Carnifex (93 page)

"Where? Who?" she demanded, lurching strait upright.

"Yithrab, Captain. City of Hajar. Devastation is near total. There must be a half million dead. Hell . . . maybe two million. As for who . . . "

"Yes?"

"Unknown. The analysis is different from any we have a record of. All I can say is it wasn't one of ours."

"Get me a line to the President of the Federated States," Wallenstein ordered.
That son of a bitch,
she thought.
He promised he wouldn't tell the FSC that Robinson was trying to give nukes to the
Ikhwan
. And, so far as I can tell, he didn't. But he never said he wouldn't
use
one. And he just did. And I thought
I
was ruthless . . . 

Except for a couple of men who sat a bench near the superstructure of the ship, the small party accompanying Carrera stood in a group by its port side. In the distance, they could see
Qamra
approaching. A ladder had already been let over the side to allow them to climb down.

Soult and Mitchell watched Carrera as stood on the deck, while waiting for the
Qamra
to come alongside to pick them up. Carrera looked, to say the least, unwell. Soult worried about the "old man's" trembling hands. To Mitchell, the major concern was the glassy, mindless stare.

If the boss said it was right to nuke a major city and kill upwards of half a million people, that was enough for them. Still, though they, themselves, had no particular problem with the nuking of Hajar, perhaps it was bothering him.

Whatever he was feeling inside, though, could not be good. And then . . . 

Ah, Jesus
," Mitch thought,
he's crying.

It was true, not some fluke of the light nor even some bits of detritus in his eyes. Trembling, staring down at the sea; tears also coursed down Carrera's face. He didn't seem to notice.

"Other side of the ship," Soult said to the other guards and seamen standing around. "Now! We'll take care of him." He looked at the boy, Hamilcar, and appended, "Stay here, son. Maybe it will help your father."

Hamilcar nodded but thought,
I don't think anything much that I can do will help.

"He's just relieved that it's finally over," Mitchell insisted to the soldiers and sailors scurrying away. He called to their backs, "And if you mention a word of this to
anyone
, your
grand
children will have nightmares."

Both men moved in to stand close to either side. It was as well that they did; Carrera's knees buckled and he began to fall to the deck. They caught him and half carried him backwards to the bench.

"Boss? Sir? Pat?" There was no reaction, except that the tears were joined by sobs.

"What do we do, Jamey," Mitchell asked, desperately.

"Get him to a doctor? Get him home? Hell, I don't know. We've seen him in bad shape before, but
this
?"

"I think we'd better call the Sergeant Major."

"And my mother," Hamilcar added.

Carrera, Hamilcar, Mitchell, and Soult came in by chartered jet. The plane landed on the military side of the airport and was immediately surrounded by troops of the 1
^st
Tercio
,
Principe Eugenio
. Lourdes, Parilla and McNamara boarded, along with a dozen others. Inside they found Carrera stretched out on a medical litter, either asleep or comatose. Lourdes knelt before her son and hugged him tight, then turned and placed one hand against Carrera's face before bending to kiss his forehead.

"Home now, my love," she said. "Home now . . . forever."

If Carrera heard he gave no sign, but continued to stare straight up as if he were someplace else entirely.

"Doctor, what's wrong with him?" Parilla asked of the medico in attendance.

"Bare minimum, complete exhaustion," the doctor answered. "What other problems he may have will take a while to figure out and treat. A nervous breakdown is possible."

At McNamara's order, four of the men escorting picked up the litter and carried it first to the exit way, then down the long flight of debarkation steps to the tarmac below. There the litter was placed in an ambulance which drove slowly and carefully to a Legion NA-23, parked nearby.

Marqueli and Jorge, and about seventy thousand others, watched the plane come in on the old military strip at the curved, northern point of the island.

The NA-23 cargo plane, in the colors of the Legion and with a picture of Jan Sobieski's Winged Hussars painted on the side, landed on the airstrip on the Isla Real, then turned and taxied to the terminal. There it stopped and lowered its ramp.

Virtually the entire population of the island—over thirty-five thousand soldiers, plus their wives and children—lined the fence at the edge of the airfield or found a spot along the road that led from there to the rest of the island.

Four of the people waiting were Jorge Mendoza, his lovely wife, Marqueli, and their two children. Another child was on the way; Marqueli's belly being impressively swollen.

Jorge's thesis was now the text for a course he taught at Signifer and Centurion Candidate Schools. The basis of the thesis and of the course was an Old Earth bit of science fiction written by a man known to Terra Novans only as RAH, a translation of which Carrera had had printed. Both thesis and course were entitled, "History and Moral Philosophy."

"This doesn't look good, Jorge," Marqueli said after the plane had lowered its rear ramp. "He can't walk . . . or isn't, anyway. They're carrying him on a litter, with my cousin walking beside. It looks like a funeral procession." The woman began to sniffle.

"It'll be okay," Mendoza said. "Old bastard is too tough to die on us . . . especially when we need him so badly now."

Carrera was carried down the ramp and placed on the back of a flatbed truck. Lourdes and Parilla had wanted another closed ambulance but the Sergeant Major had insisted, "No . . . rumors are flying everywhere. Let t'em see he's . . . basically . . . . all right . . . t'at he just needs a long rest. He would want t'at."

Marqueli wasn't the only one beginning to tear up. Jorge whispered, "He was my commander. I can't say I liked him, or that many of us did. But we
did
love him."

Women began to weep as the flatbed moved away. What would happen to them and their husbands and families now? Carrera had given employment and care, had given meaning to lives. What did the future hold for them? What about the coming war? Children cried as their mothers did.

With their women and children, the men, too, began to shed tears. This was their commander, the man who had led them to victory upon victory. Would he return to them, return to continue the great war on which they had all embarked? If not, would his like ever be found again? A hard man and a harsh one they knew him to be. Did not the times themselves demand hardness and harshness?

The flatbed moved to the guarded gate to the airfield. Now they could truly see him and the weeping redoubled. Guards lining both sides of the road kept the surging crowd back. The cries grew:

"Give us our commander! Give us our
duque
!"

Something touched Carrera. Where wife and family had not moved him, or not enough, the tears of his men and their women did. From under a draping sheet a single arm emerged and was held straight up.

At the end of the arm was a clenched fist.

The minstrel boy will return one day,
When we hear the news, we will cheer it.
The minstrel boy will return we pray,
Torn in body, perhaps, but not in spirit.
Then may he play his harp in peace,
In a world such as Heaven intended,
For every quarrel of Man must cease,
And every battle shall be ended.

--Anonymous,
The Minstrel Boy
, Third Verse

Flames arose from torches on the green.

Lourdes had not been invited. "Love, in this one thing, you cannot be witness," Carrera had told her.

Her eldest was there, the boy Hamilcar Carrera-Nuñez. The boy was wide eyed, half at the spectacle and half at being led kindly by the hand by his father. They walked along a path marked with the flaming torches towards the marble obelisk that marked the grave—though it was more memorial than grave, really—of his dead siblings and their mother.

Before moving to the memorial Carrera had shown the boy pictures of Linda and their children, explaining their names and telling him stories about them in life. He'd also told the boy how they'd been murdered.

"That's why I spent so much time away from home, Son," the father explained, "hunting down the men responsible."

"I understand, Dad," the boy said.

Perhaps he did, too. He was a bright lad, extremely so. Carrera expected great things of him.
Kid will likely be tall, too, given that his mother's 5'10."

Around the obelisk were several close friends: Kuralski, Soult and Mitchell, as well as Parilla. Jimenez, McNamara and Fernandez were in Pashtia, Jimenez commanding the field legion in Carrera's absence. Those present were uniformed and stood at parade rest as Carrera led the boy forward by the hand.

Soult brought out a bible, which he handed to Carrera. Releasing Hamilcar's little hand, the father knelt down beside him, holding out the book and saying, "Place your left hand on this and raise your right. Now repeat after me."

"I, Hamilcar Carrera-Nuñez . . . "

"I, Hamilcar Carrera-Nuñez . . . "

" . . . swear upon the altar of Almighty God . . . "

" . . . swear upon the altar of Almighty God . . . "

" . . . undying enmity and hate . . . to the murderers of my brother and sisters . . . and the murderers of their mother, my countrywoman . . . and to the murderers of all my country folk . . . and to those that have aided them . . . and those that have hidden them . . . and those who have made excuses for them . . . and those that have funded them . . . . and those who have lied for them . . . wherever and whoever they may be . . . and whoever may arise to take their places. I swear that I will not rest until my fallen blood is avenged and my future blood is safe. So help me, God."

"Very good, Son," Carrera said, handing the bible back to Soult and ruffling Hamilcar's hair affectionately. "Now we are going to have dinner with my friends, back at the house. The day after tomorrow we go back to getting ready for the next war."

Warning: Authorial editorial follows. Read further at your own risk. You're not paying anything extra for it so spare us the whining if your real objection is that it is here for other people to read. If you are a Tranzi, and you read this, the author expressly denies liability for your resulting rise in blood pressure, apoplexy, exploding head or general icky feelings. (I am indebted to my former law partner, Matt Pethybridge, for his contributions to this afterword. Matt joins me in this dissent.)

"Do I hate cosmopolitans?" you ask. Why, no, of course I don't hate them. That would be like hating sex . . . or drugs. Cosmopolitanism is like sex and drugs, you know; it just makes you feel all gooey and great inside. It's like sex and drugs in another way, too. I'll cover that later.

Okay, I'll be serious now.

Imagine, just for now and just purposes of illustration, some solid geometric figure; a cube will do. One side of the cube is labeled "progressivism." Another might be "pacifism." Still another might be "multiculturalism." Then there's "humanitarianism" and "environmentalism" and "cosmopolitanism." What's inside the cube, if it is a cube, I can't tell you, but surely it's something that holds those six (or probably more) together. After all, scratch a cosmopolitan; wound a multiculturalist. Kick a progressive and set an environmentalist to screaming.

Some might say that what's inside the cube is communism. I'm not so sure it's that sophisticated. Really, I suspect there's not a lot more holding all those –isms together than a mix of arrogance, envy, hate, and rage. Oh, and greed. Greed's often very important, too. Still, I don't
know
what's inside. The cube—if, again, it is a cube—is not that opaque.

I know only what's on the outside. One of those things is cosmopolitanism. And yes, that's what I'm going to talk about right now.

There are a number of different kinds of cosmopolitanism, most of which are not really all that cosmopolitan. We have the religious versions, notably the Islamic and Christian ones. There's also a communist cosmopolitanism. And then there's what one might call "true cosmopolitanism," the kind put forth by Immanuel Kant and, more recently, Martha Nussbaum. For the most part, I'm going to talk about "true cosmopolitanism," hereinafter, just plain "cosmopolitanism." To do that, though, we need to at least glance over the others.

"All wars are civil wars because all men are brothers." 

—Francois Fenelon, Archbishop of Cambrai
[1]

Cosmopolitan religions typically allow anyone to join in; they are open to anyone who will accept
their
tenets, laws and philosophies. That's as far as it goes, though. If one has not joined in the circle of the given religion, and that religion
means
anything to its adherents, one is outside it. I don't think I'm doing any violence to cosmopolitan thought by saying that religious cosmopolitanism is different, that drawing the kind of circle cosmopolitan religions do—us and them, in and out—is not really cosmopolitanism.

Communist cosmopolitanism, on the other hand, starts with the premise of ins and outs. It may cut across nations and ethnicities, but communist cosmopolitanism cannot avoid the distinction of
class
. It exists because of the distinction of class. Class is a bright line circle drawn around some men, and excluding others.
[2]

Cosmopolitanism, on the other hand, permits no circles. It would allow no "us and them." It insists, to take Fenelon's words, that "all men are brothers." Of course, if all men are brothers then we are all part of the Family of Man.
[3]
To cosmopolitanism, this is so, the merest truth. Any distinctions drawn, any circle that doesn't include the entire human race, is arbitrary and illegitimate. Keep that—"arbitrariness"—in mind for later.