After the Revolution, page 37
All eyes turned to Manny.
“I should…probably go talk to him.”
“Don’t do anything you’re not comfortable doing, Emmanuel,” Donald said.
“Fuck that,” Jim said. “The bastard is on the ropes. Shame him! Shame him good.”
As he headed for the exit, Manny looked to Major Clark. The old soldier’s one good eye was narrow and focused.
“Manny,” he said, “if he didn’t want to talk he wouldn’t have gone up to the bar. He’d have just left. There’s no honor lost in another conversation. Another try.”
Roland was three beers in by the time Manny reached him. And knowing Rolling Fuck that could mean he’d already ingested enough acid to kill a large octopus. The chromed mercenary was already wavering in his seat by the time Manny pulled up a seat.
“Hey,” Manny said.
“Heeeeeey buddy,” Roland replied in a voice that was just…super stoned. “Sorry about getting angry back there.” The post-human spun his empty pint-glass around on the bar table. It was a strange sight to see. Manny had gotten so used to seeing Roland as something akin to a Greek God. He certainly wasn’t omniscient, or omnipotent, but he was unspeakably powerful and just as irresponsible to leave out around humans.
And yet here he was, fiddling with an empty pint glass like a nervous college freshman standing at the back wall of some house party. Manny felt a surge of sympathy.
“It’s OK, man. I actually think I get it,” he said. “Like, I’ve had plenty of chances to join either the SDF or the Austin Defense Forces. I never did. Maybe some of that’s because I’m scared. Hell, up until like…a few days ago, my plan was to get the fuck off this continent as soon as I could afford it.”
Manny paused and bit his lip. It was an instinctive gesture, his gut’s reaction to a sudden burst of self-awareness. Manny hadn’t thought about any of this before.
“I dunno,” he said. “This shit’s been going on basically all my life. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t scared of something like this happening. I didn’t understand any of it as a kid. But I can remember being seven or eight years old and just being so angry at the soldiers. Even our soldiers. I thought, if all you assholes would just refuse to be led into battle, none of this could happen.”
“But you know that’s not how it works, right?” Roland asked, as he turned away from Manny and waved at the bartender.
“We love this war shit. At least some of us do, those of us who are… Oh!” The bartender arrived. Roland ordered “a mai-tai mixed with a margarita and one of those, whaddya goddamn call ’em, oh yeah a fuckin’ MO-HI-TO.”
“Roland,” Manny’s voice was gentle but firm, “how many beers did you drink before I got here?”
“Not beers,” Roland said in a casual voice, “Mushroom rum. Sweet, but not bad.” He licked his lips while he watched the bartender work through the Herculean task of crafting his requested beverage.
“Roland,” Manny said. And the chromed man turned back to him.
“Ah, sorry. It’s been too long a stretch of sober for me. I got excited. What the fuck was I saying?”
“That war is fun.”
“Oh, yeah. As long as you don’t think you’ll die. That’s why all throughout history you had so many generals and politicians kickin’ off conflicts. Because they felt safe, and when you’re pretty sure you’ll live, war is an absolute hoot. That’s the problem with me and fighting.”
“The problem is you like it too much?”
Roland grabbed his hand. The chromed man moved so fast Manny didn’t even see the motion-blur. Roland’s hand was just wrapped around his wrist, immovable. He squeezed, hard enough that it hurt. Roland’s eyes bulged out and stared into Manny with a manic intensity that was frightening.
“I. Fuckin’. Love. It. It’s like sex on heroin and bungee jumping and getting rammed in the ass and that first shot of liquor you sneak when you’re fourteen, all at once and mixed with the best actual battle drugs the most bloated military budget in history could buy.”
He loosened his grip and turned half away from Manny.
“That’s why I shouldn’t do it. Because I’ll get carried away, like I got carried away in Dallas. Maybe this time I won’t be able to stop when it’s time to stop.”
Manny kept his eyes on Roland’s. The big man turned a little further to the left, but he didn’t look away.
“How do you know that your intervention won’t make things better?” Manny asked. “Maybe if we can kill enough of the Martyrs their power will be broken forever. Maybe your intervention will be the first step toward making this a more livable part of the globe.”
Roland laughed. It started as a low chuckle that then cascaded into a series of rolling, rib-cracking howls. Manny didn’t get the joke and couldn’t find any humor in his words. So he sat tight until Roland’s mirth subsided and the chromed man had recovered enough to explain himself.
“Sorry, sorry,” he said between chuckles. “It’s just…ah shit, kid, you’re too young to know how funny that is.” Roland straightened up and wiped a tear from his eye. “See, you’re talking about me the exact same way people talked about the U.S. Military back when I was a kid.”
The bartender came by and sat down Roland’s drink, an enormous jug filled with a multi-hued mix of alcoholic beverages. The post-human took a deep pull from his maitaigarito. Manny took the chance to ask a question.
“I thought you didn’t remember anything further back than a few years ago?”
“I don’t remember anything clearly,” Roland said. “But I do remember bits and pieces. And I remember being a young man and watching the news break in an off-base bar. Some election had gone bad in Bolivia. The president announced he was sending in more soldiers to help keep the peace.”
“Did it work?” Manny asked.
“I dunno, kid. What’d your school teach you about Bolivia?”
“That there was a genocide in– oh,” Manny said as Roland’s point sunk in. “Right.”
“Ayep,” Roland grunted and took another, deeper gulp from his ridiculous beverage.
They were quiet for a while. Manny took the opportunity to take a long look at Roland. His face held only a few lines around his eyes and lips. And yet he still looked old, positively ancient. There appeared to be a tremendous weight to the man’s eyes, accentuated by the deep wrinkles underneath them. It looked as if the chromed man’s face was sagging underneath the weight of what he had seen.
“Roland,” Manny asked, “do you have any idea where you came from?”
“I think I was born around Mississippi, b–”
“No,” Manny interrupted, “not like where you were born. But how you became what you are today. You said you’ve been disconnected from the Internet for the last ten years. I’ve got to guess your implants are even older than that. But the way everyone here talks about you, you’re still King Shit.”
“Oh,” Roland said. “Yeah. That. I got no real idea what happened there. I know I was in the Army. I’m pretty sure that’s when the tinkering started.”
“Sure,” said Manny, “but didn’t a lot of the Road People start as ex-special forces who went rogue? Why are you special?”
“I got no clear answer to that question, buddy.” He smiled as if he’d just remembered something good. “I guess I’ve got that surgery coming up. Once I get my memories back, I’ll let you know what I find out.”
Manny laughed too, but his was cold and bitter. “Sure. I’ll probably be in a refugee camp at that point. Or dead.”
“Damn, kid,” Roland said.
“Yeah,” Manny said, “I’m really not trying to manipulate you here. It’s just–”
“No, I get it,” Roland waved him off. “It’s fair. You’ve got every right to be pissed. I just can’t…” he trailed off. Manny put a hand on Roland’s shoulder. He didn’t understand how the post-human felt. How could he? Manny couldn’t even conceive of having that kind of power. But he could see why it was a difficult choice.
There was a part of Manny, a dark manipulative chunk of his soul, that knew he was on his way to changing Roland’s mind. This was essentially the same strategy he used on the job. You built empathy with people through a combination of shared experiences and regular engagement. That empathy paid dividends when you needed some Lieutenant’s approval to cross through a checkpoint. It would pay dividends here if he was careful and consistent.
That’s fucked up man, he thought. You’re manipulating your friend into killing a bunch of people.
“You know what,” Manny said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to–”
Roland drained the rest of his mug, belched, and looked over at Manny. He looked unsteady, half-conscious. The chromed man put his left hand over Manny’s hand while it rested on his shoulder. He fixed Manny with his half-focused eyes and nodded.
“Fuck it,” Roland said, “I’ll fuckin’ help you. I’d be a dick if I didn’t. Sasha might do OK, picking up a gun. But you’re a damn bullet magnet. Can’t let that happen again.”
“Thank you,” Manny said with a nod. “I know–”
“Don’t say anything else, kid. I really don’t want to think about what I just promised to do.”
Manny found Sasha sitting around a fire pit, outside the city proper, deep in conversation with Donald Farris. Sasha sat on the ground, legs splayed out wide with her butt in the grass. Donald sat in a folding chair. It wasn’t cold outside, precisely, but it had cooled off a great deal from the heat of the day. The air held just the barest hint of winter. It was shaping up to be one of those odd September days where Texas seemed on the verge of an actual seasonal shift.
One look at Sasha’s face told him she was at least as unsettled as Roland. He didn’t want to crowd her so he squatted down on the other side of Donald.
“Emmanuel,” the old man’s voice was as smooth and rich as Manny remembered from the narration of his documentary. “It’s good to see you. Sasha’s been telling me her story. She actually just turned to the subject of you.”
“Yeah?” Manny asked.
“Yes, she was telling me how she met you and Marigold, and how you both helped her find her way free of the Kingdom.”
“Oh,” he said, and looked to Sasha. “I never really met Marigold. I didn’t realize you knew her well.”
Sasha shook her head. “I only knew her a little while. I was just supposed to be administering tests to her. But I couldn’t stop her from talking and…she made sense. She made more sense than what was going on out in the Kingdom every day.”
Sasha stared down into the fading embers of the fire.
“I feel stupid for ever believing in that place.”
“And what do you believe in now?” Donald asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It seems arrogant to decide that God doesn’t exist just because I let myself get taken in by a cult.”
“Mmm,” the old man nodded. “The good news is, you’re young. You’ve got plenty of time to figure things out again.” His cheeks turned up into a smile and his face blossomed with wrinkles.
“Now,” he looked up at Manny, “what have you been up to, my dear boy?”
“Talking to Roland,” Manny said. “He agreed to help, by the way. He’s going to fight.”
Donald Farris’s smile turned into a frown. Manny hadn’t been expecting that.
“How did you do it?” he asked in a somber, grave voice.
“We just talked for a while,” Manny said. “He explained why he didn’t want to fight. It sounded very reasonable…” Manny paused, and then made the choice to lie just a little. “I wasn’t trying to change his mind. I didn’t ask him to help.” That last part was true, at least. “I do feel bad, though. I’m sure he changed his mind because of me.”
“Is it really on you if he chooses to fight?” Sasha asked. “I killed two men. Both of those deaths are on me. But you didn’t order Roland to do anything.”
“No,” Donald Farris agreed, “but I doubt Roland would’ve made the decision to intervene if Manny hadn’t pressed.”
“That’s probably true,” Manny admitted.
Donald looked from Manny to Sasha.
“There’s a war ritual, peculiar to the men and women and whatevers of this community. I think you’d benefit from seeing it.”
“A ritual?” Sasha asked.
“Not a religious one, I assure you. But yes. They call it their war ritual.” He extended a hand out to the field around Rolling Fuck. Manny looked out at it for the first time since coming out here and realized that people seemed to be packing up.
“Right now,” Donald said, “the citizens are packing up their tents and their RVs and preparing the city for departure. It’s moving out with their army. They’ll drive that thing,” he jerked a thumb in the direction of the City of Wheels, “right up to the damn battlefield. It’ll be behind them the whole time they’re fighting. I think they stole the idea from the ancient Celts.”
“Anyway,” he said, “once the city is in position, they’ll open up these little boxes that look quite a lot like bee hives and they’ll let out a swarm of about a thousand little drones. Those’re mostly just facial-recognition cameras attached to wings and a wee engine. They’ll record everything and send data on the faces of every enemy fighter to a central computer in the city.”
“What good does that do?” Manny asked.
“It gives us a chance to identify those men, or women, so we can scrape their social media profiles and display pictures and videos from their lives, once they die. The whole city, everyone who isn’t fighting, turns out to watch that.”
“That sounds fucking terrible,” Manny said. “What do we gain from watching the home movies of dead men?”
“A memorial.”
Manny didn’t understand, but he could see that Donald Farris was revving himself up for an involved explanation. He let the old man talk.
“I was a small child when my country invaded Iraq, along with the United States and a few other nations. The war was news, yes. But that’s all it was. Even our own soldiers were more numbers than real people. I’d hear that two Royal Marines had died in a roadside bombing, and it meant less to me than when my neighbor broke his leg slipping down the stairs.”
“War isn’t like that for us,” Manny said, “I don’t know anyone in Austin who hasn’t lost a friend, or family, to the fighting. It affects us all.”
“So it does, my boy. So it does. And if any of our warriors die today, you can bet it’ll effect everyone in this social experiment we call a city. But you didn’t let me finish. The thing that was truly toxic about my childhood knowledge of war, is that it erased the other side. Our boys didn’t do body counts. So there were seldom reports on how many civilians we killed, how many enemy fighters died. That information was out there, but you had to look hard. Most people never did.”
Donald Farris shrugged, and then winced from the motion.
“It’s easy to get people to care about their own soldiers. But if you want to stop wars, or at least make them less common, you’ve got to get people to give a shit about the soldiers on the other side. That, my young friend, is where your people are even worse than my own. You’re close enough to the war to not just feel indifferent about these Martyrs marching off to die. You actively want them to die. That’s understandable. But it’s also poisonous. When you dehumanize others, you become less human yourself.”
Manny nodded, not sure of what to say.
“In my youth,” Donald Farris continued, “the country that occupied this continent was the most powerful nation on earth. They held the keys to the deadliest military machine ever constructed. It was easy to get Americans to support involvement in a thousand little conflicts, because each only required a small fraction of the nation’s military power. It only risked a few American lives. But millions of people around the world died. Women and children and old men and dumb, young boys from Yemen to Turkey to Guatemala. To justify those murders Americans had to make those people less than human. And once they’d done that, it wasn’t such a great jump to do it to their neighbors.”
He stared up at the setting sun, and Manny saw tears in his eyes.
“What you’re going to see tomorrow is the best attempt I’ve seen, so far, to bridge the empathy gap between a people and their foes.”
Chapter 23
Sasha.
Rolling Fuck trundled forward, crunching its way over the Texas plains and leaving a carpet of flattened grass and broken trees in its wake. And Sasha Marion, situated in a little purple building atop one of the city’s tallest spires, couldn’t quite believe her eyes. In spite of its many wheels the city didn’t look like the kind of thing that should be able to move. It was as if the Empire State Building had taken up jogging.
Sasha had only really talked to Donald Farris and Manny since the war council had concluded. She’d wanted to go up to the bar with Manny and Roland, since they were the only people here she even sort of knew. But their conversation had seemed a private sort of thing. At first she’d thought that her hosts had made an oversight in leaving her unwatched. Surely they wouldn’t let someone who’d been their enemy just a few days ago wander freely through their home? But as the hours went by it became clear that’s exactly what they’d done.
So Sasha explored. It had been exhilarating, actually. Every inch of the city was different and strange and new to her. Across the gantries there were numerous market stalls with fresh meat and produce. At first she recognized all the foods. But the higher and further she went, the stranger everything seemed. The meat went from beef and chicken to alligator and zebra and mammoth and, eventually, something Sasha thought might be from an actual dinosaur. She was sure it was all lab grown. And the produce was certainly gene-modified. At one point she came across a kiosk filled with fruit that had been tweaked to take the shape of gigantic, erect penises. There were penis watermelons, penis oranges, penis apples, and even bags of tiny penis-shaped grapes.
