Over the weeks that the general was with them, Tam Claukski watched him in awe, taking notes and codifying what he saw. The old reprobate held seminars on everything that a devious officer should know about side-stepping the rules. The general was very adamant about what should go through channels, what might profitably be transmitted through the T&B comm lines, and what had to be aborted.
One whole day he spent with Tam manually processing messages which Tam’s procedures had been editing and routing automatically.
“Take this guy,” Fry meant the message, not the sender. He used his pen as a pointer. “These three sentences are a lament to the gods and a whine about the sender’s powerlessness. The next paragraph is an outright appeal for sympathy. Then he gets angry and we have to read what is essentially a page of diatribe against his commanding officer. He wraps up his case with a conspiracy theory. Only the last two lines contain the nub of a useful suggestion. If this sadsack tried to put such a missive through normal channels, he’d get head detail.” Fry laughed. “But as I understand it, T&B is trying to be more than a normal channel.”
Tam grimaced. “It’s pretty hard to do something with that kind of ranting mess. I have a good semantic program that I’m training to sort and flush gripes like that.”
“No,” said the general. “Flushing just dumps out the gold dust with the sand.” Fry used his pen to block the whining in red, then attached the note, “Delete.” He recast the last two lines in a larger, bold typeface, this time attaching the message, “Expand and resubmit.” He grinned. “That ought to shock the shit out of our raving victim. Make him think. Otherwise send him out on head detail.”
The next day, too early, Fry held a seminar for the Starbase coterie who had signed up for “Trolls & Bridges.” He combed over the T&B categories with a razor sharp ruthlessness. Tam saw his categories as a skeleton around which to build a defense strategy. Yankee saw them as an alternate command structure. Fry saw them as communication nodes that connected people in ways that command lines couldn’t. The general tried to explain to them why, in two months, the T&B team had been able to make a better strategic analysis of the rising kzinti threat than the whole apparatus of expensive ARM think tanks.
Looking out over the room, he saw that these eager officers, who would probably dominate the roster of heroes of the next war, were flattered but didn’t really believe him. They might make jokes about the ARM, but they had been brought up in awe of its secret dominion. The ARM had pulled some deadly tricks out of its hat when the kzinti seemed overwhelming. The ARM wore a mystique of invincibility, of endless cabalistic powers it could command if it had to.
So go back to basics. The general spent the next hour lecturing these neophytes on ARM’S modus operandi. How did the ARM develop Grand Strategies? It had the resources to recruit mankind’s best strategic minds. It even had a science of creative mood drugs. Inject just the right sense of danger in which to think about threat strategy. Inject just the right kind of cold concentration in which to work out logistic problems. The ARM’s think tanks were high-powered places. But they weren’t working—because they couldn’t transfer what they knew to the grunt tacticians who had to implement the Grand Strategy. Why?
For four hundred years the ARM had been acting to repress the cycles of revenge that once threatened to tear the Earth apart and infect space. From immemorial time mothers had pledged their infant sons to the task of murdering their father’s murderer. Men plotted revenge for the rape of daughters. Tribes massacred each other to revenge an insult. Each brooding generation laid down its sedimentary layer of pain, claiming special victim status. Revenge was gradually formalized to the level of religious dogma and elevated to an art form by technology—eventually scouring Europe with religious wars, devastating the Middle East with Holy jihads when vengeful Christian pushed Jew into lands where prophets had elevated revenge to a way of life.
It was all nonsense. Yet none of it was easily given up. Even later thinkers of this violent era, atheists repelled by the mindlessness of a religious spirit that buried men in the mud of France’s trenches, invented “class warfare” as their new spiritual cleanser. The ARM forced men’s minds into a mold of peace, catholic in its guidance.
The centuries of effort had been so successful that these young officers of Barnard’s Starbase didn’t know their own history. Each one of them saw mankind as essentially benevolent. Whatever they thought, they felt that evil was an aberration, not a choice. Whatever they thought, they felt that a soldier’s soul remained in mortal peril, absolution his lot.
The general spoke to shock them: whatever lurked out there, kzin or no kzin, the ARM could not permit men to risk their souls by thinking about war. Better that they die and go to heaven in a state of grace. The military strategists of the ARM were like the priests of the Old Catholic Church who read the Bible but did not permit their parishioners to read the Bible because it was too dangerous. Fry noted wryly that a priest who cannot talk to his flock about theology atrophies as a theologian and ends his days by harassing Galileos.
The general drove on with his analogies. Like deadly experimental viruses, the ARM kept its military strategists in sealed bottles, inside sealed labs, a fragile mankind protected from contact with the military mind through elaborate protocols. Were these strategists still virile? How dangerous could a mutating virus be after generations of isolation from its host, feeding on government pabulum?
Was he making his audience hostile by laying on the heresy so thick? He had to convince these boys that they were mankind’s mainline of defense against the kzin. “The ARM’s military strategists can’t even talk to each other without going through rigorous need-to-know protocols. I can’t talk to them without going through channels and telling the protocol keepers what I need to know and why! I could be dangerous. I might get infected and lead Earth to a rediscovery of revenge. I might resurrect the ultimate weapon and use it.” Fry paused, then paced until he had his curious audience waiting for his next words. “When I tell you that Barnard’s Starbase is the best strategic think tank that humanity has right now, I mean you to take me seriously.”
A cocky officer in the back interrupted. “When is ARM going to close us down?”
“Ah, we have a conspiracy theorist in the back. ARM isn’t going to close us down. Perhaps you think the ARM is an oligarchy desperate to cling to power, even if that means losing a war with the Patriarchy. Nonsense. The ARM is just another tradition with a lot of social inertia. I’ve talked with men high in the ARM. They know what’s wrong. We lost battles in the last war because they couldn’t bring themselves to release the tech in time—they were genuinely afraid that we would turn the tech against ourselves. Have you ever read the Los Alamos plea to Truman asking him not to use the first fission bomb on Japan? The ARM struggled to make critical changes during the war. They did make changes. You can’t imagine the agonies they went through when the kzinti were winning.
“Then came the peace and the pre-kzin mindset all snapped back like so much memory-plastic. How easy was it to end slavery? How easy was it to end the Hundred Year War? How easy was it to shift from the paradigm of Biblical authority to the paradigm of science? Right now the ARM is bigger than any man. The precepts of the ARM were already built into the hidden assumptions of billions of people long before we met the kzin. Shoot every member of ARM today and it would just recreate itself out of the ashes and go about its business of wiping war from the minds of men. At Starbase we have no traditions. We can travel light and fast. The next war is going to be the worst war that mankind has ever faced and we need men who can think about it unencumbered.”