This was one of the more successful of the terrorist groups. It operated for more than ten years before The Brand was caught, with eight others. Their goals were always the same: an extremely difficult and dangerous feat that needed resources of skill, bravery, cunning. They were all people who had to have danger to feel alive at all. They were "left-wing," socialists of a sort. But discussions of a "line," the variations of dogma, were never important to them. When they exchanged the phrases of the international left-wing vocabulary, it was without passion.
They did not court, or crave, publicity, but used it.
Most of their engagements with danger were anonymous and did not reach newspapers and television.
They blackmailed an international business corporation or individual, for money. Large sums would find their way to refugee organisations, prisoners escaping or in hiding, or to the "network." Young people in refugee camps would find themselves mysteriously supported into universities or training of some kind. Flats and houses were set up in this country or that, sometimes across the world, for the use of the "network." Organisations similar to theirs, temporarily in difficulties, would be helped. They also blackmailed and kidnapped, for information. They wanted details of how this business worked, the linkages and bonds of that multinational firm. They wanted information from secret military installations - and got it. They acquired materials to make various types of bomb, weapon, and supplied other groups with them. If any one of these young people had been asked why she or he did not use these talents "for the common good" the reply would have been "But I do already!" for they saw themselves as an alternative world government.
When they were caught, it was by chance; and this is not the place to describe how.
The Brand, and her associates, were in prison, all with multiple charges against them. Murders had been committed, but not for the pleasure of murder. The pleasure - if that is a word that may be used for the heightened, taut, lightning shimmer of excitement they sought, or rather, manufactured - did not come from the isolated brutal act or torture of an individual, but from the exploit as a whole - its conception, the planning, the slow building of tension, the exact scrupulous attention to a thousand details.
INDIVIDUAL FIVE (Terrorist Type 12)
X was the son of rich parents, business people who had made a fortune through armaments and industries associated with war: World War I provided the basis of this fortune. His parents had both been married several times, he had known no family life, had been emotionally self-sufficient since a small child. He spoke many languages, could claim citizenship from several countries. Was he Italian, German, Jewish, Armenian, Egyptian? He was any one of these, at his convenience.
A man of talent and resources, he could have become an efficient part of the machinery of death that was his inheritance, but he would not, could not, be any man's heir.
He was fifteen when he brought off several coups of blackmail - emotional legerdemain - among the ramifications of his several families' businesses. These showed the capacity to analyse; a cold far-sightedness, an indifference to personal feelings. He was one of those unable to separate an individual from her, his circumstances. The man who was his real father (though he did not think of him as such, claimed a man met half a dozen times almost casually, whose conversation had illuminated his life, as "father"), this ordinary, harassed, anxious man, who died in middle age of a heart attack, one of the richest men in the world, was seen by him as a monster, because of the circumstances he had been born into. X had never questioned this attitude: could not. For him, a man or a woman was his, her circumstances, actions. Thus guilt was ruled out for him; it was a word he could not understand, not even by the processes of imaginative effort. He had never made the attempt to understand the people of his upbringing: they were all rotten, evil. His own milieu, the "network," was his family.
Meeting The Brand was important to him. He was twelve years younger than she was. He studied her adventures with the total absorption others might bring to "God," or some absolute.
First there had been that casually met man whose ruthless utterances seemed to him the essence of wisdom. Then there was The Brand.
When they had sexual relations - almost at once, since for her sex was an appetite to be fed, and no more - he felt confirmed in his deepest sense of himself: the cold efficiency of the business, never far from perversity, seemed to him a statement of what life was.
He had never felt warmth for any human being, only admiration, a determination to understand excellence, as he defined it.
He did not want, or claim, attention from the public or the press or any propaganda instrument: the world was contemptible to him. But when he had pulled off, with or without the "network" (he often worked alone, or with The Brand), a coup that was always inside the empire of one of his families, he would leave his mark, so that they should know whom they had to thank: an X, like that of an illiterate.
In bed with The Brand, he would trace an X over the raised pattern of the concentration camp number on her forearm, particularly in orgiastic moments.
He was never caught. Later, he joined one of the international police forces that helped to govern Shikasta in its last days.
INDIVIDUAL SIX (Terrorist Type 8)
The parents of this individual were in camps of various kinds throughout World War II. The father was Jewish. That they survived at all was "impossible." There are thousands of documents testifying to these "impossible" survivals, each one a history of dedication to survival, inner strength, cunning, courage - and luck. These two did not leave the domain of the camps - they were in a forced labour camp in the eastern part of the Northwest fringes for the last part of the war - until nearly five years after the war ended. There was no place for them. By then the individual who concerns us here had been born, into conditions of near starvation, and cold: impossible conditions. He was puny, damaged, but was able to function. There were no siblings: the parents' vitality had been exhausted by the business of setting themselves up, with the aid of official charitable organisations, as a family unit in a small town where the father became an industrial worker. They were frugal, careful, wary, husbanding every resource: people such as these understand, above all, what things cost, what life costs. Their love for the child was gratitude for continued existence: nothing unthinking, animal, instinctive, about this love. He was to them something that had been rescued - impossibly - from disaster.
The parents did not make friends easily: their experience had cut them off from the people around them, all of whom had been reduced to the edge of extinction by the war - but few had been in the camps. The parents did not often speak about their years in the camps, but when they did, what they said took hold of the child with the strength of an alternative vision. What did these two rooms they lived in, poor, but warm and safe, have to do with that nightmare his parents spoke of? Sometimes at this time of life, youngsters in the grip of glandular upheaval crystallise in opposition to their parents with a vigour that preserves opposition for the rest of their lives.
This boy looked at his parents, and was appalled. How was it possible? was his thought.
I digress here to the incredulity referred to in my report on Individual Three, who spent years examining the deprivations of the people around him with: How is it possible? I simply don't believe it! Meaning partly: Why do they put up with it? Meaning, too: That human beings should treat each other like this? I don't believe it!