Imperial Stars 2-Republic and Empire Read online

  "You never knew me," he said. He leaned back and laced his fingers over his rolled stomach. For a moment, he seemed to be chewing something. "You're overburdened with misinformation. Let me clarify your situation. You have a choice. You can tell me that you believe me—that I informed on your friends and as a result they were sliced. Then you can walk out of here, have a warm place to live, and 500,000 credits a year. Or you can believe that this is a test, that Supervisor Stattor is lying to you, and that, Usko, is treason. For treason, you will spend the rest of your life dying on Perda, cutting shoe soles out of 'leather'."

  Whatever small thing Stattor had sucked out of his teeth, he swallowed. "Well?" he asked.

  Her age, her fear, and her dread pushed her deeper into her chair. She had lowered her head and Stattor could see the dry frizzy hair that grew there in erratic patches.

  She looked up. Above the mouth that was twisted by paralysis, her eyes sparkled as though they were filled with chips of silver. "You brought me here to offer me comfort and disgrace or a slow death for a wasted life. Why?"

  "I'm an insecure man. I sleep better when I know that others operate from self-interest. Your idealism makes me . . . uneasy." Stattor smiled. "When you accept my offer of generosity, you'll be as corrupt as the rest of us. There's no reason for you to go back to prison now, because the ideal you sacrificed for was an illusion."

  "You're taking the one thing . . ."

  Stattor smiled even harder. "And we used to think human nature was so damned mysterious." He pressed the call button on the autovox and Zallon entered immediately. "See that Ms. Imani has priority transportation to the rehabilitation center. Her welfare is of special importance to me."

  "I understand."

  "That's gratifying," Stattor said.

  As Zallon helped her out of her chair, she said, "If I were strong enough to use these hands—"

  "We mustn't let our lives be spoiled with regrets," Stattor said pleasantly.

  As Zallon helped Usko through the door, she looked back once, it was just a glimpse, and Stattor was reminded of the other reason he had sent her to prison. It happened so many years ago, when they had awakened in each other's arms. She had slept so beautifully, her smooth, translucent eyelids closed over her quiet eyes—and then she had awakened and her eyes had opened suddenly and she had looked at him. There, wrapped in the sheets, with the morning sun streaming across the room, she had looked at him with that same expression—a kind of horrified surprise.

  The door irised shut behind them, and Stattor nodded to himself. Yes, it was probably at that moment, with the sun filling the room—and he remembered there was a bowl of oranges on a table, radiant with sunlight—it was at that moment that he decided that some way, somehow, he would do this to her, and not long after that he began giving information to the government police.

  So now it had all worked out. The loose end was tied to everything else.

  He swept his hand across the lower part of his stomach. He did not feel so bad now. Neither his arms nor his legs ached, and his stomach did not seem filled with bile.

  Stattor turned in his chair and gazed out the transparent bubble at the churning hub of the galaxy and then at his globular cluster. But beyond those stars, in the textureless black, there was what drew his eyes. When he looked into it, he almost felt his soul drawn out of his bloated and diseased body and sent into a place where there was neither light nor matter nor decay nor care. The autovox chirped.

  "Supervisor," Zallon's voice said gently, "there is the matter of the dispersal list."

  Stattor grunted and spun his chair to face the desk again. The list lay there, face up, awaiting his final decision whether or not to exempt any of the condemned. He thought of Aros waiting in some detention cell, old, haggard, half dead, and then he thought of himself and Usko, there beside the lake, so long ago. She had brought a bouquet of colored weeds up from the shoreline, and Aros had stood up, laughing, his arms wide to receive her—

  His eyes stopped on the autovox.

  Zallon had overstepped his limits. Stattor could barely see the green blossom of his nebula behind it. His emotionless aide, that sunken-eyed reptile, never revealed his feelings about anything, so how could he be trusted? He was an unknown.

  Excepting no one from execution, Stattor pushed the list away from him. He had never liked Aros. Nor Zallon. With his fatted hand, Stattor retrieved the list and entered Zallon's name at the bottom. One way or another, so many people tried to stand in his way, to annoy him, or to prevent the grand and mysterious thing that was about to happen to him. It was very close. He could feel it come nearer every hour.

  For a moment, his stomach did not burn and the beta-blocker made his life easier. He leaned back in his chair and again turned to face the absorbing blackness beyond the galaxy, and he was content to know that soon, so very soon, his flesh would turn to myth.

  Editor's Introduction To:

  Litany For Dictatorships

  Stephen Vincent Benet

  Whitaker Chambers says of his education at Columbia:

  "Nothing that I can remember was said about the Russian Revolution. No one in Contemporary Civilization parted the curtain of falling snow to show me Petrograd with a cold rain blowing in from the Gulf of Finland on a day in November 1917. The tottering republican government of Russia had ordered the drawbridges over the Neva River to be raised."

  Of course, Chambers had this advantage over our generation: at least he knew there had been a Republican government of Russia. Nowadays, everyone is taught that the Bolsheviks overthrew the czars, and no one remembers Alexander Kerensky and the Social Democrats who, for a few months, gave Russia the only republican rule it has ever had.

  Chambers continues his story.

  "The great spans tilted slowly through the air. The Red Guards and the Communist Party resolutes had begun to execute that careful plan, the brainchild of Comrades Trotsky, Podvoisky, and Antonov-Avseenko, which proved to be a master technique for the revolutionary seizure of a modern city. The Communists were occupying the public buildings, the ministries, the police stations, the post office, newspaper and telegraph offices, the telephone exchange, banks, powerhouses, the railroad stations. To cut off the working-class Viborg quarter from the other bank of the Neva, and to prevent its masses from re-enforcing the insurgent Communists, the falling republican government had raised the bridges.

  "In from the Gulf of Finland steamed the armored cruisers of the Baltic fleet, whose crews had already gone over to the Bolsheviks. The cruisers nosed into the Neva within point-blank range of the bridges. Their slender guns rose with mechanical deliberateness, and, as they rose, the spans of the bridges slowly dropped again. The masses streamed across into the central city. This was the crisis of the uprising and one of the decisive moments of history.

  "The upraised guns of the cruisers—one hopefully renamed The Dawn of Freedom—did not lower. They swung and lobbed their shells into the Winter Palace, which stood next to the Admiralty on the river bank. Inside, the rump of the government was in its final, dying session. Outside, fierce fighting was going on. Directing it was one of history's most grotesque figures, Antonov-Avseenko—the Communist mathematician and tactician, the co-contriver of the coup d'etat, the man with the scarecrow face and shoulder-long hair under the shapeless felt. Antonov rushed toward the guns at the head of the steps. His armed rabble followed him. They stormed the doors. The Winter Palace fell. With it, in that vast, snow-afflicted sixth of the earth's surface, fell the absolute control of the destinies of 160 million people."

  —Whitaker Chambers, Cold Friday

  The odd part is that after the Bolsheviks took over, it became fashionable in the West to act as if they were the true republicans. Lincoln Stefans, "America's Philosopher," visited the Soviet Union and returned to say, "I have been over into the future, and it works." American labor union leaders visited terrible places in the Gulag and came home praising the Soviet's "rehabilitation programs." And everywhe
re, Western intellectuals proclaimed "there is no enemy to the left."

  Republics were in danger only from the right; this despite the news from the Soviet Union.

  Make no mistake: as Robert Conquest shows in Harvest of Sorrow, the truth about the artificial famine in the Ukraine was widely available in the west. The Manchester Guardian and Daily Telegraph, Le Figaro, Neue Zuricher Zeitung, and the Christian Science Monitor and New York Herald Tribune gave broad coverage. Most of this was ignored by Western intellectuals. Some didn't believe it. Others said you can't make omelets without breaking eggs, as if that trite phrase excused turning the breadbasket of Europe into a death camp of starving people.

  George Bernard Shaw said, "I did not see a single undernourished person in Russia, young or old. Were they padded? Were their hollow cheeks distended by pieces of foam rubber inside?" Of course, Shaw went where he was told, accompanied by official guides, unlike Malcolm Muggeridge, who went to the Ukraine in secret, and found the people starving.

  Then there were Beatrice and Sydney Webb, champions of English Socialism, who said, "The cost of collectivization was driving out the universally hated kulaks and the recalcitrant Don Cossacks by tens or even hundreds of thousands of families," and conclude that dekulakization was planned from the start to summarily eject from their homes "something like a million families. Strong must have been the faith and resolute the will of the men who, in the interest of what seemed to them the public good, could make so momentous a decision."

  Robert Conquest observes that these words might equally be applied to Hitler and the Final Solution.

  Steven Vincent Benet was one of our better poets, and a man who believed in freedom and the Republic, but even he did not see that between Red Fascism and Black Fascism there was only this difference: the Red variety was much more efficient and racked up a much higher score of victims.

  Benet's "Litany" was dedicated to the victims of Black Fascism, but it can serve for all, including, of our charity, Trotsky and Antonov, who were themselves murdered by the regime they created.

  Litany For Dictatorships

  Stephen Vincent Benet

  For all those beaten, for the broken heads,

  The fosterless, the simple, the oppressed,

  The ghosts in the burning city of our time . . .

  For those taken in rapid cars to the house and beaten

  By the skillful boys, the boys with the rubber fists,

  —Held down and beaten, the table cutting their loins,

  Or kicked in the groin and left, with the muscles jerking

  Like a headless hens on the floor of the slaughter-house

  While they brought the next man in with his white eyes staring.

  For those who still "Red Front!" or "God Save the Crown!"

  And for those who are not courageous

  But were beaten nevertheless.

  For those who spit out the bloody stumps of their teeth

  Quietly in the hall,

  Sleep well on stone or iron, watch for the time

  And kill the guard in the privy before they die,

  Those with the deep-socketed eyes and the lamp burning.

  For those who carry the scars, who walk lame—for those

  Whose nameless graves are made in the prison-yard

  And the earth smoothed back before morning and the lime scattered.

  For those slain at once. For those living through months and years

  Enduring, watching, hoping, going each day

  To the work or the queue for meat or the secret club,

  Living meanwhile, begetting children, smuggling guns,

  And found and killed at the end like rats in a drain.

  For those escaping

  Incredibly into exile and wandering there.

  For those who live in the small rooms of foreign cities

  And who yet think of the country, the long green grass,

  The childhood voices, the language, the way wind smelt then,

  The shape of rooms, the coffee drunk at the table,

  The talk with friends, the loved city, the waiter's face,

  The gravestones, with the name, where they will not lie

  Nor in any of that earth. Their children are strangers.

  For those who planned and were leaders and were beaten

  And for those, humble and stupid, who had no plan

  But were denounced, but grew angry, but told a joke,

  But could not explain, but were sent away to the camp,

  But had their bodies shipped back in the sealed coffins,

  "Died of pneumonia." "Died trying to escape!"

  For those growers of wheat who were shot by their own wheat-stacks,

  For those growers of bread who were sent to the ice-locked wastes,

  And their flesh remembers their fields.

  For those denounced by their smug, horrible children

  For a peppermint-star and the praise of the Perfect State,

  For all those strangled or gelded or merely starved

  To make perfect states; for the priest hanged in his cassock,

  The Jew with his chest crushed in and his eyes dying,

  The revolutionist lynched by the private guards

  To make perfect states, in the names of the perfect states.

  For those betrayed by the neighbors they shook hands with

  And for the traitors, sitting in the hard chair

  With the loose sweat crawling their hair and their fingers restless

  As they tell the street and the house and the man's name.

  And for those sitting at table in the house

  With the lamp lit and the plates and the smell of food,

  Talking so quietly; when they hear the cars

  And the knock at the door, and they look at each other quickly

  And the woman goes to the door with a stiff face, Smoothing her dress.

  "We are all good citizens here. We believe in the Perfect State."

  And that was the last time Tony or Karl or Shorty came to the house

  And the family was liquidated later.

  It was the last time.

  We heard the shots in the night

  But nobody knew next day what the trouble was

  And a man must go to his work. So I didn't see him

  For three days, then, and me near out of my mind

  And all the patrols on the streets with their dirty guns

  And when he came back, he looked drunk, and the blood was on him.

  For the women who mourn their dead in the secret night,

  For the children taught to keep quiet, the old children,

  The children spat-on at school.

  For the wrecked laboratory,

  The gutted house, the dunged picture, the pissed-in well,

  The naked corpse of Knowledge flung in the square

  And no man lifting a hand and no man speaking.

  For the cold of the pistol-butt and the bullet's heat,

  For the rope that chokes, the manacles that bind,

  The huge voice, metal, that lies from a thousand tubes

  And the stuttering machine-gun that answers all.

  For the man crucified on the crossed machine-guns

  Without name, without resurrection, without stars,

  His dark head heavy with death and his flesh long sour

  With the smell of his many prisons—John Smith, John Doe,

  John Nobody—oh, crack your mind for his name!

  Faceless as water, naked as the dust,

  Dishonored as the earth the gas-shells poison

  And barbarous with portent.

  This is he.

  This is the man they ate at the green table.

  Putting their gloves on ere they touched the meat.

  This is the fruit of war, the fruit of peace,

  This ripeness of invention, the new lamb,

  The answer to the wisdom of the wise.

  And still he hangs, and still
he will not die,

  And still, on the steel city of our years

  The light fails and the terrible blood streams down.

  We thought we were done with these things but we were wrong.

  We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom.

  We thought the long train would run to the end of Time.

  We thought the light would increase.

  Now the long train stands derailed and the bandits loot it.

  Now the boar and the asp have power in our time.

  Now the night rolls back on the West and the night is solid.

  Our fathers and ourselves sowed dragon's teeth.

  Our children know and suffer the armed men.

  Editor's Introduction To:

  Doing Well While Doing Good

  Hayford Pierce

  In Volume One of this series, we learned how Chap Foey Rider, Anglo-Chinese chairman of Rider Factoring, discovered the Galactic Postal Union through observation of the simple fact that the farther a letter had to travel, the faster it arrived.

  As a result, the Postal Union has sent an ambassador, and Chap Foey Rider must think fast.