Arslan. Part 6

He lowered the bottle long enough to shrug, and drank again, drew a deep breath, and prodded his papers with the b.u.t.t of the bottle. "These are the messengers that tell me my failure is probable," he said. "Hunt, pick up those." Hunt stooped and gathered up the papers from the floor; he looked blankly across Arslan as he laid them on the bed, and met my eyes. "The current demographic a.n.a.lyses. Always they insist upon this message. I cannot make them change their story." He smiled to himself. You could literally see the liquor hitting him. Something like a shudder went down the length of him, as if he were settling more comfortably into his skin; the lines around his eyes smoothed out, and his face flushed.

I watched him pretty sourly. I didn't like his dirty boots, and I didn't like his jibes at religion. "Does that mean you're giving up?" He made a little grunt of amus.e.m.e.nt. "At any rate," I said, "it means there's a little bit of hope for the world."

"Hope," he said thoughtfully. He drank deep again, and then suddenly he collected himself like a cat going into a crouch. He turned to me, leaning hard on his elbow, his face and voice indignant and venomous. "You are not a child, sir. You have seen something of life and death. Tell me, are they what you have pretended them to be? You call yourselves a Christian people; and that, sir, is a lie, and you are wise enough to know that it is a lie. You would have called Kraftsville a safe and pleasant place to live, before I came, would you not? But answer this for yourself, sir. How many households do you know personally in Kraftsville? Two hundred, perhaps-three hundred? How many of these are free of serious evil-serious evil, sir? Aggression, exploitation, cruelty-l.u.s.t to possess, l.u.s.t to destroy-hatred, envy, deceit-have not these been always commonplace in Kraftsville? I did not import pain, sir; it is a local product." His mouth tightened emphatically. He went on staring at me with remote eyes while he bit at his underlip. "And yet it is true," he announced sternly. "It is true that Kraftsville was a safe and pleasant place, in comparison with other places. Your hungriest paupers have been better fed than the chiefs of towns. Your people have slept in security. They were free, they were healthy, as human health and freedom go. They had never suffered war. But you know that in most of the world, sir, there has been war and war again, and again, and again war, so that every generation learns again. Strange. It is very strange." He shook his head like a man in real puzzlement.

"What is?"

"More than one hundred years without war. A strange way of life."

"What do you mean, without war? My G.o.d, we've-"

"You have made war, you have not suffered it! Your nation, sir, has been perhaps the happiest to exist in the world. And yet consider its history. The natives despoiled, displaced, cheated, brutalized, slaughtered. The most ma.s.sive and the most cynical system of slavery since the fall of Rome. A civil war spectacular in its dimensions. A century of labor troubles, of capitalist exploitation and union exploitation. And in the very ascendancy of your power, disintegration! The upheaval, the upswelling, of savagery, of violence. Not revolution, sir, for revolution requires coherence. Not eighteenth-century France, but fifth-century Rome. The exposure, the revelation, of that all-pervading rottenness that is the fruit of your hypocrisy." He pursed his mouth like a disapproving old woman. "Grotesque, sir, this combination of a primitive puritanism and a frantic decadence; very like the Romans whom you so much resemble. Name me a happy nation, sir!"

"Switzerland," I hazarded.

"Ah, Switzerland! The parody of Protestantism! All l.u.s.ts sublimated into the pure l.u.s.t of cleanliness and profit. The prudent, virtuous nation fattening upon the viciousness and greed and folly of all the world. Would you exchange your own life, sir, your life now or a year ago, for the life of those pious, prosperous people?" He shook his head dogmatically. "I tell you, sir, not even the j.a.panese have been more rigidly inhibited."

I wasn't entirely surprised at this tirade. After all, as he'd said himself, you didn't conquer the world for fun-nor for theory, either. There had to be some kind of emotional force powering Plan One. Why it came out now, this particular evening, was understandable enough, if he was really tired, if his plan was really in trouble, if he'd just heard Hunt plotting to murder him.

He leaned a little towards me again, blazing at me like an evangelist on fire with his message. "Sir, you have been shocked by things I have done in Kraftsville, by things my soldiers have done. But I tell you we have been restrained, my soldiers and I. I tell you-and, sir, you know this already, you have known it for years-all these things, and worse, much worse things than these, have been done every day, in every country, all over the world, for thousands of years. You knew this, sir; your history, your newspapers, your eyes, your brain, your body and blood have told you. Were you shocked then? Was your Christian faith shaken? Did you vow vengeance for those wrongs?"

He leaned back abruptly against the pillows and drank again. It was my turn. "All right, General, let me tell you something. You don't shake my faith, either. Sure, I know about the h.e.l.l that goes on in this world. That's the whole point of Chirstianity-to keep from sinking into it all the way. It takes all the strength a man has, to deal with evil-that's nothing new. But that's what we're alive for. And let me tell you something else, General; we can win. You're trying to tar the whole world with one brush; you're saying it's all bad, and that's a lie. Kraftsville certainly wasn't perfect before you came, but it was paradise compared to what you've made of it, and it was a better and happier place than a lot of other places."

"Yes, sir, yes!" He was smiling his triumphant, now you-understand-how-right-I-was smile. "Have you read Candide, sir? Three hundred pages of catastrophe and misery and injustice, of which the moral is, 'We must cultivate our garden.' Was not this the virtue of Kraftsville, that it cultivated its own garden? Sir, I am trying to reduce the world to Kraftsvilles."

"'Reduce it'! You're reducing it, all right, reducing it to a wasteland. You think you get gardens out of ashes?"

"No!" he cried gladly. "Out of death and excrement. Out of garbage and corpses. You cut the weeds before you sow the crop, do you not? Consider the world as it was before I came, sir. Throughout Asia hunger, disease, fear, tyranny of landlords or of rulers, and war or the threat of it. In Africa, chaos and corruption. In South America, unconquerable poverty breeding still new revolutions. And everywhere, dread of nuclear war and busy preparation for it. Was this a happy world, sir? A safe and pleasant place to live?"

His voice rang and throbbed, a parade-ground voice-except, I realized, he wasn't actually speaking very loud. His eyes burned. He looked as if he'd hit anybody who dared to answer one of his rhetorical questions. On the other side of the bed, Hunt was watching him with a kind of motionless frenzy-frozen on the verge of some explosion.

"And this was not an accident of the times. What came before, sir? Colonialism; and I a.s.sure you-I a.s.sure you, sir-that the evils of colonialism have not been exaggerated. Before the Second World War, the First. Before that, more than half a century of revolutions, and the Industrial Revolution that powered them all. Before that, the wars of Islam and the wars of Christianity. How far back do you wish to go, sir? Do you remember the Chinese general who took Canton in fifteen-hundred and gave that perfect order to his troops: 'Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill'? Can you smell the stink of the galleys, sir-the most elegantly efficient means of transportation for twenty centuries? An invention of the Romans, sir, those famous practicians. Do you remember the battle of Lepanto, which saved the West for Christianity and proved the virtue of heavy firepower? Was there a really significant difference between the stench of the Turkish Moslem galleys and the stench of the Spanish Christian galleys? On the one hand the smell of Christian slaves and Moslem convicts, on the other that of pagan slaves and Christian convicts. There were still galleys in the nineteenth century, sir; and the latest belonged to France, that most humane flower of Western civilization. Which do you prefer, sir? That holy St. Vladimir of the Russian church who used cavalry to drive his subjects to the river to be baptized or drowned; or that holy Emir of my country who kept a snake pit into which uncooperative amba.s.sadors could be lowered; or those prudent American pioneers who ma.s.sacred a village of Christian Indians as a preventive measure; or those loyal Vietnamese patriots who tied their Communist neighbors together in live bundles and dropped them into rivers-a technique they may have learned from a study of French history? An English soldier of Cromwell's army was surprised to see the little children of a woman dead of starvation eating the flesh of their mother's corpse, and yet there is a natural logic in this. Pa.s.sing over gas ovens and human vivisection, penal colonies and sharecropping, you have heard of the battered-child syndrome?" He gave me a blank ghost of his angelic smile. "A worldwide, an age-old phenomenon, though perhaps especially a modem American one. Are these things tolerable? Clearly yes; they have always been tolerated. But there are more important things. Consider, sir. It is natural to man to build a civilization, and it is natural to civilization to destroy itself and to wreck the world."

"You think so?" I broke in roughly.

He glared at me a moment, and then half-relaxed-remembering, no doubt, that he was talking to humans. "I think so, yes. If war were not natural to man, there would be no wars. And what is natural is inevitable. Do you know the fable of Venus and the cat? No?" He laughed. "Read it." He waved his hand impatiently, disposing of the human race with a gesture. "Man is a mistake of evolution. He is too potent. Any species will foul or exhaust its habitat in time, unless it is checked by counterforces." He wiped his hard palm across the mouth of his bottle and drank in violent gulps. Something seemed to have given way in Hunt. He sat docile and still now, his eyes following automatically every movement Arslan made. "Counterforces," Arslan said, "internal or external. When the food supply is inadequate, the does drop fewer fawns. But man, man is too strong. He fouls and exhausts too rapidly, and nothing checks him for long. There is only one end for such a species: extinction; quick extinction. It only remains to be seen if the end comes by holocaust or by poisoning and starvation." He chuckled. "A bang or a whimper."

I started to speak, but again he crowded in ahead of me. "Is this important? Not in itself, except to those who die. But man has taken all the world as his habitat. Therefore this is important. Not man alone, but the whole world is dying. Your scientists have spoken of the web of life. Yes. It is a web, in four dimensions. And man hangs in the web above the void. But man has strained and twisted and torn the web. Man has pruned the web to make for himself a cozy hammock, and now"-he snorted a contemptuous laugh, or maybe it wasn't a laugh-"now he dangles, now he feels the runs and ravels in the fabric, and the void is so cold, so cold!" He drew a harsh breath through his open mouth, and nodded dogmatically. "Yes, sir. The natural is the inevitable."

"Then what's the use of what you're doing?" I got in.

He nodded again. "Good. A good point. If man is set back to his beginnings, will he not build another civilization? If he can, yes; but he must have the raw materials, and his environment must not be too strong for him. Now, sir, do you understand?"

"No, I don't. You say what's natural is inevitable, and I say that at least what we've done before we can do again. Man has proved he can handle any environment in the world-and out of this world, too. If you're talking about depletion of natural resources, a civilization just getting started doesn't need the resources that we've depleted."

"On the contrary, sir! It is exactly the resources it needs that are gone forever. Where now is the ore that can be mined and smelted without modern equipment-the equipment that I am destroying? Where is the coal that lay exposed on hillsides, the oil that oozed from the ground? There is wood, yes, I grant that, there is water, yes, there is air, and these will survive-if I succeed. If I succeed." He stopped for another drink, a hasty one this time. "But consider the environment, sir, the environment as a whole. Drouth, flood, fire, vermin, disease, all the enemies that man boasts of controlling-he has armed them, trained them, fed them, laid himself down in their path. Man has unbalanced the world, unbalanced so literally, sir, that he creates earthquakes. Earth breaks beneath his tread and he falls, he drowns in his leaking oil. He burns the oxygen of the land, he smothers the oceans with his grease. These abuses must cease, sir-I tell you, these abuses must cease at once! You have complained"-his face twisted in a genuine sneer of contempt-"because your little pollution machines have been turned off-your clumsy little coal-burning power plant-" Something internal interrupted him; his eyes went blank and private, and he chuckled and muttered. He was drunk.

"So we cut down the trees instead," I said.

He grunted and shrugged. "Reversible. Correctable. You understand? What you do to the trees is very little. Man is man; yes. But it is possible to eliminate the practices that cause irreversible damage. It is possible to reduce the population within tolerable limits. District by district."

"I thought you'd already stopped everything, abuses included."

"I have halted these abuses, sir. It is the first step-only the first step. No doubt the world can heal itself, but already it has been permanently scarred-disfigured-maimed. This is my hope, sir: that, once destroyed, civilization will not rise again, or at worst will rise only very slowly."

I heard Hunt draw a long, weary-sounding breath. Arslan was tending to his bottle again, and I said bitterly, "If civilization's going to destroy itself anyway, why do you have to step in and do it?"

He waved his hand impatiently. "Is this so hard to understand? I do it for two great reasons. The first, but the less important, is this, to save mankind from much suffering."

"Save it!" I was on my feet and he was looking up at me. "You call this saving mankind from suffering?"

"Yes, sir," he said coolly. "But in any case, my second reason is sufficient."

"And what is that?"

"To save the world from mankind."

I swung away from him and paced around the room, stopping at the foot of the bed to face him. "Plan Two," I said. "What's Plan Two?"

A new kind of smile spread across his face, thin and cold. "If civilization cannot be thoroughly eradicated, it remains necessary to exterminate the human species."

"That's what I thought. d.a.m.n you, that's what I thought." My own voice sounded small and thin in the silence before it and after it.

"This plan contains its own problems," he was saying. "The n.a.z.is eliminated with difficulty only a few million persons. And pa.s.sing over all operational problems, the final problem remains: Who will exterminate the exterminators?" He dropped his head back on the pillow and smiled at me. "There are, however, other approaches. For example, a program of disease dissemination could be managed to end with the spread of contagion to my armies."

I stared down at him. His smile deepened and faded, and his eyes flicked away, finished with me, to rest on the ceiling. I raised my hand, and let it drop again. I would no more have hit him than I would have hit a corpse.

"But there are unavoidable risks," he went on after a moment. "Your liberals have prattled of the dangers of biological weapons, the danger of inadvertently destroying mankind. But in fact it is very difficult. No disease can be trusted to produce perfect mortality. There is always, always, the possibility of undiscovered pockets of survivors. Are you familiar with the screwworm fly, sir?" He turned his bland face back to me.

"Screwworms," I said, when that non sequitur had gotten through to me. "I'm familiar with screwworms."

"Then perhaps you know that they were exterminated in Florida by releasing sterilized males into the wild population for two consecutive years."

I shook my head, partly to clear it, partly because that didn't sound logical.

"Yes, sir." He was warming to his subject again. "Naturally, the species was particularly vulnerable to such treatment. With the human species, one entire s.e.x would have to be sterilized. There are certain advantages of sterilization over killing, as no doubt you can see. There are two possible disadvantages; death is irreversible, sir, and it is recognizable." And again he gave me a small, horrible smile.

I turned slowly back to my chair and sat down. We were walking through a mine field; but there were ways out of it, if we could just feel our way into them. Who exterminates the exterminators?

It dawned on me presently that for a minute, or a few minutes, or maybe more, we had all three been silent, sunk and oblivious in our separate contemplations of the same horror. Well, contemplation didn't win wars. I took a deep breath and cleared my throat.

"General," I said, "I don't know the details of how you came to power in your own country. We didn't get too much news of it, and frankly I've forgotten most of what little we did hear. But I have an idea you started out as a patriot."

"My country," he mocked throatily. "My country." He pressed himself back into the pillows, stretching his legs and lifting the bottle at arm's length, then relaxed again. "This I have never understood," he said mildly, "how people forget. By what mechanism do your minds shut out parts of themselves? I, I do not forget."

Hunt laughed haggardly. Arslan looked at him, and slowly an intense, warm smile lit up his face. "I do not forget," he said again. "You speak of my country, sir. Do you think Turkistan is a country? Ah, no. Turkistan is an invention, sir, of the British."

It was interesting to hear bitterness in Arslan's voice. It helped bring him down to size. Now he was drawing maps in the air with his hand. "Turkistan is a dying fish. In the time of Herodotus-not so very long ago-here" (he stabbed the air with his bottle) "was a great sea. What is it now? A salt pond-a puddle-fifty, sixty feet deep. And here the Caspian; a great sea still, but also dying. Once rivers flowed into these seas from the mountains here on the south. The mountains still stand. The rains fall, the snows melt, the rivers start out bravely into Turkistan. But only two are strong enough to live. And the others, that flow into nothing, that are blotted up by the desert and the sun, they are not rivers, sir. Can you call them rivers?" He drank, and added to his imaginary map. "Here, the Amu Darya, the famous Oxus. Northeast, the Syr Darya, the little brother of the Amu." Hunt's eyes, across the bed from me, glinted like wellwater. "These are the only streams that feed our salt puddle, which is called the Aral Sea. But the Aral Sea is a Russian lake. Do you begin to understand?" Another stroke at the air. "Between the Syr and the Amu live a people with Mongol eyes and little leather caps."

"Not your people," I said. Not if you could judge from his tone of voice.

"Not my people, but my mother's people." What kind of a mother could Arslan have had, I wondered. "They call themselves Uzbek, the people of Uzbek Khan, who led them across the Syr Darya a few hundred years ago-not so very long. But between the Syr and the Amu they found Bukhara-Bukhara the old city. Bukhara the n.o.ble; the Dome of Islam; the city of the pure faith. Bukhara, my city; not my mother's city. And beyond the Amu they could not go, because of the Turkmens." He drank again. His voice had turned heavy with the liquor. He managed his words and his sentences all right, but you could hear him managing them. "Turkmens-Turkistan-Turkey-you understand? If my people had traveled a little farther west, as their cousins did, I would have been born a Turk. The Uzbeks, too, call themselves Turkish; but in the old language Turkmen means 'pure Turk.'" A drunken frown darkened his face. "Although some have claimed 'Turklike'; but that is a lie. In any case, you see, sir, there are differences..." He faded out for a moment, and then collected himself again. "All over the map of Central Asia, sir, you will find Turkistans-towns, provinces, regions. Sinkiang is not Chinese, and its right name is not Sinkiang; it is East Turkistan. Afghanistan south to its center is not Afghan; it is another Turkistan. My country," he said again, and chuckled. "This is not a country, it is a ... diaspora. And this Turkistan that the British made and sold to the Emir of Bukhara-is not even Turkistani, except for my Turkmens. My father's Turkmens. You understand, sir, that the British were very anxious to stop the expansion of Russia in Central Asia. Russia itself was not a country, it was an empire, and an empire has no natural boundaries. Therefore the British manufactured their buffer states and sold them to the greediest local rulers: Iraq, Afghanistan-and the northern borderland, the most expendable buffer, Turkistan. So the Emir of Bukhara ruled over Turkmens and Uzbeks and Tajiks, and the British had their buffer state, their treaty of friends.h.i.+p, and their oil concession.

"Did I begin as a patriot? Ah, no, sir; I began as a child of a general of the Air Force, the air force that the British had given. My father was the patriot, who bombed the Emir's palace and began the civil war-the Generals' War. When it was over, there were no generals except my father.

"But before it was over, he had allowed my mother to take her children to Samarkand-Samarkand the city of delights, the city of Uzbek Khan and Timur the Lame. She believed that we would be safer among Uzbeks. Nevertheless, it was an Uzbek general who imprisoned us, and took time from his revolt against my father to rape personally my mother-my first experience of rape, sir, although not, as you know, my last. But it was a time of countercoups and counterrevolts. We were freed, and we fled into the desert of the Black Sands-my first and last experience of flight. We reached Bukhara, the city of wisdom, exactly in time for the countercoup of the loyalists-loyalists, you understand, to the dead Emir. So we were imprisoned again. This time my father came with his fighter-bombers. He sent a warning to the loyalists that if his family were not released within six hours he would strike. The loyalists replied that if he struck, his family would be killed. We were not released. He struck. And while the bombs fell, we were stoned in the courtyard of the old prison." He smiled thinly. "Until my father ordered the courtyard strafed."

He lifted his eyes questioningly to the ceiling, took a long breath, and went on. "So in due time the attack was successfully completed, and I was removed from the rubble, and survived, as you regret to see. Do you care to consider this, sir-how merely another stone, or another bullet, or another hour would have spared the world the affliction of Arslan? But the past is what we have."

Suddenly he sat up, crossing his legs under him, making the bed shake. "Yes, Hunt, yes, this is a disillusionment. Yes, it is sad, is it not, to find one's angels or one's devils driven also? The superman himself is human-all-too-human." He groped in his pocket for a cigarette, looking humorously from one to the other of us. "You have considered me a monster, and indeed you have reason. But-alas for the sublimity of your feelings!-the monster is also a man. I must confess this in humility."

Certainly Hunt was hanging on his words, pale and tense. Arslan's bottle was empty. He rolled it off the edge of the bed, and got his cigarette lit with a little difficulty. "Did I begin as a patriot, sir? In ten years my father was as powerful, and as rich, as any emir of Bukhara had been, and ready to send his only surviving son to Oxford like any satellite princeling. But I did not choose to be sent to Oxford. I studied one year at Moscow, two at Peking. You will understand, sir, that the Chinese saw me as a tool which they might shape for their own hands. When I returned to Bukhara, I took charge of the army-the simple utility, sir, of being a dictator's son. However, I disagreed with my father on several points of policy, and I was not disposed to obey his orders on those points. For these reasons he arranged to have me a.s.sa.s.sinated. It was a good plan, you understand. Whether the a.s.sa.s.sination succeeded or failed, he could put the blame on certain rebellious elements in the army, whom he very rightly suspected of plotting against him, and thus arm himself with an excuse to crush them." He paused and smiled. "Nizam," he said fondly, "was one of these. And Nizam's private intelligence system, even then, was better than my father's. It was Nizam who raised the revolt, but he raised it in my name, broadcasting a full confession by one of the a.s.sa.s.sins.

"I was not prepared to execute my father. I owed him something, did I not? I planned only to hold him in protective custody. But the choice was not given me. We took Bukhara, but not my father. He had preferred to shoot himself."

"I think that was the first news we heard of you," I said.

"And yet you could believe that I began as a patriot?"

"I'm curious, General. What makes you so eager to deny that you might have been one?"

"But I do not deny it! Ah, no, sir. If love and hate are brother and sister, why not pride and shame also? You understand, then, that I have had four years in which to rule my country. My country. Yes. My artificial buffer state. And for four years I worked hard to do what I am now undoing: to unite, to centralize, to modernize. It is possible that I would have made Turkistan a country that could have patriots." Abruptly he swung his feet to the floor and stood up, swayed and recovered, and laughed softly. "Bring them, Hunt," he ordered, gesturing loosely towards the papers on the bed, and walked out.

Hunt stooped slowly to the papers, his face withdrawn and haggard. I got up and put my hand on his arm. "Give him a minute," I said. "He may go to sleep."

He nodded. He sat himself stiffly on the edge of the bed and began brus.h.i.+ng away at the dirt Arslan's boots had left. "Mr. Bond."

"Hunt," I said, "I'm not your princ.i.p.al any more. I wish you'd call me Franklin."

He nodded again, and moved his mouth in his little inward humorless smile. "It would be very useful," he said at last, "to be brave."

"I believe you're as brave a person as I've ever known." We looked at each other. "Hunt, I'll talk to you again later. I'm not just sure yet what has to be done. Will you try not to rock the boat for a little while?"

"Okay," he said wearily. He straightened the papers and stood up. "Thanks for something."

Chapter 8.

One week later, Arslan was standing across the table from me as I finished my breakfast, his knuckles on his hip, his garrison cap on his head. He beamed with youth, health, and vitality. "I am saying goodbye, sir," he announced. "I leave Nizam in command. Kraftsville has given me much pleasure."

I was on my feet by that time "You're leaving? For good?"

He laughed happily. "For good, for evil, who knows? It is very possible that I shall return. In a year, two years, twenty years perhaps. If not, sir"-his dark eyes flashed and fixed me hard-"I am very happy to have known you."

Hunt was standing in the kitchen doorway. Arslan swung halfway around, to follow my look. "Yes, sir, Hunt goes with me." The whole idea tasted good to him. He stood there for a minute watching the boy and rocking a little on his feet. "Go, Hunt," he ordered cheerfully.

"Wait a minute," I said. Hunt hesitated just inside the living room. I clasped his right hand in both of mine. His face flushed; his eyes were bright with fear and excitement. "Do you want to go?"

His head twitched. "Yes," he said huskily, and followed that with a quick, painful grin. "Under the circ.u.mstances." His eyes fell. "I'm sorry..." he began indefinitely.

"Can I do anything for you here? Can I tell your folks anything?"

He made a little sardonic grimace. "Could they tell me anything? Tell them goodbye, I guess." Now he looked up, faintly returning my handclasp.

"Come back if you can, Hunt," I said. "But whatever happens, don't give up."

He gave me a sudden wild look. Luella had followed from the kitchen, wiping her hands. "Hunt-"

"Goodbye, sir," he said. "Also thank you. Both." He walked out briskly, eyes straight ahead.

Arslan stood where I had left him, smoking a cigarette, his eyes dancing. "I suggest that you cooperate with Nizam, sir. You should not expect as much indulgence from him as from me."

"I have a pretty good idea what to expect. How many of these troops are you taking with you?"

He grinned delightedly. "Have I appointed you my adjutant? What you need to know, you will learn without my help." He touched his cap in salute, or what pa.s.sed for a salute with him-almost correct, almost genuine, like a good amateur actor who wants his audience to know he doesn't have to make his living at it. "Good luck," he said.

"It could be worse, Mr. Bond," Leland Kitchener said. "There's no taxes, anyway."

There were no taxes, and no forced labor-except for the girls in the brothel. But there was the sunset curfew. There was the no-meetings rule. There was the soldier billeted in every home. Arslan hadn't moved a one of them, but he had taken all the surplus Turkistanis-the ones from the camp. A few days later, about half the Russians followed, or anyway headed east. And District 3281 belonged to Colonel Nizam.

NOTICE. The following items are declared contra- band: Wire, all types. Electrical equipment, all types.

Engines, all types. Petroleum products, combustible.

By February, Nizam's notices didn't bother to include the instructions any more. Everybody knew the blacklisted items had to be delivered immediately to the school, the camp, or Nizam's headquarters. Immediately (we had learned the definition the hard way) meant today. The notice would be up at daybreak; if you didn't see it, or understand it, or have the means to comply with it, that was your hard luck. The next day, and unpredictably after that, there would be spot checks and sometimes sweeping searches. Possession of contraband was punishable (not always punished, though) by death. So we kept a sharp and early eye on the notice boards, and pa.s.sed the word fast.

That had come to be the most obvious function of the Kraft County Resistance: to watch the boards, to pa.s.s the word, to help people shed their "contraband." The KCR was an established fact of Kraft County life now, but it was an invisible fact. Everybody knew it existed-which meant we had to a.s.sume Nizam knew it-but n.o.body called it by name. It was always "they" or "people" or "somebody." Keeping the members.h.i.+p secret was easier than I'd expected, for the very good reason that n.o.body wanted to know. "Somebody told me" was all the authorization needed, and instructions were pa.s.sed along from neighbor to neighbor just as efficiently as gossip used to be. That first spring of Arslan's absence, we had it down so pat that we could inform every household in the district inside of two hours. Then there would be a quietly frantic time. Definitions were matters of life and death. Was paraffin a combustible petroleum product? What about plastics? Did you have to cart your whole useless refrigerator to town, or was it good enough if you brought the motor? Did you have to take down your wire fences? What about phone wires and electric lines, that weren't exactly in anybody's possession?

We took down the fences. We climbed poles and took down the wires. We carted refrigerators. We ran regular wagon trains through the district all afternoon, picking up stuff. We tried to put ourselves in Nizam's place and imagine what he had in mind (though that didn't work entirely-one thing he had in mind was that at least part of whatever we decided would be wrong), and in cases of doubt we figured better safe than sorry. We also cached a few thousand feet of electrical wire, two generators, and about two bushels of a.s.sorted radio equipment.

Arslan had been satisfied to let us wither on the vine; Nizam went at us with an axe. You could say that Arslan had hit us like an avalanche, but after the dust had settled he really hadn't tried to shake us any further. You might even say he'd been fair, according to his lights. At least he'd stuck by his own rules. But Nizam's whole idea was to shake us and keep us shaken.

He had a little bit of a problem. Wherever Arslan was now, it was pretty evident he was still keeping a tight rein on his colonel. The look in Nizam's eye told me very plainly what would happen to me if the choice were up to him. It wasn't one of my biggest worries. Nizam was nothing if not scrupulous, and he had to play by Arslan's rules, too. It was Nizam who a.s.signed a loud-mouthed corporal to my house, making me as vulnerable to the billet rule as the Bensons had been; it was Arslan who must have decreed free medical service for all citizens, including inoculations against all the foreign diseases his troops might have brought in. It was Nizam who inst.i.tuted a system of bribing informers with extra rations; it was Arslan who had seen to it that n.o.body would have to starve in District 3281.

Even working within limitations, Nizam showed himself an expert at pure, plain hara.s.sment. He was keeping the district in a state that varied from nervous tension through misery and frustration to panic. Not to speak of the families of the people who were shot.

That Petroleum products, combustible was a typical example. At one unexpected stroke it deprived us of all our lights. No kerosene for lamps, no paraffin for candles. The town went black-except for Nizam's termite nest. Meanwhile every housewife was muttering unladylike things under her breath about the paraffin seals she'd had to pry off her jelly jars. It was a confiscation with no material excuse for it. If he wanted our kerosene, why wait till it was practically used up? If he wanted to deprive us of it, why not just wait a little longer, till we ran out? But about two weeks later, Nizam informed me that kerosene would be issued on a strict ration to selected households.

"We don't need it," I told him. Selected households meant collaboration and broken morale. Rationing meant black-marketing and dependence. I already had a little project started for the manufacture of tallow candles, and we were experimenting with sunflower-seed oil.

The households were selected and the kerosene ration authorized. n.o.body came to the camp to pick it up. All the lucky families had received a message from the KCR the same day they got their notification. Everybody had lived without kerosene for better than two weeks now. Some of them really wanted it, but not badly enough to cast what amounted to a vote for Nizam and against America. Not when it was put to them clearly in those terms. And the first tallow candles were being distributed free. After that, it would be a commercial enterprise.

So we had our successes. We held the line. But it wasn't only people we had to contend with. That year the bugs began in earnest.