And finally, the cause could be a matter of internal politics. The Department of Public Health and the military had been at each others’ throats for many years now. It was a question of which one would gobble up the other. The Department of Public Health was a hideously ravenous, insatiable organization, but if these military operations were even marginally successful, the generals would bring this organization to heel. Of course, if the war failed to produce a result that was even slightly worthwhile, it would be the gentlemen generals who were brought to heel, and therefore the possibility could not be excluded that this entire undertaking was a cunning act of provocation by the Department of Public Health. And by the way, it looked as if this was actually the case—judging from the disarray that was apparent everywhere, and also from what we had been yelling out loud to the entire world for a week already, when it turned out that the military action had actually not even started yet. And maybe, massaraksh, it wouldn’t start at all . . .
When Zef reached this point, the couplers clattered and clanged and the car shuddered. They heard shouts, whistles, and tramping feet outside, and the train carrying the penal tank brigade set off. The criminal convicts broke into thunderous song: “Once again there’s no chow and no vodka for us . . .”
“OK,” said Maxim. “What you say sounds perfectly plausible. But then how do you see the war developing, if it does start after all? What will happen then?”
Zef aggressively growled that he was no general, and then plunged straight into telling Maxim how he saw the whole business. Apparently, during the brief respite between the end of the world war and the beginning of their civil war, the Hontians had managed to fence themselves off from their former overlords with a strong cordon of atomic minefields. And in addition, the Hontians undoubtedly also possessed atomic artillery, and their politicians had had enough wits not to make use of all this abundant wealth in the civil war but to save it for us. Which meant that the invasion could be envisaged as proceeding approximately as follows: The spearhead would be three or four penal tank brigades lined up in the Steel Staging Area, with an army corps propping them up from the rear. Following up behind the army men, they would send in blocking detachments of guardsmen in heavy tanks, equipped with mobile radiation emitters. The degenerates, like Zef, would all go rushing forward to escape from the radiation blasts, the criminals and army men would go rushing forward in a fit of induced elation and enthusiasm, and any deviations from this norm, which were bound to arise, would be obliterated by fire from the Guards bastards. If the Hontians were no fools, they would open fire on the blocking detachments with their long-range guns, but it had to be assumed that they were fools, and therefore it had to be assumed that they would engage in mutual extermination—in this mayhem the League would turn against the Union, and the Union would sink its teeth into the backside of the League.
In the meantime our valiant troops would advance deep into enemy territory, and the most interesting part would begin, but unfortunately we wouldn’t see that. Our glorious ironclad torrent would lose its cohesion and start spreading across the country, inevitably moving out of range of the mobile radiation emitters’ influence. If Maxim hadn’t lied about Gai, the men who broke out in this way would immediately start suffering from radiation hangover, which would be all the stronger because the Guards would have spared no energy in whipping them on during the breakthrough . . . “Massaraksh!” Zef howled. “I can just see those cretins crawling out of their tanks, lying down on the ground, and begging to be shot. And the good-hearted Hontians, not to mention the Hontian soldiers, driven berserk by this hideous outrage, won’t refuse them, of course . . . There could be unprecedented slaughter!”
The train was picking up speed and the car was energetically rocking from side to side. In the farthest corner, criminal convicts were shooting dice, the lamp was swaying up under the ceiling, and on the lower bunks someone was monotonously muttering—he must have been praying. The air reeked of sweat, dirt, and the bucket latrine. The tobacco smoke stung Maxim’s eyes.
“I think they’re taking that into account at General HQ,” Zef went on, “and so there won’t be any whirlwind breakthroughs. It will be a half-hearted positional war; the Hontians, for all their stupidity, will eventually realize what’s going on, and they’ll start hunting down the radiation emitters . . . Basically, I don’t know what’s going to happen,” he concluded. “I don’t even know if they’ll give us any chow in the morning. I’m afraid they won’t feed us again—why would they bother?”
They said nothing for a while. And then Maxim asked, “Are you certain that we’ve done the right thing? That our place is here?”
“Orders from HQ,” Zef muttered.
“There might be an order,” Maxim objected, “but we’ve got heads on our shoulders too. Maybe it would have been better to decamp with Boar. Maybe we would have been more use in the capital.”
“Maybe,” said Zef, “and maybe not. You heard that Boar is counting on atomic bombing—many of the towers would be destroyed, and free regions would emerge. But what if there isn’t any bombing? Nobody knows anything, Mak. I can picture very clearly to myself the state of bedlam at our HQ . . . The rightists are strutting and swaggering; heads will roll in the government any day now, and those bastards will scramble for the free places . . .” He pondered, rummaging in his beard. “Boar spun us a line about the bombing. But I don’t think that was why he headed for the capital. I know him, he’s been creeping up on those leaderist types for a long time . . . so it’s quite possible that heads will roll at our HQ too . . .”
“So it’s bedlam at our HQ as well,” Maxim slowly said. “So they’re not ready either . . .”
“How could they be ready?” Zef protested. “Some of them dream of destroying the towers, but others dream of keeping them . . . The underground isn’t a political party, it’s like a mixed salad, with shrimp . . .”
“Yes, I know . . .” said Maxim. “A mixed salad.”
The underground wasn’t a political party. In fact, the underground wasn’t even a front of political parties. Specific circumstances had split its HQ into two irreconcilable groups: categorical opponents of the towers and categorical supporters of the towers. All these people were more or less opposed to the existing order of things, but, massaraksh, their motivations diverged so widely!
There were “sociobiologists,” who absolutely couldn’t care less who was in power, whether it was Dad, who was a major dynastic financier, the head of an entire clan of bankers and industrialists, or a democratic union of representatives of the working strata of society. All they wanted was for the cursed towers to be razed to the ground and for everyone to be able to live like human beings, as they put it—that is, to live in the old, prewar manner.
There were aristocrats, the surviving remnants of the privileged classes of the old empire, who still believed that what was happening was merely a protracted, lingering misunderstanding, that the people still remained loyal to the legitimate heir to the imperial throne (a dismal, hulking brute of a man, who drank heavily and suffered from nosebleeds), and that it was only these absurd towers, the criminal brainchild of professors from His Imperial Highness’s Academy of Sciences who had betrayed their oath of allegiance, that prevented our kind, simple-hearted people from manifesting their genuine, genial, simple-hearted devotion to their legitimate lords and masters.
The unconditional destruction of the towers was also supported by the revolutionaries—the local communists and socialists, such as Wild Boar, who had become well versed in theory and well seasoned in practice during the prewar class struggles. For them the destruction of the towers was merely an essential condition for a return to the natural course of history, a signal for the beginning of a series of revolutions that would eventually lead to a just social order. Siding with them were the rebelliously inclined intellectuals such as Zef or the late Gel Ketshef—simply honest people, who regarded the towers as a repulsive and dangerous venture, steering humank
ind into a dead end.
The leaderists, the liberals, and the enlighteners were in favor of keeping the towers. The leaderists—the extreme right wing of the underground—were, in Zef’s estimation, simply a band of power-seekers who were desperate to obtain departmental appointments, and their efforts were sometimes successful. A certain Kalu the Swindler, who had managed to scramble his way into the Department of Propaganda, had once been a prominent leader of this fascist group. These political bandits were prepared to employ any means at all in their frenzied opposition to any government, if it was composed without their participation.
The liberals were in general opposed to both the towers and the Unknown Fathers. However, what they feared most of all was civil war. They were national patriots, extremely protective of the glory and might of the state, and apprehensive that the destruction of the towers might lead to chaos, a general desecration of sacred values, and the irretrievable disintegration of the nation. They were in the underground because they were all, to a man, supporters of parliamentary forms of government . . .
And as for the enlighteners, they were undoubtedly honest, sincere people, and far from stupid. They hated the tyranny of the Fathers and were categorically opposed to the use of the towers to deceive the masses, but they considered the towers to be a powerful means for educating the people. They regarded the modern individual as being both a savage and a beast by his very nature. Educating such individuals using the classic methods would require centuries and centuries. Burning out the beast in the human being, strangling the individual’s animal instincts, teaching him to feel kindness and love for his neighbor, teaching him to hate ignorance, falsehood, and philistinism—that was a noble goal, and with the assistance of the towers, this goal could be achieved within a single generation.
There were too few communists, because they had almost all been killed during the war and the coup; nobody took the aristocrats seriously; the liberals were too passive and frequently didn’t know themselves what they wanted. And so the largest and most influential groups in the underground were the sociobiologists, the leaderists, and the enlighteners. They had almost nothing in common, and the underground had neither a unified program, nor a unified leadership, nor a unified strategy, nor unified tactics . . .
“Yes, a mixed salad . . .” Maxim repeated. “It’s sad. I had hoped that the underground was intending to somehow exploit the war . . . the potentially revolutionary situation . . .”
“The underground knows damn all,” Zef morosely said. “How do we know what it’s like—a war with radiation emitters right behind you?”
“You’re all totally worthless,” Maxim exclaimed, unable to hold back.
Zef immediately flared up. “Why, you!” he barked. “Ease up, now! Who are you to say what we’re worth? Where did you spring from, massaraksh, to start demanding this and that from us? Do you want a combat mission? By all means. See everything, survive, go back, and report. Does that sound too easy for you? Excellent! So much the better for us . . . And that’s enough. I want to sleep.”
He demonstratively turned his back on Maxim and suddenly yelled at the dice players, “Hey, you grave diggers down there! Go to sleep! Onto your bunks.”
Maxim lay down on his back, put his hands behind his head, and started looking up at the ceiling of the car. Something was crawling across the ceiling. The grave diggers were quietly and spitefully arguing as they settled down to sleep. The man to the left of him was groaning and whining in his sleep—he was doomed, and he was probably sleeping for the last time in his life. And the men around him—snoring, sniffling, tossing and turning—were probably sleeping for the last time in their lives. The world was a lackluster yellowish color, stifling and hopeless. The wheels hammered, the locomotive howled, a smell of burning blew in through the little barred window, and outside the window this weary, hopeless country went hurtling past, this country of cheerless slaves, this country of the doomed, this country of walking puppets . . .
Everything has rotted here, thought Maxim. Not a single living person. Not a single clear head. And I’ve ended up in a fine mess again, because I put my hope in someone or something. You can’t count on anything here. You can’t rely on anything here. Only on yourself. And what good am I on my own? I know that much history at least. A man alone ain’t got no bloody chance . . .
Maybe the Sorcerer’s right? Maybe I should abstract myself from it all? Calmly and coolly, from the height of my knowledge of the inescapable future, observe the raw material seething, boiling, and melting, the naive, clumsy, and amateurish fighters rising and falling; watch as time forges them into Damascus steel and plunges that steel into torrents of bloody filth to temper it, with the slag sprinkling down in showers of corpses . . . No, I don’t know how to do that. Even thinking in categories like that is repugnant . . . It’s a terrible thing—an established equilibrium of forces. But then, the Sorcerer did say that I am also a force. And there is a concrete enemy, which means there is a point to which the force can be applied . . .
I’ll get whacked here, he suddenly thought. For certain. But not tomorrow! he firmly told himself. That will happen when I manifest myself as a force, and not before. And even then . . . we’ll see . . .
The Center, he thought. The Center. That’s what I have to search for, that’s what the organization has to be directed against. And I’ll direct them. I’ll make sure that they do something real . . . And I’ll make you do something real, my friend. Just listen to how loudly he snores! Snore on, snore on—tomorrow I’ll drag you out of here . . .
OK, I have to sleep. But when will I ever get a proper sleep? In a big, spacious bed, in fresh sheets. What kind of habit is it they have here, sleeping over and over on the same sheet? Yes, in fresh sheets, and read a good book before I fall asleep, then retract the wall between me and the garden, turn out the light, and go to sleep . . . and in the morning have breakfast with my father and tell him about this railway car . . . I can’t tell Mom about it, of course . . . Mom, you just remember that I’m alive, everything’s all right, and tomorrow nothing’s going to happen to me . . . And the train keeps on moving, there haven’t been any stops for a long time, obviously somebody somewhere has realized that they can’t start the war without us . . .
I wonder how Gai’s getting along in his corporals’ car? He probably feels pretty weird right now—they’ve got enthusiasm in there . . . I haven’t thought about Rada for a long time. Why don’t I think about Rada now . . . No, this isn’t the time. OK, Maxim, my old friend, you lousy piece of cannon fodder, sleep, he told himself, and immediately dozed off . . .
He dreamed about the sun, the moon, and the stars. All of them at once; it was such a strange dream. He wasn’t allowed to sleep for long. The train stopped, the heavy door swung open with a creak, and a strident voice bellowed, “Fourth company, out! Move it!”
It was five o’clock in the morning, it was just getting light, mist was hanging in the air, and a fine rain was sprinkling down. The military convicts started feebly clambering out of the railcar, convulsively yawning and shuddering in the chilly air. The corporals were there in an instant, spitefully and impatiently grabbing men by their feet, dragging them down onto the ground, giving the especially sluggish ones a thump, and yelling: “Separate into crews! Line up!” “Where do you think you’re going, you dumb brute? Which platoon are you in?” “You, fat-face, how many times do I have to tell you?” “Where are you off to? You lousy, worthless mob!”
They raggedly sorted themselves out into crews and lined up in front of the railcars. A drunk who had lost his way in the mist ran around looking for his platoon, with abuse being barked at him from all sides. Zef, somber and short on sleep, with his beard bristling, gloomily and distinctly croaked, “Come on, come on, line us up, we’ll wage you lots of war today . . .” A corporal running by smacked him on the ear, Maxim immediately stuck out his foot, and the corporal went tumbling over in the dirt. The crews roared in delighted laughter.
&n
bsp; “Brigade, attention!” someone invisible roared. The battalion commanders started howling, straining themselves hoarse, the company commanders picked up the refrain, and the platoon commanders started dashing around. No one stood to attention; the military convicts huddled over with their hands stuck into their sleeves, skipping about on the spot, the fortunate rich ones smoked without trying to conceal it, someone relieved himself, politely turning his back to the gentlemen commanding officers, and little conversations rippled through the ranks about all the signs indicating that they wouldn’t give the men anything to eat again, and they could go to hell with this damned war of theirs.
“Brigade, stand at ease,” Zef suddenly shouted in a strident voice. “Dismissed! Fall out!” The crews gladly dispersed, but then the corporals started bustling about again, and suddenly guardsmen in gleaming black cloaks came running along the line of railcars, holding their automatic rifles at the ready and stretching out into a sparse cordon. A frightened silence ran along the line of railcars after them; the crews hastily lined up and leveled off, and out of old habit some of the army convicts put their hands behind their heads and spread their legs.
An iron voice from out of the mist said quietly but very clearly, “If any of you scoundrels opens his rotten mouth, I’ll give the order to shoot.” Everybody froze. The minutes wearily stretched out, filled with anticipation. The mist thinned a little bit, revealing a rather ugly station building, wet rails, and telegraph poles. On the right, at the head of the brigade, a dark group of men came into sight. Quiet voices could be heard coming from it, then someone querulously snapped, “Carry out the order!” Maxim squinted back over his shoulder—the guardsmen were standing motionless behind him, glaring out from under their hoods with expressions of suspicion and hatred.
A squat figure in a camouflage coverall separated off from the little group of men. It was the commander of the penal brigade, ex-colonel of tank forces Anipsu, who had been demoted and jailed for trading in government fuel on the black market. He brandished his cane in front of him, jerked up his head, and began his address: “Soldiers! . . . And that is not a mistake, I am addressing you all as soldiers, although all of us—including myself—are still just shit, the garbage of society . . . Blackguards and bastards! Be grateful that you have been permitted to go into battle today. In a few hours’ time, almost all of you will be killed, and that will be good. But for those of you scumbags who survive, it will be the beginning of a glorious life. A soldier’s rations, vodka, and all the rest of it. Now we shall move into position, and you will board your vehicles. This is a paltry job—just ride a hundred miles on caterpillar tracks. Making tank soldiers out of you is about as likely as making bullets out of shit, you know that yourselves, but everything that you can get your hands on is yours. Gobble it up. This is your own battle comrade, Anipsu, telling you this. There is no road back, but there is a road forward. If anyone backs down, I’ll incinerate him on the spot. And that especially applies to the drivers . . . There are no questions. Brigaaade! Rrright turn! Forward . . . Close up! You blockheads, you centipedes! Close up, I told you. Corporals, massaraksh! Where are your eyes? . . . A herd of cattle! Separate out into fours . . . Corporals, sort these swine into fours! Massaraksh . . .”
The Inhabited Island Page 33
