Between the Stars (12 page)

Larsen marveled at the way Shevket played his audience, like a virtuoso performing on a perfect instrument. He knew that the Turk had attracted a considerable following with his hard-line opinions among the holo audience. Of course, he had never expressed such extreme views in public, but might he sway a truly mass audience with some genuinely violent oratory? That was probably what Norwich the media man was here for.

"Our time draws near," Shevket resumed. "If we do not act quickly and seize the moment, it will be past retrieving. I declare here the foundation of the Victory party. It is a word that sounds good in any language:
la victoire
,
Sieg
,
Qahir
. However one expresses it, it is a word to stir the soul. Who is with me?"

As one man, they stood and cheered. Larsen stood as quickly as the rest, knowing that should he fail to do so he would lose out forever if Shevket prevailed. Knowing as well that, should this prove a flash in the pan, as had so many other movements, no one would remember that he had been here save those that could be easily eliminated. But he found himself genuinely stirred. Nothing in his previous career had held out the promise of such satisfaction. The cold pleasures of power as he had wielded it in the past seemed colorless juxtaposed with the despotic delights promised by Shevket. To command men for the pure joy of seeing one's will obeyed! That was an experience worth devoting some real effort to.

"Are there any questions?" Shevket asked. "This is a momentous occasion. Surely you have some doubts you wish me to address."

The men milled uncertainly. Cheering with a crowd was one thing. Standing forth as individuals was quite another. Still, these men had not gained their rank through lack of personal assertion. The young Greek captain who had been conversing with Favre leaned on the table and looked to his left, at Shevket.

"My General, what of Mr. Anthony Carstairs and the hierarchy of the Earth First Party? They have dominated this planet for a generation and they will not relinquish power easily."

"Leave Carstairs to me, Captain Nicopoulos. As for the rest of that party," Larsen appreciated how the use of the simple adjective "that" separated all those present from it, "it is a useful structure, and may be left largely intact once we have imposed our own people in all positions of real authority." It was a pertinent point, and Larsen wondered whether the Greek captain had been primed with it.

"You by now realize," Shevket continued, "that we are all now part of a conspiracy. Do not be afraid of the word. All of the great turning points of history have begun with a conspiracy. Only losers are remembered as conspirators and plotters. The victors are known to history as founders and visionaries. We are strong. We shall become numerous. And only faintness of heart can stand in our way. We shall forge the single world state that Earth First always promised and never delivered. That world will return to the natural order of mankind: There shall be leaders, there shall be followers, and there shall be serfs. No longer shall the strong serve the weak!"

When the cheering and shouting died down, he went on more conversationally. "In the course of the next three days I will interview each of you individually. You will be briefed on your new duties. Soon I shall have other men like you here for their preliminary indoctrination, but you shall always be the first." He raised his tankard. "To victory!"

When Larsen returned to his room, the girl was still there. This time she knelt by the bed and she had discarded the scarlet gown. He undressed and crawled between the cool sheets, his mind turning over the possibilities of the evening. She started to climb in with him but he stopped her with a gesture. "No, I have no further need of you tonight." Wordlessly, she picked up her gown and left the room. He settled back in the bed and said to himself, "After all, being seduced twice in the same evening might be overdoing it."

The next morning he showered and shaved and dressed with his usual fastidious care. Exiting the room, he found Natasha awaiting him outside the door. He wondered whether she had stood there all night. She guided him through the corridors to a terrace where a lavish breakfast buffet had been laid. He contented himself with French rolls and coffee and made small talk with a few of the uniformed men. Not many were awake at the early hour and those that were showed bleary eyes despite the anti-hangover drugs they had taken.

Breakfast finished, Larsen strolled in the well-kept grounds for a while, then returned to the chateau. Inside he saw few people save the ubiquitous servants in their chromed collars. A sound of clicking metal drew him to a cavernous room full of athletic gear and floored with thick mats. In its center two men were fencing with sabers. They were anonymous in their masks, but he knew the larger of the two had to be Shevket. The smaller man was swift and powerful, a perfect counterpoise to the Turk's strength, imperturbability, and precision. Larsen knew nothing of sword-play, but he found these two superb athletes fascinating to watch.

Abruptly, Shevket abandoned his defensive style and loosed a flurry of high-line attacks. It ended when he slid past his opponent's guard and the lightweight fencing foil landed with a resounding smack on the leather top of the other's mask. "Touché!"

"Bravo!" Larsen called out, applauding.

The two men unmasked and Larsen was astonished to see that Shevket's opponent was none other than Cesar Favre, looking nothing at all like the indolent aesthete of the previous evening. With his sword, he gave Larsen an ironic salute. "You have learned my guilty secret. I love battle as much as the general. Unlike him, I prefer the safe kind. I have yet to defeat him with any sword."

"Have you had breakfast, Aage?" Shevket asked.

"I have."

"Excellent. If you find it convenient, I would like to speak with you for a while in my study."

The Dane raised his eyebrows slightly. "Is this to be my interview?"

Shevket smiled, showing a mouthful of predators teeth. "No, you of all people need not be interviewed. I just wish to go over some important matters with you. Norwich will be there as well."

"Lead on." The two took their leave of Favre and walked through the tapestry-hung corridors to Shevket's private quarters. Larsen had to hurry a bit to keep up with the general's long stride, and he suspected that Shevket took unnaturally long steps in order to put others at that disadvantage.

The study was lined with shelves of old-fashioned books in cloth and leather bindings. Larsen scanned them, expecting to find the collected works of the Marquis de Sade, but was disappointed. He did find the political equivalents of those works, along with a great many military volumes and books of art. A servant brought in a tray of drinks and a few moments later Norwich joined them.

"Gentlemen, help yourselves and have a seat." Shevket took his own advice and took a glass of white wine. Larsen took a Bloody Mary and sat in one of the room's comfortable, overstuffed Victorian chairs.

"Last night," Shevket said when they were settled, "I primed some of my best prospective supporters. Now we must speak of a mass media strategy to raise our new party into a position of dominance. You are aware that I do not see it as a party of the people or any nonsense of that sort. Nonetheless, we must have mass support at first. That means whipping up enthusiasm and
that
means using the media."

"I am happy to see that you understand that, General," said Norwich. "Earth First has all but forgotten the importance of proper media coordination in achieving political ends. Decades in power have lulled them into thinking they got there and stayed there through some sort of cosmic predestination. Actually, they accomplished it through extremely subtle and adroit manipulation of the media, especially the popular holos of the day. Of course, we have far more effective techniques at our disposal now."

"You said you had mapped out a preliminary campaign," Shevket said. "Please outline this for Mr. Larsen and me."

"First, allow me to sketch some of the techniques used in the past to raise individual men to power and to sway large numbers of people." From a side pocket he took a small, flat box perhaps three by six inches, less than half an inch thick. This he placed in the center of the floor.

"This is our latest unit, not yet available to the public. In it I've set a program, which I can control with this unit," he held up a smaller handset with control plates, "for purposes of explanation. From time to time I'll talk over the program to tell you what is happening, but when these programs reach the public, they will be non-interferable. That means that the viewer, although we prefer the word 'experiences' will be aware of nothing but the program. Shout in his ear and he won't hear you. Step before him and he won't see you."

"Amazing!" Larsen said.

Norwich smiled like a proud father. "It's what we've been searching for since the beginning of communication—total control of the audience." He fiddled with the handset. "To begin, nothing quite so dramatic. Before the age of mass communication, let us say prior to the early twentieth century, there were only two ways for a candidate for office, a demagogue, or a mere rabble-rouser to influence the body politic. These were the written word and the spoken word. Then, as now, few people knew how to read or bothered to if they knew. The principal way to whip up passions was still, as it had been since earliest times, oratory. With the advent of radio, it became possible for millions to hear the spoken word at once, but this had its disadvantages. People sitting in their own homes did not get the mob feeling of being in a mass audience. The poor sound reproduction of the crude speakers destroyed much of the nuance of the human voice. The British Prime Minister Churchill was one of the few who was able to sway people by the power of his voice over the radio.

"The early motion pictures had no sound, so their effectiveness was limited to depicting powerful visual images. A good deal of this was seen in the First World War when all sides involved made films depicting their enemies as ravaging barbarians. These were unspeakably crude, but the audiences of the day were not visually sophisticated and the efforts proved quite effective.

"Still, the main political instrument of this period was the mass rally. I will now show you some images from the time. These have of course been cleaned up and enhanced to make them easier on modern senses." Lifelike images sprang to life in the center of the room. The rest of the study faded and its place was taken by holographic crowds. The quality was not what it would have been had the scenes been holographed in the first place, but they were astonishingly realistic, the off-key color and movement just sufficient to give an impression of great age.

"This is wonderful!" Larsen said.

"Wait until you see what is to come," Norwich promised. "Now, here in one of the earlier films we see Vladimir Lenin addressing a crowd. Note how important the tight packing of the crowd is. You will see that throughout most of these oratory scenes." In the holo, a baldheaded man in archaic spectacles harangued a crowd. The film had been a silent but a Russian voice had been perfectly lip-synched and the crowd noises were believable.

"Here we have the infamous Herr Hitler."

"A much-maligned man, in my opinion," Shevket said.

"Um, yes. In any case, he may have been the greatest master in history of the art of harangue. I'm afraid you have to be German to appreciate it, though. This scene shows one of the famous Nuremberg rallies. You will notice that, besides compelling speeches, these people made great use of pageantry. The next scene is the American President Roosevelt. Again, he was more of a radio personality. This was the last great age of political oratory, because next came—" the holo switched to an image of a plastic box with a glowing window "—television. It was dreadfully crude in its inception, but its effect was astounding."

"Difficult to believe people would actually sit for hours and watch those tiny monochrome images," Larsen said.

"And yet they did," Norwich resumed. "Oh, there were flashes of the old style in the middle decades of the century. There was a black American named King who did rather well with the spoken word. He was a preacher and the churches were practically the last schools of oratory still left.

"You see, television did two things: It shrank the images to what you see here, reducing the statesmen to puppet-show scale, and it robbed them of their audiences because, once they were accustomed to television, it became impossible to get people to leave their homes in large numbers for anything but sporting or entertainment events.

"Politicians tried to adapt. Actually, many were not displeased with the new medium. Addressing mass audiences in city after city was a grueling, exhausting routine, as you may well conceive. Instead, they took the lessons to be learned from the burgeoning advertising business and resorted to short commercials to get their point across. In fact, they hired advertising people for this purpose. It was at this time that they began to learn the importance of such concepts as image, manufacturing those pseudo-personae as they were needed. The television medium encouraged laziness, and politicians of the developed nations were pursuing a lazy electorate. Selling them sloth, you might say."

"And with great success," commented Larsen, drily.

"No question of it. Now, having given you this wholly inadequate preparation, allow me to demonstrate how our new technology is going to make General Shevket the most wildly adored leader since, oh, since Hitler, or perhaps Juan Peron." He switched off the images still parading through the room.

"In modern political life," Norwich went on, "say for the past century or more, the element of crowd spirit has been lacking. As in the early days of television, people still prefer to huddle close to their holoscreens. I propose to change all that. You see, in the course of my studies, I ran across a memoir—am I waxing too pedantic?"

"No, please go on," Larsen urged. "You understand that, above all other things, I love to hear about the methods by which power may be wielded. I find this all fascinating." Shevket nodded as well.