Arslan (13 page)

“That's what I thought. Damn you, that's what I thought.” My own voice sounded small and thin in the silence before it and after it.

“This plan contains its own problems,” he was saying. “The Nazis eliminated with difficulty only a few million persons. And passing over all operational problems, the final problem remains: Who will exterminate the exterminators?” He dropped his head back on the pillow and smiled at me. “There are, however, other approaches. For example, a program of disease dissemination could be managed to end with the spread of contagion to my armies.”

I stared down at him. His smile deepened and faded, and his eyes flicked away, finished with me, to rest on the ceiling. I raised my hand, and let it drop again. I would no more have hit him than I would have hit a corpse.

“But there are unavoidable risks,” he went on after a moment. “Your liberals have prattled of the dangers of biological weapons, the danger of inadvertently destroying mankind. But in fact it is very difficult. No disease can be trusted to produce perfect mortality. There is always, always, the possibility of undiscovered pockets of survivors. Are you familiar with the screwworm fly, sir?” He turned his bland face back to me.

“Screwworms,” I said, when that non sequitur had gotten through to me. “I'm familiar with screwworms.”

“Then perhaps you know that they were exterminated in Florida by releasing sterilized males into the wild population for two consecutive years.”

I shook my head, partly to clear it, partly because that didn't sound logical.

“Yes, sir.” He was warming to his subject again. “Naturally, the species was particularly vulnerable to such treatment. With the human species, one entire sex would have to be sterilized. There are certain advantages of sterilization over killing, as no doubt you can see. There are two possible disadvantages; death is irreversible, sir, and it is recognizable.” And again he gave me a small, horrible smile.

I turned slowly back to my chair and sat down. We were walking through a mine field; but there were ways out of it, if we could just feel our way into them. Who
exterminates the exterminators?

It dawned on me presently that for a minute, or a few minutes, or maybe more, we had all three been silent, sunk and oblivious in our separate contemplations of the same horror. Well, contemplation didn't win wars. I took a deep breath and cleared my throat.

“General,” I said, “I don't know the details of how you came to power in your own country. We didn't get too much news of it, and frankly I've forgotten most of what little we did hear. But I have an idea you started out as a patriot.”

“My country,” he mocked throatily. “My country.” He pressed himself back into the pillows, stretching his legs and lifting the bottle at arm's length, then relaxed again. “This I have never understood,” he said mildly, “how people forget. By what mechanism do your minds shut out parts of themselves? I, I do not forget.”

Hunt laughed haggardly. Arslan looked at him, and slowly an intense, warm smile lit up his face. “I do not forget,” he said again. “You speak of my country, sir. Do you think Turkistan is a country? Ah, no. Turkistan is an invention, sir, of the British.”

It was interesting to hear bitterness in Arslan's voice. It helped bring him down to size. Now he was drawing maps in the air with his hand. “Turkistan is a dying fish. In the time of Herodotus—not so very long ago—
here
” (he stabbed the air with his bottle) “was a great sea. What is it now? A salt pond—a puddle—fifty, sixty feet deep. And here the Caspian; a great sea still, but also dying. Once rivers flowed into these seas from the mountains here on the south. The mountains still stand. The rains fall, the snows melt, the rivers start out bravely into Turkistan. But only two are strong enough to live. And the others, that flow into nothing, that are blotted up by the desert and the sun, they are not rivers, sir. Can you call them rivers?” He drank, and added to his imaginary map. “Here, the Amu Darya, the famous Oxus. Northeast, the Syr Darya, the little brother of the Amu.” Hunt's eyes, across the bed from me, glinted like wellwater. “These are the only streams that feed our salt puddle, which is called the Aral Sea. But the Aral Sea is a Russian lake. Do you begin to understand?” Another stroke at the air. “Between the Syr and the Amu live a people with Mongol eyes and little leather caps.”

“Not your people,” I said. Not if you could judge from his tone of voice.

“Not my people, but my mother's people.” What kind of a mother could Arslan have had, I wondered. “They call themselves Uzbek, the people of Uzbek Khan, who led them across the Syr Darya a few hundred years ago—not so very long. But between the Syr and the Amu they found Bukhara—Bukhara the old city. Bukhara the Noble; the Dome of Islam; the city of the pure faith. Bukhara, my city; not my mother's city. And beyond the Amu they could not go, because of the Turkmens.” He drank again. His voice had turned heavy with the liquor. He managed his words and his sentences all right, but you could hear him managing them. “Turkmens—Turkistan—Turkey—you understand? If my people had traveled a little farther west, as their cousins did, I would have been born a Turk. The Uzbeks, too, call themselves Turkish; but in the old language Turkmen means ‘pure Turk.'” A drunken frown darkened his face. “Although some have claimed ‘Turklike'; but that is a lie. In any case, you see, sir, there are differences...” He faded out for a moment, and then collected himself again. “All over the map of Central Asia, sir, you will find Turkistans—towns, provinces, regions. Sinkiang is not Chinese, and its right name is not Sinkiang; it is East Turkistan. Afghanistan south to its center is not Afghan; it is another Turkistan. My country,” he said again, and chuckled. “This is not a country, it is a ... diaspora. And this Turkistan that the British made and sold to the Emir of Bukhara—is not even Turkistani, except for my Turkmens. My father's Turkmens. You understand, sir, that the British were very anxious to stop the expansion of Russia in Central Asia. Russia itself was not a country, it was an empire, and an empire has no natural boundaries. Therefore the British manufactured their buffer states and sold them to the greediest local rulers: Iraq, Afghanistan—and the northern borderland, the most expendable buffer, Turkistan. So the Emir of Bukhara ruled over Turkmens and Uzbeks and Tajiks, and the British had their buffer state, their treaty of friendship, and their oil concession.

“Did I begin as a patriot? Ah, no, sir; I began as a child of a general of the Air Force, the air force that the British had given. My father was the patriot, who bombed the Emir's palace and began the civil war—the Generals’ War. When it was over, there were no generals except my father.

“But before it was over, he had allowed my mother to take her children to Samarkand—Samarkand the city of delights, the city of Uzbek Khan and Timur the Lame. She believed that we would be safer among Uzbeks. Nevertheless, it was an Uzbek general who imprisoned us, and took time from his revolt against my father to rape personally my mother—my first experience of rape, sir, although not, as you know, my last. But it was a time of countercoups and counterrevolts. We were freed, and we fled into the desert of the Black Sands—my first and last experience of flight. We reached Bukhara, the city of wisdom, exactly in time for the countercoup of the loyalists—loyalists, you understand, to the dead Emir. So we were imprisoned again. This time my father came with his fighter-bombers. He sent a warning to the loyalists that if his family were not released within six hours he would strike. The loyalists replied that if he struck, his family would be killed. We were not released. He struck. And while the bombs fell, we were stoned in the courtyard of the old prison.” He smiled thinly. “Until my father ordered the courtyard strafed.”

He lifted his eyes questioningly to the ceiling, took a long breath, and went on. “So in due time the attack was successfully completed, and I was removed from the rubble, and survived, as you regret to see. Do you care to consider this, sir—how merely another stone, or another bullet, or another hour would have spared the world the affliction of Arslan? But the past is what we have.”

Suddenly he sat up, crossing his legs under him, making the bed shake. “Yes, Hunt, yes, this is a disillusionment. Yes, it is sad, is it not, to find one's angels or one's devils driven also? The superman himself is human-all-too-human.” He groped in his pocket for a cigarette, looking humorously from one to the other of us. “You have considered me a monster, and indeed you have reason. But—alas for the sublimity of your feelings!—the monster is also a man. I must confess this in humility.”

Certainly Hunt was hanging on his words, pale and tense. Arslan's bottle was empty. He rolled it off the edge of the bed, and got his cigarette lit with a little difficulty. “Did I begin as a patriot, sir? In ten years my father was as powerful, and as rich, as any emir of Bukhara had been, and ready to send his only surviving son to Oxford like any satellite princeling. But I did not choose to be sent to Oxford. I studied one year at Moscow, two at Peking. You will understand, sir, that the Chinese saw me as a tool which they might shape for their own hands. When I returned to Bukhara, I took charge of the army—the simple utility, sir, of being a dictator's son. However, I disagreed with my father on several points of policy, and I was not disposed to obey his orders on those points. For these reasons he arranged to have me assassinated. It was a good plan, you understand. Whether the assassination succeeded or failed, he could put the blame on certain rebellious elements in the army, whom he very rightly suspected of plotting against him, and thus arm himself with an excuse to crush them.” He paused and smiled. “Nizam,” he said fondly, “was one of these. And Nizam's private intelligence system, even then, was better than my father's. It was Nizam who raised the revolt, but he raised it in my name, broadcasting a full confession by one of the assassins.

“I was not prepared to execute my father. I owed him something, did I not? I planned only to hold him in protective custody. But the choice was not given me. We took Bukhara, but not my father. He had preferred to shoot himself.”

“I think that was the first news we heard of you,” I said.

“And yet you could believe that I began as a patriot?”

“I'm curious, General. What makes you so eager to deny that you might have been one?”

“But I do not deny it! Ah, no, sir. If love and hate are brother and sister, why not pride and shame also? You understand, then, that I have had four years in which to rule my country. My country. Yes. My artificial buffer state. And for four years I worked hard to do what I am now undoing: to unite, to centralize, to modernize. It is possible that I would have made Turkistan a country that could have patriots.” Abruptly he swung his feet to the floor and stood up, swayed and recovered, and laughed softly. “Bring them, Hunt,” he ordered, gesturing loosely towards the papers on the bed, and walked out.

Hunt stooped slowly to the papers, his face withdrawn and haggard. I got up and put my hand on his arm. “Give him a minute,” I said. “He may go to sleep.”

He nodded. He sat himself stiffly on the edge of the bed and began brushing away at the dirt Arslan's boots had left. “Mr. Bond.”

“Hunt,” I said, “I'm not your principal any more. I wish you'd call me Franklin.”

He nodded again, and moved his mouth in his little inward humorless smile. “It would be very useful,” he said at last, “to be brave.”

“I believe you're as brave a person as I've ever known.” We looked at each other. “Hunt, I'll talk to you again later. I'm not just sure yet what has to be done. Will you try not to rock the boat for a little while?”

“Okay,” he said wearily. He straightened the papers and stood up. “Thanks for something.”

Chapter 8

One week later, Arslan was standing across the table from me as I finished my breakfast, his knuckles on his hip, his garrison cap on his head. He beamed with youth, health, and vitality. “I am saying goodbye, sir,” he announced. “I leave Nizam in command. Kraftsville has given me much pleasure.”

I was on my feet by that time “You're leaving? For good?”

He laughed happily. “For good, for evil, who knows? It is very possible that I shall return. In a year, two years, twenty years perhaps. If not, sir"—his dark eyes flashed and fixed me hard—"I am very happy to have known you.”

Hunt was standing in the kitchen doorway. Arslan swung halfway around, to follow my look. “Yes, sir, Hunt goes with me.” The whole idea tasted good to him. He stood there for a minute watching the boy and rocking a little on his feet. “Go, Hunt,” he ordered cheerfully.

“Wait a minute,” I said. Hunt hesitated just inside the living room. I clasped his right hand in both of mine. His face flushed; his eyes were bright with fear and excitement. “Do you want to go?”

His head twitched. “Yes,” he said huskily, and followed that with a quick, painful grin. “Under the circumstances.” His eyes fell. “I'm sorry...” he began indefinitely.

“Can I do anything for you here? Can I tell your folks anything?”

He made a little sardonic grimace. “Could they tell me anything? Tell them goodbye, I guess.” Now he looked up, faintly returning my handclasp.

“Come back if you can, Hunt,” I said. “But whatever happens, don't give up.”

He gave me a sudden wild look. Luella had followed from the kitchen, wiping her hands. “Hunt—”

“Goodbye, sir,” he said. “Also thank you. Both.” He walked out briskly, eyes straight ahead.

Arslan stood where I had left him, smoking a cigarette, his eyes dancing. “I suggest that you cooperate with Nizam, sir. You should not expect as much indulgence from him as from me.”

“I have a pretty good idea what to expect. How many of these troops are you taking with you?”

He grinned delightedly. “Have I appointed you my adjutant? What you need to know, you will learn without my help.” He touched his cap in salute, or what passed for a salute with him—almost correct, almost genuine, like a good amateur actor who wants his audience to know he doesn't have to make his living at it. “Good luck,” he said.