchen, picked up an apple, and stepped out the back door, and that was the last anybody had seen of her.

  When Arslan came in about an hour later, looking very pleased with himself and yelling for Rusudan, we were just realizing she was gone. The women were in a flutter. Arslan’s face hardened; it was against his orders for Rusudan to go anywhere alone. But she had lived in Kraftsville almost a year now, and that particular order had been disobeyed a hundred times. He didn’t say much to the two women who had been with her, but whatever he said was effective; their faces were sick with dread as they scampered out the back door and went separate ways into the dark.

  After them went the soldiers—half a dozen who had come back with him, and three of his own bodyguard. Hoofs pounded and tires squealed. Arslan himself was across the street to school and back again four times in ten minutes. Obvi
ously he was losing no time in mounting a full-scale search.

  “What do you think?” Luella asked me quietly.

  “I think you’d better go upstairs.” I wanted her out of Arslan’s way. He had driven Hunt upstairs already with one savage gesture. Only little Sanjar stood by gravely, gazing up from the level of his father’s knee.

  “They’ll be wanting their supper,” Luella said.

  “Well, let them call for it.”

  She put her hand on my arm. “All right, but you come up with me.”

  It must have been about nine o’clock when I heard the front door open after a period of quiet, and came downstairs to see a Turkistani sergeant frozen in a salute that Arslan did not return. The man’s face was blank and hard as a glazed brick. Arslan stood in front of the couch, his shoulders a little hunched and his eyes dogged. There was dead silence in the room.

  “What is it?” I asked the sergeant. Most of them knew a little English by now.

  He dropped his salute, and spoke a few stiff words to Arslan. Arslan gestured silently towards the door, and was through it himself before any of his bodyguard had time to open it for him.

  They brought her in within the hour. Sanjar had run downstairs in his pajamas when he heard the jeep, with the women fluttering after him. Arslan in the doorway shouted; one of them scooped up the boy, and they rushed back up the stairs.

  His arms were full of her. She looked grotesquely big; she should have been doll-size, she seemed so broken. Clothes and hair, tangled and soiled, stuck out every which way; here a limp arm, there a dangling foot. He laid her on the couch and straightened her.

  She was mired with her own blood. Whatever she had been beaten with had smashed full across her bright, queenly face. She was unquestionably dead.