The King's War

by Andrew Stanek

  Will frowned at this explanation.

  “But you kept sending us food? Even after the u-boat command sunk your ship?”

  “Yes. Even after the ROV Marianas was sunk by a DPRV submarine, food aid continued. There was an argument over it. This time our politicians decided that food should not be used as a weapon. This time. I will also say that the DPRV officially denied it had anything to do with the sinking, suggesting that the Marianas struck a mine and sank. From your story, it sounds like they portrayed the incident very differently domestically.”

  “They did.” Will said slowly. “On the radio... the day after Nate died... they said that the battle he died in, they’d sunk lots of rebel ships, cruisers, destroyers, battleships...”

  Lt. Norris’ wry smile was back.

  “The radios in the DPRV can only tune in to the state-run news, which is propaganda, but you already know that story wasn’t true. Your friend Nate told you. He didn’t sink any cruisers or destroyers. And there’s no such thing as a battleship anymore. The ‘dreadnoughts’ that your navy is so proud of are relics of a very distant past. Just one of those strike fighters you saw on the deck of this carrier could - on its own - sink a battleship. Maybe two battleships.”

  Will thought about this, and he frowned down at Lt. Norris’ prosthetic hand.

  “Can we win?”

  “What?”

  “Does this mean, we can never win the King’s War?”

  “I already told you, the King’s War ended a long time ago. But no. The DPRV army is absolutely gigantic, but it’s corrupt and much of the military is allocated to functions that aren’t really related to combat operations... for example, your friend Nate spent much of his service building a railroad that probably had nothing to do with the military. They also seem to have assumed police power, as you didn’t mention a civilian constabulary. I think that if Edward King decided that he wanted to go to war with his counterparts in the ROV, he’d lose very quickly without outside help. Back during the War, the international Communist bloc helped his grandfather. These days I’m not sure there’s anyone left to support him. He’s alienated too many people. So no. You couldn’t win. Not with your prop planes and your ironclads. But you could kill a lot of people with your artillery and your nuclear weapons before you were defeated, so no one wants to fight you. And that’s the way your leadership wants it. For your people the King’s War will never end. The rebels and the Black Force will always be just over the horizon, just about to attack, blamed for killing the people who the army has executed, always the boogeymen underneath children’s beds, the ominous enemy waiting to conquer you that only the King can protect you from. And as long as your people believe that, Edward King can still call himself King Edward.”

  Will thought about this for a long time, but he had no response.

  “What will happen to us now?” he asked.

  “You’re not staying here, I can guarantee you that. We’ll probably take to East Vermark - that’s the ROV - where they’ll want to interrogate you further. I’ve got to go talk to your friend.” He stood to go. “Do you need anything, by the way? Food? Water?”

  Despite himself, Will smiled. He was reminded of the tobacco-chewing navy officer back home and his calls of, “tools, fuel, spare parts! Cheap! Army surplus!”

  “I am a little hungry,” Will admitted.

  Lt. Norris left and returned with a sandwich, wrapped in a waxy paper. Norris set a cup of water next to it.

  “It’s funny,” Will said with a small smile. “You said our country was communist - meaning that everything was shared, but to get anything from the military, I always had to pay. And you said that you were capitalists, meaning you bought and sold things. But you just gave me this for nothing.”

  Norris looked surprised.

  “It’s just a cup of water.”

  “Where I come from we don’t have much water.”

  Chapter 22

  As Lt. Norris had promised, Will and Harry were transferred to the capital of the ROV by helicopter. Will had never seen a helicopter before, with its single whirling blade on the wrong axis to be an airplane, but the principle behind its operation was much easier to grasp then the jet fighters that coated the deck of the carrier. Despite their large size, these jet airplanes could hover and, at a moment’s notice, suddenly fly away at fantastic speed. Will knew that the Royal Air Force back home did not have anything comparable to them. Such jet aircraft could be heard from miles away, their engines producing a continuous eardrum-bursting roar rather than the humble putt-putt-putt of the prop planes.

  Before they went, Will asked to see the Dreamer. There wasn’t much to see. The aircraft had broken apart on its impact with the deck of the carrier, and though the cockpit had remained largely intact, Will knew it would never fly again. He took a single piece of the broken aircraft as a souvenir - a part of the ailerons, which he had worked on with the lathe. The carrier crewman removed the engine to study it, and the rest was unceremoniously dumped into the sea. Strangely, for the day or so he was on the carrier, naval airmen kept walking up to him, asking him if he had really built the aircraft himself and pressing him for details. Will was not sure why they did this, as they had the gigantic jet fighters to work on and fly.

  Despite all he had seen and heard, Will remained unsure that everything Lt. Norris had told him was true. Even though he had seen Lt. Norris’ mechanical arm and the roaring jet fighters, a part of him still believed his country couldn’t possibly be so far behind the rest of the world. He quickly discovered that he was wrong. When Harry and Will reached their destination in capitalist East Vermark, Will began to see things he had never seen before no matter where he looked. The buildings were no greater than they were in the King’s Capital in communist Vermark, but there were so many more of them here - huge towers of steel that seemed to stretch up forever, clustered tightly together, ten to a block. Neon signs hung in many windows, next to televisions - which Will had never seen before - showing images of people and news from far-off lands. The cars did not have to be cranked to start. Instead, they sprang to life at the approach of the driver, seemingly as soon as he got inside - every car must have had an electric starter, and what else Will could not imagine. There was a public transit system too, a train that looked strange and alien as compared to those he’d seen before. The train did not belch acrid smoke as a coal man shoveled rocks into the furnace, but instead shot along an elevated rail at unimaginable speed, carrying fearless thousands. Everywhere around Will, people drew little devices out of their pockets which lit up their faces as they stared into them, sometimes happily, sometimes impassively. When he asked what these were, Will was told they were phones - he could not imagine how this could possibly be. And on top of everything else, there were planes. Aircraft the size of royal dreadnoughts regularly rocketed overhead, pushed through the air by four massive jet engines. Will stopped to stare each time one zoomed past.

  He wished to go out and explore the city more, to learn if it was all real or merely an elaborate illusion that had been created for his benefit, but he did not have the freedom of the city. Will was given a room in a sort of an apartment building near the top floor, high up above all this, and was not allowed to leave. A minder was stationed with him, and he was taken to a nearby government building every few days, where he was asked to recount the story he had told Lt. Norris again and again. But even in his apartment, Will realized things were different. It had an air conditioner and a heater, the former of which Will had only seen in the capital and the latter of which was no different from the furnaces back home, but they never wanted for power to run. The apartment always had electricity. There was a radio too, but it had a dial that Will could use to select the station. Back home it had only broadcast the King’s lies. Will could pick any of a hundred or more signals with this radio, many of which played music that was strange to him, but still reminded him of the gramophone the soldiers had salvaged for the canteen. His room had a television,
too. This had taken some getting used to, but he eventually decided that the news, at least, was no different from what he was accustomed to. It was just the shock of being able to see the presenter that baffled him. The news was substantively also very different. News in his home town had been almost entirely good, except at the very depths of the famine, all about military victories and the King’s inspirational visits and speeches and advice for the population at large. Here, despite what Will thought of as tremendous marvels of technology, the news was quite bad - but much of the bad news, about killings, storms, and wars, was from distant corners of the globe that Will had never heard of before. He discovered that Norris had very much told him the truth about capitalism - advertising was everywhere, and everything had a price.

  Will spent much of these times asking how things worked, which so tired his escorts that they eventually gave him a little laptop computer and showed him how to type and use the internet. He spent much of his free time reading about the principles of design, engineering, and technology behind everything he had seen. However, in the few moments before he went to sleep, he asked himself what Nate and Martin would have said if they could have seen all this.

  Martin, he was certain, would have been thrilled. He would have never stopped reading.

  “I knew there was something weird about the King,” he could hear Martin’s voice saying. “We should have seen that before. I wonder what kind of medicine they have here? Are their doctors better than ours? They must be if they can replace Lt. Norris’ arm like that. I’ll have to look it up. I want to read about this communism and capitalism stuff too. Let me borrow your computer.”

  Will smiled to himself. But what would Nate say? Would he have stayed loyal to the King to the end?

  “I don’t believe everything they’re telling us about the King,” Nate’s voice shot back. “I think we’ve got to have faith in the King. Just because they have all this doesn’t prove anything. Their military might be lined up on the border, poised to invade at any moment, like the King always told us.”

  Fortunately, Will didn’t have to wonder what Harry would say, because he still saw him occasionally when they came in for further ‘debriefing,’ although they were not allowed to visit each other more than this. After all the technological achievements he had seen, Harry merely shrugged and said that he would have liked to have visited their farms.

  “I asked about the farms,” he said. “They told me that they’re a lot like our farms, but they have better seed stocks and more machines. That doesn’t surprise me. They still depend on the sun and the rain, just like we do.”

  To Will’s surprise, it wasn’t the last he’d seen of Lt. Norris. The naval intelligence officer began re-appearing at his debriefings about four days after Will arrived in the capital, while Norris and everyone else pressed him for every last detail of his life. Will had no idea why they wanted to know these things, but he told them everything. After another week of interviews and deposition, the ROV investigators declared that they had everything they wished to know.

  “I do have a few more questions for you,” Lt. Norris said at the end of this process. “These are a little more speculative. I’m really asking for your opinion. Is that alright?”

  “It’s fine with me.”

  “In the past we might get hundreds or even thousands of defectors from the DPRV in any given year. Now, you’re the only defector we’ve had in a long time. Why do you think that is?”

  Will paused, considering. “People would only deliberately come and defect if they had reason to believe that the outside was better,” he said at last. “When we first spoke, you talked about how the DPRV secured the borders and banned fishing to stop people coming over by boat. That would actually stop you from fleeing. But all of the border guards and the naval officers I ever met are corrupt,” he said, thinking of the tobacco-chewing man and his truck full of army surplus equipment. “You could buy them off and cross the border if you really wanted to. The reason people don’t defect is that they don’t know all this is here. I was very well educated by the standards of my village. People called me ‘the scholar.’ But I didn’t know anything about the rest of the world. I was taught - and I really did believe - that the things we produced in the capital were absolute cutting edge, the most advanced in the world. I would look at a tractor with a new type 8 engine... or a military four-engine airplane... and think to myself, ‘well, that’s amazing.’ And to the extent I thought about the rest of the world at all, I thought that they must be very unfortunate not to have machines and tools like ours. I didn’t know.”

  Will collected his thoughts. “I think that maybe by embargoing the kingdom, you played into King Edward’s - Edward King’s - hands. Because you refuse to sell these things to the people back home, they don’t know they exist. And so they don’t know they’re stuck in the past, living in a backwards society. They look at the smallest sign of modernity and think it must be an incredible technological advance.”

  “Are you saying you’re of the opinion that we should lift the embargo on the DPRV?” Norris asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe it would expose people to outside things, which would be... outside machines and technologies, outside traders, and new ideas. On the other hand, it might end up like the food you sent us to help alleviate the famine. The military might take credit for it. Or the King might take credit for it. I can imagine the radio newscast saying that the King had personally invented some great new technology... like televisions or computers... and then it all gets quickly introduced and everyone starts shouting ‘All Hail King Edward,’ just like they did when the military started delivering the rations you sent us. But right now, King Edward doesn’t want people to know that the outside world is better. He tries to keep people ignorant, and by refusing to trade with him you’re helping to do that.”

  “It’s easy for us as outsiders to guess about what perpetuates the DPRV regime. As an insider, as someone who’s lived there, what do you think allows the regime to keep running internally?”

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t know that either.”

  “Maybe I could rephrase the question. Why do you think the DPRV seeks international isolation? Why does Edward King want to keep his people ignorant? Wouldn’t it be much better for him if they were intelligent and informed about the outside world, and could replicate what we’ve built here?”

  “It’s because his rule is built on lies and deception. It’s very difficult to have people be smart enough to build things and make things but too stupid not to realize that everything would be better if the system were different.”

  Norris clasped his hands together, his mechanical fingers interweaving with his real ones.

  “Could you elaborate on that?” he asked. “What do you mean by ‘lies?’”

  “Having thought about it for a long time, I do think the regime is built on lies. I’ve been asking myself something over and over again - why did they lie to us about so much? Not just about the war and the level of technology, but about my parents and Nate and Martin... And I think that the DPRV has been created by one lie leading to another. The King told everyone that the King’s War was ongoing so no one would dare rebel against him and everyone would be united in the common effort against his enemies. I know that I always heard, and sometimes even thought, that I had to work because an invasion was just around the corner. But then the King had to pretend they were at war, so he staged what you call ‘provocations’ and battles. And he lost some of the battles. But to maintain the idea that he was winning, he had to say that they won them instead. And if anyone said otherwise, they had to disappear. All the lies made him fall behind the rest of the world, so he had to lie more and say they were actually the most advanced, and anyone who knew otherwise - who were the smartest people - had to disappear too. Lies leading to more lies leading to more lies.” Will paused.

  “Something I really have wondered about... is Martin and Nate. When Nate died, he really was killed by the re
bels, but they said he was still alive. When Martin died, the army shot him, but they said he was killed by the rebels. But if they’d just told the truth in the first place, and said that Nate had died in battle, then Martin would still be alive. They said one person was dead, and one was still alive, and if they’d just told the truth... their lie would have been the truth. Do you see?”

  “I think I understand,” Norris said.

  “But because they lied, both of them are dead now. I don’t think I’ll ever forgive the King for that.”

  “And what about the deaths of your parents?”

  Will felt a little pang close to his heart as Norris said this.

  “That was an accident, but it was still the fault of the King’s War. Then, they lied to me like you lie to a child, to spare his feelings from the truth. I’m not sure they even understand what they’re doing anymore. Lying is just a habit for them. I think, at some level, I knew my parents weren’t killed by the rebels. It was all wrong somehow. And I never felt any anger towards the rebels. But other people believed it. Nate believed. He joined the army, then the navy, and he really did get killed by the rebels.”

  “I want to ask your opinion on the effectiveness of the leafleting, since you actually had the leaflets drop on your village.”