“We’ll be better off than under a lot of human leaders I can name!”
Their faces had grown flushed, and their voices had risen. Liese and Rose broke off their conversation and looked over at them. The doctor said, “And Alan Lessing? How does he fit into your computer plan for the master race?”
“He is… was… a valued co-worker. He’s also an old friend. Nothing more.”
“He was a protege of Herman Mulder, who is Secretary of State to President Outram, and Vice-President of your Party of Humankind under Dom.”
“That’s so.” Wrench regained control. “Did Lessing talk about Mr. Mulder?”
“No. He never mentions anything after his… what do you call it?… secondary school… high school. General Copley told Rose about Lessing ‘s friendship with Mulder.”
“He was Mr. Mulder’s bodyguard out in India. When he vanished in the Ponape raid, the Mulders were devastated. Now that he’s turned up like the proverbial bad penny they’re ecstatic.” Wrench paused for breath. “Lessing doesn’t discuss the present? His own experiences? What’s happening in the world?”
“He shows no interest. He doesn’t seem to care.”
“Not even about Pacov and Starak? God, the things he must’ve seen!”
“It’s like a cinema film to him. He watches but he does not participate, even when he himself is one of the actors.”
“He was always an aloof bastard,” Wrench mused. “Our society bred many like him: the ‘peripheral people,’ the ‘terminally unin-vol ved, ‘ as somebody put it. I don ‘t know if Lessing even cared that much about his wife “
“Wife? What wife?”
“You didn’t know? My God! Yes, a lovely Indian girl, Jameela Husaini. The Izzies killed her during their raid on Ponape. He never told you?”
“He never said…! Wehadno idea!“The doctor appeared angry, almost as if Lessing had betrayed him personally.
“As though she didn’t affect him, not down deep, where he lives.” Wrench lifted the lid of the pot to see if there was more tea. The stuff was strong and black and aromatic, the way he liked it.
The doctor stood up. “Wherever Alan Lessing lives, it is some place very private, beneath barriers and walls and defenses thicker than any Führerbunker.”
Wrench motioned to Liese. “Thanks for the tea. We’ve a plane to catch. Lessing should be ready by now.”
As they moved toward the door Dr. Casimir said, “By the way, Cadre-Commander, I am a Jew.”
“I had guessed it,” Wrench said. “I’m surprised you haven’t moved on to the Izzie colonies in Russia.”
“Copley doesn’t bother me. I have things to do here.”
“Things change,” Wrench replied, and smiled.
The liberals — in various guises and incarnations — ran the Western world for a century. Their goals were highly idealistic and altruistic — in theory. In fact, of course, the liberals could never realize the aspirations of even their best thinkers: freedom from want, employment for all, care for the sick and the aged, an end to crime— the list is long. Their difficulty lay in Their misreading of human nature; their theories of equality and human malleability simply had no basis in reality. The Left adopted the theoretical communism of the Jewish intellectuals, only to find that this produced Russian, Polish, Czechoslovak, Bulgarian, etc. despotisms instead of “equality for all” and “to each according to his need.” At best, these communist states eventually returned to a quasi-capitalism; at worst, they were unimaginably awful.
Outside of Europe, communism manifested itself in localized forms: for example. People’s China, Viet Nam, North Korea. Laos, and Cambodia. These, too, were despotisms. They had new names and faces, but beneath the surface they were merely carry-overs from Asian societies of the past. The same was true in South and Central America: traditional dictatorships decked out with red stars.
The liberal Center — exemplified by Great Britain, France, and the United States— chose one or another form of “representative democracy.” If these states failed, it was not for want of tying. But it was too difficult to make needed social changes while at the same time upholding every conceivable version of everybody’s “civil rights.” The capability to adapt to new situations became bogged down in the ever-spreading web of administration, bureaucracy, and the pressures of competing personalities and “interest groups.”
The greatest failing of centrist liberal thought is inaction: teten to too many voices, adopt too many solutions, and end by being dominated by others who are stronger and better directed. Shall I give you a great recipe for failure? Don’t initiate and maintain strong policies: always react — often weakly and Inappropriately — to those of others. Make only minor changes since major ones will certainly offend somebody. When in doubt, call a committee, hold a seminar, have a referendum, file lawsuits, let everybody have a say. Leave the real power in the hands of clandestine cliques within the government. See to it that your citizens are too sated with bread and circuses — burger-pops, holo-vid, and football-ever to demand a real role in their own governance. When confronted with an urgent choice, be sure to dilly-dally, then choose the path of least resistance. Accomplish little-and do that slowly. Such gutless, hypocritical, political game-playing won’t work in our post-Pacov world. It wouldn’t have worked much longer without Pacov and Starak. We faced-and still face-horrendous problems: the Greenhouse Effect, pollution, war. drugs. AIDS (which continues to spread into the heterosexual. White population from the groups in which it is endemic, in spite of our best efforts), and a dozen others. Outmoded institutions will no longer serve, and we cannot allow our present rulers to destroy our environment through action orinaction. Regrettably, the past clings to us, as we cling to it.
The Party of Humankind offers a way: a way not just out, but up. We call for work and sacrifice and deep changes— sometimes hard, difficult, slashing changes— in our society. We love America; we love our ethnos; we believe that all people, everywhere, should love their own ethnos similarly. As separate, homogeneous societies working together in friendly collaboration, we can build a world where Pacov, Starak. and atomic destruction can never happen again. There can be no compromise, no salvaging the old and thus shortchanging the new.!e must rid ourselves of social parasites and doctrines that weaken us! We must do it now. We cannot wait. We cannot hesitate. We must not fail. Our ethnos, our nation, and our children’s futures are at stake.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Saturday, August 21, 2049
The room tinkled and dripped; it took Lessing back to some dim, childhood memory of a waterfall, wet leaves, sinuous shadows over dark-glistening pebbles in a stream. He remembered birds, butterflies, and even a beady-eyed, grey fieldmouse come to wash its face and drink.
Probably another goddamned movie: one of those nature-pom shows his father used to watch on the arts channel. Any minute they’d be showing the fieldmice copulating, a snake doing a skin-striptease, or a tall-antlered elk mounting his mate and bellowing out his joy for all the forest to hear.
He grinned to himself. He was over most of that now: no more trouble distinguishing fantasy from reality. The room was one of the vast sitting rooms in Herman Mulder’s mansion in Virginia. At the moment it did resemble a cavern behind a waterfalclass="underline" dim, nacreous, filled with hanging plants and flowering shrubs and running water and the scents of dark earth and growing things. Sixty feet away, by the far wall, Mrs. Mulder fluttered in the emerald gloom, adjusting the lamps, setting the chairs at precise angles, flicking away a bit of lint here, a mote of dust there. She’d done it all before, and Eva, the housekeeper, had done it before that.