by Adam Roberts
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
PART 1 - PANTEGRAL
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
PART 2 - SCHÄFERHUND
PART 3 - I, GIANT
Acknowledgements
Also by Adam Roberts from Gollancz:
Salt
Stone
On
The Snow
Polystom
Gradisil
Land of the Headless
Swiftly
Yellow Blue Tibia
New Model Army
ADAM ROBERTS
Orion
www.orionbooks.co.uk
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Adam Roberts 2010
Dickens image Copyright © Hulton Archive Getty Images
[engraving by André Gill, 1868]
All rights reserved
The right of Adam Roberts to be identified as the author
of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in Great Britain in 2010 by
Gollancz
An imprint of the Orion Publishing Group
Orion House
5 Upper St Martin’s Lane
London WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
This eBook first published in 2010 by Gollancz.
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
eISBN : 978 0 5750 8874 0
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As the classes of an aristocratic people are strongly marked and permanent, each of them is regarded by its own members as a sort of lesser country, more tangible and more cherished than the country at large. As in aristocratic communities all the citizens occupy fixed positions, one above the other, the result is that each of them always sees a man above himself who patronage is necessary to him and below himself another man whose cooperation he may claim. Men living in aristocratic ages are therefore almost always closely attached to something placed out of their own sphere, and they are often disposed to forget themselves. Amongst democratic nations new families are constantly springing up, others are constantly falling away, and all that remain change their condition; the woof of time is every instant broken, and the track of generations effaced. Aristocracy had made a chain of all the members of the community, from the peasant to the king: democracy breaks that chain, and severs every link of it.
De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, II:2:2
It’s too late, it’s too soon, or is it—
The Hives, ‘Tick Tick Boom’
PART 1
PANTEGRAL
1
I am not the hero of this story. Because I am narrating it, and because it relates events mostly from my point of view, you may conclude it is somehow about me. I ask that you remember, throughout, that it is not. The hero of the story - in the old style of these things, according to the way novels have traditionally been made - is that New Model Army of which I was formerly a component.
Transparency is one of those necessities for the proper operation of any democracy. Indeed, a democracy can be gauged as successful insofar as it approaches the asymptote of complete Zamiatin transparency. You find that thought distasteful. You want to preserve your privacy. I understand, although it necessarily means that you are not properly committed to the idea of democracy. It’s hard for you, I appreciate; given that you’ve been conditioned from an early age to pay lip service to the idea of democracy. All I’m saying is that you don’t accept the fullest consequences of that allegiance. I hardly need to add, besides, none of the so-called democracies in the world today are properly democratic. They are, rather, rigid hierarchies, whose oligarchs consent, every few years, to punctuate their routine with a single mass reality-TV-show-style plebiscite. That’s not what democracy means.
If the ideological commitment doesn’t persuade, then perhaps you’ll at least concede that NMAs are a much cheaper way of putting an army together than the tradition mode. It is cheaper because we avoid the redundancy inherent in the older feudal military structures. Each soldier in our army sorts themselves for food, obviating the need for a specialized catering corps. We all have access - a simple credit chip - to the army’s bank savings, and so can buy our own kit, and arrange for our own travel. It is in our interests to buy good kit, and to look after it; a soldier who bought cheap kit and pocketed the difference would suffer on the battlefield. And a soldier who simply stole money would swiftly be discovered by his colleagues and as swiftly dealt with.
There are dangers, of course, associated with having army funds pooled centrally. Thirty years ago this would have been a mortal weakness; for we would probably have banked with a national bank, and left ourselves vulnerable to that nation’s government seizing our assets, should they at any stage become hostile to us, as they might well. But global and non-national banking saves us from that risk. Medical corps: we tend to ourselves and to our friends. Technical support, we attend to ourselves. It is much easier to do this, in the interconnected age of knowledge, than you might think - some little training, most of it arranged by the soldiers for themselves, augmented by immediate access to all the world’s databases, wikis and resources covers most eventualities. As to staff officers, we have none. We monitor one another. It is, again, in our interests to do this. As to an officer corps: we repudiate so archaicaristocratical a notion as commanding officer. We have no need for that sort of thing.
In those paragraphs you have the whole logic of the NMA.
I fought in a German NMA for a year; one of the three NMAs that fought at the Battle of Rawalpindi. That was a debacle, and the best thing I can say is that it was a greater debacle for the conventional forces than for us. After that I got out. I decided civilian life was for me. I could do this without letting my comrades down because, by the end of the week of fighting, the three NMAs had only enough personnel to constitute one NMA and, as it recoalesced, people had the opportunity to leave without inconveniencing anybody else. So I left.
I came home. Had you asked me then, as an individual, ‘what is home, to you?’ I would have said UK-EU. Nowadays, of course, I have a different answer. You’ll see why. Back then, though, I thought in national terms. After a year of floating from one job to another it occurred to me that I was poorly cut out for civilian life. I was, you will note, very far from the first solider to leave an army and spent months uncovering that obvious fact.
I decided I ought to go back in the army. One does not, however, become part of an NMA by walking into a recruitment office. Were any NMAs so foolish as to establish such offices, national governments would close them down. The legal situation of NMAs, under national and under UN law is - I need hardly tell you this - awkward, to say the least.
It came to me that I cou
ld serve a spell in a conventional army, so I joined up with the British Regulars. But the New Model Army had spoiled me for conventional army work - officers peacocking around, giving me orders, and me having to follow the orders no matter how idiotic they be. In retrospect it was foolish of me to think I could stick it. But I am not inclined to judge myself too harshly. I was thinking as a soldier thinks - thinking what am I good for, really, if not being a soldier? Setting me to work as a chef, or in a shop, or tailoring marketing emails all day in a swEtshop, was like using a scimitar to plough the soil.
So for a while I was in the regular army, and sixty per cent of the energy in a regular army is expended in keeping the soldiers locked in the hierarchy called, variously, ‘rank’, ‘King’s Regulations’, ‘orders’, ‘the glorious traditions of the King’s Own South Downers’. This is the feudal model along which armies have been organized since the earliest wars: you have a place, and you stay in it. You do whatever you’re told by the people above you in the hierarchy, because they, effectively, own you - they may dispose of you, send you to your death, no matter how futilely, or idiotically. Some people say that the death throes of this system came with the First World War, when the officers exercised their deadly seigneur-droit via an unprecedented prodigality of deaths amongst the lower orders. I’ve never been persuaded by that argument myself. It is true that the British officers wasted their men’s lives: yes, but they won. In those times, with those weapons and that terrain, and most of all with that feudal organization, there really wasn’t another way to win.
The change happened later. It was this: democracy colonized new technology.
Consider the Second World War. History tells us that war was a fight to see whether a democratic system could beat an authoritarian one. The axis-fascists argued that democracy must be defeated, because it is in the nature of democracy to be riddled with internal contradiction, dissension, bickering and faction - that for instance no democracy could focus the will to stay in a long, destructive and expensive war - that the mob would grow tired of the hardships, losses and deaths long before an iron-willed fuehrer would give up. But then the democracy-allies won, and that victory was taken by many precisely to signal the inherent strength of democracy as against authoritarianism. So in the period after that war, ‘democracy’, or its slogan ‘freedom’, was boss. And many people took it to be a virtue so plain as to be self-evident.
So one of the shaping ideological forces of the second half of the twentieth century is that democracy is not just ethically better than dictatorship, it is practically superior. Hey, people said: look at the number of wars fought between the two regimes and always won by the former. This era was ushered in, and ideologically validated, by the fact that armies from democratic nations fought armies from authoritarian nations and won. But although that was the case, nobody suggested that the armies themselves should be run on democratic lines. There has never been in the history of humankind a properly democratic army. There were mental incapacities in place that made it hard for people even to think the possibility; but they boiled down to - release ordinary soldiers from their feudal bonds and they’d all run away from battle, like cowards! This is a version of the older anti-democracy complaint: give people the power to run their own countries and they’ll do nothing but vote themselves bread and circuses! Or in more up-to-date form: they’ll vote to cut taxes and to raise welfare!
That’s not what happens, though, actually.
This is the way the story begins: in 500 BC, or thereabouts, Athens invented democracy. It’s hard to believe that nobody had thought of running a country that way before, since it seems so natural and right - but so it was. At about the same time Athens got lucky; for only a few years after inventing democracy they discovered silver in southern Attica and were able to open a network of mines that made them, very quickly, very rich. Because they were a democracy this meant that the state was rich. So they called an assembly to decide what to do with all the money. Some proposed distributing it amongst the citizens to make them all, individually, wealthy. Others said, no: spend it, rather, constructing a navy, building and equipping ships, training our people to sail them. Everybody voted, and the democracy chose the latter option. In other words: right at the start democracy showed itself able to make the harder, not the softer, choice. Democracy, since then, has shown itself consistently able to prioritize harder, collective goals over shorter-term individual gratifications.
And it was fortunate the Athenians made the choice they did. It meant that when the autocratic Persians invaded Greece in 480, the Athenians were equipped to be able to defeat them at Salamis. And it meant that the democracy of Athens, more adaptable and flexible than the autocratic city-states that surrounded it, and gifted with more motivated population, went on within a century to overrun the whole of Greece and the eastern Mediterranean. Because of democracy they become the top dog in the area. An army of free men is always going to have higher morale than an army of slaves. That’s common sense. But we didn’t realize how true that was until the NMAs, because until the NMAs every army had been an army of slaves.
So: the important change did not begin to happen with the First World War, nor with the Second - for in those wars both ideological blocs were served by feudal authoritarian-model armies. It started to happen with the wikipedics of the end of that century (this new vogue was: the wisdom of crowds, infotopia, wikinomics). The new e-democracy utopianism is fuelled by new technologies that make it much simpler to canvas everybody’s opinion quickly and efficiently. Then came the establishment of the first two New Modelled strike forces, and their extraordinary success.
Modern democracy is a watery affair compared with the Athenian original. In Athens every citizen ran the state; only slaves and women were exempted (unjustifiable exclusions by modern eyes, of course). Everybody assembled in the ecclesia and discussed affairs of state. Everybody got involved. Nowadays people abdicate their democratic responsibilities: elect representatives to rule on their behalf. Once they’re elected they have years and years when they can do whatever they like; that’s the nature of representative democracy. We don’t have democracy, in the world of politics today; we have oligarchy punctuated by occasional contests to determine who has the most effective control of the media.
The received wisdom is that we can’t run countries nowadays like Athens was run, because there are too many people - seventy million in the UK alone - to fit into a single assemble and vote on every issue. Maybe that’s true; maybe not - seventy million can vote online easily enough. But there is inertia in the logic that determines how countries are governed. That inertia is so important a principle that it even has a specific political name and affiliation: conservatism.
That’s by the bye, because my concern is with the NMAs. I suppose it is true that the huge size of contemporary populations means modern democracy lacks fit to the Athenian original. But an army of good size - I mean, one large enough to be effective in proper battle, but small enough to retain manoeuvrability, logistic manageability, flexibility - is exactly the size of an antique Mediterranean city-state. This is one of the mistakes made by those generals who have gone to war against New Model Armies. They think they are fighting a corps of men and women. They are not. They are fighting a polis. That is why they lose.
2
There was a boy with a key embedded in his forehead.
Stop.
The British Army is 100,000 bodies strong or so, and can call, in times of greater need, upon 50,000-or-so reserves. Of course, were times to get direr still it could mobilize many more, for it has a large population base on which to draw. The British Army enjoys a fierce reputation around the planet. It is divided into a certain number of corps, divisions, brigades, all arranged according to internal hierarchical logics and distributed meta-hierarchically. It is centuries old.
Our NMA, ‘Pantegral’ as it is now known, consists of a shade fewer than ten thousand people - many of them British, of course, though not a
ll. It is four years old - a mere toddler. It has no truck with internal hierarchies of any kind, and as an entity it related on similar meta-principles of equality with other NMAs.
150,000 troops against 10,000. There is no question which army had more, and more advanced, and most of all bigger, ordnance. I know the British Army: for although my service lasted only a few months, I did serve it in.
As far as my Regular Army military service goes: it became clear to me quickly that I had stumbled into a stiflingly feudal machine. I was like a twenty-first-century man tricked into the eleventh century and startled by how primitive and brutal existence is. So, when I realized this, I applied for discharge. It was declined. Accordingly, I went absent without leave. This outraged the authorities, although it did not bother my immediate colleagues, men (exclusively) who had never taken a liking to me. Since they were not bothered I had no qualms about going, although it necessitated a good deal of skulking about the country whilst Military Police - another costly and burdensome paramilitary organization for which NMAs have no truck - chased me here and there. I was saved, in effect, by the Succession War. Since this war also destroyed me, as you will see, my statement may look paradoxical: but you’ll see it is true. And as for the key, intersecting the bone of the skull - what is it? It is the seed. And what does it seed? Let us say, thought: or consciousness; or awareness. Awareness is, perhaps, the best way of putting it.