by Ian Whates
Except maybe an American. It turned out that the Hollywood community was just using me to get locations on the hideouts of Canadian actors who’d been long-time US residents and were still living there secretly, unwilling to go back to their native land. Thanks to the war, there was no film work in Canada. Also, any Canadian who’d ever worked in American films, TV, or theatre was a “traitor” in Canada by then. (Hence the notorious Stratford-Ontario Festival massacres, a few years ago – a whole generation of classically trained actors wiped out in a single season. What a goddamn waste.) According to our intel, there are still several thousand Canadian actors living in hiding or under false identities in the US – although the paranoid Actors Equity Association wildly inflates the likely numbers.
Anyhow, what can I say? I’d spent most of my life in Gaza before being sent to America. So, despite my training, I was naive. I had no idea how depraved people can be. When the Hollywood underground asked for my help, I agreed to put them in touch with William Shatner.
I’ll never forgive myself for what they did to him. His acting wasn’t that bad.
It was a cruel lesson in the ways of North Americans, and I never forgot it.
A lot of people believe the war began with a bloody incident twenty-one years ago, known as the Puck Riot, when Montreal attacked Syracuse over the disputed outcome of a hockey game. But the conflict’s true origin goes back even further.
A few years ago, Iraqi human rights workers came across a cache of documents hidden in an old sushi joint in Detroit. Suspecting these were important, they turned them over to Lebanese intelligence – a long-time ally who, in turn, shared them with us. The newly discovered documents turned out to be top-secret correspondence that told the whole story of how the war really began.
Twenty-two years ago, a geographer in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, discovered that the US border, unbeknownst to anyone until then, illegally extended into Canadian territory by 217 metres.
Representatives from both countries met in Bismarck, North Dakota, to discuss the situation.
Rather than move the official border, the US State Department proposed that the Canadians cede the disputed land to the United States. Canada’s minister of International Cooperation refused to agree to this. The governor of North Dakota remarked that, with this refusal, the minister was failing to live up to her all-too-Canadian title.
According to reports relayed to Washington at the time, the Canadian minister replied, “What do you mean by that, you rube?”
(However, some historians think that since Minister Michelle Bouvier was a francophone Canadian, she may actually have called the governor a rue, which is French for “street”. But it remains unclear to this day why she would have called Governor Williams a street, so this theory has never gained significant support.)
The subsequent exchange of insults between the two parties is too culturally specific to make much sense, but the upshot was that the American governor shot the Canadian minister. (Governor Williams was killed four years later by a direct missile strike. His personal journal was recently found by Pakistani peacekeepers patrolling house to house in what’s left of Bismarck. In his private writings, his long-standing bigotry against Canadians is detailed in shockingly specific language. Among other things, he firmly believed you could detect any Canadian, no matter how cleverly disguised, by smell.)
In an attempt at damage control after this disastrous summit, the Americans bribed the Canadians to hush up the minister’s murder by giving them Detroit. We think a key piece of documentation must have been destroyed, because no one can figure out why Canada agreed to such a bad exchange. Meanwhile, the Americans kept their North Dakota border right where it was. And more than a few Canadians went home fuming with wounded pride and a burning sense of injustice – a dangerous combination in the frozen north.
Indeed, many staffers on both sides resented the infamous Bismarck Capitulation, as it came to be known in the cache of secret documents that were uncovered in Detroit decades later. Some Americans believed their government should never have ceded an inch of territory to “those smelly moose-huggers” from across the border. Meanwhile, a number of Canadians were bitterly disappointed in their prime minister, who they thought should have held out for Silicon Valley or the Big Apple rather than settling for the Motor City.
These malcontents on both sides of the secret Bismarck agreement began sowing discontent among the masses of both nations. Canadians grew to resent America’s economic imperialism and bad daytime television. Americans began to hate being the butt of so many Canadian jokes. So, next thing you know, rebel movements intent on destabilizing both governments turned a rather dull hockey game between Montreal and Syracuse into the war’s first battlefield.
After that, things just kept escalating. The Pentagon ordered missile strikes in Quebec. Ottawa retaliated by invading Washington state and pushing all the way south to Oregon. North Dakota invaded Saskatchewan, but it was years before anyone noticed. Montana went up in flames as brother fought brother.
There was a brief period of hope after the Negev Peace Agreement, when the Israel–Palestine government forced the North Americans to sit down and negotiate a ceasefire. But the IP diplomats really had no idea what they were dealing with. They walked away from the Bedouin tent where the accords had been signed and celebrated a job well done. Within days, though, there were riots in Calgary, Vancouver, Orlando and Kansas City protesting the terms of the agreement. And within weeks, Des Moines, Savannah, San Diego, Toronto, Victoria and Whitehorse were rioting, too.
The Middle East tried to ignore these violent, isolated outbursts as the usual sabre-rattling of the rabid citizens of those two famously infantile nations. We all hoped that if we just pretended not to see their tantrums, they’d get tired of throwing them. And for almost a full year, the tense ceasefire still held.
But then a splinter rebel faction of lunatic Canadians slipped into New York and burned down Yankee Stadium. Then the Boston Tea Martyrs, a motley but massive underground militia of Americans, retaliated by dumping seventeen tons of mercury into Lake Ontario, as close to the Canadian shoreline as they could. (Were they too ignorant to understand the toxic water would damage their own ecosystem, too? Or were they just too bloodthirsty to care? In North America, you never really know.)
That was when Israel–Palestine, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Jordan and Syria created a join task force, the Middle East League, to try to prevent all-out war from breaking out again in North America. (Oman, Yemen and Saudi Arabia would have joined the League, too, but they were too busy trying to establish a lasting peace between England, Wales and Scotland.) Our diplomats hastened to Washington and Ottawa to see what could be accomplished. (I hear that talking to the US president was like trying to reason with the sea. And some of our diplomats confided upon their return home that they believed the Canadian prime minister was suffering some form of psychosis. Consequently, some of the Middle East’s best psychiatrists joined the next few peace missions to Canada, disguised as junior diplomatic aids. Unfortunately, no diagnosis was ever reached. Doctors thought the PM’s condition could be anything from syphilis to schizophrenia to just being a power-hungry jackass.)
However, the League’s hope of negotiating a renewed ceasefire, never mind real peace in the region, was shattered when a gang of radical senior citizens in Miami, armed with light artillery, began attacking Canadian cruise ships that docked there under the terms of the Negev Agreement. In response, the Maple Leaf Brigade began firing home-made missiles across the border at Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire. When his boyhood home was destroyed in one of these strikes, the US president ordered carpet bombing in Nova Scotia.
And so the war was back on again.
Maybe it’s the climate that drives men mad here?
By the time I dropped into Ohio with the Perilous Prophets, I was well into my second tour in Nam, as we called North America, and the senseless rage of this continent was eating away at me. I needed to get
out. Get out soon.
My initial recon of the volatile southern Ohio Valley revealed that the inhabitants had burned down every maple tree in their region. This senseless destruction of life was just another way, in their view, of attacking Canada symbolically. Some of the younger Prophets were disturbed by such wanton waste.
In this bastion of hyper-patriotism, Ohioans had renamed Canadian bacon as “freedom bacon”. Canada’s maple syrup products had been banned here for years; they weren’t even available on the black market in Ohio, as they were in New York and New Jersey. Clothing merchants had to show proof that their wares contained no Canadian wool. No one bought furniture any more made of maple wood, and people burned their old maple furniture by night in communal bonfires.
In northern Ohio, various factions were lobbing a deadly assortment of home-made rockets, expired Soviet ordinance, and heat-seeking missiles across the border into Ontario. Most of their artillery couldn’t clear Lake Erie, though, and wound up in the drink. The environmental consequences were increasingly dire, but neither the Middle East League nor the Peace in Our Time triumvirate on the Saudi peninsula could get permission for our experts to assess the damage to the lake’s marine life.
My mission here was to facilitate a key step in a multi-stage process designed to get Canada and the US to withdraw to their original pre-war borders and come back to the negotiating table. The Middle East League knew better than even to mention the subject of the North Dakota–Saskatchewan border that had, as top-level officials inside both North American governments knew, led to the start of the war in the first place. That dispute was so sensitive, so volatile, so seemingly irresolvable, the first parameter established for a new wave of proposed peace talks was that the subject wouldn’t even be put on the table. It would be postponed until a later, indefinite set of talks.
I thought this was a doomed strategy. How could we ever get these two nations to stop fighting if we didn’t force them to discuss and resolve the issue that had led to twenty-one years of war in the first place?
This strategy was the idea of the Mexicans, who were desperate. Their once-thriving economy was in trouble because of the flood of American refugees pouring across their border after most of California was occupied four years ago. Canada had vowed to bomb Mexico if they didn’t turn over American refugees involved in cross-border raids against Canadian occupiers; and the US had vowed to blockade all Mexico’s Gulf ports if they complied with the Canadians.
So Mexico had begged the Middle East League to try once again to end the war. And I had been sent to Ohio, one of the hottest fronts in the war these days. My assignment was to establish contact with the chiefs of the most active fighting forces here – whether official-military, rebel, splinter, or counter-revolutionary – and convince them to cooperate with a call from Washington for a ceasefire. The federal government was by now so weak and ineffectual that it would topple altogether if it tried to end the war without the full political support of the country’s various militia.
“But we’re not at war,” said Herb Neiheisel, leader of the Battling Ohioans, soon after I located his base camp near the lakefront town of Sandusky.
“You’re kidding me,” I said to Neiheisel. “You and Ontario exchange heavy artillery fire almost every day. Civilians in both countries – women and children – are killed by direct strikes, as well as by enemy raids, on a weekly basis. It’s illegal for Canadians to travel to the US, and vice versa. It’s illegal for an American to marry a Canadian, and vice versa. American forces are occupying Saskatchewan—”
“They are?” said Neiheisel in surprise.
“—and Canadians have occupied Washington, Oregon and California. So tell me—” I spread my hands as I asked “—in what way are you not at war?”
“We won the war,” Neiheisel said smugly. “Those goddamn Canadians just don’t accept it yet.”
After three years in this place, I should have known better than to ask a logical question.
“OK, fine, you won the war,” I said, “but since the Canadians don’t accept that yet, and your life would be easier if they would acc—”
“I ain’t interested in no Canadian making my life no easier.”
Trying to untangle the double negatives, I said, “But what about your children?”
“They fight Canadians with pride, just like their daddy.”
Neiheisel looked about thirty-five, surely not old enough to have kids of military age. “How old are they?”
“My son is twelve and carries light ammunition to combat units under fire. My daughter’ll be fifteen in October. She can already take apart and reassemble an AK-47 in the dark.”
“But don’t you want them to be able to finish school?” I said, searching for an argument that might open this man’s mind to the possibility of a ceasefire. “Go to college? Get married and have kids of their own?”
“I want them to kill Canadians!”
Since this was the most important combat leader in northwestern Ohio, I tried once more. If there was any possible way Neiheisel might consider peace, I had to find that crack in his stony exterior.
So I said, “Are you sure you’re taking the best position?”
“Of course I am!”
“Because I’ve talked with ‘General’ Joe Johnson of the Columbus Defense Forces, and he—”
“You’ve talked with the General?” Neiheisel’s eyes brightened. “Now there’s a patriot! A great leader! A true soldier of the people!”
In fact, Johnson was an opportunistic thug who used a totally fictitious military title and had probably killed his first wife. But he was the single most powerful man in Ohio. Even the governor – no, especially the corrupt, spineless governor – took orders from Joe Johnson, the so-called general of Ohio.
“Yes, I’ve been in talks with him,” I told Neiheisel. “And General Joe favours peace.”
Neiheisel’s eyes bulged. “What?”
“General Joe says twenty-one years of war are enough; it’s time to end the fighting, start rebuilding the country, and raise American children in peace and prosperity.”
Neiheisel frowned thoughtfully. “General Joe said that?”
“Yes,” I lied. “The general favours peace talks.”
In fact, General Joe had threatened to cut out my tongue just for suggesting a ceasefire. But maybe I could go back to Columbus and work on him some more after I gathered support elsewhere for the idea. And, as per my training and my instructions, I would do whatever it took to get that support, if it was at all possible.
I suddenly heard the high-pitched whine of a missile approaching its target, and I was on the ground with my arms covering my head even before Neiheisel shouted, “Incoming!”
The missile exploded about two hundred yards from us.
As I got up and started brushing myself off, I said to Neiheisel, “General Joe knows that ongoing hostilities could jeopardize peace talks. The president needs a ceasefire. This can only work if Ohio will cooperate.”
I heard another whining missile coming towards us. But Neiheisel, also rising from the ground, shook his head. “No, that one won’t make it this far.” He listened a moment longer, then nodded as the noise disappeared. “Went down in the lake.”
“So what do you think?” I prodded. “Will the Battling Ohioans cooperate in a ceasefire?”
“What I think is, those two missiles are the start of a full-scale barrage, and you’d better get the hell out of here if you don’t want to violate your status as a peacekeeper and help us kill some Canadians today.”
“But—”
“I have to think about it, and today’s not a good day for thinking,” Neiheisel said, as another missile flew overhead, confirming that this was indeed the start of a battle. “Where can I get a message to you?”
“The Israeli–Palestinian peacekeeper base at Columbus.”
“Expect to hear from me soon,” Neiheisel said.
Well, he wasn’t kidding. Two days after
I slipped out of Neiheisel’s embattled base camp and returned to Columbus to report my findings to date, I got his message. He sent me General Joe’s severed head in a box. The enclosed note said, “Death to all traitors.”
This goddamn continent.
I decided I’d had enough of this insane war. The next morning, I applied for a transfer.
After taking a mental-health leave back in Gaza, I’ll be headed for the peacekeeping mission in Lichtenstein. Maybe I can do some good there. At any rate, after three years in North America, I’m just sure I can’t do any good in this crazy hellhole.
THE PEACEMAKER
Fred Saberhagen
What if intelligences mightier than ourselves are on the lookout for organic life in our galaxy, just as we ourselves are, but to exterminate it wherever found …?
Fred Saberhagen first forged this influential theme in the 1960s, and his interstellar killing machines make him, as it were, Mr Berserker, although he also wrote much varied and energetic fiction ranging from sword and sorcery and riffs upon Dracula to time-travel to extraordinary solo SF novels such as The Veils of Azlaroc. Besides, he was an editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica and wrote the original entry there on science fiction.
CARR SWALLOWED A pain pill and tried to find a less uncomfortable position in the combat chair. He keyed his radio transmitter, and spoke:
“I come in peace. I have no weapons. I come to talk to you.”
He waited. The cabin of his little one-man ship was silent. His radar screen showed the berserker machine still many light-seconds ahead of him. There was no reaction from it, but he knew that it had heard him.
Behind Carr was the Sol-type star he called sun, and his home planet, colonized from Earth a century before. It was a lonely settlement, out near the rim of the galaxy; until now, the berserker war had been no more than a remote horror in news stories. The colony’s only real fighting ship had recently gone to join Karlsen’s fleet in the defence of Earth, when the berserkers were said to be massing there. But now the enemy was here. The people of Carr’s planet were readying two more warships as fast as they could – they were a small colony, and not wealthy in resources. Even if the two ships could be made ready in time, they would hardly be a match for a berserker.