Of a Note in a Cosmic Song; Part Four

by Nōnen Títi

  The outcome of the elections was announced four days later in a speech held by Roilan: Because five of the eight issues had not produced a majority answer, which he blamed on the large amount of people who’d not bothered to vote at all, a revote would be held, with an additional issue, which asked whether it was considered a majority even if there was only one more vote. This time everybody would have to come or they’d risk being imprisoned.

  “That’s ludicrous,” Jema told Frimon, who was in the committee. “You can’t force people to vote. That’s bringing back a DJar regime.”

  “Yes, so you go protest it. Let’s see how far you get,” he answered.

  Jema didn’t go to Roilan, she went to Benjamar, who’d brought the committee together. “You’re a judge. How come you let this happen?”

  “What is happening?” he asked.

  “He’s making threats.”

  “Did you come here to tell me that Roilan isn’t allowed to speak his mind without permission?”

  “You know what I mean. He’s trying to get people to comply by using threats. He has no law to go by. We were supposed to vote on these rules.”

  Benjamar, irritatingly calm like always, motioned for her to take a seat. “I brought the parties together, Jema, no more. It’s up to them to organize it. If there’s no law that states he can put people in prison for not voting, then his threat will be just that: a threat. It won’t become my business until he actually does it. Saying that, there’s also no law that states he can’t do it,” he added in a typical Benjamar fashion, a little amused about her getting upset about it.

  “But he has no right to even say it. He scares and confuses people. How can he possibly talk about freedom and threaten people with prison in one speech? How can someone dictate that people must vote? It is wrong, Benjamar. It’s just wrong.”

  “That may be so, but I am not the one to talk to. Like I said, no laws have been broken.”

  “So what are you – the voice of the law or the voice of justice?”

  He started laughing. “By definition, the voice of justice. In reality, always and everywhere, the voice of the law. Most people believe those to be the same thing.”

  “Do you?” she asked.

  “On DJar, no, they were not the same thing. On Kun DJar we have as yet no laws, so I can’t say.”

  This was impossible. Jema had come for his help, but he wasn’t offering any. He insisted it wasn’t his problem and she couldn’t convince him otherwise, so she left.

  Now that she’d made it her business, she couldn’t very well go home and leave it be. Sure, she didn’t need to go defend other people’s right not to vote if they were stupid enough to fall for those threats, but if she didn’t say something she’d be allowing Roilan to assume a position of power he wasn’t entitled to; she’d assist in the birth of tyranny. Hadn’t she told Leni that by not speaking out they were letting Frimon decide for the entire Society? So she had no choice but to speak. The elections were in two days. How was she going to reach all the people to ask them not to accept this? Who else would be interested in a protest?

  Of all the organizers, besides Frimon, Kolyag was the least likely to agree with Roilan. The people who supported him were sick of rules and had expressed that with slogans about freedom. Now was the time to prove what they believed in. After some asking around, Jema found Kolyag on his way back from the same beach where he’d been at war with Roilan only three moons ago. She walked up with him to explain. He listened, but she could feel his impatience. He wasn’t really interested anymore.

  “Why not? Because you care more for winning your sports competitions?” she asked.

  “Maybe they bring us more satisfaction than political competitions,” he retorted, which was, of course, exactly right.

  “But isn’t it more important to act for the freedom of all the people than for personal satisfaction? What if Roilan decides to ban the games? I mean, you give him all the power, so he could easily do that and he was just as guilty as you were for what happened in the dunes, so if he can still be in government, then so can you.”

  “Roilan won’t ban the games; he takes part in them,” Kolyag answered, which wasn’t the point.

  “Look, all I need is a group of people to join me in a protest tomorrow. Just to be seen. I’ll do the talking.”

  Kolyag made a gesture as if waving away an irritating insect. “Okay, we’ll see you at the social building at Kunup.”

  Jema left him, convinced he had just wanted to be rid of her, but to her surprise nearly two kor of people appeared the next morning, Kolyag included. She explained her cause and got some support. At any rate, they became noisy enough to attract the attention of people walking by. The small group became a little bigger and word went out for people to refuse to vote under threat. When it became boring to just stand there they decided to walk, and ended up at Roilan’s home, who, of course, had long been alerted and was nowhere to be found. Two men threatened to throw some stones to make their point. It took all her diplomatic skills to convince them that was not what a protest meant. By Kundown there was no telling if they’d made a difference – nobody went home on a high, anyway. Tomorrow would prove if it had been worth it. If enough people didn’t vote, the message would soon reach the rest of the population that Roilan had no legal right to act on such a threat and he couldn’t stick a set of people into four lousy prison rooms.

  What Jema had not counted on was that not legally allowed to carry out a threat and not doing it were two different things. Just before Kundown on election day, two men came to her door, claiming to be guards with orders to arrest her. The absurdity and speed of it overwhelmed her. The voting had only just finished, so it was too early to have checked the records, unless it wasn’t as anonymous as they said it was. The two men didn’t know. They didn’t even know the reason for this. She’d have to talk to someone else about it.

  “And I will. I’ll go to Roilan,” she said.

  They blocked her path, saying they couldn’t allow that. They were here to carry out their orders.

  “And who gave you those orders?”

  “Roilan did.”

  “So where is the paper that shows me you have the right to do this?”

  They didn’t have one, but they’d never needed that before and they’d been guards on DJar.

  “So one day you ordered Roilan around and now you’re taking orders from him?”

  “Things have changed,” one of them answered, impatient with her unwillingness to co-operate.

  No matter how much she explained the wrong of this, they were not hearing her. They had no opinion on the voting issue and insisted she’d come with them to talk to someone later.

  Trapped inside her home and rapidly getting more and more angry, Jema’s mind ran over her options. These guys were soldiers, doing other people’s dirty work; stupid and dangerous. Thanks to Benjamar, they no longer carried immobilizers, which was a plus. Nonetheless, even if she’d had the courage to do so, she wouldn’t be able to fight them. But she wasn’t going to some prison and be humiliated either. She talked again, non-stop, asking after their rights and the law they represented, but to no avail. They didn’t work with laws, only with orders, and they were getting fed up with this.

  “So get Benjamar,” she told them. Then she raised her voice to shout that same message at the people on the street who’d stopped to watch. That caused one of the guards to try and take her arm to force her to come.

  “No!” She tried to close the door on them, but one of them put his foot in the way. A moment later she found herself out on the street with her arms restrained. “Damn you fanatic, moralistic perverts; you have no right! Let go of me, you idiots!” She cursed and insulted them, and those who stood watching for not helping. She screamed at the onlookers and then at the guards, having no idea where all the words came from, nor where her mind found time to realize that Nini and Marya must have felt like this on DJar. And Roilan himself!

  That
last thought made her furious. She’d get him back for this. She’d kill him. She should have let them throw those stones after all. Aware of being the object of entertainment she stopped being afraid, pulled up her legs as the kids in Closed House would have, and bit one of the guards on the hand. A moment after he yelped, her feet touched the ground and a blow on her back made her fall flat in the dirt. All she could hear was the shocked sounds of the crowd, who had let this happen.

  “Now I have a reason to step in.” The hand in front of her belonged to a voice she knew: Benjamar’s voice. “Stand up,” he said.

  Through the burn in her eyes, which was more anger than pain, she caught a glimpse of him smiling. She forgot to do what he said until he repeated it. Trying to get her breath back, she stood by while Benjamar demanded of the two cowards that they tell him on whose authority they acted. “Go and find Roilan and tell him to come to my home immediately.”

  They left to do Benjamar’s bidding without so much as a word of protest. Vermin, they were, unable to think: the lowest of the low, who did their filthy jobs in return for medals from the state. She would get them back for this… and all those onlookers for standing by without doing anything… and Roilan – him more than anybody. If only the fog could come in now and kill them all.

  “Are you okay?” Benjamar asked.

  No, of course she wasn’t. Some dogs had just bitten her by order of the law. “I’m fine.” Dogs trained to serve any oppressive regime in the name of protection.

  “Come with me.”

  Jema didn’t protest accompanying Benjamar to his home. She wanted to be away from the staring people. Where had he come from? Nobody could have alerted him that fast. He must have been watching. How long for? Until one of them had kicked. “You knew this would happen?”

  “I had a pretty good idea.”

  “So, will you prosecute them for physical assault?”

  “I’m not a prosecutor; I’m a judge.”

  “You should be a leader.”

  “Don’t tell me what I should be.”

  Inside Benjamar’s home it was cool and dark. It felt better. Jema took the cup of wine he offered and sat where he told her.

  “You see, Jema, it’s easy to shout out what is right and wrong or talk about principles, but when you’re alone and have to make a choice it gets harder.”

  “What about the others?”

  “What others? Everybody else went to vote, though quite a few left the paper blank, I heard.”

  “Hypocrites!” She’d kill Roilan. Somehow… She’d get him back for this. Not just him; those soldiers and the people watching and Kolyag!

  “What are you thinking? Are you planning a revenge attack or are you contemplating your own mistakes?” Benjamar asked, still smiling.

  Revenge, yes, unless he finally decided to do something. Charge those guards with violence and Roilan for setting them up to it?

  “Well?” Benjamar asked.

  “They illegally abused me.”

  “No. It may have been unlawful and it may have been abuse, but the former is a legal distinction made by those in power; the latter, if I may quote your own words, is an ethical distinction made by those involved: you.”

  Yes, she’d said that on SJilai. Had she been wrong then? But the mob would have stood by and let him take power. “So I messed up, but he was still wrong.”

  “Who decides over right and wrong, Jema? Is it people’s personal values or is it the people in the position of power?”

  “I know that, but you could have stopped him. He would have listened to you.”

  Benjamar sat down opposite her. “But that’s the point, isn’t it? I could have stopped him this time using my power over his. That doesn’t help future problems, though. Nobody learns from that. Now Roilan will have to draw his own conclusions and so do you.”

  “The only conclusion I can draw is that the system always wins. He had the guards so he wins, but that doesn’t make him right.”

  “Right in an ethical way or in a legal way? Suppose there had been a law in place already that made voting compulsory?”

  “But then the law would also be wrong.”

  “Which brings us back to where we started; who decides that? I may have been a judge, but we have no laws. So who was I to tell him that his ruling was wrong? It would have been my personal values against his,” Benjamar said.

  “But who gave him the right to take that position?”

  “Who is it that ever gives people the right to take power, Jema? Who but that person himself and those who let him?”

  “Exactly, and I was trying not to let him, but the rest of the cowards just stood by.”

  “Which they always do, regardless of whether that is right or wrong.”

  Jema finished her drink. He was right. It was useless to keep asking. Despite their moralistic criticism of Depeter, the mob would let it happen again, because of a myth that connected soldiers with justice; a myth people had blindly accepted as truth and which they kept alive through stories of heroes and bravery told to their children, without seeing that tomorrow’s children would be murdered by the soldiers their parents worshipped today. Maybe she’d believed it would be different here, that people would automatically do the right thing when starting over. Maybe it would never be different. “Thank you for being there, anyway,” she said instead.

  “What would you have done if I had not? If I’d let them put you in that prison?”

  What would she have done? Killed herself, most likely. That was just too humiliating to live with. She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  Roilan arrived with the question what he had done wrong this time.

  “You tell me that,” Benjamar answered.

  Jema looked away. Roilan’s presence made her angry all over again.

  “Look, I just wanted to get everybody to vote, so we’d have a definite answer. I just issued a warning. I wasn’t expecting people not to do it, but I couldn’t just ignore it then, could I? Then I would have lost my credibility.”

  “Don’t ask me if you could. Ask yourself.”

  Roilan didn’t seem very powerful right now. Like everybody else, he had trouble arguing Benjamar’s logic. He couldn’t say why he’d decided to make it a threat. He wasn’t even sure if it was right to use prison for an offence like not voting, nor could he say if not voting should be an offence. He had to admit that, since there was as yet no law, he had no right to enforce it and, yes, he had sent the guards but he would have never allowed them to start kicking.

  “Nevertheless, that’s what they did using your name as an excuse.”

  Roilan glanced at Jema before responding to Benjamar. “I never knew they would do that. They knew it was wrong. I only wanted an election in which everybody had a say. I thought that was fair.”

  “Fair, yes, for people to have that right, but is it fair to force them?”

  Benjamar always had a return question, never an answer, yet he got the answers he wanted.

  “No, I guess not. I just did what seemed the best way to get a real majority decision.”

  “The best way or the most efficient way for your end goal?”

  “Both, but isn’t the definition of an otacy that everybody votes?”

  Jema moved to jump in, but Benjamar’s hand was up before she opened her mouth. He wanted her to stay out of this, and, today, she felt obliged to heed him.

  “When does a right become an order?” he asked Roilan. “And when did it become yours to give or take? Where were all the others who sat in the meetings organizing these elections when you decided to call for a revote? Where were Frimon, Tigor and Frantag?”

  “They never told me not to. They could have come to me.”

  “After you made the decision and announced it, or before it?”

  Roilan relented. He admitted he’d not thought it all through. “I didn’t ask them first. I should have.” He went on to say he’d made a mistake and even said sorry to Jema.

 
She purposely looked the other way.

  Benjamar refilled the cups and went on to hold a speech to both of them about how easy it was to assume based on your own point of view, because of how it used to be on DJar, or because it seemed fair or right.

  Even if she still wanted to feel angry at Roilan, Jema had to admit that he wasn’t as power-hungry as she’d thought. He had just assumed, like she had, only he’d found people to back him up, with force even. He had twisted a few words to turn a right into an obligation, too subtle for those without the brains to notice, and it was those he’d hired to enforce his rules.

  That was the scary part: that those who had previously been ready to beat him up had accepted the change of power and followed his orders; go with the winner, regardless of what motivated him. It wasn’t a question of good or bad. People chose sides according to who was likely to come out on top and they didn’t even realize they were doing it. It wasn’t the devil who was dangerous; it was those who followed and acted in his name. How easy was it for normal, well-meaning people to become dictators if nobody stopped them? Without followers there could be no devil, and without soldiers neither wars nor despots. How would they ever get to Daili’s ideal of a peaceful community if people were only concerned with winning? Winners created losers, which caused hurt and revenge until the tides turned; it wasn’t even a conscious choice, it was instinctive, but how did you fight that, especially in a species that believed it had the ability to make rational decisions?

  Too many questions came and went against the background of Benjamar’s chastisement. Why did everybody listen to Benjamar? Because he was older and more experienced? But was that enough? On DJar it hadn’t been. DJar belonged to the young. That was why all the mistakes from the past were repeated over and over again, like Roilan would have done here. But real leaders didn’t need soldiers, and didn’t cower behind votes. They made decisions, even if unpopular, for the right reasons. But what if the mob had become the dictator; if the otacy myth kept it in power, puppeteering even those who believed they had been chosen to lead? How did you fight a myth like that? Benjamar could easily run this colony: He could push his ideas and all would follow him, but he didn’t do that; he knew when to step back. He let people draw their own conclusions. Was that what real leaders did?