Arslan (24 page)

I had learned by that time, too, the tactics he used to make his command of English seem greater than it was. No, not his command—for he commanded it truly and superbly—but the range and accuracy of his understanding. I had been reading to him for weeks when he first began to ask me the meanings of words—sometimes words he himself had used earlier. He never, as far as I could tell, admitted ignorance of an English word to anyone else. Confronted unignorably with a phrase he was unsure of, he would turn it back, with a straight face, in question, threat, or provocation, to elicit more data. I thought, too, that one reason for his inscrutable looks, his reluctance to show surprise or annoyance or enthusiasm, was a simple fear of betraying misunderstanding by an inappropriate reaction. In his own tongue he behaved as in his own bedroom—responsive as quicksilver, eager, impatient, and irritable, throwing off little explosions of scorn and admiration.

In that crowded, bustling house I lived alone and silent. The raucous poultry of the yard, the thick-tongued soldiery, alike confident of their validity, filled day and night with urgent communication. Betty—Miss Hanson to me before my promotion to auxiliary adulthood—emitted signals of agony and ecstasy from Arslan's room. Mr. and Mrs. Bond communed conjugally, upon a band narrow but apparently clear. Cats wove their intricate society through the useful obstacles of humankind and its hounds. The monkey,
sui generis
, scratched his piglike skin and pattered forth rattling streams of helpless exhortation. Individuals addressed communications to me: Darya sang, in a language whose very sounds I never grasped; Mrs. Bond presented to me kindnesses, fruit pies, clean linen; Arslan's soldiers delivered retailed orders and original mockery; Mr. Bond kindly preached; Arslan laid upon me his light hands, his heavy body, his intolerable informations. I did not respond. Only in certain roseate darknesses—the laughably, pitiably frail virginness of dawn, the dying violent power of sunset, the glory that attended midnight in Arslan's sweated bed—did I speak, give answers, question, and then to Arslan alone. A certain mechanical heaviness invested otherwise my speech centers.

“Light, Hunt,” he said. I lit the lamp: the match blared its small headstrong explosion; the patient wick took the fire quietly and lifted a tall pale flame, ravelling into a tangle of dark smoke. I set the chimney, fixed in its perfect curve, over the equally perfect and ever altering curves of combustion. The flame settled; the smoke vanished; the room was lit. “Is not light beautiful?” Arslan said.

I considered. All the all-but-infinite hues of the spectrum were beautiful; and every intensity, from the coalmine dark to the retina-searing brilliance of a star unmasked, had its peculiar beauty. He took my wrist as I returned, and I sat beside his neatly sprawled body on the bed, and nodded. How, then, could any visible thing be unbeautiful?

“Yes, beautiful,” he said—the voice that swam in dark sweetness, that purred, that without music sang. “And strong, Hunt; light is strong. Do you know the laser?”

Personally, no. I nodded anonymously.

“A beam of light of such—” his hand groped air until he found the perfect word—"
integrity
that it pierces steel.” He loosed my wrist and turned to me on his elbow, his face eager and exhorting, Arslan's native posture. “As a weapon it is only a weapon—you understand? It has its own limits—of range, of speed, of accuracy, of maneuverability. Another weapon, Hunt, nothing more. But every new weapon has its hour, the period when its power is multiplied by its newness. Therefore to use a weapon most efficiently, it is necessary to strike during its hour.”

And if there was nothing at which to strike? But Arslan could create his own victims. Now he tamped his pillow into a solid backrest. His shoulders curved against it as he lit a cigarette (swiftly, impatient of his self-interruption). “Consider, Hunt. If the United States had struck, intelligently and with decision, at the hour when she alone possessed nuclear weapons and her delivery capability exceeded the defensive power of every other nation, she could have conquered the world.”

I looked at him, interested at last in the content of what he was saying. He touched me, and thus unspellbound I asked, “Did you do it with lasers?”

He let his head fall backward, draped from the rolled pillow, not in indolence but in enjoyment. He talked around his cigarette; gentle rivulets of white smoke accompanied his words. “The laser had been developed as a defensive weapon. Unfortunately its offensive potentialities will never be realized. But consider, Hunt! When two men face each other with drawn knives, who will live longer? He who wears armor. The shield was as decisive an invention as the sword. And what is the shield against the sword of full-scale nuclear attack? Either a counterstrike force too massive and dispersed to be neutralized, or a defensive network that is virtually one hundred percent effective. Nothing less is adequate. The advantage of the laser, the beauty of the laser, Hunt, is its speed. The antimissile missile has one chance to destroy its target: the laser has four, five, six! No, nothing is perfect—but we can approach perfection as a limit. Given a complete defensive network of lasers, the damage that can be inflicted by a nuclear strike approaches zero. Most certainly, for a large country, it falls within the limits of acceptable damage. Therefore—” he half straightened, jabbing his cigarette toward me—"your country and the Soviet Union competed for years to perfect an antimissile laser—competed quietly.” He smiled at me, the playful smile. “Conveniently for me, the Soviets succeeded first. Do you understand now?”

He touched me nowhere; but my whole right side was warmed because of him, the principal heat exchange occurring in the region of my right hip. He reached past me to tamp out his cigarette; returning, his arm brushed across me, his hand caught gently below my armpit. “A little,” I said.

He chuckled lowly. “A little,” he mocked. “A little, little. Hunt,” he said, urgently if cavalierly. His fingers sank into me (five bruises tomorrow) and I said, mightily aloud, “I want to understand.”

He paused, his fingers still tight in my side, eyeing me with humorous surprise. “You want,” he said interestedly. “Good. I shall tell you.” His gripping hand eased slowly. “I knew—and your government knew, Hunt, in much more detail than I could know—that the Russians had perfected an antimissile laser. It followed that they were installing a laser defense network as rapidly as possible. Do you understand, Hunt? It is very simple. The shield—the first shield—is a weapon of offense.” I understood. It was very simple. “I went to Moscow to talk to the Chinese, yes, as the papers said, but much more as an escort to Nizam.” His eyes, unmoving, withdrew from me a moment. It was dull and cold to realize that he thought more of Nizam than of me. Recollection united them, occupation welded them. They were made one by years (five? ten? fifteen?) of shared effort, intense not with love but with life and death. Conspiracy and combat—two fields as far beyond me (considered as a point infinitesimally distant from the neutral center) as, say, experimental biochemistry and steamfitting—were the elements of their weathered intimacy. “Nizam was a student of the Soviets,” he said reminiscently. “Therefore he was able to apply appropriate modifications of their own methods to themselves. We were half certain before we set out for Moscow, almost certain before we reached Moscow, entirely certain before we finished a week in Moscow, that the Russian laser defense network was complete. No, Hunt, you could not have known. Certain parts of your government knew that the Russians had perfected the laser, and were installing it, but how far the installation had proceeded they did not know.” He sank his head back into the pillow. His face rounded and sweetened; his smile played like summer upon earth. “There were two men,” he said.

There had been two men. I remembered them very well from eighth-grade Current History. Their names were Glukhovsky and Kerbabayev, and it was hard to keep in mind which was the technical head of state and which the leader of the Party. I remembered the stout businessman face of one, soulless and broad, and that the other was a little man. But as Arslan spoke, low and luxuriatingly, the blurred pictures sharpened and came alive to me. Two men. And I shuddered, stroked with the razor-edge of actuality. It was more strange and thrilling that the man beside me had seen, conversed with, dealt with those miraculous beings—men and yet powers—who had swayed nations, destroyed lives, inspired headlines, than that he, Arslan, was himself such a being raised to a higher power. For I touched him, I knew the taste of his breath and its sound in sleep, his flesh had wounded mine, I saw him yawn, scratch, spit, his stomach rumbled, he repeated himself and mispronounced words; he was Arslan to me, absolute Arslan, but he was familiar to me as the potent air.

It was Glukhovsky, the man with the business face, who had been Chairman of the Supreme Soviet and thus effectively Tsar of all the Russias. “Ah, he was good, Hunt. Good!”
Good:
praise from the cockleshelled lancer for the featureless wall-face of the turning whale, backed with kilotons of oiled muscle and buoyed with the endless ocean. “It was the hour of the laser, and of Russia. The world was hers to take, if she had the courage. It could be a long hour for her, perhaps. But for me, Hunt, the hour was very short. It was necessary to do two things. First, to encourage the Russians to take this world that they had earned. Second, to persuade them to give it to me. Not so difficult, Hunt—not so very difficult. There was a disagreement within the Russian government.”

And in blazoned clarity I saw the scene: the two Russians with distrustful eyes, the smooth wood of the table, the smooth faces of the Chinese, the red telephone ominous and ludicrous, and Arslan, Arslan in his hour. I saw the tiger glint of his prowling eyes, the crouched short-muscled power within (born for the stalk and spring, not the long lope of pursuit), the glow of joy that made his squat solidity beautiful as Praxiteles’ gods. “Nizam,” he said, “had made these things possible.” Nizam making the ways straight. I looked for Nizam in that picture, and distinguished a shadow on the outskirts. “He had—isolated—insulated—the room. Thus I could make my proposal without interruption. And could enforce an answer.”

He spoke Russian, presumably well. “Enforce an answer how?” I asked him: Gem-eyed Arslan, two thousand miles behind enemy lines, armed with a silent whip named Nizam, enjoying himself. Arslan at climax, all but imperceptibly quivering, alight, afire, ablaze. Shabby princeling of a beggar state, stretching his hand to manipulate the crowned chessmen of world politics: “With a gun,” he said.

I would have laughed, if laughter had been among my current capabilities. At least I registered the words as amusing.
I could enforce an answer: Enforce an answer how? With a gun.
Premier Arslan Khan of Turkistan in the capital of the world's vastest nation—and, for the hour that might have been long, the world's most powerful. “Naturally our belongings had been searched; but I had carried it always on my person.” Arslan's bedmate, Arslan's bathmate. “Naturally we had been examined electromagnetically; but there are convenient devices, which were known to Nizam, that defeat such examination. Thus I had the gun with me in the conference room. It was necessary only to point it.”

But already the scene was fading. It had been merely a projection of colored light, not one of the etchings of the mind. The red telephone would not have been in that room, probably not the Chinese. I frowned, trying to follow the legend he unrolled for my education, trying to regain the interest I had felt or claimed to feel. He had pointed the gun. He had made his proposal: that the Chairman of the Supreme Soviet deliver to the President of the United States an immediate ultimatum demanding immediate response—capitulation (though not in that unacceptable term) or nuclear war. “And in either event, Hunt, I asked for myself only the command of the armed forces. More than that I could not hope to be given.” That was all he asked. Later he would not need to ask.

“It was not unreasonable, Hunt.” No; insane but not unreasonable. Silent-eyed Glukhovsky had heard all the reasons long before he faced Arslan's pistol. And brisk little Kerbabayev, who watched them both with equal attention, burned with belief in those reasons: There had been a disagreement within the government.
Irony:
somehow the word had always brought me the picture of some unidentifiable curio, carved in ivory. It was a beautiful irony that Kerbabayev should hear urged upon Glukhovsky at pistol point, by the premier of Turkistan, the very act that he had been urging for weeks past: It was reasonable, reasonable. It was the terminus of all the logic of defense and counterdefense, of strike and counterstrike. For what else (excepting only the great ends of Communist teleology) had they worked, contrived, expended, sacrificed, risked? How could they lack the final courage now to take the final risk, a risk so much less than many they had triumphantly run? Thus he had surely argued. And now they would take that risk perforce: Arslan was the gadfly to drive them into the promised land, and then be brushed away.

Or, alternatively, to be crushed at once, before the heavy thews began to move. And Arslan's audacity, if it failed of success, would have ended the arguments forever: He, Kerbabayev, would be silenced with the same blow that destroyed Arslan.

And the man who faced the pistol—had he been charmed, somewhere within, by this swift brash grace and youthfulness, the outrageous speed and ease with which this trivial opportunist had pierced the guarded heart of their strength? Or had he only raged, Philistine confronting the minuscule host of inspiration, at all the petty, irrevocable stupidities, of his underlings, predecessors, colleagues, that had left him suddenly at catastrophe's brink? Or, executive to the last, had he been weighing truths and consequences all this while, premeditating the muscular actions that should inflect his face, produce words from his breath, explode or petrify the world?

“He did not accept.” So there had been a man, a member of my very species, who had refused Arslan—a character as unreal, in that aspect, as Arslan's mythical parents, as the teachers in whose classrooms he had presumably sat, as the woman for whose love he had considered committing follies. Why had he not accepted, that man? I did not well understand, then or later, his teleology; perhaps to him it implied the necessity of the current phase of international relations. Or, ideology aside, did the status quo appear, in the curled computer of his brain, more advantageous than the newborn risks and harvests of a new world conquered? Or, simply and humanly, was he unwilling to exchange the ritual of his daily problems for the cataclysm of a revealed truth?