So she got up about three meters into the tree and said, "Dinner, as if you didn't already know."
"I hope none of you die of the monkey sickness," said Chinma.
"Well I should hope you hope that!" said Lettie.
"I mean, I'm happy here. I didn't think I ever would be, but if one of you dies, this place will never be happy again."
"Dad died. Mark died."
"But they didn't die here," said Chinma. He was thinking of bodies burned and houses bulldozed, though he would never say so.
"So are you coming to dinner or not?" said Lettie.
He came down the tree. She let him pass her on the way down, because down was harder and scarier, and also because she liked it when he reached up and helped her make the last jump, or so Chinma thought.
He followed her into the house across the back lawn, which was still bright with sunlight, because in these northern latitudes the day was much longer in the summer than it had been in Nigeria. He looked at her hair swaying across her shoulders with every step. He watched how confident she was. Bad things had happened in her life. Death had come to people she loved. And yet she kept her eagerness for each day.
Don't die, he said to her silently as he followed her into the house. Please don't die. This disease the monkey god forced into my nose as a prank on the whole world of humans, let it take no one in this house. Or if it must take someone, let it be me. I know that I'm immune but I've had this year of a life in a larger world, one with oceans and airplanes and brave soldiers as well as cruel ones. I've had a year in which the things I did made a difference and people were glad that I was alive. Take me now, God, before you take any of them.
Father had never listened to him, or any of the brothers, really, and certainly none of the mothers or sisters. But God would listen. Mrs. Malich said so. God didn't always do what we wanted, but we were heard.
Keep this family alive, God, and I will believe in you forever.
Then they sat down to a dinner of colorful vegetable-and-mozzarella pasta salad, in which all the seasonings were namby-pamby spices like basil and oregano, nothing with any fire in it. But he had lived here long enough now. He appreciated the fact that he could taste all the flavors. It had become delicious to him.
AFTERWORD
The Empire franchise does not belong to me. It began with Donald Mustard and the rest of the team at Chair Entertainment, who had the idea of a video game about a red-state vs. blue-state civil war in America today. They wanted to develop it into a real franchise—games, novels, movies, comic books, everything.
At that point, they had only a little of the story—but lots of cool graphics and a firm conviction that the hero we began with had to die in the middle. I knew what a challenge this would be for a novelist, and I took it on as a partnership. They gave me a free hand with every other aspect of the story (though their cool graphic of a lake that drains to reveal a secret entrance to an underground factory was irresistible), and the novel Empire was the result.
Since then Chair was acquired by Epic Games, the movie rights were optioned by a major studio, the Xbox game Shadow Complex inspired by the first novel was launched to great acclaim, and I found my road into the dark future of the Empire story.
It is the character of Averell Torrent who intrigues me most, and who drives the plot of every book. He is potentially the kind of philosopher-king Plato talked about, but he also has to solve the problem of getting enough power to accomplish the great things that he envisions for the world. In case you haven't noticed, this kind of ambition is usually the worst kind of disaster for the human race, because one man's Utopian dreams rarely match with other people's desires, and even more because it is usually in the getting of power that the dreams become corrupted. Something about breaking eggs to make an omelet. I happen to be an egg, not an omelet-maker, so I think of Torrent as the kind of person who is fascinating to read about in history, but quite dreadful to have as a ruler, because his ambitions can kill an awful lot of people and make the rest quite miserable.
But I'm playing fair with him. It would be easy to have a crazy man like Hitler or Idi Amin, or a religious fanatic like the Kims of North Korea (Communism functioning as a religion, for it always does) and the ayatollahs of Iran. Instead, I'm making him the kind of man that, if you had to have a king, he'd be the one you hoped for.
If he really existed, and this were a history, every page would be about Torrent. But this is a novel, and so it is not about him. It is about the people who are close to him, in a position to judge what kind of man he is, and also in a position to do something about it if he doesn't measure up.
As I was writing this novel, Africa took me by surprise. It was supposed to be the source of a bit of adventure and then I'd move the action to other places on the world stage. But I ran into Chinma, a couple of sick monkeys, and a plague to rival those that decimated the Roman Empire twice, contributing greatly to its fall. I was steered this way in part by my reading of Rodney Stark's The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries. Stark makes excellent use of the sketchy sources we have in order to gain a fairly reliable-seeming picture of how Christian practices led directly and indirectly to its overwhelming the civilization in which it emerged (though philosophically the reverse happened, as well; see How Greek Philosophy Corrupted the Christian Concept of God by Richard R. Hopkins).
One of Stark's key points is that because Christians had less fear of death (or more social pressure to appear not to fear it) and a stronger commitment to selfless service to one's neighbor, Christians stayed put and nursed one another—and strangers—during the plagues when other people fled. The treatments they gave cured nothing, but still gave plague victims a far better chance of survival. The result was that not only did Christians have a much lower mortality rate when infected with the plague, but also the pagans they nursed survived at a higher rate—with very favorable impressions of Christianity. We know this happened because of the extremely favorable statements about Christians, even from people who hated them; and when Julian tried to restore paganism, he tried to get the pagans to behave more like the Christians in providing one another what we now think of as social services and health care!
As always happens when I'm writing fiction, what I'm reading in history and science pops up. Only with the Empire books, I have the rare opportunity to look at contemporary problems and issues square on. When I'm writing stories set in fantasy worlds or far futures, it's hard to say much about the problems of contemporary Africa, for instance. So when the story of Chinma, a boy who happens to be the first to be infected with a devastating new plague through his contact with monkeys, intrigued me, I decided not to have him die and then drop him from the book, as I had originally planned. Instead, I kept him, and with him kept the whole continent of Africa as the center of most of the action of the book. If you're going to have a potentially civilization-wrecking plague in your story, either you kill everybody off right from the start (Stephen King's The Stand) or the whole book becomes about the plague and the efforts to deal with it. Epidemics cause panic and distort nations, economies, and individuals. History always has to bend to make way for them. So, in this case, must fiction.
I also looked into the HULC exoskeleton from Lockheed-Martin and imagined what it might become with a bit more development over the next few years. And since my fictional President Torrent has even more of a monopoly on power and media attention than our current president, I couldn't resist having him use that power to do the things that I believe would help most in our transition to a post-oil world, a transition that will happen, but does not have to involve a long sojourn in the Stone Age along the way (though that is certainly the way we seem to be headed).
This is also a novel about soldiers. I have done my best, having never served in the military myself, to learn from others. I have been an avid reader of history—which includes military history—for
almost my entire life. From reading Bruce Catton's The Army of the Potomac as a child I learned so much about how destructive both bad commanders and good ones can be, and how the soldiers respond to both kinds, that I have seen military affairs through that lens ever since. I also read William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich at a tender age, and the horrors caused by those who seek empires without regard to the cost have been indelibly stamped in my mind.
I have also learned from good friends like Tom Ruby and the many officers he has introduced me to, and from friends and family who have selflessly served our country in the military—including my brother, who joined the U.S. Army in the late 1960s and gave me a chance to hear about military life in rich detail.
In the writing of this book, I was greatly helped by the patience of Beth Meacham, my editor, to whom this book is dedicated. This is not the first time that I have surprised myself with new ideas that take a novel off in a strange direction, and she has, with heroic patience, dealt with the delays that come from this and other bothersome little problems in a writer's life. I sometimes think of myself as a toothpaste tube, and Beth as the person who squeezes the end of it. Unfortunately, she is not the person with the power to open the cap (that would be my recalcitrant unconscious), so she can sometimes be frustrated with the nothing that comes out for such long stretches of time. Yet all I ever receive from her is the encouragement of a collaborator who believes in me and my work, and for that I am grateful.
As I wrote this novel—most of it while on "vacation" in a rented house in Salvo, North Carolina—I was greatly helped by my crew of first readers. My wife, Kristine A. Card, is always the first to see each chapter, but she is not the only one to make suggestions that help me know what my readers care about, to make sure I don't neglect story threads that matter to them. Erin and Phillip Absher, who were with us at the beach (and in so much else in our lives), provided such guiding responses; and because my son Geoffrey Card joined us with his family for a week, he brought his keen eye to the novel as well, offering many excellent suggestions that kept me from lazily abandoning small but important issues. Kathryn H. Kidd was farther away, but no less faithful in her response to and encouragement of the project. And Donald and Geremy Mustard at Chair gave this novel careful readings that resulted in significant improvements.
My daughter Emily is indirectly responsible for the existence of two of the chapters of this novel. She drove the family for five hours each way, to and from Salvo Beach, so that I could write chapters instead of doing the driving myself.
In fact, I was able to write this novel because I did not have to pay attention to any of my ordinary duties as other people filled in for me, most notably my assistant (and the publisher of my online fiction magazine, InterGalactic Medicine Show—http://www.oscIGMS.com), Kathleen Bellamy, and my webwright and, at times, factotum, Scott Allen, who kept my plants watered, my garden harvested, and my fish fed while I was holed up typing this book.
To Tom Doherty, my publisher, I always give thanks—he is tried and true, and knows how to make and sell a book. My agent, the late and much-missed Barbara Bova, stuck with me for thirty-two years. She was the founder of my career and the protector of my interests in the publishing world. She was also a dear friend, and no one can take her place.
My daughter Zina, the last one still at home, will have a father again, now that this book is done, and Kristine will have a husband, and many friends and associates may even get answers to their emails.
Scan Notes:
[02 nov 2010—scanned for #bookz]
[04 nov 2010—proofed by ECS (Escaped Chicken Spirits)]
Hidden Empire Page 34