Arslan (12 page)

I watched him pretty sourly. I didn't like his dirty boots, and I didn't like his jibes at religion. “Does that mean you're giving up?” He made a little grunt of amusement. “At any rate,” I said, “it means there's a little bit of hope for the world.”

“Hope,” he said thoughtfully. He drank deep again, and then suddenly he collected himself like a cat going into a crouch. He turned to me, leaning hard on his elbow, his face and voice indignant and venomous. “You are not a child, sir. You have seen something of life and death. Tell me, are they what you have pretended them to be? You call yourselves a Christian people; and that, sir, is a lie, and you are wise enough to know that it is a lie. You would have called Kraftsville a safe and pleasant place to live, before I came, would you not? But answer this for yourself, sir. How many households do you know personally in Kraftsville? Two hundred, perhaps—three hundred? How many of these are free of serious evil
—serious
evil, sir? Aggression, exploitation, cruelty—lust to possess, lust to destroy—hatred, envy, deceit—have not these been always commonplace in Kraftsville? I did not import pain, sir; it is a local product.” His mouth tightened emphatically. He went on staring at me with remote eyes while he bit at his underlip. “And yet it is true,” he announced sternly. “It is true that Kraftsville was a safe and pleasant place, in comparison with other places. Your hungriest paupers have been better fed than the chiefs of towns. Your people have slept in security. They were free, they were healthy, as human health and freedom go. They had never suffered war. But you know that in most of the world, sir, there has been war and war again, and again, and again war, so that every generation learns again. Strange. It is very strange.” He shook his head like a man in real puzzlement.

“What is?”

“More than one hundred years without war. A strange way of life.”

“What do you mean, without war? My God, we've—”

“You have
made
war, you have not suffered it! Your nation, sir, has been perhaps the happiest to exist in the world. And yet consider its history. The natives despoiled, displaced, cheated, brutalized, slaughtered. The most massive and the most cynical system of slavery since the fall of Rome. A civil war spectacular in its dimensions. A century of labor troubles, of capitalist exploitation and union exploitation. And in the very ascendancy of your power, disintegration! The upheaval, the upswelling, of savagery, of violence. Not revolution, sir, for revolution requires coherence. Not eighteenth-century France, but fifth-century Rome. The exposure, the revelation, of that all-pervading rottenness that is the fruit of your hypocrisy.” He pursed his mouth like a disapproving old woman. “Grotesque, sir, this combination of a primitive puritanism and a frantic decadence; very like the Romans whom you so much resemble. Name me a happy nation, sir!”

“Switzerland,” I hazarded.

“Ah, Switzerland! The parody of Protestantism! All lusts sublimated into the pure lust of cleanliness and profit. The prudent, virtuous nation fattening upon the viciousness and greed and folly of all the world. Would you exchange your own life, sir, your life now or a year ago, for the life of those pious, prosperous people?” He shook his head dogmatically. “I tell you, sir, not even the Japanese have been more rigidly inhibited.”

I wasn't entirely surprised at this tirade. After all, as he'd said himself, you didn't conquer the world for fun—nor for theory, either. There had to be some kind of emotional force powering Plan One. Why it came out now, this particular evening, was understandable enough, if he was really tired, if his plan was really in trouble, if he'd just heard Hunt plotting to murder him.

He leaned a little towards me again, blazing at me like an evangelist on fire with his message. “Sir, you have been shocked by things I have done in Kraftsville, by things my soldiers have done. But I tell you we have been restrained, my soldiers and I. I tell you—and, sir, you know this already, you have known it for years—all these things, and worse, much worse things than these, have been done every day, in every country, all over the world, for thousands of years. You knew this, sir; your history, your newspapers, your eyes, your brain, your body and blood have told you. Were you shocked then? Was your Christian faith shaken? Did you vow vengeance for those wrongs?”

He leaned back abruptly against the pillows and drank again. It was my turn. “All right, General, let me tell
you
something. You don't shake my faith, either. Sure, I know about the hell that goes on in this world. That's the whole point of Chirstianity—to keep from sinking into it all the way. It takes all the strength a man has, to deal with evil—that's nothing new. But that's what we're alive for. And let me tell you something else, General; we can win. You're trying to tar the whole world with one brush; you're saying it's all bad, and that's a lie. Kraftsville certainly wasn't perfect before you came, but it was paradise compared to what you've made of it, and it was a better and happier place than a lot of other places.”

“Yes, sir, yes!” He was smiling his triumphant, now you-understand-how-right-I-was smile. “Have you read
Candide
, sir? Three hundred pages of catastrophe and misery and injustice, of which the moral is, ‘We must cultivate our garden.’ Was not this the virtue of Kraftsville, that it cultivated its own garden? Sir, I am trying to reduce the world to Kraftsvilles.”

“'Reduce it'! You're reducing it, all right, reducing it to a wasteland. You think you get gardens out of ashes?”

“No!” he cried gladly. “Out of death and excrement. Out of garbage and corpses. You cut the weeds before you sow the crop, do you not? Consider the world as it was before I came, sir. Throughout Asia hunger, disease, fear, tyranny of landlords or of rulers, and war or the threat of it. In Africa, chaos and corruption. In South America, unconquerable poverty breeding still new revolutions. And everywhere, dread of nuclear war and busy preparation for it. Was this a happy world, sir? A safe and pleasant place to live?”

His voice rang and throbbed, a parade-ground voice—except, I realized, he wasn't actually speaking very loud. His eyes burned. He looked as if he'd hit anybody who dared to answer one of his rhetorical questions. On the other side of the bed, Hunt was watching him with a kind of motionless frenzy—frozen on the verge of some explosion.

“And this was not an accident of the times. What came before, sir? Colonialism; and I assure you—I assure you, sir—that the evils of colonialism have not been exaggerated. Before the Second World War, the First. Before that, more than half a century of revolutions, and the Industrial Revolution that powered them all. Before that, the wars of Islam and the wars of Christianity. How far back do you wish to go, sir? Do you remember the Chinese general who took Canton in fifteen-hundred and gave that perfect order to his troops: ‘Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill'? Can you smell the stink of the galleys, sir—the most elegantly efficient means of transportation for twenty centuries? An invention of the Romans, sir, those famous practicians. Do you remember the battle of Lepanto, which saved the West for Christianity and proved the virtue of heavy firepower? Was there a really significant difference between the stench of the Turkish Moslem galleys and the stench of the Spanish Christian galleys? On the one hand the smell of Christian slaves and Moslem convicts, on the other that of pagan slaves and Christian convicts. There were still galleys in the nineteenth century, sir; and the latest belonged to France, that most humane flower of Western civilization. Which do you prefer, sir? That holy St. Vladimir of the Russian church who used cavalry to drive his subjects to the river to be baptized or drowned; or that holy Emir of my country who kept a snake pit into which uncooperative ambassadors could be lowered; or those prudent American pioneers who massacred a village of Christian Indians as a preventive measure; or those loyal Vietnamese patriots who tied their Communist neighbors together in live bundles and dropped them into rivers—a technique they may have learned from a study of French history? An English soldier of Cromwell's army was surprised to see the little children of a woman dead of starvation eating the flesh of their mother's corpse, and yet there is a natural logic in this. Passing over gas ovens and human vivisection, penal colonies and sharecropping, you have heard of the battered-child syndrome?” He gave me a blank ghost of his angelic smile. “A worldwide, an age-old phenomenon, though perhaps especially a modem American one. Are these things tolerable? Clearly yes; they have always been tolerated. But there are more important things. Consider, sir. It is natural to man to build a civilization, and it is natural to civilization to destroy itself and to wreck the world.”

“You think so?” I broke in roughly.

He glared at me a moment, and then half-relaxed—remembering, no doubt, that he was talking to humans. “I think so, yes. If war were not natural to man, there would be no wars. And what is natural is inevitable. Do you know the fable of Venus and the cat? No?” He laughed. “Read it.” He waved his hand impatiently, disposing of the human race with a gesture. “Man is a mistake of evolution. He is too potent. Any species will foul or exhaust its habitat in time, unless it is checked by counterforces.” He wiped his hard palm across the mouth of his bottle and drank in violent gulps. Something seemed to have given way in Hunt. He sat docile and still now, his eyes following automatically every movement Arslan made. “Counterforces,” Arslan said, “internal or external. When the food supply is inadequate, the does drop fewer fawns. But man, man is too strong. He fouls and exhausts too rapidly, and nothing checks him for long. There is only one end for such a species: extinction; quick extinction. It only remains to be seen if the end comes by holocaust or by poisoning and starvation.” He chuckled. “A bang or a whimper.”

I started to speak, but again he crowded in ahead of me. “Is this important? Not in itself, except to those who die. But man has taken all the world as his habitat.
Therefore
this is important. Not man alone, but the whole world is dying. Your scientists have spoken of the web of life. Yes. It is a web, in four dimensions. And man hangs in the web above the void. But man has strained and twisted and torn the web. Man has pruned the web to make for himself a cozy hammock, and now"—he snorted a contemptuous laugh, or maybe it wasn't a laugh—"now he dangles, now he feels the runs and ravels in the fabric, and the void is so cold, so cold!” He drew a harsh breath through his open mouth, and nodded dogmatically. “Yes, sir. The natural is the inevitable.”

“Then what's the use of what you're doing?” I got in.

He nodded again. “Good. A good point. If man is set back to his beginnings, will he not build another civilization? If he can, yes; but he must have the raw materials, and his environment must not be too strong for him. Now, sir, do you understand?”

“No, I don't. You say what's natural is inevitable, and I say that at least what we've done before we can do again. Man has
proved
he can handle any environment in the world—and out of this world, too. If you're talking about depletion of natural resources, a civilization just getting started doesn't need the resources that we've depleted.”

“On the contrary, sir! It is exactly the resources it needs that are gone forever. Where now is the ore that can be mined and smelted without modern equipment—the equipment that I am destroying? Where is the coal that lay exposed on hillsides, the oil that oozed from the ground? There is wood, yes, I grant that, there is water, yes, there is air, and these will survive—if I succeed. If I succeed.” He stopped for another drink, a hasty one this time. “But consider the environment, sir, the environment as a whole. Drouth, flood, fire, vermin, disease, all the enemies that man boasts of controlling—he has armed them, trained them, fed them, laid himself down in their path. Man has unbalanced the world, unbalanced so literally, sir, that he creates earthquakes. Earth breaks beneath his tread and he falls, he drowns in his leaking oil. He burns the oxygen of the land, he smothers the oceans with his grease. These abuses must cease, sir—I tell you, these abuses must cease at once! You have complained"—his face twisted in a genuine sneer of contempt—"because your little pollution machines have been turned off—your clumsy little coal-burning power plant—” Something internal interrupted him; his eyes went blank and private, and he chuckled and muttered. He was drunk.

“So we cut down the trees instead,” I said.

He grunted and shrugged. “Reversible. Correctable. You understand? What you do to the trees is very little. Man is man; yes. But it is possible to eliminate the practices that cause irreversible damage. It is possible to reduce the population within tolerable limits. District by district.”

“I thought you'd already stopped everything, abuses included.”

“I have halted these abuses, sir. It is the first step—only the first step. No doubt the world can heal itself, but already it has been permanently scarred—disfigured—maimed. This is my hope, sir: that, once destroyed, civilization will not rise again, or at worst will rise only very slowly.”

I heard Hunt draw a long, weary-sounding breath. Arslan was tending to his bottle again, and I said bitterly, “If civilization's going to destroy itself anyway, why do you have to step in and do it?”

He waved his hand impatiently. “Is this so hard to understand? I do it for two great reasons. The first, but the less important, is this, to save mankind from much suffering.”

“Save it!” I was on my feet and he was looking up at me. “You call this saving mankind from suffering?”

“Yes, sir,” he said coolly. “But in any case, my second reason is sufficient.”

“And what is that?”

“To save the world from mankind.”

I swung away from him and paced around the room, stopping at the foot of the bed to face him. “Plan Two,” I said. “What's Plan Two?”

A new kind of smile spread across his face, thin and cold. “If civilization cannot be thoroughly eradicated, it remains necessary to exterminate the human species.”