“Why should anyone do such a thing?”
“Because the Nineteen Families are losing power. Bring in a police state, a regime of strict social control, and they can keep power forever. In the meantime everyone is panicking.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“The whole tendency of political progress here has been evolution toward a less hierarchical, more representative form of government. This is profoundly regressive. It means increasing coercive authority which means giving the Families further powers.”
“Who do you want in authority? The Families and the council on which you sit or cats with six-inch fangs?”
I looked around the faces. The Defense Committee did not want to believe in the—what was the word?—the Kzin. I did not want to believe in them myself. But I had stood in that swamp. My collecting clothes were stained with the mud and blood of the place… unless… I grabbed my own telephone and shut my house down.
I know the body language of animals professionally. A majority of the members of the Defense Committee were looking at van Roberts as a leader. Not because they all agreed with him politically, far from it. But he was presenting reassurance of a sort.
“We've got our families' futures to think of,” said van der Stratt. “I have a little daughter who I want to grow up in a free and peaceful world. Some of you have children too.”
Grotius woke up. “I'm sorry,” he said. “Too much to do. I've also been reading all the military literature we can find. So many new terms. Everything from electronic battlefield management to caltrops. I really need a whole staff to help me.”
“What's Electronic Battlefield Management?” asked van der Trott.
“What's caltrops?” asked Apfel.
“What's a staff?” asked somebody else.
“I don't like the degree of emotion that's getting into all this,” said Lufft. “It's an unprecedented situation, certainly, but that doesn't mean we can't make decisions rationally. Let's bear in mind the fact we are twenty-fourth-century Humans, the children of a high science, the star-born, and guided by science and reason. We are not primitives and we shouldn't behave like primitives.”
“All battles and all wars are won in the end by infantrymen.”
What on Earth (literally what on Earth?) did it mean? It was attributed to someone with the odd and cumbersome name of Field Marshal Viscount Wavell.
Infantrymen? Infant men?
We were in a dusty back room in the warren of the old Mechanics' Institute, which had once served as München's public library. Hermanson had opened it and was rummaging through boxes of old disks. We were lucky to have an almost equally antique computer that could display them. It had been standing under a dome as an exhibit in the entrance hall.
When the first slowboats had set out from Earth to Wunderland they had carried libraries of Earth historical material. Not much military historical material, though. ARM didn't approve of that even at first. We gathered that things had got even tighter by the time the last slowboat left.
Not that anyone had cared much. Some of the first generation had missed Earth, but why study its history when we had our own world, a wonderful, beautiful and exciting world? We had our own history to make, and life to live on a scale flatlanders could only dream of. The Belters had been humanity's first proud space-born. We, in exalted moments, sometimes called ourselves the Children of the Stars.
Weight and volume had been critical for our migrating ancestors, too, even in craft the size of the slowboats. Practically all books had been reduced to computer disks. Some, over the years, had been lost or corrupted. Some had been reprinted in conventional book form, but these had been largely textbooks of strictly practical matters, of which there were many, or the literary classics. There were books published on Wunderland, certainly—this library and the new and bigger ones were a matter of some pride—but they were our books. And after the frontier, pioneering days, librarianship had largely had to be rediscovered.
General Earth history—unlike the histories of agriculture, ecology, oceanography, physics or computing—had become largely a matter of oldsters' tales, a unit in junior high school. As a university course it had never been popular and soon faded away—it was obviously useless, and most of us had enough scraps of family traditions to think we knew it anyway. Even oldsters who found themselves homesick for Earth had done themselves no favors by brooding over it.
Now we were looking at scraps. And many of them seemed to make no sense. Scraps like “infantry” and related words. Infants? There was something that seemed like a sort of song:
It was English. We all knew English. It was one of Wunderland's main official tongues, but this was also like a foreign language. Wire and mines? Mines? What had mines to do with military matters? There were plenty of mines on Wunderland: the more modern used biologically engineered worms to digest and process rare minerals. “Infanteer” again? Or this: “The niche-warriors of the future will wage information-intensive warfare.” That seemed to be saying something. If only we knew exactly what. And this, that had come up under “weapons”:
We had all been tired when we arrived, and this seemed utterly futile. “Let's see what's in the archives, under 'Military Science,' ” von Diderachs had said, almost light-heartedly. Now half a dozen of us were staring disconsolately at a few boxes of rubbish and fragments. I had been scheduled to fly down to Castledare to address the Rotary Club, and though someone said unkindly that Rotary lunches had not changed in four hundred years and four and a half light-years, I wished that was where I was.
“Here is a fragment from someone called Gerald Kersh, from a book, They Died with their Boots Clean, published about… 1942. Listen:
“We came of the period between 1904 and 1922… Those of us not old enough to remember the war-weariness of the century in its 'teens, are children of the reaction of the 1920s, when 'No More War' was the war-cry… If only our own propagandists took a little of the blood and thunder that the peace propagandists so effectively used to move us!
“From page after laid-out page, the horrors of war gibbered at us… stripped men, dead in attitudes of horrible abandon… people (were they men or women?) spoiled like fruit, indescribably torn up… shattered walls that had enclosed homes, homes like ours, homes of men, men like us… cathedrals shattered; the loving work of generations of craftsmen demolished like slum tenements… children starving, nothing left of them but bloated bellies and staring eyes… trenches full of dead heroes rotting to high heaven… long files of men with bandaged eyes, hand-on-shoulder like convicts, blind with gas… civilians cursing God and dying in the muck-heaps of blasted towns…
“Oh yes. We saw all the pictures and heard all the gruesome stories, which we knew were true. We were the rich culture-ground of the peace-propaganda that said: 'If war was like this then, what will it be like next time, with all the sharpened wits of the death-chemists working on new poison gas and explosives, and the greatest engineers of all time devoting themselves to aeroplanes that can come screaming down like bats out of Hell?