He remembered their first meeting with Poplin after Yang’s death, finding the commander shut up in his quarters in a fog of alcohol, more than a dozen liquor bottles on the table.
Olivier Poplin’s personality was made up of three elements—fearlessness, cheer, and refinement—but all three had now evaporated, exposing the skeleton of his psyche. Once known for his unapologetic and inveterate dandyism, Poplin had stopped bathing, abandoned shaving, and certainly given up on inviting women to his bed, preferring instead to brood at the center of a self-woven web of rage, intoxication, and despair. Even the sight of his two visitors did not inspire the unhappy human spider to rise from his seat at the table.
“Looks like the booze has finally poisoned my brain,” said Poplin. “I’m hallucinating things I don’t even want to. Why the long faces?”
“Commander Poplin, you have to stop drinking. It’s not good for you.”
No reply.
“Please, commander.”
“Shut up! What does a kid like you know?!”
Poplin’s voice was loud and sharp, but lacked its usual vigor and luster.
“Why do I have to take orders from anyone except Yang Wen-li? I have the right to decide who orders me around. Isn’t that democracy? Huh?”
His hand shook as it reached for his tumbler, and succeeded only in knocking it over, along with the whiskey. He took this in with green eyes that brimmed with intoxication, then reached for a new bottle—his last. Julian caught Poplin’s arm in both hands, but could not find the right words to say. Three and a half seconds later, Attenborough broke the silence.
“Commander Poplin, consider this your formal notification. Following the death of Marshal Yang, Julian will be our leader.”
The ace pilot’s electric gaze pierced Julian and Attenborough through, but he listened.
“Allow me to be blunt, commander Poplin,” continued Attenborough. “I will not permit any questioning of Julian’s right to lead, or any word or deed that undermines the authority of our leadership. Julian may permit these things, but I will not.”
No reply.
“Got a problem with that? Then get out. If you can’t make yourself useful to Julian, Iserlohn doesn’t need you.”
After a few seconds of silence, Poplin said, “No. There’s no problem.” He seized the edges of the table with both hands and, somehow, forced himself up on unsteady feet.
I’m sorry, Julian. I know you must be suffering much more than I am…But this was something that Olivier Poplin could never say aloud. He vanished into the shower room for twenty minutes, then reappeared perfectly groomed and dressed, if still in poor complexion, and offered Julian a respectful salute.
“Commander! By your leave, as of today I am a new man. Please don’t give up on me.”
From that moment, Poplin never lost his reason in front of others again, nor forgot his responsibilities as captain of the First Spaceborne Division.
“You’re not the only one whose mettle is being tested, Julian. History poses the same question to us all. We’ve already lost Yang Wen-li; can we avoid losing hope, unity, and direction?”
Attenborough’s musings perfectly described how the younger generation who had remained in Iserlohn felt. Yang Wen-li had been their rock, but they had lost him forever. All of them, Julian included, had to ask themselves once more what they were fighting for. Even if Attenborough’s answer was his famous “foppery and whim,” he could not ignore the results his actions would have.
Julian had once brought a certain idea to Attenborough for discussion.
“What’s that? Force the empire to adopt a constitution?” Attenborough boggled at the idea, but after a moment’s thought it did seem the best of the options available to them. Even an undemocratic constitution could still serve as a milestone on the road from autocracy to democracy.
“Yes,” said Julian. “There’s no need for radicalism, if constitutionalism gives us the opening we need to slowly infiltrate the Galactic Empire itself.”
An easy thing to say, Julian thought with a rueful smile. But he had no interest in making a last stand in Iserlohn and becoming tragic martyrs to the empire’s overwhelming force. He felt this way partly due to Yang Wen-li’s influence, but the entire Yang Fleet shared this psychic territory. Only in the successful transmission of democratic republican governance to later generations would their “foppery and whim” complete itself.
To change the Galactic Empire from an autocracy to a constitutional state—if this were possible at all, it could perhaps be realized most effectively at the moment when all humanity was united in the same state. Rudolf von Goldenbaum had seized a single democracy and turned it into an autocracy. Would it be impossible to do the same in reverse?
A tiny thorn at the back of Julian’s mind nagged at his ruminations. He remained unable to identify it for several seconds before Attenborough changed the subject.
“So, Julian—I mean, Commander Mintz. You don’t think it’s likely that the kaiser will lead a fleet to attack the Iserlohn Corridor?”
“No, I don’t. Not right now. For the time being, the kaiser will be concentrating his efforts on reorganizing the galactic order around the Phezzan Corridor.”
“But it’s in the kaiser’s nature to love war. Won’t he eventually tire of peace, and reopen hostilities under the pretext of completing galactic unification?”
“I can’t imagine him doing so. If Marshal Yang were still alive, the prospect might intrigue him. But…”
But with Julian Mintz as his opponent, he simply won’t be interested, Julian thought. This was not self-deprecation but an objective assessment. Julian was a nobody; his name had no ring of authority or influence, just as Yang’s hadn’t before the Rescue of El Facil. Although Julian’s situation was slightly different in that he could at least call on the name of his deceased father and teacher, which had not been an option for Yang. Julian understood that he would never be Yang’s equal, and perhaps that understanding was what granted direction and stability to his stride as he walked toward the future.
Frederica Greenhill Yang was resting in her quarters, hazel eyes turned to the photo of her late husband that sat on her nightstand.
Yang Wen-li smiled bashfully back at her from within the frame. They had met when Yang was a newly minted officer with little apparent prospect for promotion or decoration. He had left her for the last time looking exactly the same. How many facts had accumulated in the twelve years between first meeting and final parting? And yet those facts paled by comparison with the volume of memory and the depth of feeling.
A washed-up lieutenant from the El Facil Patrol Fleet, sandwich in hand, looking stunned by the vastness of the responsibility placed upon him. When they had slipped through the fingers of the Galactic Empire to arrive safely at the planet Heinessen, Frederica had left her parents to their embrace at the spaceport while she searched for the man who had saved her. She finally found him in the crowd, but he had become a hero overnight and was surrounded by the media, frozen. She could not even get close to him. Finally her parents remembered their daughter and called for her to return. She was fourteen, and at the end of her beginning.
Yang would probably not find his family’s current situation entirely to his liking. His wife had become the leader of a revolutionary government, his ward the commander of a revolutionary army, and he himself a kind of patron saint of democracy, drafted into service even after death to provide spiritual succor and ensure Frederica and Julian’s legitimacy.
“ ‘Can’t I even rest when I’m dead?’ I know that’s what you want to say. But if you were still alive, we wouldn’t have to bear this burden in the first place.”
Even as she spoke, Frederica realized that she had learned this logic from Yang.
“It’s your fault, Yang Wen-li, everything’s all your fault. Me becoming a soldier. This imperial base somehow becoming the last redoubt of democracy. Everyone remaining here, chasing the dream of the festival. If you had any
understanding of your responsibilities, you’d come back to life right now.”
But, of course, the dead could not come back to life. Nor could the living stay unchanged. Time, once lost, could never be restored.
Which was exactly why time was more precious than a billion gemstones, and life must not be lost in vain. Yang had always maintained these truths. His characteristic retort to religions that insisted on the eternal soul or reincarnation, making light of physical death, was, If death is so great, why not die? I won’t stop you. Why is it always those who say such things who cling to life the longest?
“Come back to me, Yang,” Frederica whispered. “It’s against the laws of nature, but I’ll overlook it just this once. And this time I won’t let you die before me.
Frederica could see him so clearly, mumbling, “Well, that really puts me on the spot” into his beloved black beret.
“It’s terrifying to think about how many people I’ve sent to their deaths,” Yang had once said. “Me dying once myself is hardly enough to atone for that. The world can be a pretty unbalanced place.”
There was no end to the egoism humans could fall into. Frederica had not wanted Yang to atone for his sins. She had wanted him to live, even if it meant draining the life from others. To live a life so long his pension was a burden on public resources.
“It’s true that I lost you. But compared to never having you at all, I was truly blessed. You might have killed millions, but you made me, at least, very happy.”
Frederica had not heard Yang’s final words. But this was one point on which she felt no regret. She knew that those words had been either “I’m sorry” or “Thank you”—and most likely the former. It did not matter if nobody believed her. She knew what she knew, and that was enough.
III
After Admiral Murai led the dissatisfied and restless elements away from Iserlohn Fortress, the unity between those who remained should have been unshakable. But nobody was perfect, and alcohol in particular was prone to awaken dozing uncertainties. One day, a half-drunk officer buttonholed Julian by the door to the central command center and began harassing him. Karin happened to witness the confrontation, and to hear something she could not let pass:
“You need to learn your place, kid. You couldn’t even save Marshal Yang’s life, and now you call yourself commander?”
Even during her own opposition to Julian, Karin had never gone that far. She knew that those words must never be spoken. Julian’s pain and self-recrimination over Yang’s death were greater than anyone’s. It was not right to add to his suffering. Karin, as a member of Iserlohn Fortress, bore part of the responsibility for failing to save Yang too. The man’s heartless attack on Julian proved nothing but his own poverty of spirit.
Above all, I can’t imagine Marshal Yang blaming Julian for what happened. He’d be more likely to apologize for not managing to hold on until Julian came running.
On reflection, Yang had been a mysterious man. Karin’s words to Julian a few days earlier had been the truth: when Yang was alive, he really had not seemed such a great man to her. But hour by hour, day by day, Karin was coming to understand. Understand that all of them—Julian, Commander Poplin, the man who had been her mother’s lover for a brief moment, everyone—had been dancing with sublime rhythm and footwork on Yang Wen-li’s open palm.
Marshal Yang, Karin mused, was both home port and alma mater to the Iserlohn Spirit. Even if graduation had been inevitable one day, she wished that they could have enjoyed their time together just a little longer.
For now, though, rather than sinking into the abyss of her thoughts, she chose to take surface action. If nothing else, she could not bear to watch Julian quietly enduring the man’s abuse and responding with nothing but a rueful smile. She tossed her hair and approached the two in an orderly stride. When they turned their gaze on her, naturally she did not flinch or hesitate.
“Lieutenant Mintz, why aren’t you saying anything?” Karin said, directing her indignation at Julian rather than the drunk. “This man’s criticisms are completely unfair. If it were me, I’d give him a good two dozen slaps. Isn’t it your responsibility to defend your rightful authority, for the sake of those who depend on you?”
Julian and the drunk turned and looked at the pilot. Neither said a word, although they bore different expressions.
“I…I know it’s none of my business. But—”
Karin’s voice was drowned out by another, several times louder. The drunken man had shrugged off her interruption and returned to his tirade.
“And don’t think I’m letting Marshal Yang off the hook, either!” he slurred. “Assassinated by the Church of Terra? What kind of ridiculous way to die is that? If he’d fallen in the heat of battle, staring down Kaiser Reinhard, he could have died a hero—but no! Talk about embarrassing.”
“Say that one more time,” Julian snarled, his expression utterly transformed. Criticism of Yang had switched his emotional channel in an instant. “You’re saying people who are assassinated don’t measure up to those who die in battle?”
The other man’s expression changed too. Julian’s voice was crystallized rage. It had struck genuine fear into him.
Just then a hand came down on Julian’s shoulder from behind. The gesture was casual, but it sent a kind of wave rippling from the palm that soothed Julian’s fury.
“Come on, Julian—uh, commander, that is. You can’t strike a subordinate. Not even a worthless one.”
Julian looked from hand to arm, arm to shoulder, and finally met a pair of familiar green eyes that seemed to dance with sunlight.
“Commander Poplin…”
The drunk opened his mouth to speak again. Poplin smiled at him. The smile was not friendly.
“All right,” he said. “This is the point at which you exercise your imagination a little. Here’s your topic: what people might think of a man who’s abusing someone not just much younger than him but also burdened with far greater responsibility.”
The man said nothing.
“Back off while you still can,” Poplin continued. “If Julian gets really mad, you’ll be turned into meatballs. I’m putting myself on the line for your well-being here.”
The man walked off, muttering to himself. Poplin flashed a generous smile at Julian and Karin, both standing stock-still.
“Looks like you youngsters are at a loss for something to do,” he said. “Why don’t you keep me company while I have my coffee?”
Eventually news of this minor dust-up reached the ears of Walter von Schönkopf and Alex Caselnes.
“Julian knew he didn’t have the experience to be head of Iserlohn’s military,” von Schönkopf said. “He let us put him in that position anyway because he saw it as a way to make amends for failing to protect Marshal Yang. He’s determined to take up the mantle of Yang’s philosophy and see it realized in practice. If that drunk was too dim to grasp such an obvious fact, he’s useless to Iserlohn anyway. We’d be better off if he just left.”
“Personally, I feel the same way,” said Caselnes, “but I’m not sure that purging ourselves of dissident elements is compatible with the fundamental principles of democratic governance.”
“You’re saying democracy is a system for legally codifying self-restraint on the part of the powerful?” said von Schönkopf, a wry grin twitching at the corners of his mouth. “ ‘The powerful’ in this case being our Julian, of course. Well, Marshal Yang didn’t look the slightest bit heroic, so I suppose it makes sense that his beloved pupil wouldn’t look the part either.”
The two men lapsed into silence. Currents from the air conditioning cycled lazily through the space between them.
Both had rebuilt their shattered psyches after the shock of losing Yang forever. But the memory of winter survives the coming of spring. Their psychic landscapes were as rugged, as dauntless as ever, but the glaciers within them had permanently advanced.
The three and a half years between Yang’s appointment as commander of
Iserlohn Fortress at the end of SE 796 and his assassination had been an age of vitality and unity. Despite the interruption of their temporary abandonment of the fortress itself, those years had been filled with a light and heat that were now difficult to believe. The younger members of the republic had probably believed those times would last forever. Even their elders—although neither Caselnes nor von Schönkopf had yet reached forty—had not expected festival season to end so soon.
As if to banish the silence, Caselnes said, “Julian feels no envy for his predecessor. This is a rare quality among those who inherit their power. Here’s hoping he only grows from here.”
Von Schönkopf put his beret back on and nodded. “As Yang himself might have put it, the question now is whether history will speak of ‘Julian Mintz, disciple of Yang Wen-li’ or ‘Yang Wen-li, teacher of Julian Mintz.’ As for me, I have no idea.”
“All we know for sure is this: Not one of us on Iserlohn knows how to quit while we’re ahead. Do I have your agreement, Admiral von Schönkopf?”
“Much as it pains me to admit it, you do,” said von Schönkopf with a smile. He raised his arm in farewell and left the office. Iserlohn was at a severe numerical disadvantage; if their military was not elite, there was no point in fighting at all, and the responsibility of training their forces into that elite fell to him.
Caselnes turned back to his own work. He had his own responsibility: to keep the minority who had remained on Iserlohn fed.
IV
However unlikely an early attack by the empire might be, Iserlohn could not be lax in preparing for a military response. Julian, of course, but also Merkatz, Attenborough, and Poplin found their days entirely consumed with the demands of formations, supply, human resources, and facilities management.
The younger generation showed particularly striking diligence, partly because of their sense of duty, but also, undeniably, in an attempt to remain busy enough to keep the memory of Yang’s death at bay.
“When Marshal Yang was alive, we were busy preparing for the festival,” Attenborough would later recall. “After he died, we found that he’d left us homework, and we worked our fingers to the bone getting it done.”
Upheaval Page 2
