31
A back room of the Maison d’Illusion: Paris
The Demi-Monde: 30th Day of Spring, 1005
In a world seemingly in thrall to violence and war, the preaching of a ‘second way’, a philosophy that celebrates peace and harmony and which promotes a turn-the-other-cheek solution to the curse of MALEvolence, was inevitably going to be the subject of derision and ridicule. But the success of the first Normalists in using civil disobedience and passive resistance to oppose and disrupt the ForthRight’s occupation of the Medi made many think again. The ‘Peace Corps’ of Aaliz Heydrich soon became a political force to be reckoned with.
Normalism: Why Violence Is Never the Answer: Percy
Bysshe Shelley, Canal Publications
Since Norma had been in the Demi-Monde, she’d experienced any number of frights and shocks, but as she peeped out from behind the stage curtains at the hundred or so stony-faced women waiting to hear her speak, she had to admit that this was the scariest. If she failed now, Ella – the Beast – would be triumphant.
She made a nervous adjustment of her gown – quite modest by ImPuritan standards – absent-mindedly patted her freshly dyed blonde hair and then leant closer to the curtain, to listen to Odette make her introduction.
‘Many of you will know me. You will know me as the firebrand Odette Aroca, captain of the Market Girls regiment. I fought shoulder to shoulder with you when the UnScreweds marched on the Bastille to free Jeanne Deroin and Aliénor d’Aquitaine, who I am pleased to say are with us here tonight.’ Odette paused to allow a round of applause. ‘It was my regiment that was first inside the Bastille, and it was girls from my regiment who shot Grand Inquisitor de Torquemada.’ More applause. ‘At that time I was impatient with those of you who counselled a more softly-softly approach. I demanded that we fight fire with fire, and the results of that impetuosity are hanging by piano wire from the lamp-posts that line the Champs-Élysées: hundreds of men, women and children slaughtered by the ForthRight to revenge my lust for violence.’
Pretty powerful stuff, thought Norma. If Odette got any more cathartic, she’d be running a transactional analysis class rather than a political meeting.
‘After the taking of the Bastille, I was pursued by Checkya agents and escaped to Venice. It was there that I met a remarkable woman; a woman who changed my life; a woman who is intent on opposing the evil of UnFunDaMentalism, but who is determined to do so without plumbing the same depths of wickedness the UnFunnies have. She, more than any, knows the extent of the political and moral corruption within the ForthRight. She is a woman who had been party to Reinhard Heydrich’s most intimate and most gruesome secrets. Ladies, I give you … Aaliz Heydrich.’
When de Nostredame had told her she was the Messiah, it had taken a real effort on Norma’s part not to burst out laughing. It all sounded too ridiculous for words, but what hadn’t been ridiculous was when he’d gone on to say that it was her responsibility to oppose Ella – to oppose the Beast. That had been deep-breath time. Something told her that this was one responsibility she wouldn’t be able to shirk. Before, when she had acted as a spoiled, useless, brain-dead good-time girl, nobody had got hurt, but now, if she fucked up, seven million Demi-Mondians would die.
Scary stuff.
When she had sat down to think about how she would go about putting a spoke in the Lady IMmanual’s wheel, she had come to realise that this was a pivotal moment in her life. People – lots and lots of people – were relying on her and she was determined not to let them down. And the one thing she realised was that to oppose the Lady IMmanual was one thing, but to fight her was quite another. Fighting, she decided, was useless.
The one good thing about her time in the Demi-Monde was that she had learnt how utterly futile war and violence really were. In her view, violence wasn’t the answer, violence was the problem. This was the belated conclusion she’d come to after enduring the misery of Warsaw and seeing Ella murder a man in front of her. Now she knew she no longer wanted any part of the mockery that violence made of civilisation. Now she realised that the ideas her father had tried so diligently to introduce her to – the teachings of people like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King – weren’t as uncool as she’d complained they were. Now she understood that it took real courage to reject violence. And now she had a chance to do some of the things Percy Shelley had only had the guts to talk about doing.
Percy Bysshe Shelley …
She’d desperately tried to expunge him from her memory. Dishy, talented and totally unreliable, he’d been the one who had kept her returning to the Demi-Monde, he’d been the reason she’d ended up in this muddle.
Just thinking about the guy made her heart flip. God, he had been so beautiful and she had loved the man so very much. She could still remember the first time that he had kissed her. It had been the only time in her life she’d ever been kissed with real purpose by a man. Sitting side by side in the Prancing Pig – not the most romantic of settings to be sure – he’d leant over to her, brought his fingertips to her cheek, turned her face gently towards his and butterflied his lips against hers. Oh, she’d read the soppy romances that described the impact a hero’s first kiss had on a heroine but she’d always dismissed this as so much fanciful nonsense. It wasn’t. So many emotions were provoked by that kiss that it was impossible for her to recall them accurately. The biggest remembrance she had was the sensation of falling, of tumbling into Shelley, as though, somehow, they were merging. It was like fainting in stereo. It was the most profoundly emotional, the most profoundly romantic, the most profoundly erotic ten seconds of her entire life.
How had Shelley described it? It had been bliss, the infinite joy of a debut kiss.
Debut …
Now that brought her up short. She had never thought of it before but Shelley had known her for what she was, known that she was a faux-rebel, a plastic punk, known that though she had a tabloid reputation for being a wild child the reality was far different. She was all front and no substance, never having had the confidence to really kick over the traces.
And that, she realised, had been the lure of the Demi-Monde. The eNorma who had been conjured when she had entered the Demi-Monde had been more real than she had ever been. Gone was the gawky, slump-shouldered, monosyllabic teenager. The girl whose computer showed her walking (walking? Hell no, eNorma glided) through the streets of the Rookeries, when she had first switched on the Demi-Monde, was Norma as she would like to have been, if she’d had the courage. It was Norma as she would have looked and acted if she’d been on the receiving end of an economy-sized injection of chutzpah, if she’d had a shot of industrial-grade courage. For Norma, the doppelgänger that was eNorma was fantasy made real and breathtakingly exciting and unbelievably bloody scary because of it.
The question that had nagged at her was simple: how could she look so wonderful, act so confidently, and be so alluring in a computer game and yet be so diffident and unsure in real life? And it was the search for the answer to that question that had persuaded her to keep coming back to the Demi-Monde: real-Norma was identical to the eNorma – the same height, the same figure, the same looks, the same everything – but in the Demi-Monde she was transformed into this … super-woman. It had been very perplexing and very intriguing.
And then, of course, there had been the buzz associated with meeting a living, breathing Percy Shelley, her favourite poet and the man of her dreams. The man of her dreams who had betrayed her to Crowley and thrown her to the UnFunDaMentalist wolves. But in retrospect, had all that suffering been such a bad thing? Experiencing the pain and the panic had forced her to grow up. Until she’d experienced at first hand the Demi-Monde’s more outré attitudes and beliefs, it had been impossible for her to know what life was all about and to appreciate evil. Without the experience of life in the raw – and nowhere was life rawer than in the Demi-Monde – she would have remained a cypher, a mere observer of life. The Demi-Monde had forced her to engage with the world …
to become a player.
Her time in the Demi-Monde had re-modelled her, remade her into something beyond her imagining, and if she was destined to die here in the Demi-Monde, she was determined that she would die trying to do something good.
Vanka hadn’t been convinced by her new-found determination. When she had told him that if Demi-Mondians were ever to possess true free will, they had to be free of the threat of violence, he had looked at her like she was crackers.
‘You believe that?’ he’d asked with more than a hint of mockery in his voice.
‘Of course. What we have to do to face down the Beast is refuse to cooperate with our would-be oppressors, but we must do this in a non-violent and a civilised manner.’ Here Norma had to give a wry smile, as she mangled Edmund Burke’s great epigram. ‘The only thing necessary to prevent the triumph of evil is for good men and women to do nothing, but to do it in a resolute and stoic manner. We must have the peoples of the Demi-Monde meet hate with politeness; violence with peace; and punishment with imperturbability. Together we must work, all of us, to stop the machine of violence and destruction that is the ForthRight.’
‘But how will stopping the ForthRight help defeat the Lady IMmanual?’
‘Because it will show there’s another way, the way of peace. If we’re successful, when the Lady IMmanual comes to power people will already have realised how specious violence is, so she’ll be politically neutered.’
Vanka looked decidedly dubious.
‘So what do you call this creed of non-violence of yours?’
‘I haven’t given it a name yet.’
‘Try “Normalism”,’ he laughed, and the tag had stuck.
Vanka hadn’t been laughing so much when he’d realised that promoting Normalism would require them leaving Venice. The Lady IMmanual might be trying to kill him but he was reluctant to give up on his love. In the end it had been Burlesque who had weighed in with the most telling argument.
‘The important fing, Wanker, is that we all get out ov Venice before them Signori di Notte items come banging on our door. I’ve ’eard some ’orrible fings about them bastards. Seems they could teach the Checkya a fing or two about fucking a suspect over. An’ once we’re in the Medi we can ’elp Miss Norma ’ere spread ’er soppy message about not fighting and such, and get the Medi into a real tizwaz. Doin’ that is going to ’elp Miss Ella. It’ll mean, even if she is this Beast fingy, that she won’t ’ave to fight ’cos the ForthRight Army is going to be too busy sortin’ art the muddle we make of things. To save Miss Ella, Wanker, me old cock, we’ve got to defeat the ForthRight.’
It was a persuasive argument, so persuasive that finally a reluctant Vanka had agreed to accompany Norma back into the Medi. It was there that Burlesque’s girlfriend, the formidable Odette Aroca, came into her own. The girl had been tasked with gathering the leaders of the UnScrewed-Liberation Movement for a clandestine meeting where, as she told potential attendees in breathless whispers, they would meet ‘someone quite astonishing’. In the end she had managed to persuade a hundred women to brave the curfew to attend a meeting in the back room of a rather seedy bar called the Maison d’Illusion.
So tonight Norma would make her first foray into politics. And she was wetting herself.
The idea of posing as Aaliz Heydrich had come while she had been talking to Odette and explaining to her that getting any political message across needed a spokesperson who would grab people’s attention. Unfortunately, she’d added ruefully, Normalism didn’t have any celebrity endorsement.
‘Oh, I think we have,’ said Odette with a laugh. ‘I remember you telling me, Norma, that you once posed as Aaliz Heydrich …’
That was when Norma had realised that she was the solution to this particular problem. Who better to promote a message of opposition to Reinhard Heydrich’s UnFunDaMentalism than his own daughter? It would be a remarkably powerful marketing message: the father rejected by the dutiful daughter. Moreover, with the real Aaliz lost somewhere in the Real World, Heydrich and Crowley would have the devil’s own job proving that Norma wasn’t Aaliz Heydrich. It would be the biter bit.
With one last plumping up of her hair, Norma strode onto the tiny stage to face her audience. Her stunned audience.
The women making up that audience sat in shocked silence, staring at her, the expressions on their faces a mixture of astonishment and fear. Astonishment that it was the poster girl of UnFunDaMentalism – and the impassioned and unwavering leader of the RightNixes, the ForthRight’s youth wing – who was standing in front of them. And fear because wherever Aaliz Heydrich went, the Checkya were never far behind.
But it was astonishment and fear mixed with a little awe. Aaliz Heydrich was, after all, a genuine, twenty-four-carat, grade-A celebrity. The image of the beautiful Aaliz Heydrich adorned the covers of magazines and her appearances, speaking on behalf of her father, were made in front of massed crowds. Aaliz Heydrich attended the opening nights of plays in the West End, and she was seen in the most fashionable nightspots arm in arm with famous actors and troubadours. Aaliz Heydrich was a star.
There was an awkward attempt at a round of applause, which Norma raised her hand to still. ‘I am Aaliz Heydrich,’ she said simply, as she stood in the centre of the stage, ‘and I thank all you courageous women for braving the curfew to attend this meeting. You should be in no doubt that I understand what you are risking to be here. I know you have had to dodge the Checkya patrols, fearful that if you were arrested you would face imprisonment or worse. I too face these perils, though mine are made more terrible by the knowledge that it is my own father who seeks my destruction.’
Norma paused to allow the nervous chattering provoked by this statement to subside.
‘As you know, I have stood loyally at my father’s side all of my life. I have been the dutiful, obedient daughter. But there came a time, quite recently, when the knowledge of the perversity and the wickedness betokened by UnFunDaMentalism made it impossible for me to remain quiet or to remain dutiful. The catalyst for this change was when I saw the misery and the pain heaped on the citizens of Warsaw. The suffering of those poor people, as they resisted the onslaught of the SS, is almost impossible to describe, but through witnessing this suffering I came to realise that war – all war – is wrong. If the only way a people can be converted to a religion is at the end of a gun, then that religion is corrupt.’
A tentative round of applause.
‘But I would say more: if a religion or a political creed does not allow freedom of opinion and freedom of expression, then it is corrupt. It is only by criticism and open debate that the truth will triumph. You in the Quartier Chaud were blessed with a great thinker, Mary Wollstonecraft, whose teachings that violence is barbaric, inefficient and wasteful are as potent and as valid today as they were when she first postulated them all those centuries ago. Now, at last, the time has come for the mitigating and moderating influence of women to be felt throughout the Demi-Monde. Now, at last, the time has come for this senseless cycle of war and political violence that has plagued our world to be broken.’
More applause, but this time it was a trifle more enthusiastic.
‘We must oppose war and violence, by rejecting war and violence.’
‘How?’ came a question shouted from the back of the room.
‘We must first understand that to oppose the ForthRight will be difficult and will require sacrifice. I declare it to you flat out: those who join me must be prepared to die. Although ours will be a Quiet War, a non-violent war, there will still be casualties. What I am proposing is that we withdraw all our cooperation from the occupying forces of the ForthRight; that we engage in a well-orchestrated campaign of civil disobedience and passive resistance.’
A bemused silence fell on the audience.
‘We must not collaborate with evil. We must wage peace. Like all good ImPuritans, we must make love, not war!’
Now that got a cheer!
‘Anything that supports the wicked
and illegal occupation of the Medi by the ForthRight must be resisted. We must refuse to pay our blood tax, as this finances the ForthRight; we must refuse to deliver mail addressed to the ForthRight forces; we must refuse to serve ForthRight soldiers in restaurants and bars; we must refuse to collaborate in any way with the ForthRight. And we must do all this whilst practising non-violence. We must express no anger when we are beaten; we must not resist when we are arrested; we must be forever polite and stoical … and, most of all, we must be prepared to die in as noble a fashion as we are able.’ Norma paused. ‘It will be difficult, but my belief is that ultimately it will make the Medi ungovernable. My colleagues, who, like me, believe in the creed of non-violence we call Normalism, are, even as I stand here, taking this message of civil disobedience and passive resistance to the people of the Medi. We are determined to show the Demi-Monde that the ForthRight can be humbled without having to resort to the gun or the bomb. But we need your help. So I ask you now: are you with me?’
As one, her audience rose to their feet to applaud her. Now Norma was a leader, and she had never felt more alone in all her life.
*
After the meeting, Burlesque took Odette for a stroll along the bank of the Thames. Perhaps promenading past cranes and all the other dockside paraphernalia wasn’t terribly romantic, but Odette was quite content to spend an hour or so just walking arm in arm with her beau.
It was strange for her to feel so contented doing something so simple. She had gone through life being angry with everyone and every thing, so to feel calm and at peace with herself and the world was really quite perplexing. But she was – and this she put down to being in love, knowing that finally she had found a man who was a perfect fit for her, a man who was physically, mentally and emotionally the left to her right, the up to her down.
Rod Rees - [The Demi-Monde 02] Page 34