This, of course, resulted in violence. But the Euros, always with that mix of bloodthirsty fanaticism lurking beneath the soft exterior, had traditions for dealing with inassimilable foreigners who caused trouble.
* * *
The Army and Foreign Legion trucks and buses, bearing two battalions of paras, three of infantry, one of engineers, and a lot of building material, showed up before dawn. In an operation well planned and well rehearsed, the Moslem ghetto of Clichy-sous-Bois was surrounded, and the beginnings of a barbed wire fence put up, before the sun was much above the horizon.
* * *
The welfare state required lots of young people and lots of taxes to support it. Unfortunately, both the ethos of the welfare state—which could have been called "Maximum License"—and the taxes which made raising a large family highly problematic, ensured that there could never be enough babies born to keep up that tax base.
There was a solution, of course, major immigration of young workers from elsewhere. This was a solution not without its problems, however. Those problems eventually became highly pressing, as when a group of Moslem "youths" burned down a few government buildings in Paris on Bastille Day.
And then someone remembered that foreign workers did not necessarily have to be free to be useful.
* * *
"Live with the new reality, Imam," said the legionnaire officer to the senior cleric in the banlieue. "You're people will be fed, if they work. But you have abused our hospitality too much for us to allow you the freedom of our country any longer."
Nearby, more Army and Legion trucks and buses, joined now by police vehicles, dropped off Moslems by the hundreds who had been seized in the great sweep up.
"We will riot," answered the imam, huffily. "We will—"
The legionnaire cut him off. "You will maintain control or we will cut off your water, your heat, your food. There will be no riots."
"The conscience of the world—"
"Means nothing. You forgot, I think, that when we banned speech that might offend you and yours, we also took upon ourselves the power to ban any speech we desired to ban. Every silver lining has its cloud, Imam."
Chapter Four
"War is pusillanimously carried on in this degenerate age; quarter is given; towns are taken and people spared; even in a storm, a woman can hardly hope for the benefit of a rape."
—Philip Dormer Stanhope,
Fourth Earl of Chesterfield
4/Intercalary/466 AC, Officers' and Centurions' Club, Camp Balboa, Ninewa, Sumer
Carrera had extended his leave to spend local Christmas with his family. And he'd felt like a rat, too, camp-sick the whole time for his army and guilty that all those deployed couldn't be home with their families.
Patricio Carrera, Dux, in Latin, or Duque, in Spanish, commander of the deployed portion of the Legion del Cid, drummed his fingers with irritation while watching the projection screen set up in the main room of the club.
"What are you going to do if you win, Adnan?" Carrera asked of the Sumeri, Adnan Sada, seated to his right.
"To answer that question, Patricio, you have to answer the question of why the people would have voted for me."
"Because here, in Ninewa and over in Pumbadeta provinces we've got relative peace?"
Sada laughed, slightly and cynically. "That's a part of it, too, of course. But the real reason, only somewhat related to that, is that I am not a nut, either tribalist, sectarian, fascist or leftist, that I am not really a democrat, and that I am ruthless enough to hold things together. If they vote for me, they're voting to hold the country together, whatever it takes. They're also voting to get rid of this experiment in parliamentary democracy which scares the living shit out of most of them."
"You mean they want to have 'one man, one vote, once'?"
"Pretty much," Sada agreed, then amended, "or rather, they don't want there to be a chance for the rise of the sort of lunatics democracy tends to throw up in this kind of society. They also want their traditions and their tribes respected. They want someone able to keep the Farsi at bay; yes, even the ones who share sect with the Farsi would prefer being a majority in a non-sectarian Sumer to being an Arab minority in a non-Arab state."
"Are you planning on de-socializing?"
"There's no way to," Sada answered, definitively, "not entirely. It's the curse of a single-resource economy. When someone tells me how to divide up the oil without just pouring money into corrupt hands . . . "
Sada's face suddenly looked grim as his voice acquired a hint of despair.
"Most Arabs, you know, think Allah gave us the oil as a special gift because he loves us. I suspect he gave it to us as a trap because he hates us."
Carrera looked down, thinking, Balboa, too, is something of a single resource country, the Transitway. The other major income producer, the Legion, is not, strictly speaking, a part of the economy. How would Balboa divide the Transitway? When they've tried it just meant huge bribes for private profit.
Sada continued, "I am of a mind to de-socialize most of those things the previous government took control of; agriculture, construction, liquor distilling. Who knows, maybe I'll be able to buy a decent local beer and whiskey someday, rather than having to rely on the Legion's unofficial imports."
Sada was not one of those Moslems who took the proscription against alcohol too very seriously.
"In any case," Sada finished, "I will deliberately wreck this doomed-to-fail, absolutely impossible experiment in parliamentarianism and work to create what can work, a federation of the tribes with a national army. And, after all, what the hell difference what kind of government we have provided it doesn't try to govern much? I will never be able to eradicate corruption so I'll just have to work with it, even to regularize it."
That sparked a thought for Carrera. When the day comes, as it will, when the government of Balboa has to go, how will Parilla and I organize the country? Around the provinces that, outside of Valle de la Luna, don't mean much? Around the tercios of the legions? It's something to think on. Of course, first we'll have to fight the Taurans who are only in Balboa to ensure we can't get rid of the government.
Carrera's thoughts were interrupted by a loud cheer and some warbling from the female serving staff at the club, which included several dozen Sumeri hookers, war widows mostly, that the Legion had taken under its wing. He looked up and saw that the main screen showed election returns from Pumbadeta and its environs; a sweep for Sada.
"They appreciate that, as far as they can tell, I saved them from you," Sada commented, with a grin.
It was true enough. Without Sada's personal example and intervention Carrera had been determined to kill every Pumbadetan male capable of sprouting a beard. And they'd known it.