by M J Engh
I looked at him, interested at last in the content of what he was saying. He touched me, and thus unspellbound I asked, “Did you do it with lasers?”
He let his head fall backward, draped from the rolled pillow, not in indolence but in enjoyment. He talked around his cigarette; gentle rivulets of white smoke accompanied his words. “The laser had been developed as a defensive weapon. Unfortunately its offensive potentialities will never be realized. But consider, Hunt! When two men face each other with drawn knives, who will live longer? He who wears armor. The shield was as decisive an invention as the sword. And what is the shield against the sword of full-scale nuclear attack? Either a counterstrike force too massive and dispersed to be neutralized, or a defensive network that is virtually one hundred percent effective. Nothing less is adequate. The advantage of the laser, the beauty of the laser, Hunt, is its speed. The antimissile missile has one chance to destroy its target: the laser has four, five, six! No, nothing is perfect—but we can approach perfection as a limit. Given a complete defensive network of lasers, the damage that can be inflicted by a nuclear strike approaches zero. Most certainly, for a large country, it falls within the limits of acceptable damage. Therefore—” he half straightened, jabbing his cigarette toward me—“your country and the Soviet Union competed for years to perfect an anti-missile laser—competed quietly.” He smiled at me, the playful smile. “Conveniently for me, the Soviets succeeded first. Do you understand now?”
He touched me nowhere; but my whole right side was warmed because of him, the principle heat exchange occurring in the region of my right hip. He reached past me to tamp out his cigarette; returning, his arm brushed across me, his hand caught gently below my armpit. “A little,” I said.
He chuckled lowly. “A little,” he mocked. “A little, little. Hunt,” he said, urgently if cavalierly. His fingers sank into me (five bruises tomorrow) and I said, mightily aloud, “I want to understand.”
He paused, his fingers still tight in my side, eyeing me with humorous surprise. “You want,” he said interestedly. “Good. I shall tell you.” His gripping hand eased slowly. “I knew—and your government knew, Hunt, in much more detail than I could know—that the Russians had perfected an anti-missile laser. It followed that they were installing a laser defense network as rapidly as possible. Do you understand, Hunt? It is very simple. The shield—the first shield—is a weapon of offense.” I understood. It was very simple. “I went to Moscow to talk to the Chinese, yes, as the papers said, but much more as an escort to Nizam.” His eyes, unmoving, withdrew from me a moment. It was dull and cold to realize that he thought more of Nizam than of me. Recollection united them, occupation welded them. They were made one by years (five? ten? fifteen?) of shared effort, intense not with love but with life and death. Conspiracy and combat—two fields as far beyond me (considered as a point infinitesimally distant from the neutral center) as, say, experimental biochemistry and steamfitting—were the elements of their weathered intimacy. “Nizam was a student of the Soviets,” he said reminiscently. “Therefore he was able to apply appropriate modifications of their own methods to themselves. We were half certain before we set out for Moscow, almost certain before we reached Moscow, entirely certain before we finished a week in Moscow, that the Russian laser defense network was complete. No, Hunt, you could not have known. Certain parts of your government knew that the Russians had perfected the laser, and were installing it, but how far the installation had proceeded they did not know.” He sank his head back into the pillow. His face rounded and sweetened; his smile played like summer upon earth. “There were two men,” he said.
There had been two men. I remembered them very well from eighth-grade Current History. Their names were Glukhovsky and Kerbabayev, and it was hard to keep in mind which was the technical head of state and which the leader of the Party. I remembered the stout businessman face of one, soulless and broad, and that the other was a little man. But as Arslan spoke, low and luxuriatingly, the blurred pictures sharpened and came alive to me. Two men. And I shuddered, stroked with the razor-edge of actuality. It was more strange and thrilling that the man beside me had seen, conversed with, dealt with those miraculous beings—men and yet powers—who had swayed nations, destroyed lives, inspired headlines, than that he, Arslan, was himself such a being raised to a higher power. For I touched him, I knew the taste of his breath and its sound in sleep, his flesh had wounded mine, I saw him yawn, scratch, spit, his stomach rumbled, he repeated himself and mispronounced words; he was Arslan to me, absolute Arslan, but he was familiar to me as the potent air.
It was Glukhovsky, the man with the business face, who had been Chairman of the Supreme Soviet and thus effectively Tsar of all the Russias. “Ah, he was good, Hunt. Good!” Good: praise from the cockleshelled lancer for the featureless wall-face of the turning whale, backed with kilotons of oiled muscle and buoyed with the endless ocean. “It was the hour of the laser, and of Russia. The world was hers to take, if she had the courage. It could be a long hour for her, perhaps. But for me, Hunt, the hour was very short. It was necessary to do two things. First, to encourage the Russians to take this world that they had earned. Second, to persuade them to give it to me. Not so difficult, Hunt—not so very difficult. There was a disagreement within the Russian government.”
And in blazoned clarity I saw the scene: the two Russians with distrustful eyes, the smooth wood of the table, the smooth faces of the Chinese, the red telephone ominous and ludicrous, and Arslan, Arslan in his hour. I saw the tiger glint of his prowling eyes, the crouched short-muscled power within (born for the stalk and spring, not the long lope of pursuit), the glow of joy that made his squat solidity beautiful as Praxiteles’ gods. “Nizam,” he said, “had made these things possible.” Nizam making the ways straight. I looked for Nizam in that picture, and distinguished a shadow on the outskirts. “He had—isolated—insulated—the room. Thus I could make my proposal without interruption. And could enforce an answer.”
He spoke Russian, presumably well. “Enforce an answer how?” I asked him. Gem-eyed Arslan, two thousand miles behind enemy lines, armed with a silent whip named Nizam, enjoying himself. Arslan at climax, all but imperceptibly quivering, alight, afire, ablaze. Shabby princeling of a beggar state, stretching his hand to manipulate the crowned chessmen of world politics. “With a gun,” he said.
I would have laughed, if laughter had been among my current capabilities. At least I registered the words as amusing. I could enforce an answer. Enforce an answer how? With a gun. Premier Arslan Khan of Turkistan in the capital of the world’s vastest nation—and, for the hour that might have been long, the world’s most powerful. “Naturally our belongings had been searched; but I had carried it always on my person.” Arslan’s bedmate, Arslan’s bathmate. “Naturally we had been examined electromagnetically; but there are convenient devices, which were known to Nizam, that defeat such examination. Thus I had the gun with me in the conference room. It was necessary only to point it.”
But already the scene was fading. It had been merely a projection of colored light, not one of the etchings of the mind. The red telephone would not have been in that room, probably not the Chinese. I frowned, trying to follow the legend he unrolled for my education, trying to regain the interest I had felt or claimed to feel. He had pointed the gun. He had made his proposal: that the Chairman of the Supreme Soviet deliver to the President of the United States an immediate ultimatum demanding immediate response—capitulation (though not in that unacceptable term) or nuclear war. “And in either event, Hunt, I asked for myself only the command of the armed forces. More than that I could not hope to be given.” That was all he asked. Later he would not need to ask.
“It was not unreasonable, Hunt.” No; insane but not unreasonable. Silent-eyed Glukbovsky had heard all the reasons long before he faced Arslan’s pistol. And brisk little Kerbabayev, who watched them both with equal attention, burned with belief in those reasons. There had been a disagreement within the gove
rnment. Irony: somehow the word had always brought me the picture of some unidentifiable curio, carved in ivory. It was a beautiful irony that Kerbabayev should hear urged upon Glukhovsky at pistol point, by the premier of Turkistan, the very act that he had been urging for weeks past. It was reasonable, reasonable. It was the terminus of all the logic of defense and counterdefense, of strike and counterstrike. For what else (excepting only the great ends of Communist teleology) had they worked, contrived, expended, sacrificed, risked? How could they lack the final courage now to take the final risk, a risk so much less than many they had triumphantly run? Thus he had surely argued. And now they would take that risk perforce. Arslan was the gadfly to drive them into the promised land, and then be brushed away.
Or, alternatively, to be crushed at once, before the heavy thews began to move. And Arslan’s audacity, if it failed of success, would have ended the arguments forever. He, Kerbabayev, would be silenced with the same blow that destroyed Arslan.
And the man who faced the pistol—had he been charmed, somewhere within, by this swift brash grace and youthfulness, the outrageous speed and ease with which this trivial opportunist had pierced the guarded heart of their strength? Or had he only raged, Philistine confronting the minuscule host of inspiration, at all the petty, irrevocable stupidities, of his underlings, predecessors, colleagues, that had left him suddenly at catastrophe’s brink? Or, executive to the last, had he been weighing truths and consequences all this while, premeditating the muscular actions that should inflect his face, produce words from his breath, explode or petrify the world?
“He did not accept.” So there had been a man, a member of my very species, who had refused Arslan—a character as unreal, in that aspect, as Arslan’s mythical parents, as the teachers in whose classrooms he had presumably sat, as the woman for whose love he had considered committing follies. Why had he not accepted, that man? I did not well understand, then or later, his teleology; perhaps to him it implied the necessity of the current phase of international relations. Or, ideology aside, did the status quo appear, in the curled computer of his brain, more advantageous than the newborn risks and harvests of a new world conquered? Or, simply and humanly, was he unwilling to exchange the ritual of his daily problems for the cataclysm of a revealed truth?
“Therefore I shot him.” And, patient and cold (it was the previous sentence that had chilled me), I looked at him. It was the first time such words had been addressed to me, and to my ignorance they sounded abnormal. But the logic was real. Arslan had enforced his answer.
It was, or course, desperate. He had begun the plunge, the crimson sky-dive of Macbeth. If Kerbabayev, too, “did not accept,” where could he turn to find his next sacrifice? Isolated in that still room as in the hurricane’s eye, he had no weapon but murder, no exit but triumph. A second Glukhovsky would have defeated him. But if there had been two Glukhovskys, he would not have attacked.
And Kerbabayev, of course, had accepted. Doubtless it had seemed to him a dazzling gambit. The goaded muscles would move, more suddenly than decision alone could make them, and the whole momentous bulk of his nation be set upon the path of righteousness. As for Arslan, without question he could be eliminated or neutralized; or (questioned) at worst he, Kerbabayev, would be able to keep a hand on the reins; and if all somehow failed, if the path were missed, or led awry, then Arslan should be sponge enough to sop up all the guilt.
He had made the call. He had delivered the ultimatum. The mountain had been climbed because it was there. No doubt the world’s end would have been different if there had been no red telephone—or, say, no Arslan, or no human race. The evolution, at least, would have been longer.
But these things came to me later, far later. Beside Arslan, in the lamplight, nothing stirred in me—nothing until the sullen slow warmth of an unexpected resentment (disappointment? shame?—some degradation product of a residual patriotism I had thought I never had) roused at his casual disposal of my country’s honor. “The United States, of course, capitulated.” Why of course? Why was all the uncertainty, all the risk, in Moscow? I looked down at my hands in my lap, and Arslan, hunching toward me, laughed. A momentary pulse of desire to argue rose in my throat, beat once, and died. Later, in the still hours before sleep, I was to cherish that little urgency as one more hopeful twitch of my paralyzed soul. Confusion of the deathbed over … There was still a future tense.
CHAPTER 17
Measuredly, by a gentle gradation of brutal degrees, I was being weaned away from slavery. He took me hunting, and I breathed. He struck me, and I spoke. He left my door unlocked, and I was afraid. It was not night I feared (Come, seeling night), but the great ghost-filled day. Daylight and Kraftsville swelled and swirled around the house, infiltrated the staircase, eddied outside my door. Tendrils snaked and vined through cracks and keyholes, every exit and entry let in a puff, and I sat bleak as Arctic stone in the knowledge that I would have to go out into it, out into all of it.
At first I went only with him, at special order. “Come, Hunt.” It would be no farther than the yard. The horses were ghosts to me. I looked through them, or looked away. I had learned to ride, seriously, two summers before. He caressed their solidity with a touch luxurious and sure, feeling for faults. From the outside Mr. Bond’s house looked alien or unreal. Warm breezes rustled the dusty flowers. Yellow sunlight poured in heavy swathes from the exhaustible sun. It was simply hot.
“Come, Hunt.” It was not an invitation; he merely commanded my attendance. Thousands at his bidding speed, And post o’er land and ocean without rest. I also served, apparently; though for what, in the sunlight, was obscure.
“Come, Hunt.” In the newly finished stable, in the good smells of horses and raw lumber, he talked his plausible Russian, criticized equerriel architecture by eye and hand, and turned on me with a sudden order to mount. The horse stood just-saddled; the Russian groom was laughing. I muffed it, naturally. But once in the saddle, hot with shame and dread, looking down at Arslan (a fantastic viewpoint), I felt my body take over. I remembered how it was to ride. He looked at me—looked up—and laughed. And looking down I smiled my first smile.
And still later, Mr. Bond’s gentlemanly and unpronounceable lieutenant was deputized to chaperone me. I liked his worried expressions and his diluted devotion to Arslan. He regarded me with the eyes of a conscientious nursemaid who didn’t much like children. He was a mild challenge, a natural object for harassment; but I wasn’t up to it. I was debilitated, the good invalid child glad of its leading-strings.
He led me, on Arslan’s precise instructions, farther and farther into the ghost-filled day. Two blocks south (the stables, to fetch the horse of Arslan’s whimsical choice); four blocks east (Nizam’s headquarters, to deliver some trivial, perhaps nonexistent, message; to look, or not to look, one block onward to my father’s house); three blocks north (shorter but farther, a different neighborhood, to Gullick’s the harness-maker, for a rather interesting modification of a halter). And outside Gullick’s house he courteously instructed me to wait a few minutes for him, and turned the nearest corner.
It was the first time I had been alone in the open, and I was at a loss. I dangled Arslan’s halter and admired the air. Did a colt feel the same dull resentment at being trained? Or, for that matter, the same dull satisfaction? I would perform my lessons, accept the bit, follow the reins. The line of least resistance, spidery clue through the funhouse labyrinth of actuality.
And alone in the open air, perceiving the world leafy and flowery, full of space in which the displaced personality could spread arms and turn about, sun-shone, solitary, I felt myself grow cheerful. Future tense aside, there was most definitely a present—a present in which it was possible to move, smile, respire, ride horses, understand harness, study Latin.
The tranquil street was unpeopled but alive. Hadn’t there always been people on the streets, before Arslan? No, I remembered now, and the scene around me sharpened into a keener focus, unmodifiable, indescribable
in its realness and rightness; lovely and real. It had been exactly like this before Arslan, on such a sidestreet, on such a summer day—the life and quiet bustle all in the houses and the trees, only an occasional flitter-between or resident-on-threshold (passer-by, porch-chatter, rug-shaker, harness-customer, tomato-picker), nobody in very much of a hurry. Nothing had changed. And I felt for the first time a wholehearted homesickness for my own people (cracked, contused, lacerated, but whole) and in it, temporary but stabbing, an instant ache for fellowship, for the kids of Eighth Grade, Room One.
And on cue, real and right, with the coincidental inevitability of fate-in-the-dice, two figures emerged from the green shadows of the next cross-street north, coming my way on the other side of the street. They were Gene Michaels (not, indeed, of Room One, but he had played first trumpet beside me) and Simon Teffertiller, universally known as Bud, kind-eyed and potato-faced. They were in eager conversation. I stood and waited until they were nearly opposite me. Then, “Hi,” I said, and lifted my hand.
They were very, very busy with their conversation. Not until they were definitely past did a half-glance come my way, and Bud exclaimed, in a voice that filled the attentive universe, “Hey, Gene, do you believe in fairies?”
I waited, hot but frozen, very busy in my turn with the harness, until they turned the corner, and then while I counted ten, twenty, forty-seven; and considering this a sufficiently angular and realistic number to justify me before any lingering atoms not yet convulsed in snickers, I turned and walked slowly—to very hell with instructions—back the long three blocks to Mr. Bond’s house. Some part of my brain (was it the cerebellum?) had cravenly deserted under fire, leaving the management of all my muscles to my unpracticed consciousness, so that I traveled in jerks and wavers where all should have been smooth but firm, and stubbed my toes.