Edward Llewellyn - Prelude to Chaos

“It’s natural for men to fight like animals?”

“The trouble is that men don’t fight like animals. They fight like men. And women too, these days!” I shrugged. “If your Teacher’s only half right, there’s going to be a lot of natural selection for animal traits in the next few years.”

She persisted. “You mean that those humans with the greatest lust for blood will be the ones who’ll survive to breed?”

“No!” I stood up. Then I sat down. “Natural selection doesn’t work like that. And you know it! Also, blood-lust, whatever that is, has nothing to do with it Some men who like fighting are bloody-minded murderers. Some are meek slobs who turn sick at the sight of blood when away from the action. It’s not some kind of an addiction—it’s not like being hooked on alcohol or drugs or sex. If you can’t have it, you can go without it I never wanted to fight anybody in the Pen. I never missed not having a drink in the Pen. But I enjoy a bourbon when it’s available, and so I go to places where it is available when opportunity offers. Because when it’s available, then I want it” I stood up again. “Soldiers aren’t psychopaths—”

“Sit down, Gav! I know they aren’t And there’s apple pie for dessert. I baked it while you were fighting off those bandits. It kept my hands and mind busy while I was wondering if I’d ever see you alive again!” She disappeared into the kitchen and returned with the pie in her hands. She put it on the table and again her eyes began to probe me. “So you think fighting’s inborn? Are there enough of us with the talent to defend this place?”

I gave her stare for stare. “There’s you—for one!”

“Me?” She bent to help out the pie, then said quietly, “I suppose I would fight if I have to.”

“If the Settlement stays in the Cove, then you will have to. And you’ll find you won’t need blood-lust or anything else so degrading. Just talent. And you’ve got the talent, if anybody here has. I’ve seen you in action. You may not have the instinct to kill—but, by God, you’ve got the drive to fight and the brains to win!”

She looked uncomfortable, as though I were praising her for a skill of which she was ashamed. She handed me my plate and pushed the cream pitcher toward me. “Eat your pie. I was crying while I baked it. That’s how tough I am!” “Homer’s heroes and Elizabethan sea captains wept buckets. All over the place and at any excuse. So you can’t cop out because you sob as you shoot. Of course, you won’t Not when you’re having to aim.” I started on the pie. “God, but this is good!”

We finished our dessert in silence and I began to clear the table. She followed me into the kitchen. “Gavin, if there were more of us talented people, could we defend the Settlement?” “No! Sutton’s indefensible against anything more than a mob. But enough to defend the Settlement if it were some place it could be defended.” I went and threw a couple of logs on the fire. “Fairhaven for instance.”

“I don’t think the Council will move.”

“If they don’t—I will! Judy, you’ve seen the kind of signals we’re getting from other Settlements. Federal Marshals arriving to arrest ‘suspects.’ ‘Rescue teams’ coming to rescue children. ‘Deprogramming experts’ to deprogram Believers. I’m not going to hang around waiting to be picked up and shipped to some ‘rehab center’—that’s what they’re calling the concentration camps. That’s where the Administration is mind-wiping Believers and distributing children, especially girls, for adoption by the Administration’s friends. As soon as the Feds come—I go!”

“You’d leave me?”

“I don’t want to. But if you won’t come with me I’ll not wait to watch you arrested, mind-wiped, and bound over to the custody of some damned Executive.”

“Gavin—I can’t leave. I have to stay! These are my people.”

“From what I hear they’ll need a doctor in those ‘rehab centers.’ The methods they’re using seem pretty rough. If you’ll be in any shape to practice medicine after they’ve rehabilitated you!”

She bit her lip, but remained stubborn. “I have to stay with my fellow Believers.”

“Then try and persuade the Council to get out of this trap. A move to Fairhaven might buy them time.”

Fairhaven was the remains of a once-prosperous fishing village farther north up the Bay. It was still a safe small-boat anchorage but within a year of the Joseph Kinross meeting the Jenny Wren it had become a wilderness of collapsing wooden houses and now, some forty years later, the only sign to show that people had once lived there was the remains of a stone wharf. The forest, unchecked, had invaded the village from three sides; a forest still reputed to be filled with unexploded shells. The Navy had used it as a target for off-shore bombardment, and the inshore approach was dangerous. Fairhaven was isolated enough for the most devout Believer.

Enoch took Judith and me to look at the place. Boats from the Cove sometimes used it as a shelter from bad weather when fishing up the Bay, but ashore there was only desolation. The forest had grown right down to the rocky beach. At least there wasn’t space to land a gun-ship. It was a refuge, but what a refuge! Both the near and the distant future of the Settlement depressed me. It would be a case of just surviving. They would have to revert to wood and canvas, muscle power and homespun. Living off the fish they caught and the deer they shot—while they still had ammunition for their rifles. And if they were left alone.

Most governments had started cautious campaigns trying to persuade their citizens to cut down on their use of Impermease, but cancerphobia was as endemic as ever, farmers weren’t going to give up their cheapest, safest, and most effective insecticide without a very good reason, and women took no more notice of vague warnings about possible side effects from using the “liberator” than they had of Papal warnings of probable punishments in the life to come.

No government had yet had the guts to publish the real reason for caution. That the panaceas they had all been pushing for over twenty years were a sterilizing agent with a twenty-year delay. And even less did they dare to tell their people that the time for caution was past. That the damage was already done. I suspect that Impermease was bringing the governments of the world closer together than had anything else in human history. Even obtuse politicians who had seen the true statistics could see the common disaster ahead. And have the self-preserving reflex of hiding the true statistics as long as possible, while they planned for their personal futures.

Through the summer one could almost sense the percolating down of the dread information through the layers of government by the changing reactions of public servants toward the Settlements. The police, once helpful, had become so hostile that radio reports from other Settlements told us how they were starting to set up their own armed patrols. Both State and Federal Goverments were shrugging off Settlement charges of discrimination, and those Believers still holding positions in various bureaucracies kept warning us to avoid attracting attention to ourselves.

Outsiders were beginning to skulk along the road to Sutton Cove. News from other Settlements spoke of vigilante groups forming in the cities and of bands of goons ranging the countryside. The authorities were accusing Settlements of harboring such bands; another excuse for liquidating them. As yet the declining population of young people was having no real effect on the operation of vital industries and systems. But a whole generation of teachers were losing their jobs as classrooms progressively emptied, and they added to the general atmosphere of resentful anger.