The Living Will Envy The Dead (34 page)

Naturally, my orders were already out of date.

“Sir,” a guard called, “there is a horseman at the gate demanding to speak to the person in charge.”

“I’ll see him,” I decided, and allowed Dutch to lead me out of the building and back onto the estate.  The lone horseman was wearing a strange mixture of gear, some of it seemingly medieval, while other parts were definitely modern.  The body armour he was wearing had probably come out of a police armoury or maybe even a security firm’s office, but I doubted that it had carried a red Christian cross symbol when it had been new.  It wasn't the sign of the International Red Cross, but something far more ominous.

He glared at me, trying to be intimidating.  I could see how he would be intimidating to anyone without real experience.  He was strong, either through heavy exercise or steroids, and looked it.  He wore a tight goatee, black armour with the red symbol, and carried a modern M16 rifle, a whip and a long broadsword.  The effect was that of a barbarian out of a story where the laws of physics had changed remarkably.

Oh, and he stank.  It wasn't just the horse, which was looking faintly bored with the entire situation, but of something else, rather less pleasant.  I didn’t know what it was, but it was more than just refusing to wash every so often.  He kept trying to give me the eye, but I knew that there were a dozen rifles trained on him from hidden positions.  If he drew that sword – which made a certain kind of sense, given how sparse ammunition had become – he was a dead man.  That body armour wouldn’t stop hunting rifles.

“You in charge here?”  He finally thundered.  It was the voice of a man used to getting his own way at all times and hang the consequences to everyone else.  I guessed he was one of nature’s bullies, like Moe or others I would have preferred to forget.  A single punch in his gut would feel very good, I decided.  “I have a message for you and Ingalls from the Sword of the Lord.”

My eyes narrowed.  How had he known I came from Ingalls, or that Ingalls was serving as the centre for the Constitutional Convention?  Logically, they’d been aware of us longer than we’d been aware of them; they might even have slipped in a few spies along the way.  It wasn't as if it was easy, now, to check someone’s bona fides.

Worse, they knew where the FOB was.  What would they do with the information?

“You can give your message to me,” I said, finally.  I was tempted to take him prisoner and find out what he knew, if anything, but a muscle-bound brute like that was probably rated as expendable by his superiors.  Why else would he be sent here, where he might be killed out of hand?  “What do you want?”

He opened a saddlebag and pulled out a sheet of paper, wrapped in an envelope.  It was curiously fitting, in a way, even though it looked odd being held by a man on horseback.  The Warriors of the Lord, we learned later, had kept dozens of horses in stables as a breeding program for their post-disaster nightmares.  It was a cunning move on their part and one that had paid off handsomely.  If the demon technology had been destroyed or crippled, horses would be worth twice their weight in gold.

“This is the message from the Prophet Zechariah, the bearer of glad tidings of the word of the Lord and His Son Jesus Christ,” the man intoned.  I almost laughed.  It would have been deadly funny if it hadn’t been so apparent that he meant every word.  “You will take it to your nest of sin and harlots and inform them of the choice facing them.  We are coming and the wrath of the Lord will melt your resistance like water.”

With that, he slapped the horse, turned around, and cantered off into the distance.

“Bastard,” I said, with feeling as I read the letter.  “Dutch, I’m going back to Ingalls with this and the refugees.  While I’m gone, keep on high alert and resist any attack, understand?”

“Yes, sir,” Dutch said.  “What do they want?”

“Oh, nothing very much,” I said, icily.  The anger was still burning within my breast.  I wanted something to kill.  “Just everything we have and if we worship them, we even get to keep our lives.  How generous these people are, to be sure.”

Democratic decision making is a means for finding and implementing the will of the majority; it has no other function. It serves, not to encourage diversity, but to prevent it.

-David Friedman

There are times when I think that granting the franchise to every American citizen was a bad idea.  As a case in point, try the Constitutional Convention.  I had left them to attend to the report of contact with the Warriors of the Lord, debating angrily over who should have the right to vote.  When I got back, with the three refugees in tow, I found that they were
still
arguing over it…and didn’t look as if they had come to any kind of compromise.  It was strange, in a way; they’d ensured that democracy would continue to govern America – as long as the Warriors were defeated – but they were now arguing over who had the right to vote.

Oh, I could see both sides of their argument, something that hasn’t always worked in my favour.  Suppose you gave an unrestricted franchise to everyone over the age of sixteen, or eighteen, or twenty-one.  The vote would go to the smart or politically-aware, those who bothered to actually think about the issues, and also to those who would vote for a candidate with a nice smile, or because of his stance on [insert your favoured Cause of the Month here] or because of what was effectively a bribe.  I remember one of our politicians, before the Final War, promising every citizen an ‘above average’ income.  You’d think that such a loser would…well, lose, but instead he had a steady support base and a permanent seat in Congress.  How could anyone believe that everyone could have an above average income?  The average would continue to rise, knocking businesses and corporations out of business, until the entire economy collapsed.

You see, a political machine depends on harvesting votes from voters.  The politicians promise the Earth in exchange for votes, which really means that as long as the voters get what they want, they won’t change sides and vote for the other guy.  That can have perverse results, from time to time, and sometimes downright dangerous ones.  Politics became, not about making decisions, but avoiding them.  The Congressmen and Senators tried to be all things to all men…and, naturally, failed.  They couldn’t just please one group, could they?  They’d trapped themselves by their own words.  They even passed dangerous and short-sighted legislation because they believed that it was what the people wanted.  The Constitutional Convention wanted to prevent that from happening ever again.

And what about the exact opposite?  What if we restricted the franchise?  Even if we accepted that as a principle of government, how could we decide who got to vote and who didn’t?  Take an American citizen – take a citizen from anywhere on Earth – and ask him who should get a vote and I bet you twenty dollars (post-war currency) that he will say that
he
should get a vote, and that he’ll also have a long list of people who shouldn’t have a vote.  It got worse, of course; without a vote, people would feel as if they had no stake in society.  Why had we broken away from Britain in the first place?  No taxation without representation, hey?

The arguments were growing more and more poisonous.  Most of the representatives were farmers or military veterans, or both.  They wanted some guarantees against the steady growth of Washington’s power – never mind that Washington was probably a radioactive pile of rubble – and the stupid laws that had been driving many of them out of business.  They wanted to restrict the franchise, then allocate it, then divide it up depending upon permanent homes…I couldn’t follow all of the arguments and I had no wish to try.  One man, who shall remain nameless, seriously proposed disenfranchising everyone who hadn’t been born in one of the Principle Towns.  A second person, another man, insisted that a woman should be disenfranchised until she had produced at least four children.  The only idea that was gaining traction was the concept – stolen from
Starship Troopers
– of granting the franchise to men and women who had served in the military, even though there weren't many of the latter.

Look, I like Robert A. Heinlein as much as the next man. 
Starship Troopers
was required reading at Boot Camp – the film was sometimes required watching as well, but we were called upon to critique it as savagely as possible – but I could see one major flaw with the overall arrangement.  It seems clear, to me, that the hero’s father hadn’t been a voter himself…despite owning a successful business and paying taxes.  Why should he had paid taxes without representation?  Worse – if that wasn't bad enough – a man who had built a business was no unskilled teenager to be turned into a military officer and sent out to be shot at.  (The purpose of war, by the way, is not to die for your country, but to make the other guy die for his.)  The world of
Starship Troopers
made a deeply flawed use of manpower.

That, in short, was the environment into which I brought the news of the Warriors.  Historically, I am reminded of the Congress of Vienna, which was still in session when Napoleon Bonaparte escaped from Elba.  United, they issued orders in joint session, rather than being separated and forced to waste time reuniting.  I’d like to say that the Constitutional Convention reacted to the threat in a quick and precise manner, but I’d be lying.  They had the bit in their teeth and were unwilling to be distracted by anything so small as a horde of religious fanatics sweeping across the land like locusts towards them.

Luckily, I had Ben-David’s help.

“We must show the voters that we can act as a proper government,” he said, after having blown a trumpet loud enough to silence the chatter.  The delegates watched with a vague undertone of mass rebellion.  I had to admire Ben-David’s pluck.  I’d seen insurgents in Iraq who looked less threatening and the representatives could probably shoot straighter.  “I call upon you all to listen to the Colonel’s important briefing.”

I’d actually spread the word about the Warriors when I’d received the first message, but why worry about that when we were on the verge of war.  “Gentlemen, I will be brief,” I said, and I was as good as my word.  I outlined what had happened since I had left Ingalls to tend to the report from Dutch and the FOB, what I had learned from the refugees, and finally the message from the Warriors themselves.  “We are faced with a choice between war or slavery.”

“This may be nothing more than an exaggeration,” Reverend Thomas McNab thundered, afterwards.  I might have painted Christianity with a broader brush than I had intended.  The Reverend didn’t look too happy.  “They might only be a Christian mission out to reform the land.  Just because they’re religious doesn’t mean that they’re the bad guys, does it?”

I said nothing.  I’d seen this kind of evasion before, from Muslims who would have preferred to forget that the more radical factions existed.  The Christian mainline would have preferred to forget that the fringe, with its embarrassing series of politically incorrect views on everything from homosexuals to abortion, existed.  I would have preferred to forget it myself; after all, if people wanted to worship in any manner they liked…well, why not?  As long as no one else was hurt…

But they would be hurt.  Normally, the fringe movements were all talk and very little action.  After all, they were embarrassing enough that they were regularly disowned by the mainliners and generally confined themselves to peaceful protests and the occasional spat over the issue of the day.  Now, however, law and order had broken down completely and someone who wanted to make their mark on the land could take it much further than possible before.  The police were gone, the army and National Guard were effectively gone – or broken up and scattered – and the government had been destroyed.  The Warriors of the Lord might come to dominate the entire east coast of America…if we couldn’t stop them.

“I don’t think that we can take that on trust,” I said.  I hesitated.  I hadn’t wanted to introduce Samuel, let alone his wife and brother-in-law, to the gathering, but there was no choice.  “I brought one of the refugees to testify in front of you.”

Samuel started, as I advised, with his headlong flight from the city and how they’d been captured by the Warriors of the Lord.  We’d had had time to go through his story with the help of Jackson and a couple of others who had had experience interrogating cooperative suspects and we’d built up a much better picture of the Warriors of the Lord than we had realised.  Samuel talked about how he’d been taken as a slave, beaten repeatedly – he showed off his scars, including a nasty one near his groin, to the gathering – and how the others had been treated.  The story of their escape he saved for last, but he was careful to make it clear that without Dutch’s arrival, they would have been recaptured…and, like other runaway slaves, beaten to death.