Inferno: A Chronicle of a Distant World (The Galactic Comedy) (19 page)

Is the flaw in them, or in my vision?

I have done everything I can to convince myself that everything that happened was inevitable, and I think it was, with one exception: it was not inevitable that we landed here and attempted to turn it into a paradise. Nowhere is it written in the Book of Fate that Arthur Cartright had to impose his values on a peaceful, happy people who never knew or cared that he existed until the day he decided to shape their society to his vision of utopia.

I wish I were a religious man, because I feel the need to ask forgiveness of someone, and I cannot face the jasons to ask for theirs.

Love,

Arthur

23.

Unlike his predecessor, when William Barioke got angry, he didn't rant and rave and cry for blood. He became even more quiet, more distant, more in control of himself. He never raised his voice and he never lost his temper—but woe betide the jason who had caused his wrath.

He summoned his cabinet in the middle of the night, and when the last of them arrived, bleary-eyed and worried—for members of his cabinet had been known to be executed for failing to obey the law as interpreted by the president—he stood before them, waving a sheet of paper.

"I have just been informed that the Republic has cut off all aid to Faligor," he said in cold, measured tones. "They have ordered all their ships to avoid landing here, and they will not allow any Faligorian ship to land on any Republic world."

"What is the cause of this betrayal of our friendship and good will?" demanded one of his aides, quite certain that the president was about to tell them, but wanting to get his own outrage on record first.

"They claim to have a list of some 643 documented abuses of the rights of individual jasons and moles, and they have accused the government of misappropriating funds," replied Barioke.

This caused considerable uneasiness among the cabinet members. The logical response would be to jump up and steadfastly deny the charges, but since everyone knew them to be true, and in fact an understatement, they simply sat still, waiting for the president's next words.

"These charges were made and documented by James Krakanna," continued Barioke. He spoke very softly, very slowly, but in the total silence of the room no one had any difficulty hearing him. "This schoolteacher and his ragtag followers have ceased to become an irritant, and are now a serious threat to our government." The president paused and looked from one cabinet member to the next. "I want Krakanna dead and his followers all killed or in prison within a month. I will accept no excuses." Barioke walked to the door. "I will leave the details to you, and I strongly advise you not to fail me."

Then he was gone, leaving his ministers to cope with the problem.

24.

Within ten days of the cabinet meeting, some 400,000 troops marched out of Remus toward the Hills of Heaven with a single purpose: to kill James Krakanna and destroy his army.

They spent twenty days combing the countryside looking for any trace of Krakanna and his followers, and finding none. The local villages denied having any knowledge of his whereabouts; a few went so far as to disclaim any knowledge of Krakanna's existence. It was a twenty-day exercise in futility, broken only by the screams of the dying as the army marched over a dozen widely-dispersed and well-hidden minefields.

True to his word, Barioke dismissed every cabinet member from office thirty days after the meeting. Some were merely exiled; most disappeared, never to be seen again. The president, convinced that the villagers had lied to his soldiers, ordered every village they had visited to be destroyed as an example to any other jasons who might be inclined to protect Krakanna.

Krakanna remained invisible for the better part of two months, then launched a series of attacks on widely-dispersed and poorly-protected government and military outposts, adding appreciably to his munitions in the process. Word filtered through to Remus that his ragtag army was growing larger every day.

Barioke sent out another huge column of soldiers to find him, and Krakanna lured them further and further into the dense rain forests, then attacked individual units that had become separated from the main body of troops, and kept fighting his guerilla war until the army had to retreat.

Barioke discovered that Krakanna was a member of the Trajava, a tribal subgroup of the Traja, and had sent his army off to kill as many Trajava as it could find. More than a quarter of a million of Krakanna's tribesmen died before the few survivors were so dispersed that the army decided it was counter-productive to pursue them further.

Krakanna bided his time. Then, in an audacious nighttime raid, he and some of his followers snuck into Remus and destroyed the entire fleet of 46 spaceships, retreating before anyone realized they had ever been there.

Barioke offered enormous rewards for any information leading to Krakanna's capture. Not a single jason stepped forward, and in retaliation, Barioke announced that he would destroy one village a day, without regard to tribe or location, until Krakanna surrendered himself to the army in Remus. Krakanna sent a reply, never made public, that he would kill ten soldiers and two government officials for every jason that Barioke killed.

Barioke determined that the message had come from the rain forest surrounding the Hills of Heaven, and mobilized his entire army. Within four days the forest was totally surrounded, and the president gave the order to begin tightening the noose. All lines of communication with the outside world were cut off, all means of egress were closed, and the army began methodically dividing the enormous forest into manageable sections, thoroughly searching one before moving on to the next.

It was sound strategy, and it might have worked, given enough time.

But time was one thing William Barioke did not have. With his army occupied two thousand miles away, Romulus and Remus were defended by only a token force, and General Sibo Dushu, taking full advantage of the situation, swept down from the Great Northern Desert with the remnants of Gama Labu's army and took control of the twin capitols in less than a day.

Barioke was marched out in manacles to the city center, where the statue of Conrad Bland had once stood, and was publicly executed.

Dushu then announced that he would be happy to share power with Krakanna, invited him to come to Remus and help form a new government, vowed to transfer Barioke's private funds to the Faligor treasury, and insisted that the press sit in on every meeting he had, so that the populace would know that he wasn't just another in the line of egomaniacal dictators, but truly had the planet's best interests at heart.

Arthur Cartright was standing in the crowd that had gathered to hear Dushu speak. Though he still hoped for the best, and applauded politely at the proper points in the speech, this time he decided not to join the frantic cheering that followed the pronouncements.

Bookomark:Paty 4 — DUST

Part 4:

DUST

Interlude

You climb the scorched steps of the Parliament building, and when you reach the top, you stop and turn and look out on the broad thoroughfare, now littered with bodies. Gama Labu looked down from here once, and William Barioke, and Sibo Dushu, and you wonder what they saw? Was it cheering faces and a hopeful future that somehow went awry, or did they just see golden sheep, ripe for the slaughter?

There are no cheering throngs this time, no hopeful citizens lining the streets, no bureaucrats ready to rubber-stamp whatever the newest conqueror wants. There are just the dying and the dead, and the hungry avians circling overhead, as they once used to circle over the kills in the game parks.

You hear a noise behind you and turn to find an elderly jason, his clothing soaked with blood, staggering toward you. You go to him, catch him just before he collapses, and help ease him down to the marble flooring.

He opens his mouth and rasps out a word. It is in a dialect you do not understand, but you know he is asking for water, and you open your canteen and hold it to his lips. He takes two swallows, then leans back and looks up at you gratefully.

"Do you speak Terran?" you ask. "Are there any more of you inside?"

But he is unconscious now, and you enter the building, your footsteps echoing through the still, dead air. And as you walk you ask yourself why you are bothering. Worlds have traditions: for some it is industry, for others agriculture or art. But for Faligor the tradition is genocide.

You are only halfway through your search of the building when you hear your name being called, and you thankfully return to the sunlight. Your team has found five more survivors, all children, and you clamber down the stairs and prepare to go to work, wondering all the while if you are merely saving them for the next maniac to come along . . .

25.

Sibo Dushu didn't break his promises. In fact, he referred to them every day. He simply found it necessary to put them off until he could restore order—and since he had an army at his disposal, the restoration of order did very little to endear him to the populace.

He announced a curfew for every city under his control, and gave his soldiers shoot-to-kill orders for anyone breaking that curfew. Unfortunately for his public image, the first four people shot were two ambulance drivers, a doctor and a patient was being rushed to a Romulus hospital after dark.

That public image wasn't enhanced when a member of the Thosi tribe tried to assassinate him. Before anyone could work up much sympathy or outrage, his reprisal left more than two hundred thousand Thosi dead.

Since Faligor's money was still worthless, Dushu announced an innovative new tax: his soldiers would perform a methodical house-to-house (and hut-to-hut) search for items that could be sold for hard currency on those few worlds that were still willing to have commerce with Faligor. The penalty for refusing the search was death, and the penalty for not producing something worthwhile for the searchers was death or imprisonment, depending on the mood of the searchers. This instantly halved the unemployment rate in the cities and created an entirely new field of endeavor: thievery. Jasons robbed their neighbors, their stores, even their museums, in order to have something to give the soldiers when their domiciles were visited.

At the same time, Dushu kept calling upon James Krakanna to surrender his arms and join him at the conference table. Krakanna replied that any soldier or government employee who wandered more than thirty miles to the west of Remus would be shot on sight. Dushu wasn't much of a general, but he knew more about military tactics than Barioke, and he realized that he couldn't ferret out an entrenched guerilla army from the rain forest, so he settled for alternately threatening Krakanna and entreating him to join in the formation of the new government.

As Krakanna grew bolder and his raids more successful, Dushu became obsessed with him. Everyone knew that Krakanna's army was growing almost by the hour, but no one knew how large it was, how well-equipped it was, or even what Krakanna's eventual goals were. The new president ignored all the other problems facing him and concentrated on drawing Krakanna out into the open. Entire cities went without water and without power, roads went unpaved, even the spoils of his new "tax" remained in warehouses rather than being sold for hard currency.

As weeks passed and Dushu was still unable to obtain any information about Krakanna's strength or position, he concluded that an all-out attack was imminent, and pulled his army back to fortify Romulus and Remus. Any cities or villages that were loyal to him with have to fend for themselves; until he knew the size of the force he would be facing, he couldn't spare a single soldier for any of them.

Krakanna was silent for a week, then two weeks, then a month, and the tension in Romulus and Remus grew with each passing hour. Nervous soldiers shot each other in the night, supporters of Dushu locked themselves inside their homes, and Dushu himself went nowhere without an elite bodyguard of forty jasons.

Then, finally, Krakanna broke his long silence—but not to Sibo Dushu.

26.

Dear Susan:

Something has to be done. Dushu's reign promises to be even bloodier than the last two, difficult as that must be for you to comprehend. He's a disciple of Gama Labu, and he's taken over a world that has been so decimated and plundered by his predecessors that there is almost no opposition to him. The jasons have been beaten down, physically and spiritually, and can offer only token resistence.

There is only one hope for Faligor. I hesitate to suggest it, since I have so long opposed him, but James Krakanna is still out there in the forest, and rumor has it that his army is growing larger every day.

I mention this only because I received a curious letter, ostensibly asking me to meet with him. I cannot be sure of its authenticity, nor do I know why he should want to see me, but something has to be done, and so I have agreed.

His emissary is due to arrive momentarily. How we will make it through Dushu's lines to Krakanna's encampment I do not know, but I suppose if the emissary makes it to my house, there must be a way.

I have serious reservations about this meeting, but the alternative is to do nothing, and I have done nothing for too many years now. I cannot sit idly by and watch this planet raped and plundered a third time.

If you do not hear from me again, you will know that I was mistaken once again, but at least I died trying to help that once-beautiful world that I still love.

Love,

Arthur

27.

It took Cartright and his guide two days to make their way through Dushu's lines and into the massive forest that surrounded the Hills of Heaven. Cartright didn't see a single soldier, though he was certain that hundreds of them were watching them as they progressed deeper and deeper into the forest.