“That’s right. It’s here, too. Even as I speak to you, it is exercising its claws; raking them over its first victims, to see whether they’ll hold fast. And it has selected those victims welclass="underline" it knows that between your fears and your confusion over the issues involved in the strike—confusion it has carefully nurtured—you may be tricked into thinking that all pans are a threat.
“That’s the way Hitler got started. Eliminate the undesirables. Of course, we all know that the list of undesirables never stops growing, until it has found our neighbors, our loved ones and ourselves. Everyone becomes a threat, eventually. Because the monster is never satiated. It won’t stop to lick its claws until civilization is one vast prison camp; and even then, it will hunger for more.”
Her voice had begun to roughen. She cleared the phlegm that had gathered in her throat. “I realize I am not telling you anything you don’t already know. But sometimes we lose the difference between knowledge and knowing. We start taking things for granted. Like the disease we cease to inoculate ourselves against, thinking it is a thing of the past. That’s the most dangerous time. That’s when the evil turns out not to be dead at all but merely dormant; waiting, watching for the chance to live again. The history of war is filled with battles that were lost because the would-be victor enjoyed his triumph too soon.
“I pray that will not happen to us. But whether it does, depends on all of us. I am just one person; I haven’t the strength to move history by myself. No one person has. But together, we can move it, against any force. We can choose a hopeful future, or a hopeless one. But whatever it is, the choice is ours. I can only pray that it is a wise choice.
“Thank you.”
The swirling blue and white orb of the Earth swam in space before her. A beacon of intelligence in an otherwise dead, though beautiful, Solar System. The orb was completely dark nowhere: even the side away from the Sun throbbed with bright energies.
Lisa felt as though she could reach out and embrace it, as though it really were the great mother Gaia of mythology. But she knew, rationally, that that was impossible; that the chimera would evaporate at the touch of any sense save sight. An Earth like this could only be envisioned, never loved. Never felt. That was what was wrong with it. In the end, it wasn’t real. It didn’t have grass between her toes. It didn’t have life.
She sensed the presence behind her, and turned to meet it. She squinted in the sunlight.
Julia L’uboleng emerged from her silhouette, and walked up to the sapphire world. She pushed her hands into it as though it were a cleansing wash.
“It is so much like the real one, isn’t it?” she observed. “Not at all like children. Children you can touch easily. This—” she dropped her hands—“requires long term commitment.”
Lisa stepped backwards, disoriented. “You—how did you know I was here?”
Julia looked at her probingly. “You really can’t figure that out?” She sighed, and shook her head. “All right, I’ll spell it out for you. Despite outward appearances, the relationship between Ben and myself is not that of boss to underling. Verstehen Sie? Do certain things suddenly make a lot of sense all of the sudden?”
Lisa felt her mouth falling open, and shut it. Yes, a lot of things make sense now. Her mind swam in a maelstrom of absurdities, a vortex which threw a wall up against the world. They’re lovers? She had heard of such things, had even suspected on several occasions, but…
But what? Are you saying it’s immoral, unnatural, perverted? Why?
“You don’t have to work so hard not to look horrified,” Julia said, without emotion. “To be honest, until I met Ben, I would have reacted the same way. And seeing how hard Ben was working you over—well, never mind that.” Her face was dark with pain momentarily. “I didn’t come here to fight you for Ben; I came here to fight with you for him. If that deal you offered before is still good, that is.” She put out a hand. “If it is, I’m officially accepting it.”
It was not easy to focus on the real issues, but somehow Lisa forced herself to. To her surprise, Julia’s hand was not ice cold.
“I was wrong to blame you for what happened to Ben,” Julia suddenly confessed. “It was no more your fault than what happened to that girl. The fault is with the people who go around preaching hatred. And with the people who, knowing better, are afraid to stand up to them.”
Julia L’uboleng, mea culpa? If Lisa weren’t hearing it with her own ears, she could not have brought herself to believe the words.
Believe them or not, however, she would not accept them. “If I had known what was going to happen, I wouldn’t have stood up to them either. If I could go back and do it all over again—” But you can’t go back. You can’t undo what is done. And you can’t escape responsibility, one way or the other.
“Maybe the trick is to be naive enough that you never suspect the worst,” Julia observed. “That’s what’s wrong with me: I always take the worst for granted.” She laughed bitterly. “And when it doesn’t happen, I’m amazed things turned out as well as they did. Take that little lecture of yours; I’m surprised you haven’t been publicly lynched yet. Instead, I just checked its audience rating. Would you believe it’s up to a twenty-three?” Lisa’s heart practically leapt out of her mouth at this revelation. A twenty-three! Only in her dreams had she even gotten half that. “Are you serious? You must have read it wrong.”
“Twenty-three and climbing You’ve touched a real nerve, Ms. Jiang. Arresting shimps has turned out to be a real blunder for the government; even Reed Ready is condemning it, even though he’s trying to make it look like a conspiracy between the miners and the UN bureaucracy. He doesn’t realize how badly he’s hurting his case: people don’t know who they’re scared of more now, the bugs or the men in uniforms. Add to that the magnificent way you played the groundhog resentment against grangers angle.” Julia grinned wolfishly. “That was when I realized you weren’t quite the innocent you like to play, Lisa Jiang,” she concluded. “Either that, or you’ve got a born instinct for politics. One thing is for certain: the world is going to be demanding a lot more of you, a lot sooner than you think.”
Lisa’s mind spun in its cocoon. This has got to be a dream. Or maybe I cyberlinked into virtual space and got lost somewhere. She fought to breathe steadily, to keep herself from hyperventilating. To keep focus on what was important. “Does that mean… have they released Ben yet?” she demanded.
Julia gave her the same look that children give adults when they ask truly stupid questions. “Don’t be ridiculous. It isn’t that easy. But I do expect to start hearing pathetic rationalizations for the arrests soon: how it’s for the shimps’ own protection, and how it’s only temporary, and so on. Evil always has to pretend it’s really only dumb first, before it makes a strategic retreat.”
I don’t care about that. All I want is to see Ben free. Let others fight the war.
She knew it was foolish even as she thought it. Lisa Jiang stay out of trouble? She might as well lock herself into her compartment, strap herself into bed, and feed and relieve herself by tubes. Even then, she’d still manage somehow to end up facing the Fredericksons and Readys of the world.
“I’m not sure I find anything amusing in it, quite frankly.”
Lisa realized she’d greeted her realization with a wry grin. She wondered momentarily if she should tell Julia what she’d been thinking. Or if it was necessary to tell her, for that matter. Instead, she said, “Isn’t that sort of an old-fashioned word, evil? No one seems to use it anymore; at least, I haven’t heard it since, since I was little.”