Robert Frezza - [Colonial War 01]

by A Small Colonial War (epub)

  “Did Lieutenant-Colonel Vereshchagin really tell you to take today off?” she asked.

  “Just so. Lieutenant-Colonel Vereshchagin watches his officers very carefully.” Sanmartin carefully set aside his quebracho singlestick and selected a mango. “Every few months or so, he sends Major Henke off with a fishing pole. There ought to be some symbolism in that, but I’ve never figured out what it is.

  “The Iceman, Major Kolomeitsev,” he continued, “never lets go of the reins for an instant, seven days a week, forty-eight hours a day, until you begin to believe he’s some sort of machine. Then he’ll disappear only the Variag knows where.”

  “And you?”

  “I’ll wake up in the morning and look out and say to Hans, ‘Hans, it’s Saturday in Chubut.’ Hans will say something profound in German, from Thomas Mann or Schopenhauer, and off I’ll go. Of course, the Variag knows when it’s Saturday in Chubut three days before I do.

  “There is also Hans to consider,” he said presently. From his pocket he took an embroidered handkerchief she had given him and wiped his chin. “He’s going to be a very fine company commander if I don’t shoot him first. He needs to get practice in. Is that enough of an explanation or shall I think of something more?”

  She laughed. “It will suffice. You look well.”

  “I feel naked.”

  She laughed. “Why did you come here of all places?”

  “The sea, the sky, the breeze, I suppose. It reminds me of Java,” he answered lazily.

  “Java?”

  “Java, a wonderful island, the richest and most densely populated of the Sunda Besar. South of Kalimantan, northwest of Australia, southeast of Asia.” He smiled at some memory.

  “What amuses you?”

  “We had a beach like this one. We wrote out six-part warning orders and seven-part operations orders to move platoons down to count coconuts. They’d bring their wives. ’ ’ He laughed softly to himself. “The Variag cured me of that bad habit quickly enough.”

  “And what of your other bad habits?”

  He coughed. “To tell the tale, I first caught up with the Variag off in the middle of nowhere. As prescribed for such occasions, I jumped down from my vehicle, snapped off a salute, and requested orders in my best parade ground manner.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Oh, yes. He tapped that pipe of his for no less than five minutes. Then took me by the arm over to the third of number nine. They were sitting around in the sand looking like pirates, and he said to them, ‘All right, children, gather. This is your new executive officer, Lieutenant Sanmartin. Take him up the Wadi Fahed Alrasheed’—a wadi is a kind of donga—‘and I would like him back on Wednesday, so I would ask you to please try not to lose him.’ I must have just stood there like a sheared sheep because the next thing he said was, ‘Lieutenant, paper is expensive. I will see you on Wednesday. ’ Ten minutes later, I was wearing ten kilos of sand and cursing his ancestors for seven generations. Of course, I did the same to Hans.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Oh, yes. When he got back, the whites of his eyes were brown. Dust and all, he gave me one of those academy salutes and said, ‘Number eleven platoon patrol returning as ordered, sir!’ I’d borrowed a pipe for the occasion, so I banged the bowl of it against my knee, and said, ‘Hello, Hans, did you have a nice trip?’ He was so mad, he couldn’t see.”

  “Wasn’t that dangerous?”

  “Dear one, we ran patrols up that wadi for seven solid months and never made a contact. That was part of the reason Hans was so mad. War on Ashcroft was usually very dull.” He pointed at the field table. “The legs there fold out and down.”

  “Tell me more about Ashcroft,” she said, ignoring his instructions.

  He stared up at the sky and held up his hands to examine them minutely in the sunlight. “Ashcroft is hell,” he commented matter-of-factly. “The days are hotter than Hades, the nights colder than the devil’s kiss. I had a watch my mother gave me. The second day out, the crystal cracked across. The highest forms of native life are single-celled algae that my friend the marine biologist wasn’t sure were native.”

  She held aloft a wrapped delicacy.

  “Kasha made it. Don’t ask,” he replied to her unspoken question. “Before the crack-up, they seeded the seas swimming with diatoms, copepods, coccolithophores, dinoflagellates, radiolarians, and I forget what else.”

  She set aside the wine and opened two bottles of the lager, one of which he took.

  “We lived in respirators. You could watch plastic melt and be frostbitten by midnight. I saw a man with sunburned retinas, green herring straight off the ship. He never looked up, the sun reflecting off the rocks got him.” He drank some of the warm beer.

  She closed her eyes and opened them. “When I think of desert, I think of heat and sand, palm trees. Camels.”

  “There were four different deserts, really, stone deserts to break axles, ice deserts so bad even the cakes stayed away, sand deserts, dust deserts. The sand deserts ate paint and glass when the khamsin blew. The winds couldn’t lift the sand grains well. We’d find a hill and watch the wind blow the sand like wheat rippling in a windstorm. The dust deserts ...”

  He stopped and touched her hand momentarily to watch the skin flush, the deadened white springing back to life. “The dust storms killed. The big ones were ten meters tall and a hundred kilometers across. We couldn’t ran. We couldn’t hide. The fine particles ate our respirators. Finer still, and they’d seep through and eat our lungs. That and the static electricity murdered our engines. Every day we’d think, today we’ll do something wrong and not come out. We always did, though.”

  “Why would anyone live there?”

  “Why does anyone live anywhere? It’s close to Earth, even short-haul freighters can make it. Shipping lanes run past. One of the companies lured fifteen thousand people there with pretty brochures and built a city on men’s bones. I know your people don’t like blacks, and maybe you’ve reason, but if men ever had a reason to run riot, the cakes did. They were charged for the food they ate, the air they breathed, and spaces where they slept in shifts. The overseers and the other parasites kept the thumbscrews tight. Do I sound prejudiced?”

  She nodded.

  “I am. For a pin we’d have cleaned that city out and given it to the cakes.”

  “They fought.”

  He nodded. “They figured out that it wouldn’t be their children who inherited the promised land. Addeparvumparvo mag-nus acervus erit. Add little to little and there will be a great heap, said Ovid. One of their number with a classical education called himself Spartacus. He taught them to feed the labor guards their guns and whips, and the concern’s pet legislators convinced the Diet there was a revolt to be put down. The whole time, ships to Dai Nippon were landing without the slightest idea anything was happening.”

  “What did he do?”

  “It was what he didn’t do. He didn’t massacre the parasites, and he didn’t surrender when we showed at his door and rang the bell. Bis peccare in bello non licet, to blunder twice in war is not permitted,” he quoted, picking up his assault rifle from where it lay and running his hands absently down over the trigger mechanism and the mirrored safeties on either side. “We blew them out of the city. The survivors took to the hills with the food, and we played at stabbing water until Admiral Nakamura decided who he wanted to shoot in what order. We did end up hanging five directors for enslavement. Of course, the fact that the cakes took up arms had already finished the parasites.”

  “Survival of the fittest?” she said with a slight smile.

  He grimaced. “No, that’s not really what Darwin said. Creatures multiply and specialize to fill all the little niches. Then the environment changes. A grass uses silica to protect itself or an ice sheet comes, and the niches aren’t there any more. Species who find new niches live and proliferate. The rest disappear.” He dusted his hands and examined his singlestick minutely, tracing the fine grain before he sl
ashed out at the horsetails suddenly.

  “People are just the same, they proliferate, they stratify and modify their behavior to fit a particular niche. Then the tide comes in to wash the sand castles away. We’re good at that. Soldiers, I mean.”

  She looked through his eyes as he tried to pin a fragment of a memory and classify it.

  “The managing director there, I saw him, a little wizened man,” he said to complete the thought, “carrying his possessions out of his big office in a little sack. I don’t suppose anyone ever told him there were people outside he was killing.”

  He stared out at the sea. “I saw a land turtle patterned red-brown and brown like a lacquered box, up at West Point on Hudson, north of the corridor of fire. It had the director’s skin and eyes. It was lying off the side of a road with a cracked shell. The universe had trucks, and it never understood. ”

  “I’ve read about the corridor of fire,” she remarked, reading into his silence.

  "They were the lucky ones, ’ ’ he responded. "The ones caught up in the plagues of the wizards’ war didn’t have it so easy. ” “What is the swearword that Heer de Kantzow always uses?” “You mean ‘Frosty’? Just so, that came out of the plague years. They let loose one unusually virulent sexually transmitted disease that left its victims looking like albino lepers.” He paused for a second to collect his thoughts. “It’s strange, but the crack-up was the best thing that could have happened. It gave us a chance to breathe, some of us. Like Black Death, it gave succeeding generations something to propel themselves forward.”

  “Four billion dead?” she asked.

  “Is a small price to pay for survival and the stars. We would have paid something, sooner or later. We poisoned the forests and the rivers and the pitifully few productive areas of the sea, and we crowded ourselves until we couldn’t breathe. If the crack-up hadn’t come when it did, we might not have left enough to build on.”

  He picked up the horsetail he’d destroyed and handled it tenderly. “I know,” he said, not looking at her. “Maybe it would have been better if we’d all stayed home loving each other until Malthus and the rats laughed. Lord and heaven, we’ve tried to wreck every other world we’ve been on, this one included.”

  As he was speaking, fluffy clouds touched the tops of the forested mountains and gathered, turning black. Thunderbolts split the sky and then a torrent of water turned the dust of the road into a sea of mud.

  “Help me get everything into the pickup,” Sanmartin said, sweeping up his stick, the rucksack, and his rifle.

  “Nonsense,” said Bruwer firmly. “We put it all under the table and eat it here. ’ ’

  She began speaking as they finished fruit and satay, watching the rain pour over the sides of their shelter and around, via the little trench he’d scratched into the soil. She told him a parable, what she remembered of her years on Earth.

  “I was nineteen when I began teaching in the camps. They still have camps, you know, filled with Afrikaners who have never been permitted to find a place after all these years. In autumn, I said to the children, ‘Let’s have a rugby team.’ They said that was splendid, but they asked why they couldn’t have two teams, so that the teams could play each other. I said that that was all right. The two best boys were the team captains, and I let them choose up sides.

  “Their first practice was on a Saturday. I asked them what the names of their teams would be, the Springboks or the Im-palas or whatever they liked. They told me they hadn’t really thought about names, but one team was for the Potgieterites and the other for the Malanites. The ones whose families supported Potgieter were on one side. The ones whose families supported Malan were on the other. I had to excuse myself so that I could go to the girl’s room and be sick.

  “Later, much later, my father called me,” she said, as if recounting the tale someone else had told her. “My father remarried after my mother died. We were never close, especially after I went away to school, but he called one day and said that he had received permission for the five of us, my stepmother, her children, I and he, to emigrate. It was not that he was unkind or uncaring, but he ordered. I told him that I would have to think. And he pleaded for me to come. And so I went. He never pleaded except that one time.”

  “And he died when he got here,” Sanmartin said.

  “Yes, it was his heart. But there was the ship, you see. The ship was packed with Afrikaners, filled with families. It was almost like a reunion, because it seemed that half of my class was traveling. It was days before I realized that only the Potgie-terites were on board, none of the little Malanites. It was then that I understood my father.”

  “I always meant to ask you why you threw your lot in with us,” he said.

  She laughed softly. “I didn’t really. It was so strange. When they decided to stop teaching English to the lower classes, there was no job for me. The next week the same people were begging me to interview with an Imperial major.”

  Sanmartin remembered the time Rettaglia had spent that first week rooting out people the thrones and powers had squeezed out of a normal existence. Once you eliminated the obvious misfits, he had said, it was like holding Diogenes’s lamp.

  “They were disappointed with me; it was unusual for a woman not to marry and leave,” Bruwer explained, as if what she said was perfectly natural. “I don’t know what I would have done. I did not want to understand. I wanted to go through and not see what was around me. A lot of people do; it isn’t always easy to look at the unpleasant things.”

  “No, he said slowly, “it isn’t always easy.”

  “The people are asking themselves, you know.”

  He nodded.

  “You have governed us by martial law. Well and good, but it has been three months. Sober, responsible people ask themselves what it is you will do when you decide to stop governing us by martial law. That man, Andrassy, who was appointed as landrost, they see him, they see who appointed him.”

  He nodded.

  “It’s growing, like one of your ice sheets, to sweep us all away.” Her grandfather had himself asked, several times. Fear was like contagion, like the great infections of the crack-up, sparing neither adult nor child.

  “You never say anything about your homeland,” she stated after a while.

  The muscles around his mouth tightened. “I don’t have a home.” He stroked his singlestick. “When I left, there wasn’t much I had to bring away.”

  It was her turn to have no answer.

  “I took some months off, once,” he said, “sailing around the Great Barrier Reef and north to the Solomons and beyond, to see the reef fish and watch the crowns of thorns scour coral heads white through the boat’s crystal bottom. The locals thought I was crazy to take a small boat over the reefs at night. They were right, I suppose. Some day, I’ll do the same here, to see what there is to see. I don’t think anyone has yet. They’re too busy grubbing for metals.”

  “You tell me what it is that you find.”

  “I will.” He stuck his hand out in the rain and cupped it, letting it fill with water. He let a few minutes pass. “We had a firelight once, out in the bled— out in the desert. Five of us and a half-dozen cakes. Then right in the middle of it, the clouds came low and they started baling out heaven with buckets. Most rain on Ashcroft was ghost rain that never reached the ground, but that day it hit like the wrath of God, lightning spears and the wadis filled with water shooting by like surf in a tidal bore. We ended up together on one little hill, cold and wet and miserable, and we went back together—cakes and everyone.” “That was Isaac, wasn’t it?” she asked.

  “Just so. If it hadn’t been for a rain like this, I would have killed him or he would have killed me. It wouldn’t have meant a thing to either one of us.”

  “No, that is not so,” she said frowning.

  “I loved the sandy desert,” he said after a while. “The shifting dunes like tides in the sea. The big ones last for centuries, growing a little and shrinking a little,
serpentine like beautiful women stretched out against the sky, with plumes of sand leaping from the crescents of the barchans into space.”

  “What of colors?” she asked.

  “Yellowed sands. Dust in reds of every shade from pink as fine as the skin on your hand to red like the blood of oxen. Brown takyrs, clay patches smooth as glass that sand slides over, where floods run into depressions so shallow they can’t be seen and die, century by century, measure by measure, polished by the dust and the wind. Black stones, iron and manganese oxides. Sometimes blues and grays on the horizons along eroded rock faces, streaked and carved. There were other colors, I suppose; I remember those. ’ ’

  He stopped speaking, and it was as if a door had shut itself, never to reopen. He let the water that had trickled from the sky spill out of his palm. “On Ashcroft, I didn’t know there were colonial worlds like this one. ’ ’ He put his arm around her shoulder.

  “It bothers you.”

  “You have everything the cakes didn’t have.”

  “And we throw it all away.”

  “Some of you want a little more.” They watched the rain. “Every one of these colonial worlds festers until it rots. The Diet’s too frugal to stop it before it starts, but they can afford whole battalions to sweep the litter.” He slashed at the horsetails. "Half of me says everything here is going to pop, the other half says, ‘the Variag has keramat. Fate enfolds him with her wings.’ Somehow . . .” He slashed out at the rain, adding, “The Variag is as tense as I’ve seen him, and I’d be lying if I said I think I’ll take that boat out to sea. Why did Rhett send you?”

  She stopped his mouth with her hand. “Hush!” she said, and he made no protest. After a span of time, she said, “The rain is stopping. Would you like to go back?”

  “Yes,” he said, looking out at the waves.

  ORLOV SEEMED TO DISAPPEAR INTO THE PARTIAL SUNLIGHT AS snyman watched. The charcoal and green splotches of the battle dress seemed to change color as the light melted into them, individual threads standing out against different backgrounds, subtly allowing the whole to blend. Dark shadings high, and lighter shadings low, made shadowing disappear, and the irregular patterns swallowed him whole.