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.”
At the end of the seminar, Lucas Fry turned to Yankee. “Let’s sneak out I’d like nothing better than to play some silly game with Nora. Is there a place where I can buy her a present? Is there anything she likes?”
Yankee took the general over to a friend’s house whose daughter fashioned jewelry as a hobby. “I can’t think of a thing she likes better than baubles.”
Lucas picked out a chain platinum headband inlaid with translucent stones from Starbase’s primary “Do you think she’ll like it?”
“She probably won’t wear it. She likes to squirrel away pretty things where she can dig them up and cherish them.”
“Well, women don’t wear their jewelry anyway. They keep all that stuff in boxes to show their girlfriends.” Fry bought the headband from the young girl with praise for her workmanship.
“That was a good speech you gave us,” said Yankee, gliding along the hallway and up the steel stairs. “You make a fine mentor.”
“That’s what Grand Viziers are for,” muttered the general gruffly. “It’s going to be touch and go. My biggest worry is Earth.”
“Why?”
“You’re a flatlander. You figure it out I can’t. But we have to bring the mass of them over to our side. They’ve forgotten that there ever was a war. Amnesia. Only the colonies are preparing. But once the kzinti have the factories to churn out hypershunt motors they will be converging on every human world from all over the Patriarchy. Flatlander’s will have to take the brunt of the attack Earth is the place with the population. It’s where we’ll have to find our cannon-fodder.”
“Do you think the ARM is behind the shut down of public debate?”
“Yah. For security reasons. Old habit. They can’t resist any ploy if it might stop people from thinking about war.
Maybe you flatlanders were buying too many toy guns. Made them nervous. They reacted. But it is not just the ARM. It’s the flatlanders themselves. The ARM’S message has been assimilated into the culture. War is no longer even part of the idiom. Kzinti warriors have to be marching across Kansas before… Oh what the hell. I want to see Nora’s face when she sees my bauble. You don’t think she is afraid of me, do you?”
Yankee had all of his cousin’s old papers. Her high school yearbooks. Her many attempts at writing a diary. Her letters to her father. School essays. Drawings. Her photo album. Her anguished, and finally angry, exchange with the war department. Her patriotic newspaper essays that had been franchised for a while on the net. Drafts of the many love letters she wrote to boys. First drafts of letters never sent-embarrassments that she had neglected to erase. One of them was a mushy love letter to a certain Yankee Clandeboye. He had never known, from the way she treated him, that she had ever had a crush on him.
For no particular reason he began to organize this unsorted mess. They all hoped Nora might recover her use of words. She would never recover her memories. She would always be the woman who had grown up half-slave, half-kzinrett, born on Hssin. Those were the only memories she had. But maybe, if she ever learned to read and talk again, she might find an interest in these papers by the woman she once had been-like a granddaughter reading the musty diary of a heroic grandmother never known.
Gradually, as Yankee got involved, as memories reminded him of the charmer who had twiddled compulsively with the same strand of hair for all the years he had known her, he started to write about her. He had a need to organize his thoughts. He wanted other people to understand this heroine. It was a story that grew on him, built around her Hssin diaries.
Something that stirred inside him told him it was a way to talk to the flatlander soul.
He began his story while Lieutenant Nora Argamentine was living as a kzinrett in the dungeon of a wrecked interstellar fortress beside a dying star, totally dependent upon a kzin who thought that it was natural for females to tend their males and young without the aid of an independent self-a kzin who had the biotechnical power, and the inclination, to take away her mind so that she might more easily fit into his world and serve him.
He built the legend around her hidden diary. With each brain operation it became more urgent for her to record what she was afraid she was losing forever. Yankee lovingly annotated her entries with her pictures, with
