The Lotus Eaters

Cut off from support by Endara's desertion, the remaining six Santanderns hid out in a pension in Balboa City. There they might have remained in safety had not one of them used the word chumbo to indicate his male appendage to a visiting whore, along with instructions as to what he wanted her to do with it. In Balboan slang chumbo meant a black man. In Santander it meant penis.

Looking for the substantial reward offered for information leading to the capture of the bombers and assassins, the de la Plata-born hooker had recognized the word as one used by the more numerous Santandern hookers in Balboa. She had gone straight to the police after collecting her earnings. In the ensuing firefight, four policemen were hit, three mortally, and all but one of the Santanderns shot to death. That one, after being delivered to Fernandez, had cause to regret not being killed.

Chapter Fifteen

Political revolutions fail. It is in their nature. That is to say, a revolution, any revolution, will tend to fail unless it isn't really a revolution at all, but a recognition of a pre-existing fact. To actually change anything profoundly, quickly, and lastingly is simply too hard.

This does not mean, of course, that the revolutionaries will fail. They may, indeed, take power. They very often manage to do quite well for themselves. Very often, indeed, they manage to do pretty well by their great-great-grandchildren. And yet still the revolution itself will have failed.

Between Old Earth and New, we have seen dozens of failed revolutions: France, 1789 AD, got rid of its king and nobility well enough . . . and had an emperor and a new nobility within fifteen years. No Marxist revolution, whether Leninist or Tsarist, has managed to last more than about seventy-five Old Earth years. How many peoples of once- colonized states have awakened a few years after their revolutions wishing the colonialists were back? Even here in Balboa, Belisario Carrera's revolution, in the early days, got rid of the Old Earthers, but morphed into a corrupt oligarchy of our own within a couple of generations.

And the successes? One can count them on the fingers of one hand. And in each case, be it the plebes seceding from the patricians in ancient Rome, the Athenian demes demanding power in return for their service in the fleet, or the American colonists, two factors stand clear: Those revolutions were limited in what they sought to achieve, and they recognized an already established state of facts. Thus, even these examples beg the question of whether they were revolutions at all in anything but name.

—Jorge y Marqueli Mendoza,

Historia y Filosofia Moral,

Legionary Press, Balboa,

Terra Nova, Copyright AC 468

Anno Condita 471 Punta de Coco Airfield, Isla Real, Balboa, Terra Nova

Two Nabakov-21 jet transports awaited the party on the airfield, their engines turning the air over the concrete of the strip into a couple of blotches of wavering haze. Within the haze, surrounded by it, two double lines of sweating Pashtun, along with a dozen Balboan tutors, boarded, along with their families. The Pashtun wore the pixilated desert battledress of the Legion but with turbans atop their heads. The tack for the horses they would pick up in Pashtia. The impedimenta—personal baggage, tentage and supplies—was already aboard and strapped down under netting.

'Now listen to me carefully,' said Carrera to Tribune Cano, wagging a finger a few inches in front of the latter's nose, 'I don't care if these people think Hamilcar is Jesus Christ, himself, let alone a reincarnation of Alexander. There will be no bowing and scraping. None.'

Carrera had to use his left index finger; his right arm was still immobilized.

'Easier to order than to enforce, Duque,' said Alena, Cano's Pashtun wife, standing at her husband's side. 'He is Iskandr, the avatar of God.'

Carrera smiled then, thinking, Never underestimate the benefits of a classical education.

'Indeed,' he said. 'Let us suppose for the moment that that is so. Was Iskandr, the boy, told that he was a god? Did his people do proskynesis? Was he spoiled?'

Alena's smooth brow wrinkled. 'Well . . . no, not so far as we know, anyway. His godhood wasn't made manifest until God himself spoke to him at the place called Siwah.'

'Right. Has this happened, to the best of your knowledge, with Hamilcar, my dear?'

Wrinkled brow was joined by pursed lips. 'Ummm . . . no,' she forced out.

'Does it not then occur to you that that is the way it must happen, that the boy not be treated as a god until God himself decrees it?'

Brow and lips were then joined by narrowing eyes. 'Perhaps.'

Carrera looked from Alena to Cano and back again, while saying, 'No perhaps about it. You will not ruin my boy. Though there is something . . . if I could speak with your wife privately, Tribune . . .'

* * *

I will not weep, Lourdes ordered herself. I will not; I will not; I will not! I will . . .

'Mom, stop crying,' Hamilcar said. 'You're embarrassing me.'

'You don't understand,' she sniffed. 'You are my son. You are my life. Seeing you go is like having a piece of me cut away.' The mother dropped to her knees on the scorching concrete and wrapped her arms around the boy.

'No, I understand,' he whispered. 'But you bore all of me in a small part of you. You, on the other hand, from beginning to now, are the only home I've ever known. I am sooo going to miss you,