The Coalition Man

by Alec Saracen

  Ceq had been right. He had been proud. A part of him was still proud. His management of the Coalition response had been a work of political genius, the kind of magnificent, audacious scheme that diplomats galaxy-wide dreamed of. Even his political enemies in the ranks of the Devvies and Revvies had grudgingly admitted that Zhai had outplayed them all, turning what could have been a disaster into a monumental salvage job which had saved the Coalition and somehow left the Solids better off than before. Even now, just thinking about it brought a flicker of warmth to his heart, swiftly followed by an extinguishing icy blast of guilt.

  It was impossible to work for a government in any meaningful capacity without being complicit in evil. Zhai had always known that. Now, he wondered if he had let that very impossibility blind him, if he had allowed himself to sink into an amoral quagmire that wasn't as inevitable as he'd thought. Had he ever truly believed he was doing the right thing, or had he just told himself that there was no right thing? Had he fallen victim to the same binary thinking he held in such contempt?

  The right thing had been beyond his reach, but had he let that excuse him from reaching for the next best thing? Now, far too late to make a difference, Zhai felt that he made a fundamental miscalculation at the outset, like a confused pilot steering his ship into uncharted waters.

  That night, his dreams were fragmented and confused. He stood in Chang's office, staring at his hideous painting of Calce, and watched the flames ripple and shimmer over the city until the paint melted and trickled over the frame and to the floor, first in rivulets and then in great multicoloured mudslides of paint, rising over his shoes as he stared at the blank canvas.

  “Calce,” Chang said from behind his desk, though Zhai did not look round. His eyes were tangled up in the enormous nothingness of the painting. It seemed to be growing. “Kadera. Naro. So much death, so much suffering – and the Coalition always seems to come out on top.”

  “Long live the Coalition,” Thier whispered in his ear.

  Zhai turned, and saw Thier sitting opposite him in the car. The office had vanished. Zhai opened his mouth, but the words froze in his throat, choking him. Thier watched him pitilessly for a moment, then opened the door and got out. When it closed behind him, Zhai was alone, still slowly suffocating on the words that had caught in his throat. The world ebbed and faded around him, and he slumped sideways, desperately trying to suck down air that wouldn't come. The last thing he heard before he woke up with a start, sweat-slick and tangled in his sheets, was Ceq's voice. She was there now, in the same seat Thier had occupied, expressionlessly watching him die.

  “I thought you were going to tell me when your life was in danger, Ambassador.”

  *

  The way forward was murky.

  Sim after sim had predicted wildly different results for any major action – assassinating Chang might accelerate a transition to democracy in one simulation and then plunge Tor into total civil war in the next. Just about the only thing the simulations could usefully tell them was that Thier had to survive, and that was nothing new.

  Grey Hawk was coming to realise that computer predictions were less than helpful in the field. All they could do with limited information was tell you the obvious, and when you replaced information with assumption and conjecture, there was little hope of a real answer. Garbage in, garbage out. The burden was on them.

  She found that she preferred that. She didn't need an algorithm to tell her what her own intuition and analysis could do just as effectively. True, the results of her secret alliance with Zhai were still unclear, but Thier's rejection of Coalition overtures was promising. As far as she was concerned, their strategy should be to protect ResTore until it could seize power without excessive bloodshed – though the path to that final, dizzying step was still unclear.

  So for now, they were playing for time, helping where they could while they waited for a clear opportunity to arise. It was frustrating, but Grey Hawk had no desire to make the wrong move too early. The game was too complex to rush in hot-headed and upset the board.

  'Game', she thought sourly. Listen to yourself. You sound like Zhai.

  The problem was that it was a game. That was the only way to make sense of the whole tangled mess that was Tor: by systematising it, reducing it to a gaggle of actors and a host of actions that interlocked and interacted. Action X leads to result Y, and everyone else adjusts their respective Action Zs accordingly. Grey Hawk felt dirty whenever she caught herself doing it.

  Tor was a planet of millions of people, not some abstract game. It was about improving the world, not simply getting one over the other players – yet it was impossible to view it through that lens while remaining a useful actor herself. Every time she tried, she tripped up on the unresolvable tension between observation and intervention. When she was right there on the ground, she was painfully aware that everything she did was a tiny fragment of a far larger whole. It was impossible to act without being drawn into the same zero-sum political system she hated, and yet a failure to act was a moral failure. There was no way out that left her clean.

  As the days passed, Grey Hawk found herself revisiting Yustrid's private diaries in her spare moments. Yustrid had always been more icon than woman to Grey Hawk, a collection of ideals and political statements more than a living, breathing human being, but as she reread the same text she had analysed in so many essays, Yustrid came to life. She was uncertain – no, more than that. She was afraid, terrified that she was doing the wrong thing or leading her followers down the wrong path, often on the verge of abandoning her embryonic politics for good but never quite able to give up her principles. How easy would it be to live in a world without truth, she wrote, and for the first time Grey Hawk could taste the bitter mix of sadness and determination behind her words. To deny goodness; to abandon equality; to scoff at fairness; to scuttle away from the shadow of obligation. It would be very easy indeed.

  That was the last entry for almost two weeks, which Grey Hawk knew coincided with the most intense fighting around Gubbala. At last, with the city in ruins and the People's Army of Liberation in retreat, with her left arm burned badly by an incendiary bomb and the tip of her right little finger shot off, Yustrid had taken up her pen again and scribbled a coda: But though the path of truth is long and arduous, and though so many of us fall by the wayside, it leads us to sunlit meadows, and lands of plenty.

  Grey Hawk wondered if Yustrid had imagined that those few words, jotted down in a mud-stained notebook in the back of a truck juddering along a rocky mountain road, would one day give a whole planet of her political descendants its name. Surely not. Yustrid's writings even a decade down the line, at the height of her power, still expressed surprise – and concern – that people followed her. Perhaps, she wrote, the human race needs prophets, no matter how false.

  It was strange to think of Yustrid as a human. For so long, she had been an academic subject to Grey Hawk. Putting aside the development of Yustridite thought and the historical context ran counter to years of theoretical education, but once Grey Hawk pushed past that veil of intellectual unease, Yustrid became almost like a distant friend, seeming to speak directly to Grey Hawk over the years and light-years.

  There were, she supposed, worse sources of guidance.

  With Yustrid at the back of her mind, she flung herself into their work. Operating from their hideaway in the tower, which nobody had so much as approached since they'd arrived, the Liberators were active round the clock in Landing. Ossaile and Macard were ignored. ResTore was not an army, and it never would be. It was a generally peaceful popular movement, which was its great strength. Arming them was out of the question, and active strikes against the Torian police and military were reserved only for the most dangerous situations, when lives would be lost without intervention. Instead, they worked to protect the ResTore leadership, which was scurrying from foxhole to foxhole to evade capture, and filmed every moment of police violence and brutality that they could, sending it anonymously t
o the underground news personalities.

  And one overcast afternoon, Grey Hawk watched from the lip of a building as four armoured police dragged a screaming teenager towards a van by his hair, his half-finished anti-Chang graffiti blinking bright pink and yellow on the wall.

  It was exactly the kind of brutality that would play well on the news. She was recording the whole thing. Then, in a flash, it turned uglier. The boy, who couldn't have been older then sixteen, lunged for his boot and managed to yank out a concealed knife, which he drove into the fist that held his hair. An officer yelped and staggered back, and another smashed the kid's hand with a heavy baton, sending the knife clattering away. A third drew a pistol and aimed it at the petrified kid's head.

  “On your fucking knees!” she heard him bark.

  The kid dropped to his knees, his hands up, blubbering an apology. As the stabbed cop fumbled with his bloody glove, the one with the gun stalked around behind the kid and took aim.

  And, for one awful instant, Grey Hawk stared down at this perfect propaganda tableau and thought: this will play so well.

  Within two seconds she had raised her rifle, dropped the pistol-brandishing cop with a perfect headshot, and left the other three screaming on the floor with shot-out kneecaps. The kid froze for an instant before haring off down the street. Grey Hawk watched him go, and another insidious thought crept into her head: you can edit that footage to make it seem like they shot him.

  She stood there dumbly, appalled by her own thoughts.

  She had considered letting the boy die for the sake of a scrap of propaganda. It had been only a fraction of a moment, but it had happened all the same – and her first thought afterwards had been how best to lie about it.

  Grey Hawk stood still, trying to reverse-engineer her own thoughts, hunting for their traitorous origin. Had she been subconsciously calculating that an outrageous video of a kid being executed in the street would have accelerated the liberation of Tor? Maybe she'd concluded that it would have saved lives, in the long run.

  Maybe.

  That was the kind of thinking the Third Primary Principle required, but it was supposed to be a difficult, artificial mental process. She had slipped into that mode of thought instinctively, relegating the immediate truth of right and wrong to second place.

  Zhai, she thought. It was him. This was his influence, infiltrating her brain and corrupting her thoughts, as if in psychic revenge for the confession she had extracted from him. She could picture him now, smug eyes glinting in the depths of that fat face, mocking her.

  But it's not me, Zhai whispered. It's all you. Unless you're so easily led that a few conversations are enough to bring you crashing down...

  Grey Hawk suddenly realised that she was standing in plain sight over one dead and three wounded police, and made a swift exit into the building as a distant VTOL buzzed her way. Her head was clouded. Her trust in her own moral instincts was under threat for the first time. A slow, subtle poison had infected her somehow, and she had to find an antidote before it was too late.

  Perhaps secrecy itself was at fault. An urge for honesty overtook her, and she opened a conference call with the other Liberators, pausing in a stairwell that stank of stale piss and smoke.

  “Grey Hawk?” Red Wolf said. “This isn't the best time–”

  “I'm in contact with Ambassador Zhai,” Grey Hawk blurted. “I have been for nearly a week now. I – approached him after the attempt on his life, offered to protect him. I should have told you. I'm sorry.”

  Silence. Then:

  “Seems like a good plan to me,” Blue Wasp said.

  “And to me,” Blue Bull said. “We need Zhai alive, especially with his own people after him. He agreed to this arrangement?”

  Grey Hawk ground her teeth in frustration. “Yes, he did, but–”

  Blue Bull sounded impressed. “Well done. That can't have been easy.”

  “I should have told you,” Grey Hawk repeated in a smaller voice, her conviction draining away like water from a sink.

  “You were under no obligation to tell us,” Red Wolf said. “Thank you for the information, but your actions are your own. If you judged that this was the best way to advance the cause, that was your call to make.”

  Grey Hawk wanted to scream. Right now, she desperately wanted someone to tell her she'd done something wrong. She needed someone to set her back on the right path, to point out something obvious she'd missed, some trap she'd blithely wandered into. Nobody would. In fact, they all seemed to think she was doing just fine.

  And that raised the worst possibility of all: that this was how it was supposed to be. That principle was supposed to take a back seat to cold calculation. That she was doing fine.

  She was on her own. In fact, as she stood there in that empty concrete stairwell, she realised that had never felt so alone in her life.

  Her own voice echoed out from her memory, quoting the Third Primary Principle with what now seemed like idiotic, naïve confidence: The true revolutionary must participate in the hated system to overthrow it.

  But, Black Horse's voice purred in reply, she must not allow her ideals to be corrupted.

  21

  Zhai always dressed for the occasion.

  Tonight, in preparation for the grand independence party, he had broken out the full ambassadorial regalia. Tor was now officially independent, recognised by the Coalition and recognising it in return, which meant Zhai finally had full diplomatic rights – and, in his mind, the right to wear traditional diplomatic robes. In most formal gatherings of diplomats these days, robe-wearers were a minority, but he knew it might be his last chance to don the opulent red velvet of a Coalition plenipotentiary.

  Beneath the robes he wore his finest silk shirt and trousers, the former white and the latter dark, and comfortable leather loafers, a gift from Gael on Zhai's fiftieth birthday. He fastened his hair into a ponytail with a clasp of red gold which had been his grandfather's, and removed his watch from his wrist, replacing it with a real, archaic timepiece from the famous Firion watchmakers on High Summer. The robes came last, soft, smooth, heavy, and flattering, transforming obesity into what he liked to think was a dignified stoutness. He switched his removed watch to mirror mode and critically examined the projected image of himself. Ruefully, he thought that he had well and truly become an elder statesman.

  A sudden glare outside the window made him look round just in time to hear the bang of the firework exploding into green sparks over a distant rooftop.

  All across Macard, Chang's independence celebrations were in full swing. Tor's new president had hit new heights of arrogance in a speech in Drayer Park that afternoon, this time with thick bulletproof panes protecting him on all sides. Zhai had not been invited. Nor had any other foreign dignitaries. It was the Chang show from start to finish. The entire stage had been bedecked in the distasteful green and orange of Tor's flag, against which Chang had cut an impressive figure in a bulging ash-grey suit, a black handkerchief in his breast pocket and a brilliant smile on his face. To Zhai, both smile and handkerchief looked like expensive accessories.

  “Very fetching,” Harod said. He was leaning on the door frame, his hands in his pockets. “Wish I was going with you.”

  Zhai stuffed his watch into an inner pocket. “Tonight is far too exclusive for riff-raff like you.”

  “Seems strange, though, doesn't it? No plus-ones at all, not even for spouses.”

  “Security,” Zhai said. He fastened his robe at the neck with a silver chain and adjusted it until it was perfectly central.

  Harod gave a little grunt of laughter. “More like paranoia.”

  “If that's what Chang's thinking, though, it's going to backfire on him. A whole room full of diplomats without their husbands and wives to keep them in check? It's going to get very political very quickly.”

  “Naroese ambassador?” Harod asked.

  Zhai sighed. “Lissa Esmerski.”

  “Oh boy. Well, have fun with that. Yo
u know, I'm suddenly rather glad I'm not invited.”

  “You sure? Audry Dance will be there for the Republic.”

  “Oh, Audry,” Harod said, gazing dreamily into the distance. “My beautiful alabaster princess. My enchanted beam of moonlight.”

  “I'll tell her you said hi.”

  “'Hi'?” Harod said in mock indignation. “'Hi' is a word not fit for my lady's ears! So vulgar, so crass! You may offer her – my salutations. Cordial salutations.”

  Zhai snorted. Harod's carnal lust for Audry Dance had been serious maybe as recently as twenty-five years ago, after which it had become a long-running joke. Since then, whenever Harod and Audry were in the same room, they spent most of their time flirting outrageously. It was Zhai's favourite spectator sport.

  “Giuna Smicer's going to be there too,” he said.

  Harod frowned. “Remind me. Thilech?”

  “Liberation.”

  “Oh, of course. The one with the–” Harod waved his hands in a mysterious, vaguely obscene gesture. “–legs.”

  “The very same.”

  “All these beautiful women,” Harod sighed. “And here I am, pushing sixty, thrice divorced–”

  “I thought it was four times.”

  “We both know Tanvi doesn't count, the harlot.” Harod's grin was equal parts sultry and wistful. “But enough about my love life. How about yours? Are your co-conspirators going to be there?”

  “I'm promised Hactaurs by the hatful,” Zhai said. “Four of them! One was plenty, two was pushing it... honestly, what kind of megalomaniac has themselves cloned instead of having children? There must be some diagnosable disorder involved there.”