Armageddon, the War at the End of Time, hadn’t happened. All told, humanity really ought to be grateful. Only when one looked at the crowding, the hunger, the unemployment, the frustrations, the dilemmas that would soon become insoluble for all time, did the gloomy visage of the future become manifest. Humans, one school of anthropology averred, were essentially aggressive, pugnacious, and acquisitive “killer apes.” If true, then sealing off the vents through which these traits were expressed would eventually blow the kettle. If man couldn’t lust, covet, fight, grab, and wave his collective privates at his foes, then he had to have escape valves through which he could release these estimable emotions harmlessly. There were no new frontiers for the privates-wavers to conquer, no badlands where they could pioneer and fight without hurting the stay-at-homes, no heroic conquerors, no knights, no dragons, no maidens to rescue. The moon and the planets were habitable only by tiny parties of skilled astronauts. The earth was too crowded and its balance too delicate to permit much more brandishing of genitalia.
Exercise, sports, and the caterwauling, orgasmic catharsis of “Banger” pop music satisfied many; the rest were fed TV. The average citizen of the twenty-first century lived vicariously; he watched football, hockey, wrestling, suicidal car races, soap operas, talk shows, sitcoms, maim-and-jiggle dramas, game shows where everybody always smiled even when they lost a million dollars, and vicarious violence for all ages and sexes. Every show was laced with “The Message”: Be passive, be peaceful, be bland.
“The blanding of the world,” as Wrench once put it; to which Jameela had replied, “Oh, you mean blandishment.” They all laughed, but Lessing thought about the two words later.
In spite of the “blandishments” of the media, the tangle of social and economic problems produced a sense of futility, a feeling that there wasn’t much point to things. Unrest burgeoned: racial imbalances, labor unions, immigrants both legal and illegal, Born-Agains versus the godless and the heretics and the cuckoo cults, prolife versus pro-choice, rich versus poor. All bubbled and frothed together in the overpopulated, polluted, crumbling cities. Suicide surpassed heart disease as a major cause of death. Other urbanized nations suffered similarly, and the regular armies spent much of their time quelling internal, rather than external, trouble. This twenty-first century was no Utopia after all.
Nor were international hostilities completely ended. Small wars were permitted as long as they didn’t escalate. “You steal my sheep, and I rustle your cattle, and I’ll see you in town Saturday night for a beer!” Some regions — the unlucky ones like Africa, Central America, and parts of the Middle East — made dandy, reusable battlegrounds. Allowable and containable conflict gave rise to the mercenaries. The aggressive individual, the sociopath, the loner, the one who could not be “blandished” and was not satisfied with cop shows and football heroes, could join a mercenary unit and fight and die to his — or her — heart’s content. Keep most of society down with indoctrination; help the occasional unredeemable looney find a suitably bloody heroic death.
The media loved the “Merc Wars.” More vicarious violence for the folks at home; sell more breakfast food, pantyhose, and deodorant. Like the gladiators of Rome, mercenaries were eminently expendable, watchable — and bankable.
Yet it wasn’t a game, no matter how the TV-casters prated about heroes, insignia, weapons, and “kills.” There were real causes, encroachments, terrorists, guerrillas, rebels, tyrants, and exploitation. The use of regular national forces would lead to escalation and confrontation, and those, in turn, led straight into the gaping maw of Doomsday. And, anyhow, the Establishments had always loved mercenaries. The Romans had hired, bribed, and eventually been swamped by barbarian troops. King John of England had used European captains and their bands to such an extent that the Magna Carta expressly ordered that they be sent packing. Read about the Hundred Years War or any of a dozen other European conflicts, and there was always the mercenary, grinning his cold grin, polishing his weapons, and ready for a “spesh-op.”
The game was in deadly earnest in the longer geopolitical sense, of course. Better arms, organization, and ruthlessness would eventually win, as the Soviets, the Israelis, the South Africans, to name just a few, well realized. Wear the enemy down, be patient, and keep coming back. Eventually “thine is the power.”
Was the West ruthless enough? Could it win against opponents who played for keeps? Lessing doubted it, and he was not alone. The “blanding” of Euro-America might help suppress internal strife, but it made for damned poor fighting men. There were always barbarians out there, circling, ready to pour in and pillage, rape, and take over. Barbarians eventually settled and became urbanized; then they became decadent in turn and were trampled into slavery by the next horde of wild goombunnies from the boondocks.
The wise man looked at history philosophically: you were out, then you were in, then you were up, then you were down, and finally you were out again. Maybe a hundred, a thousand years down the line you got a second chance. Round and round
Western society had grown passive, as fossilized as a lump of coal. The West would soon go the way of the later Roman Empire, squabbling over ancient traditions that no longer mattered, prattling of the splendors of its past, and unable to defend against the inevitable Attila the Hun, the Barbarian Who Must Surely Come.
“Down the tubes of eternity without a paddle,” as Lessing’s father used to say, quoting from some twentieth -century philosopher or other. And: “You only get one grab at the brass ring” — whatever that had originally meant. Lessing’s father had been quaint and antiquarian, a mild and prissy veterinarian who ran a pet shop in Iowa. Lessing had
He did not like thinking about his past. Yet the older he became the more he found himself doing exactly that. He rubbed his nose, cleared his throat, and sat down in the chair next to Wrench.
The conference dragged on through the morning. The seven men and five women around the table struck Lessing as unlikely Nazis. Descendants of the fearsome SS? More an insurance agents’ sales meeting! These people looked like accountants, executives, stock-holders, coupon clippers! Good, grey, solid citizens all. Instead of ideology they spoke in measured tones of profits and losses, new products and old, advertising, sales, commissions, government regulations, shipping, aircraft, tariffs, unions in Sweden, miners’ strife in France, taxes in Israeli-held Egypt.
The minute hand on the black-glass wall clock went around twice. Wrench nodded off and had to be nudged. Lessing felt his own eyelids drooping, and he gazed at the svelte Guatemalan secretary by the door until her cheeks flushed. She murmured an excuse and slipped out. No playing with that one. She probably had her eye on something more exalted than a lowly bodyguard.
He scrutinized the conferees themselves. Aside from Mulder, who spoke with an urbane, East Coast American accent, there were two other Americans, one male and one female. Two others had English surnames but talked like Spanish-speakers; these were again a man and a woman, middle-aged, prim-looking, and businesslike. Another pair of males bore Spanish surnames and sounded like Latin Americans. One was plump, the other swarthy and dapper. With them was a youngish woman who appeared to be the dapper one’s wife. Beside the latter sat the oldest of the conferees: a powder-pale woman who resembled a British dowager but whose English bore a decided French lilt. The man opposite Mulder at the end of the table appeared to be an Arab; some SS officer in exile must have succumbed to loneliness! The last two, again male and female and middle-aged, were Europeans, but so cosmopolitan that there was no trace of any accent. Not a German in the lot! Lessing’s mid-twentieth-century history was as vague as only an American high school could make it, but he did recall that some thirty years ago one of Israel’s military rulers had vowed to visit the sins of the fathers upon the sons, as it said somewhere in the Bible, quite literally, and with interest. Many Germans abroad had then found it prudent to alter their identities.