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Let’s talk some more about the Moscow disaster and its inevitable fallout — this time from the point of view of the people at ground zero, staring down the flight path of the oncoming bullets. These people are edgy and unhappy, and you should be, too — because what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and if we allow this slow-motion atrocity to set a precedent, we might be the next bird on the block.
New Dresden is not a McWorld: it’s a shitty little flea hole populated by pathologically suspicious Serbs, bumptiously snobbish Saxons, three different flavors of Balkan refugee, and an entire bestiary of psychopathic nationalist loons. The planetary national sport is the grudge match, at which they are undisputed past masters. I say “past masters” for a reason — they’re not as bad as they used to be. The planet has been unified for the past ninety years, since the survivors finished merrily slaughtering everyone else, formed a federation, had a nifty little planetary-scale nuclear war, formed another federation, and buried the hatchet (in one another’s backs).
For most of the past forty years, New Dresden has been ruled by a sinister lunatic, Colonel-General Palacky, chairman of PORC, the Planetary Organization of Revolutionary Councils. Most of Palacky’s policies were dictated by his astrologers, including his now-notorious abolition of the currency and its replacement with bills divisible by 9, his lucky number. Palacky was a raving egomaniac; he renamed the month of January after himself and fixed the rest of the calendar, too, except for November and December (his mother-in-law got August, for some reason). However, toward the end, he became a recluse, seldom venturing beyond the high iron gates of the presidential palace. There he presided over an endless party, providing fire-eaters, wrestlers, tribal dancers, drag queens, and prostitutes for his guests, while dwarfs balancing silver platters loaded with cocaine on their heads patrolled the corridors to ensure all his protégés had a good time. Needless to say, the palace gates were topped with the decaying skulls of those army officers and PORC delegates who disagreed with the Colonel-General over such fundamental policy issues as the need to feed the people.
The inevitable revolution — which finally came four years ago, in the wake of the Moscow scandal — saw Palacky thrown from his own executive ornithopter and installed a more pragmatic junta of bickering, but not entirely insane, PORC apparatchiks. Thus proving some point about it being bad form for any one PORCer to hog the entire trough.
Anyway, that’s the dark picture. On the bright side, they’re not as remorselessly reactionary as Gouranga, as totalitarian and oppressive as Newpeace, as boringly bucolic as Moscow used to be, as intolerantly Islamic as Al-Wahab, or … you get the picture. A planet is a big place, and even the excesses of the PORC junta can’t really damage the economy too badly. Given a couple of decades of civilization and a few war crimes tribunals, New Dresden will be well on the way to being the sort of place that rational tourists don’t automatically cross off their itineraries with a shudder.
In fact, as long as you don’t question the political wisdom of a system with sixteen secret police forces, thirty-seven ministries with their own militias, four representative assemblies (three of which are run on single-party-state lines by different single parties and all of which have veto power over one another), and above all, as long as you don’t mention the civil war, New Dresden can be a welcoming place for visitors. Just as long as your purpose in visiting is to buy the pretty rustic souvenirs and quaint quantum nanocomputers, ooh and aah at the wonderful reconstructed ethnic villages in Chtoborrh Province, and drink the fine laagered ales in the alpine coaching houses, you can’t go wrong.
Life isn’t that bad for the ordinary people, as near as I can tell. I couldn’t get close enough to be sure, because to do that I’d have to spend twenty years as a deep-cover mole. I wasn’t exaggerating the national suspicion toward strangers. It’s a survival trait on New Dresden; they’ve been breeding for paranoia for centuries. But from outside, the standard of living is clearly rising and looks pretty damned good compared to a clusterfuck like the New Republic.
These people have got automobiles — real fuel-cell-powered people movers, no messing around with boilers or exploding piston motors — and they’ve got music-swapping networks and cosmetic surgery and package holidays on the moons and seven different styles of imported extraplanetary fusion cuisine. Wealthy people have less time and energy for shooting each other to bits, so mostly the grudges fester on in the form of elaborate social snubs rather than breaking out in revolutions. And there are only 800 million people, so they’ve got a lot of potential if they can break the violent cycle of the past two and a half centuries.
And there are signs of peace breaking out. These days the secret police spend most of their energy spying on each other. They leave the civilians alone and drink in the same bars at the weekend. There are actually homegrown independent journalists there these days. Who knows? Any day now the place might be civilized …
… Except that three faceless bureaucrats are about to murder everyone.
I’m talking, of course, about whichever of the surviving Muscovite diplomats put their fingers to the trigger and push simultaneously. As opposed to the two of them who could, if they had the bravery to concede that the game is not worth the candle, issue a reprieve to this promising planet of nearly a billion people who are, when you get right down to it, not that much different from the former citizenry of Moscow.
Intestinal fortitude, and the lack thereof. If you’re going to appoint yourself supreme judge in a death penalty case, you should damn well make sure that you’re prepared to pass judgment and live with the consequences. And I don’t believe these cunts have got what it takes.
Which is why I’m on my way to New Dresden. I’m going to corner Ambassador Elspeth Morrow and Trade Minister Harrison Baxter and put the question to them — exactly why are they willing to execute 800 million people, in the absence of any evidence that they’re responsible for the crime of which they are accused?
Watch this space.
Ends (Times Leader)
Frank stretched his arms toward the ceiling of the breakfast room and yawned tremendously. He had slept in, and had a mild hangover. Still, it was better than being hagridden by memories of the incident in the bar the night before. For which he was grateful.
The breakfast lounge was like the other dining rooms — only slightly smaller, with a permanent heated buffet and no bar or cabaret stage against the opposite wall. That late in the morning it was almost empty. Frank helped himself to a plate, loaded it down with hash browns and paprika-poached eggs, added a side order of hot blueberry bagels fresh from the fabricator, and hunted around for a free table. The sole steward on duty wasted no time in offering him a coffeepot, and as he dug into his food Frank tried to kick his tired brain cells into confronting the new day’s agenda.
Item: Transfer point with Septagon Centris Noctis. Passengers departing and boarding. Hmm. Worth staking out the bulletin boards in case? Next item: See to transmitting latest updates. Spool incoming news, read and inwardly digest. Then … fuck it, eat first. He poured a measured dose of cream into his breakfast coffee and stirred it. Wonder if anything’s happened since the last jump?
It was the perpetual dilemma of the interstellar special correspondent — if you stayed in one place, you never got to see anything happen up close and personal, but you could stay plugged into the network of causal channels that spread news in empire time. If you traveled around, you were incommunicado from the instant the ship made its first jump until the moment it entered the light cone of the destination. But what the channels paid Frank for was his insights into strange cultures and foreign politics. You couldn’t get those by staying at home; so every new port of call triggered a mad scramble for information, to be digested into editorials and opinion pieces and essays during the subsequent flight, and spat out at the net next time the ship arrived in a system with bandwidth to the outside universe.