The Tyrant's Novel (16 page)

I won't be having any women in, I assured him.

Might change your mind. A man's a man.

Sometimes, I told him, with futile acidity.

He stood up. Thanks, Mr. Sheriff. A few words now and then, that's all. Won't see us.

The neighbors will.

They'll get used to it. Good night.

My regards to the wife and kids, I said with unfair sarcasm.

He saluted. I let him out. I paused a little after the door had shut. Could this man have ordered things on the scale of the shooting and exposure of Mrs. Douglas's nephew? Could he have said, Just a bit of juice, as he applied the electrodes to the vagina of a female prisoner? These were all within the Overguard's repertoire, after all. And how did you go home and be tender with a wife and three kids after such exercises in state security?

Or maybe he had always been what he was in my case. Mere surveillance. I desired, for his sake and mine, that that was the case.

Just to cheer myself up, I began to make notes on a special file named in ironic honor as TASK1.doc. A McCauley-like barge skipper named, for the moment, A, was an oil smuggler, getting oil out of the country and thus creating more wealth than the West permitted us to have. A1, one of his sons, was an idealistic blockade runner who brought pharmaceuticals in by truck from Istria in the northwest. The second son, A2, was an accountant used by a black-market mogul, a friend of Sonny. No, I can't say that. Scratch A2. Press the delete button and expunge it before Chaddock notices the faintest fragrance of such sedition and knocks on the door with his respectful absolutism. No, don't scratch A2 entirely. There were Istrian black-market operators who lived opportunistically amongst us, and when they were caught, Sonny was ruthless with them, because they were competition for his friends. There had been, three months before, outside Wolfmount prison, a public hanging of two Istrians who had tried to profiteer out of car parts they'd brought in. So I could have an Istrian gangster, Z. Bring back A2, but portray him as having lost his job due to the sanctions and succumbed to temptation for the sake of real but corrupt wages.

It was good to be working, even on shit. The idea that such a character as the Istrian, Z, might spark anti-Istrian feelings did not, under the pressure, mean much. Get the damn thing written and then give it manners!

Creating even these few bad ideas evoked the forgotten pleasure of imagination fast and fertile. Now the barge skipper A's teenage daughter, F1, becomes involved with the Istrian, Z. A2, the accountant, has to suffer the sting of seeing his boss flaunt his sister round the warehouses of Beaumont. Z wants a piece of A1's, the pharmaceutical smuggler's, action. The accountant brother knows that Z will adulterate the pharmaceuticals and cause death.

I made a note not to make Z too much of a villain, since the West and the sanctions were to be the chief miscreants. The point of the book was to be that few are able to escape the harshness of Beaumont, the sharp edge of the sanctions. Blah, blah, blah!

The problem now was I had actually to write this soap opera in such a way that it had the plausibility of a real book. Nonetheless, I turned out the lights at two
A
.
M
., strangely contented at having made a plan.

Next morning I began writing this melodrama. It limped for days, but I always told McBrien, when he called in, how well it was going. If the tale should die on its feet at two weeks, I would still have time to persuade Matt to flee. I operated on the principle now that if one could write one letter after another to people one had no fundamental liking or respect for, one could also write a plausible novel, a few thousand words at a time.

About the fourth day, I went back to drinking McBrien's vodka, and it put me into a sort of subtranscendent lather of creativity. About then, McBrien asked could he read some of the pages of this melodrama, and I let him since it might fuel him towards becoming a refugee. But he made applauding noises as he read and seemed to find the material quite acceptable. When, despite myself, I felt flattered by his approval, I produced twenty thousand words in eight days.

And you'll speed up, said McBrien, joyfully. Because both of us knew the second half of a book is always faster than the first.

But then a possibly fatal thing happened. I got involved in A2's, the accountant's, experience as a soldier. It was then that Hugo Carter, my military comrade, asserted himself for two days while I wrote in clearheaded fervor the short story I should have long since attended to. This tale I had been waiting to tell began to insinuate itself into the soap opera narrative I was writing. It waited for the point where my feeble, fatuous tale put the McCauley figure's son at Summer Island during the war. And here Hugo Carter had appeared, choosing to disgorge himself into the sluggish waters of my Great Uncle–ordered narrative.

The story I wrote was along these lines:

On Summer Island we conscripts were required, when stood-to, to wear both our oppressive gas masks and rubberized gloves. Summer, normally a time for heroic dives into rivers, for folly and ice cream and plaintive evening songs of longing, was a harsh season on Summer Island for the conscripts in this oppressive wear, but they made us wear the mask and gloves long enough so that we became accustomed to them. For there was no guarantee the Others would not try to gas us or drop a biological bomb amongst us. After the day's reconnaissance planes instructed the command that there were no signs of attack, we were allowed to take everything off but keep it within reach.

Young Hugo Carter, who had frankly disliked the long claustrophobic crawl along a thousand-meter L-shaped pipe when we were in training, was also honest with me about how he hated the mask and gloves. They added to his feelings of being forgotten by God, by all but his indulgent mother back in the city. Besides, he murmured to me, we're the ones who use the damned gas. They use mass immolation.

Carter and I provided a seasoning of city Mediationist boys to ranks considered too heavily Intercessionist. The southern Intercessionists were popularly looked on as hayseeds and cannon fodder. They came from a background of folk superstition and religious fundamentalism. Many were only chancily literate. But they deserved—in my experience of them—a little more respect. They had kept solidarity with us in our struggle against the Others, even though there were a majority of Intercessionists across the straits as well, in the opposing army—indeed, among the officer corps.

Southerners had, however, begun to complain, as taxis from the front delivered their dead young men in coffins, octopus-strapped to the vehicles' roofs, that we secular, urban, take-it-or-leave-it Mediationists were letting them carry the burden of casualties. It had until then been very easy for people like Carter and myself to become officers or to get exemptions. We could plead a special area of expertise, or say that our studies added to the strength of the state. In a sense it was more important than anything we could do militarily. But because of all this Intercessionist complaint, in the year Hugo Carter and I were conscripted, no excuses were accepted, no commissions were available. We were two students of humanities. What did we have to offer a state with such an ancient and complex culture except our lives?

Carter and I, with the same birthday, and from the same faculty at the university, stuck together, but we rather got to like the southerners, with their casual, earthy humor which escaped the net of orthodoxy. They were brave and practical young men. On good evenings, drinking coffee round the campfire, we felt the normal solidarity of untried troops. Our training was the usual banal stuff, relayed in a thousand tales of a thousand wars—crawling, lunging, presenting weapons for inspection, throwing one grenade to find out what the experience was like, counting one-two-three until the NCO told you to duck down behind the wall of stone. Such technicians of death were we! Considerable esprit. Considerable amounts of banter. You city types aren't such bastards as we thought. And, You pig-fucking hicks aren't so bad either. The army is an education, if only you survive it.

We stood on disputed ground—these oil well regions and islands had been ceded by an earlier government to the Others, but we had no doubt that this earlier accommodation had been nothing but that, an adjustment made under superior political, diplomatic, and military force. Thus, between the redneck Intercessionists and the most religiously casual Mediationists, we had no doubt that this country of tall reeds, sand dunes, eroding granite, and oil wells was our inheritance, to be retained.

Carter and I had arrived on the Summer Island front in time to be put to work on the latest national triumph—a thirty-mile canal which ran through the sand dunes and reed beds right across the island, a mile wide. Though mere infantrymen trained in the use of the trench mortar, we were put to work on placing steel reinforcements along the banks, and then carrying stones from a nearby hill to make the bottom of this vast ditch uneven for a potential, wading enemy. At the southern end of the island, many of the reed beds which had been studiously drained during the days of the British Mandate after World War I were now flooded to make similar barriers—wide, shallow pools, requiring attackers to wade towards the assault.

After our work on the canal, we went to defend the southern marshes, living in superbly crafted bunkers amidst the dunes and the scattered granite outcrops. Between us, Carter and I made up a trench mortar team led by an Intercessionist corporal who had been in the army for years and who rather loved having two city boys at his mercy.

The bunkers we lived in behind the trench lines were a physical sign of the contact between Great Uncle and his soldiers. Many were equipped with bunks, and they were sturdy since, comfortingly, Great Uncle did not want casualties. Heavy casualties might yet win him the war but lose him the peace. That was one of the reasons our French-built Gazelle helicopters were sometimes seen to drop over the marshes, on the other side of the straits, five-gallon drums which we knew to be mustard gas cocktails fitted with a burster charge.

More interestingly we sometimes saw professional-looking, more shapely bombs descending from the bays of our aircraft. To save our lives, Great Uncle was dropping gas and nerve agents and committing a war crime against the Others. We were forbidden to speak about this knowledge, and everywhere we went we were meant to have gas mask at hip in case the dosage accidentally came our way. But the weak prevailing wind of the straits, generally from the west, favored us when it came to mustard gas. That didn't mean the Others could not, if they chose to, destroy a battalion of us with a little canister of tabin nerve gas, if they had it in stock. Tabin tended to be denser, so the gossip had it, and to stick more to the place where it was dropped, penetrating even the ground on which the Others lay.

Every late afternoon we were shelled from across the straits—again dependent on the stocks of shells and missiles the Others had to hand. Most of us sheltered in the bunkers at these times. Hugo Carter and I surprised ourselves by our calmness under these projectiles as large as 122 millimeters. We believed in our cement roofs in the same way we believed in our mothers, even allowing for the fact mine was dead. We were ready at our officers' commands to emerge and take up position by our dug-in guns and tanks should the shelling be harbinger to an assault. We got quite used to this thunder—again, I amazed myself in that regard. Generally, the Others left the oil wells to the north of the island alone—for they hoped, by defeating us here, to inherit them.

It was the first assault which was a great shock to Hugo and me. They came in small dinghies and were seen in the first light of day crossing a broad swath of shallows in breathtaking numbers. By not preparing us with cannon, they had nearly stolen a march. Carter and I were in our trench and by our mortar within seconds, hauling the tarpaulin off, and calibrating its trajectory at the corporal's orders. The zealous Intercessionist youths whom the Others chose to breed came rabidly ashore, purple bands around their foreheads, immolating themselves willingly on our mines. This was, in its way, an astonishing savagery they imposed on their own. They allowed young bodies to be torn to gobbets of flesh on the promise the heavenly and perfected body would be divinely reassembled in the world after death. The better trained regular army came on behind, walking in the path made by the martyrs. They knew the low granite island top behind our trenches would give access to the oil well roads, and so they came en masse at our positions. Carter and I were relieved to be able mindlessly to keep feeding the trench mortar, but then, because it was not a sophisticated instrument, our corporal told us to cease, the enemy was too close, and to grab our weapons. I closed my eyes as I fired at the lines of men sixty yards away, not wanting to know anything. I continued thus for ten minutes, concentrating on my task, reloading magazines with eyes open, shooting blind. Many others, I'm sure, did the same, yet some good fortune attended our blinkered firing, because it became apparent we had beaten the Others back. God help them, said the corporal, showing fraternal feeling for a moment. It's just a pause, someone said. It's just a pause.

Next morning, about the same hour, they came back in apparently bigger numbers. We emerged from our bunkers wearing our gas masks. Gradually, because of heat, most of our fellow soldiers took them off, given that the Others were not wearing them in the first place.

Their martyrs were pathetically willing again, and Hugo began weeping for them as we served the trench mortar. But we could not make their regulars depart as they had on their previous attack. They captured a section of trench on the flank of the granite hill, so that all of us had to withdraw to the secondary line of fortifications. I could tell that our officers considered this serious. In the afternoon they were able to land their artillery, which fired all that following night. It was a scale of fire I had never heard before, and we huddled now in our mothering cement, pitying the men on watch in the trenches.

Deprived of rest, I felt mad, deranged, jangled. As Carter and I, the night having turned cold, huddled against the jolting wall of a bunker, I asked, Did the air force drop gas today?

If they hadn't, we both wished they had. We knew that if they kept on firing and sent their men in under the protection of the guns, we would be forced out of our hole to face it all.

We were all in our positions by four-thirty in the morning, an august and terrifying moment in which the sun rose before the straits, blinding us with glory and terror. A heavy artillery exchange began, during which we were required to remain in the trenches, all our senses ringing and juddering inhumanly. The tanks from both sides joined in the orchestra. Though both our French and Russian suppliers had equipped them with sophisticated land-computing sights, these were beyond the understanding of most of our tank men, who simply surrounded their vehicle with a bunker and fired away like fixed artillery pieces. Yes, yes. I could rave along about such subtleties of our conflict, the Others and us, the southern Intercessionist yahoos incompetent with their tanks, but Carter and I, city-slicker nominal Mediationists, were no better anyhow, timorously feeding our trench mortar and hoping that it was an instrument of sufficient death. Our bombers were all at once there, no more than a few hundred feet above us, dominant as the artillery eased and as the Others came roaring forward. As Carter and I and the corporal took our positions, I saw the steel canisters descend from the bellies of the bombers. They might have been smoke bombs to obscure the battlefield—though I knew they were not that, for what was the purpose?