“The draft got your balls, I hear,” Arthur said. “Correct?”
Gerry nodded and swallowed. “I have to report down at Ellay in the morning.”
“Goodbye, then,” Arthur said briskly. “Well, that’s over with. What can I offer you?”
“Ah—what?”
“I said goodbye. Wasn’t that why you came around? And having got that out of the way I offered you—well—whatever I can offer you. I believe I have some vodka, and I know I have some pot, and I also have some of this new stuff Triptine that GT’s putting out, one of their few justifications for existing. At least, so Bennie tells me. I haven’t got around to trying it myself because people of my blood-group are extra susceptible and I’m liable to hitrip for three or four days. So I’ll wait for a free weekend. Well?”
“Ah—a drink, maybe.”
“Clear yourself a chair, then, and I’ll fix it.”
Gerry found new places for a box of unlabelled tapes and two used disposable plates and sat down. He looked about him with a sudden urge to fix his surroundings on his memory. The room was a mess because it had so much in it, and Arthur was too impatient to impose a system, but merely shifted whatever was in his way to a new location.
The things that got in his way, however, were endlessly fascinating. Most of them were Asiatic: figurines, ornaments, embroideries, manuscripts in magnificent calligraphy, incense pans, musical instruments, prints of classic paintings. But there were also a wagon-wheel, and an Indian drum, and a silver flute, and uncountable books, and—
“Gerry!”
With a start, he accepted the glass being waved under his nose.
Settling into his own chair, Arthur regarded him contemplatively. “Hmmm! I was wrong, wasn’t I? We didn’t get over the subject of your departure just by disposing of the goodbyes. It’s sunk its teeth right into your veins.”
Gerry nodded.
“You surprise me sometimes,” Arthur shrugged. “You’re not the adventurous type, yet here you’re letting yourself be ripped out of your cosy regular environment by someone whose decisions are arbitrary because they’re irrational.”
“I don’t quite catch.”
“No? All generals are psychotic. All soldiers are out of their skulls. Matter of strict psychological fact—they’ve had their territoriality stamped on and they can’t recover. I hoped you’d figure this out. Even Bennie did, and you’re brighter than him.”
“Would you want me to be like Bennie?” Gerry grimaced. “So he dodged—so what use did he make of the two years he saved? He’ll be dead before he’s thirty from the stuff he keeps pouring down his throat!”
“By his own hand,” Arthur said. “You have the right to kill you. Nobody else does.”
“I thought you were in favour of euthanasia.”
“Signing the release is the self-directed blow. The rest is simple mechanics, on a par with waiting for the bath to fill with blood after you’ve slashed your wrists.”
“But this just isn’t adequate,” Gerry said doggedly. He felt the need to justify his decision to someone, and to make Arthur understand his viewpoint would be a special triumph. “The fact remains, there are people I owe a debt to, and there are other people out there willing to take away everything up to and including their lives. The hole! I saw an example of it just ten minutes ago when I passed the wreck of Ackleman’s—you know, the sporting-goods store across the way from my home?”
Arthur grinned. “You expect me to display righteous wrath? I think the guns and ammunition looted from Ackleman’s are better off in the hands of people with ideals than they would have been in the hands of the fat bourgeois slobs around your district who don’t have anything to defend and would just have let them off nervously at random.”
“At random! Christ, wasn’t it you who told me about these people who make a hobby of random sabotage?”
“Now don’t get confused the way most people do, Gerry. A codder who’s taken up sabotage for a hobby isn’t on the same footing as someone who loots a gunsmith’s for weapons. He strikes out at random because he doesn’t know what it is in his environment that’s bugging him. Partisans at least have a theory about what’s wrong, and a plan to put it right.”
“And how long would you last under the kind of government they’d like to impose on us?” Gerry demanded.
“Oh, they’d have me out and shoot me the first day they took charge. Anyone like me is intolerably subversive to an authoritarian régime, because I’m not interested in imposing my ideas by force on other people.”
“But a moment ago you were saying no one has a right to take away other people’s lives. If they have no right to do it, there can’t be anything wrong in trying to stop them.”
“Two wrongs,” Arthur sighed, suddenly seeming to lose interest in the discussion. “Want to find out what’s going to become of you, by the way?”
“What?”
Arthur reached to the floor beside his chair and lifted up a book. He blew the dust off. “Old standby,” he said in an affectionate tone. “Haven’t used you as much as you deserve lately, have I? You’ve consulted the Book of Changes before, haven’t you?” he added to Gerry.
“Yes. You showed it to me when I first met you.” Gerry drained his glass and set it aside. “I told you I thought it was a load of dreck.”
“And I told you it works for the same reason there’s no such thing as art. I quoted the Balinese who don’t have a word for it, but merely try to do everything as well as possible. Life’s a continuum. I must have said that to you because I say it to everyone. Did I teach you to use the yarrowstalks?”
“No.”
“Then get out three coins, matched if possible. I’d lend you some of mine but I have absolutely no idea where my taels have got to under all this garbage. If my name was Mary I’d march my lambs through here and they’d bring their taels behind them.”
“Arthur, are you orbiting?”
“Descending, descending. This new Too Much strain from Hitrip is—for once and by a miracle—all the advertising claims it to be. Like a pack to take along with you in the morning?”
“I don’t believe I’d be allowed to. It says something on the draft notice.”
“That figures. One of the standard techniques for breaking a man down into a soldier is to take away the joy that might make him feel life was worth living even for the man on the other end of his gun. Got those coins?”
Choosing three from his pocket, Gerry thought: I was right to avoid Arthur until it was too late to change my mind. He’s so damned certain of his cynical views and I’m not sure about anything—not even about this ancient oracle being a load of dreck.
The coins tossed, the hexagram drawn, Arthur stared at the result. “Pi,” he said, not bothering to consult the book. “With a moving line in the second place. ‘What is required is that we unite with others in order that all may complement and aid one another through holding together’—want to read the full version for yourself?”
Gerry laughed and shook his head. “You know what I think of fortunetelling!”
“Yes, I do, and it’s a shame you won’t take it seriously. Because I don’t like what your moving line does to the hexagram. It turns it into K’an, doubled—‘repetition of danger’. In other words, sparewheel, unless you’re very careful you’re in trouble.”
“I’ve thought about the risks. I don’t need a mystic book to tell me that going into the army can lead to danger.”
Arthur ignored the interruption. “Know what I think? I think the moving line goes into effect tomorrow, when you change from uniting with others to exposing yourself to danger.”
“But I am ‘uniting with others’! Could there be a clearer way of saying ‘join the army’—in the context of that book?”