Arslan

Arslan

M.J. Engh

Science Fiction Masterworks Volume 84

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 Contents

Title Page

Contents

Dedication

Part 1

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Part 2

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Part 3

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Part 4

Chapter 28

About the Author

For Fritz Leiber: friend, heartener

PART ONE
Franklin L. Bond

Chapter 1

When his name first cropped up in the news reports, it was just one more foreign name to worry about, like so many others. And like so many others, it graduated in due time to the level of potential crisis. But before it had gone any further than that, suddenly all the rules had been changed when we weren't looking, and if you said “he” without an obvious antecedent you were talking about Arslan.

On TV and in the news weeklies he'd looked no different from a lot of them: young, jaunty, halfway Oriental like the second-row extras in
Turandot
, and every one of them a major general at the very least. “Turkistan—is
that
independent now?” Luella had asked me, one of the first times he showed up.

“I think it always has been.” I meant to look it up in the big atlas at school; but I was busy planning for quarterly exams, and that intention went the way of a lot of other things I meant to do. I never did get around to it till after the Emergency Broadcast Network began its terse announcements that martial law had been proclaimed throughout the United States and that all U.S. armed forces were under the command of General Arslan. Among other things that hectic day, I looked at the map of Central Asia.
Turkistan. Cap: Bukhara. Pop: 1,369,000
. Even South Vietnam would have been able to handle a place that size. Still, with China on one border and Russia on another, and an oil field begging for development, it was small wonder Arslan had made a splash at the U.N.

“Stay off the highways,” the EBS kept saying. Whether that was a friendly voice or a hostile one was anybody's guess. “Only military transport is permitted on state, interstate, and national highways.”
Military transport
—that included, apparently, the great commercial trucks that rolled past the square and on through town. We stood and watched them in the early dusk, and I wondered if it was good luck or bad that Kraftsville happened to lie on a main highway.

“I've got to get home,” Paul Sears protested. “I can't help it if I
live
on the hardroad.”

“If I were you, Paul, I'd go around by the back road.” That was Arnold Morgan, knowing all the answers. “Once the President invokes his emergency powers, we're required to follow his instructions. That's Federal law.”

Paul snorted. “It didn't sound like the President to me.”

“I'd feel better if I knew who that General Arslan was,” somebody else put in. Which was about par for Kraftsville. Plenty of people in town had never heard of Premier Arslan, or didn't remember it if they had.

“He's the one that's been talking to Red China,” I said. The last news I remembered hearing about him, Arslan and the Chinese premier had been in Moscow by invitation, presumably discussing their border dispute. The Russians had been offering for months to mediate it. Turkistan had been cagey, China had emphatically refused; but at last they had agreed to a Moscow summit meeting, agenda unspecified. Now, a few days after the meeting started, Arslan was Deputy Commander in Chief of the United States armed forces. And the trucks were rolling. It didn't make a whole lot of sense.

Everybody was on the telephone. Long distance calls were getting through to some places, but none farther away than Louisiana, where Rachel Munsey talked to some of her relations and found out there was fighting going on down there. Maybe riot or maybe war—Rachel had managed not to find out that little detail; but there were people with uniforms and people without, and black and white in both categories. We couldn't make connections with the East Coast or the West Coast, and even Chicago was cut off cold. There were open lines to St. Louis, our nearest city, for just two days. Then they went dead, sometime in the night.

And the next morning we got word from Monckton that a real, genuine army was driving west on Illinois 460, which meant straight towards us. But Kraftsville, Illinois, wasn't likely to be anybody's military objective, and the highway didn't pass the school; I saw no reason to declare a holiday.

It was just after lunch when Luella came hurrying across Pearl Street to my office. “I thought I'd run over and tell you instead of tying up the phone. Helen Sears just called, and she says they're passing her place right now; they ought to be in town in a few minutes.”

“You shouldn't be alone,” I said. “Why don't you go over to Rachel Munsey's?”

“No, I'd rather be in my own house. And somebody might call.”

“All right. Call me or come over if you hear anything that sounds important. Otherwise just stay put. I want to know where you are.”

From Nita Runciman's eighth-grade room, which was the southwest corner of the top floor, you could see a little bit of the highway four blocks away. I told Nita to post one or two of her students there as lookouts and let me know as soon as they saw anything. In less than ten minutes she was on the intercom. “They're coming through,” she said. “Mr. Bond—” Her voice crackled. “Some of them are turning down Pearl Street. Trucks and jeeps.”

They didn't pass the school; they stopped beside it. I watched them from the south window of my office while I talked on the intercom. They pulled up in a line right in front of me, their engines still running, stretching nearly the full block. The last jeep of the string drove past the others and turned into the parking lot. There was a driver, and a man with a submachine gun, and one passenger. I didn't know what I had been expecting, but when I saw him, my heart went down a notch. He was too young, too young and too happy.

I had no doubt of who he was, much as I could have used a little doubt right then. The news pictures that had seemed so anonymous suddenly flashed into vivid focus. He gave orders exuberantly, waving his hands. Soldiers swarmed out from Pearl Street in both directions, into the schoolground and into the yard of my house. I searched the upstairs windows for a sight of Luella. But I didn't have much time to look. Soldiers were at the south door, a few steps from my office, some of them with rifles reversed—ready to smash the glass if the double doors were locked, or maybe just for fun. I got there first, and they waited grinning while I opened up. We might be wanting those doors intact.

They pushed in. Whatever they were, they weren't Americans. I got in front of a sergeant (I didn't bother to count his stripes, but he looked like a sergeant) and braced my legs. “Wait a minute!” I said. He looked at me without much interest and gave an order, and three men backed me into my office. I guessed this was what was called token resistance; anyway, it seemed like the best idea available at the moment. Now it was my teachers’ turn. They had instructions to sit as tight as possible, cooperate without objection, volunteer nothing, and keep the children still. There wasn't much else we could do on such short notice.

Boots thudded along the hall, up the stairs, down into the basement. Doors opened, doors slammed. A long barrage of thumps told me they were opening the desks. Then most of them came trooping back and out of the door. It had only taken a few minutes.

The sergeant held the south door open, saluting smartly, and General Arslan strode in, with quite a retinue behind him. He was stocky, but he moved with lightness and bounce, like a good welterweight boxer. He turned into the office as if he knew his way around. The soldiers let go of my arms and fell back, and I was face to face with him.

“You are in charge of this school?” His English was very clear, his voice a quick baritone.

“That's right,” I said. “I'm the principal.”

“What is your name?”

“Franklin Bond.”

He had been smiling all the time. Now he tilted his head in a little hint of a bow, never taking his eyes off mine. There was nothing else impressive about him that you could put your finger on, but he did have the most piercing eyes I'd ever seen. “Good,” he said. “You will show me your school.”

“Gladly. But I'd like to know what you're here for.”

He strode out, and a bayonet prodded the small of my back, in case I hadn't gotten the message. My legs were a good deal longer than his; I caught up in two steps, and we went down the hall side by side. He glanced up at me with amusement. “I shall bivouac in your town.” Well, that sounded temporary. “I shall hold a dinner here tonight. You will be my guest.”

I showed him the new west wing first, with the kitchen and cafeteria and the wide folding doors opening into our gym that doubled as auditorium. He took it all in with those eyes of his, as if the fate of the world hung on everything he looked at. Then the library and the audiovisual room and the music room. Then I had to lead him back into the main block of the school.

“And what is this?”

“That's the fire door.” Where he came from, it might be a revolutionary concept. “In case a fire ever broke out in one part of the building, we could pull this steel door down and keep it out of the other part.”

He nodded and ran his left hand up the tracks. “It is good,” he said. A connoisseur's appreciation.

It wasn't much different from a start-of-school guided tour for the PTA. A little pack of soldiers—half a dozen, maybe—seemed to be tied to General Arslan's heels. I showed him the shop, the furnace room, the washrooms, the teachers’ lounges, the broom closets. We looked into every classroom. He asked the name of every teacher. The children sat subdued and uneasy at their desks; I was proud to see that the teachers were keeping them quietly busy.

The only classroom we actually went into was Nita Runciman's eighth grade. Arslan paused a moment at the open door, resting his hand lightly on the frame, and then stepped in with a broad smile. He stood with arms akimbo, surveying the class. For the first time I noticed he wore a pistol on his left hip. The children watched him blankly.

Suddenly he stepped forward, down one aisle and back another, swiftly tapping three children on the shoulder as he passed. He was saying something, chuckling, to his men as he came back toward the door. Immediately the three were pulled from their seats and hustled after him. It was two girls and a boy—Paula Sears, LouAnn Williams, and Hunt Morgan. He had picked, very possibly, my three best eighth-graders.

“Wait a minute,” I said. He had to stop or walk into me. He stopped. “Where are you taking these children? And what for?”