Let us, since life can little mare supply
Than just ta luk abaut us, and ta die,
Expatiate free a’er all this scene ef man;
A mighty maze! but nat withaut a plan . . .
<
* * * *
A lot of people bridle when “the art of war” is mentioned— they feel that mass killing doesn’t deserve to be described as anything so fine as art. But perhaps they underestimate the wide variety of uses to which art can be put. Imagine a future after widespread plagues have reduced the United States to a jumble of city-states, autonomous enclaves controlled by very different groups of people; if one of those cities were run by artists, and they should find themselves invaded by an army, what might they do?
Pat Murphy’s first novel, published in 1982, wasThe Shadow Hunter. She lives in San Francisco.
ART IN THE WAR ZONE
PAT MURPHY
Jax watched through binoculars as the army from Sacramento crossed the Bay Bridge to invade San Francisco. She could see the figure of a woman sitting on the freeway sign just past the bridge’s second tower. The Jaxdoll was waiting for the army to come to her.
“About two hundred of them, wouldn’t you say?” asked Danny-boy. “No problem.”
Jax took her eyes from her binoculars to frown at him. They were at the top of the Union 76 Tower, where they had the best view of the bridge. Danny-boy sat at the edge of the platform, legs dangling over the long drop to the street below. His khaki-colored cap was pushed back on his head, and his curly red hair was braided to keep it out of his way. He was Jax’s lover and head of the War Council of the Artists Collective. His binoculars were trained on the army, and he did not see Jax frown.
Jax glanced at The Machine, the other artist in her fighting unit, and The Machine just shrugged. He was busy with his equipment—monitoring the radio, listening to reports from other groups scattered around the city, and preparing to communicate with the army through the Jaxdoll.
The Jaxdoll was what The Machine called an automatic sculpture. It was an automaton, built to look like Jax and mimic some of her gestures. When The Machine had given it to Jax for her birthday the year before, it had been wired to snap its fingers in a characteristic Jaxian gesture and say in Jax’s voice, “If you’re going to do it, do it now.” Now, rigged with a radio transmitter and receiver, the Jaxdoll sat on a road sign above the freeway. The sign had once given directions to the Civic Center in downtown San Francisco. More recently, it had welcomed out of towners to the Summer Solstice Festival. Currently it held a banner that read “SACRAMENTO, GO HOME!”
Jax looked at the army again. Sunlight sparkled on burnished gun barrels. The army had ten battered jeeps loaded with troops and supplies, forty or so men on horseback, and a slow-moving transport truck. The soldiers were all dressed in green. The horses were nervous, and Jax watched the riders fight to keep them under control.
“What do you think?” Danny-boy asked her.
“I think this is going to be harder than you think,” she said.
This was not a new conversation. This was a very old conversation. For months she had been trying to convince Danny-boy that a war could not be a work of art.
Danny-boy was a pacifist who specialized in organizing large art projects. When rumors of Sacramento’s invasion plans had first reached the city, he had just finished two projects—wrapping the old Alcoa Building in aluminum foil, and repainting the Golden Gate Bridge in a lovely shade of sky blue. Danny-boy took on the war as a moral challenge worthy of an artist and called the first meeting of the War Council. At that meeting, the artists elected Danny-boy to head the War Council, put Jax in charge of weapons procurement and combat training, and put The Machine, a specialist in electronic gadgetry, in charge of electronic surveillance and espionage. With that, preparations for war began.
Three months later, the Government of Sacramento had sent the artists a message demanding that the City of San Francisco become a part of Unified California under the leadership of Sacramento, pay taxes, and generally stop making trouble—or face the consequences. By that time the artists had gathered or created weapons, stockpiled food enough for a two-month siege, and organized a military organization where none had existed before. The artists painted the messenger as blue as the Golden Gate Bridge and sent him home.
“I still say we should have blown up the bridge when they were halfway across. If they want to get you, then get them first,” Jax said. She had said the same thing at the first meeting of the War Council, and she had been outvoted. Most people did not trust Jax. They considered her art and her temperament to be dark and violent, and the city was not a dark and violent place. Danny-boy had argued against her, and the War Council sided with Danny-boy. People liked Danny-boy. They trusted him.
“They’re people,” Danny-boy said. “Stupid people, but they shouldn’t have to die just for being stupid. There aren’t enough people around as it is. Maybe back before the Plagues you could justify killing people, but now ...”
“I can justify it,” she said. “They wouldn’t mind killing us, so I don’t mind killing them.” She took her eyes away from the binoculars to scowl at him again. “You’ve been trying to convert me to someone with higher moral values for so long that sometimes you think you’ve succeeded. You haven’t. I have only one rule to live by: I like to live. No higher moral values.”
She returned to her study of the army. The foremost jeep carried no supplies. The driver was a young man, much the same as the men on horseback. The man beside him was another matter. His face looked like it had been chiseled from granite. His hair matched the gray of the gun barrels. The gold braid on his hat and the gold eagles on the shoulders of his green jacket glittered. His hat was cocked back, and he stared ahead with fearsome intensity.
A red, white, and blue flag flew from the jeep; it looked like a flag of the old United States, before the Plagues had decimated the population and divided the country. “Ugly flag,” Jax commented.
When the army was within shouting distance of the Jaxdoll, one of the riders saw her and waved to the men in the jeep. The procession stopped, and the rider rode back to confer with the granite-faced man. Then the rider went forward alone. He reined his horse in under the Jaxdoll. The Machine fiddled with his controls and made the doll lean forward a little, as if it were watching the rider. The Machine handed Jax a microphone.
“Hi, soldier,” she said confidently. “I’d like to talk to whoever’s in charge of this invasion.” The rider stared up at the doll, and Jax watched his face through the binoculars. He was young—maybe eighteen or nineteen.
“Who are you?” he called.
“My name’s Jax,” she said. “I’m here to speak for the Artists Collective. We run this city, remember? We’ve been running it since the Fourth Plague. And we don’t like visitors unless they’re invited. Who are you?”
“Come down from there, and I’ll take you to the general.” His voice was sharp. He sounded as young as he looked. An army of youngsters, recruited from the Central Valley, she thought.
“Tell the general to come here,” Jax snapped back. She watched the rider frown and study the supports for the sign, looking for an easy way to climb up. “You’d look pretty silly trying to get me down. Just tell the general that I’m alone and harmless.”
He wheeled his horse around and trotted back to the jeep for a lengthy conference with the general, the man with the stone face. The general frowned throughout the discussion. Then the rider backed off, and the jeep drove forward.
“Get down from there, woman,” the general growled without hesitation.
Jax grinned. The Jaxdoll did not change expression. “I can talk to you just as well from up here,” she said. “I’m here to give you a message from the Artists Collective: Go home. You aren’t welcome here. We aren’t open for a festival right now, and we aren’t welcoming visitors.”
The granitic lines of the general’s face shifted; he smiled. �
��What do you plan to do if we don’t go home?”
The Jaxdoll leaned farther forward. “We’ll declare war. And then we’ll kill you one by one.” The Jaxdoll shrugged. “We don’t want to kill you, but we will.”
“Get down from there,” the general snapped. The Jaxdoll did not move.
“You’ve been warned,” Jax said, and she turned the microphone off and looked at Danny-boy. “Well,” she said. “Looks like we’ve got a war to fight.” Danny-boy was watching the army through his binoculars and grinning.
She looked through the binoculars and saw two soldiers manhandling the Jaxdoll down from the sign. They loaded her into the back of the general’s jeep and the procession moved on,
“There goes The Angel,” Danny-boy said. She looked up in time to see the silver hang glider soar overhead. The Angel, the only member of the War Council’s air force, did not wave. His gaze was focused on the army. He swooped over the soldiers gracefully, but not too low. He dropped three smoke bombs. As the bombs fell they left trails of smoke—red, yellow, and blue. The army scattered and the horses spooked. For a time the men were hidden by the clouds of smoke. The Angel soared away from the sound of rifle fire.
“Good shot,” Jax said. She watched through the binoculars as the smoke cleared and the army regrouped. The soldiers moved on, following the freeway and watching the skies. They took the Civic Center off ramp, and Jax lost sight of them behind the skyscrapers of downtown.
The city was an unnerving place for a first-time visitor. San Francisco was as strange as the combined efforts of several hundred artists, working together for fifty or so years, could make it. Colt Tower was painted like a giant phallus, and the downtown area was a riot of abstract neon, powered by a wind generator atop one of the taller buildings. The Transamerica Pyramid was caught in a spiderweb of colorful climbing ropes (that was one of Danny-boy’s first projects), and a giant spider was frozen in mid step halfway up one face of the building (that was one of The Machine’s first projects). Near the Pyramid a group of artists who called themselves the Royal Order of Masons was constructing a sphinx. On the other side of town a group called the Secret Order of the Druids was building a replica of Stonehenge for the next Summer Solstice Festival.
At the Civic Center off ramp, where the army would exit the freeway, a neosurrealist group headed by an artist named Lily had set up a herd of plastic horses, scavenged from saddlery shops in the city and the suburbs. With great care Lily had mounted a human skeleton on each horse, wired in a riding posture. She had rigged the skeletons so that they moved in the slightest breeze, shaking their heads and moving their jaws with great animation. It was a very ominous, very effective display.
Just beyond the horses was a group of kinetic sculptures. A tyrannosaurus watched the street with tiny piggy eyes and opened and closed formidable jaws. A pterodactyl perched on a streetlight, flexing its wings and making a strange rasping cry whenever the wind blew. Zatch, the artist who had sculpted these, had plans to reconstruct the entire history of the world in kinetic sculpture, starting with the age of reptiles.
Jax, Danny-boy, and The Machine listened to reports from the other artists. “The horses are spooking,” said a voice from the radio. “They don’t seem to like Lily’s display. Hell, one guy just shot three of the horses.”
“Everyone’s a critic,” said another voice, which Jax recognized as Lily’s.
“They’re heading for the Civic Center,” continued the first speaker. “Someone just shot a hole in the pterodactyl, but he’s still flapping his wings.”
“They’re in the plaza now,” said a new voice. “Some of the guys on horses are scouting around. They’re checking out some of the houses.”
Jax could hear the sound of distant gunfire. “These guys shoot at everything that moves,” said the voice on the radio. “Crazy.”
“The flag on City Hall is coming down. They’re putting up the ugliest flag I’ve ever seen. We’ll have to do something about that.” Jax recognized the voice—it was Catseye, a fiery young painter. He sounded ready to climb the roof of City Hall and remove the flag that moment.
“They’re parking the jeeps in front of that ugly concrete building on Golden Gate Avenue,” someone was saying. “They don’t have much taste in architecture. That’s the ugliest building around.”
“That’s an easy building to defend,” Jax commented to Danny-boy. “Smart move.”
Danny-boy marked the army’s position on the map he had fastened to a clipboard, then tucked his pencil behind his ear. He looked calm and confident. “Years from now,” he said, “they’ll remember this war. They’ll tell about how a band of artists held off an army without firing a shot. We’re making a legend, Jax. A project even bigger and better than repainting the Golden Gate.” He grinned at her.
Jax leaned back on her elbows and wondered why he was not wearing the handgun she had issued him. “Hey, Danny-boy,” she said. “Now that we’re at war, do you suppose you could wear your gun? On the off chance that you might have to fire a shot?” His belt, holster, and gun lay with his water and other supplies on the far side of the roof. She brought him the gun.
He looked a little sheepish, but he did not lose his grin. “This is a war of symbols,” he said, “not guns.”
“Wear the gun,” she said softly. “Please.” He put it on, his grin a little crooked but still in place. “In case you’ve forgotten,” she said, “you can’t shoot anyone with a symbol. And there’s a war on.”
It was night. Fog crept through the wide streets and narrow alleys of the city. The tatters of foil that still clung to the Alcoa Building rustled in the gentle breeze from San Francisco Bay. Somewhere far away a fog horn bellowed.
The sentry on the corner of Turk and Market streets yawned and stretched.
Jax watched from the shadows behind him. He was looking out into the night, facing the outside world from which danger would come. Jax had come up through the sewers. She was alone. The Machine was in the van that served as their mobile headquarters, and Danny-boy had joined Catseye for the first evening of fighting. Jax preferred to work alone.
The sentry lit a cigarette. The flame cast a brief light on his face. He was young; he looked tired. Jax sympathized, just then, with Danny-boy and his insistence on minimal violence. She was glad she did not have to kill this youngster. He could have been one of her brothers, drafted to fight in a war. He did not deserve to die for that.
Jax slipped the dart into the blowgun and aimed at his neck, just above the collar of his shirt. She preferred the blowgun to the tranquilizer rifle; it was quieter and just as effective. She fired and ducked farther back in the shadows when he grabbed his neck. He was fumbling for his rifle, starting to lift it as the tranquilizer took effect, and he fell. He was down.
She stepped from the shadows and laid him carefully on his back. She crossed his arms neatly on his chest and snapped open the pouch of indelible skin paints that she carried on her belt. With her left hand she brushed the hair away from his forehead. She worked quickly and carefully, using the red paint and the black. Simplicity, she felt, was best at this point. In bold lettering across his forehead, she wrote dead in red. On his right cheek with black paint, she signed by jax. Between his folded hands she placed the death certificate, written by Danny-boy and lettered by Animal, a skilled calligrapher. The paper said:
Certificate of Death
Please consider yourself removed from combat.
Look at it this way—we could have killed you.
If you don’t quit fighting, we will.
Signed,
Danny-boy
War Chief
Artists Collective
Jax plucked the dart from the sentry’s neck, picked up his rifle, and faded back into the shadows.
“Aces,” Jax said to The Machine. “I got one.”
He nodded. She had found the van at the planned rendezvous point. The Machine was wearing headphones and monitoring communications among the artists. Ma
ma B, a stout older lady who painted murals on buildings, was also wearing headphones. She had been training with The Machine for the past four months.
“I’ve been listening to the men guarding the Jaxdoll,” Mama B said softly to Jax. “She makes them real nervous.”
“Good,” Jax said. “They’ll be even more nervous tomorrow.” She was impatient, eager to leave the safety of the van for the darkness and excitement of the streets. “Where’s Danny-boy?” she asked The Machine.
“Catseye and Danny-boy are still out. So far, they’ve taken two sentries out by the Pyramid. Lily’s squad got the ones guarding the horses. She let the horses loose, and she’s bringing one home with her. A white one, she said.”
“Good,” Jax said. “Real good.” She sat on the floor of the van for a moment, then slipped out the door again, too restless to stay inside. She could hear the sound of distant gunfire, and she wondered what the soldiers were firing at. All day they had been firing at shadows, at their own reflections in windows, at moving sculptures, at nothing.
Universe 14 - [Anthology] Page 9
