J Bryan: Dominion

“Manufacturing and disseminating terrorist propaganda. Finally, attempting to exit the country illegally.” The man’s eyes burned into Ruppert, who thought the room had grown colder. Maybe it actually had, to intimidate him. “Even if we provided you a trial, you’d have no chance of surviving. You face a long, painful public execution. You are a terrorist, Daniel Ruppert.”

Ruppert said nothing. Now he recognized the man: he was the one who’d been in George Baldwin’s office at the GlobeNet studio, while Ruppert was hypnotized. The one Baldwin had made him forget, until Dr. Smith deprogrammed him.

“Dr. Reginald Crane,” Ruppert said. “That’s right, isn’t it? The 'doctor' for economics, not medicine.”

Crane sat back in his chair. “Correct.”

“They called you Duckers in school.”

Crane’s lips curled into a slight snarl.

"Short for 'Duck-fucker'?" Ruppert added.

The man leaned back in his chair, folded his hands, sighed. "You've picked up a thing or two since we last met." He looked Ruppert over carefully. “There is no need for secrets in this place. On my part or yours.”

“Okay,” Ruppert said.

The man sat very still, and then he asked, “What else do you know about me?”

“You’re Brother Zeb,” Ruppert asked. He made the connection even as he said it aloud. This was why the man had been so interested in him, why he’d come to Baldwin’s office at GlobeNet, why he was here now. "Of the white supremacist national church, or whatever you called it."

The man's smile was tight and cold. He unknotted his tie, then unfastened the top three buttons of his black silk shirt. He exposed his chest to Ruppert, revealing a faded tattoo of six Viking swords arranged in a swastika. “I had most of them removed with lasers, naturally, but this one I kept as a souvenir. Those were heady days."

“You programmed Sully to kill me,” Ruppert said. “And himself.”

“Oh, no, that was a slight bureaucratic error,” Crane told him. “Once your little video emerged, standard protocols went into action.”

“That was standard protocol?”

“For a target as stubbornly on the run as yourself, one takes several precautions. But it wasn’t my group. We are highly compartmentalized, you understand.”

“Terror?”

“Above that.”

“PSYCOM?”

"I’ll admit now, we did lose you entirely on a few occasions. The woman you traveled with, Lucia, she is quite capable. I’m considering recruiting her for our side. What do you think?”

“She would never.”

“All people are vulnerable to persuasion."

“Like Hollis Westerly?”

Crane offered a small smile. “You feel pity for him, don’t you? A beast like that.”

“No. I feel pity for everyone who died in Columbus. The people you murdered.”

“Naturally you do. It would be inhuman to feel otherwise.”

“Why did you kill them? So many?”

“It isn't as though we took pleasure in it," the old man said. "It was collateral damage. A necessary act of war.”

“That’s what Westerly said.”

“It’s what I told him. War surrounds us all. Some of us learn to inhabit it, to move with it, but no man controls it. Do you fault a sailor for the violence of the ocean, or for learning to navigate the storm?”

“You don’t feel anything?" Ruppert asked. "Remorse?”

“Everyone feels remorse at one time or another,” Crane said. “But we have medication for that. You’re focusing on one event and missing the broader picture. Columbus was necessary to protect and preserve the nation.”

“You protect people by murdering them?”

“You aren’t listening, Daniel. I said we were protecting the nation.”

“I don’t think I understand.”

Crane summoned a holographic keyboard, then typed at it. A three-dimensional representation of ancient Rome appeared on the desktop, with stone aqueducts from the mountains feeding into fountains among colorful marble buildings.

“This is from a PSYCOM training manual," Crane said. "Do you know what finally destroyed the city of Rome, Daniel? What caused it to become uninhabitable?”

“Uninhabitable?” Ruppert asked. “I read the population was about 10 million people.”

“You misunderstand. I meant the ancient city.” Crane passed a finger through a miniature aqueduct, and it broke, heaving water out into the mountains far outside the city walls. “Invading barbarians-Goths, if you care to be specific-besieged the city and broke all the aqueducts. They broke the aqueducts, you see, that fed the city, that made the Roman way of life possible. Without water, there could be no city. Never mind who won that particular battle. Without water, the population fell from a million to ten thousand. The greatest city in history became a ruin, home to only sheep and bandits living among abandoned palaces. You saw Las Vegas, didn’t you?”

“Okay,” Ruppert said. “But what does Columbus have to do with aqueducts?”

“Everything. In our case, it is not loss of water we fear. You know what we need, though, do you not?"

"Oil?"

"Loss of petroleum would lay waste our cities. Should we fail to secure the necessary hydrocarbons, and fail to protect the intervening supply lines between there and here, every city in America would resemble Las Vegas in a matter of weeks. No commerce as we know it. And imagine our military-the tanks, the planes, the navy, all useless lumps of metal.

“To protect the nation, we must be willing to fight off all competitors, great and small. We are the mightiest beast in the jungle, Daniel, but the mightiest beast must fight hardest to survive. It is the largest, therefore its needs are the largest, therefore it is, paradoxically, the most vulnerable. You see?”

“You think nations need to make war to survive?”

“Nations do not make war,” Crane said.

“They don't? I'm maybe too medicated right now."

“It is war that raises up nations, war that makes them powerful, war that destroys them. War is the survival competition among human beings, the driver of our evolution. It does not begin or end, though we artificially mark beginnings and endings to particular wars. The nation itself, Ruppert, is simply a long, sustained act of war, in which one group plunders both its own population and foreign lands. It is simply life, the competition for resources, and we cannot help if that is life's inherent condition.”

“Now you're claiming to be moral?” Ruppert asked.

“I am not,” Crane said. “Morality is for structuring and ordering society. Human beings, like animals, are not good or evil, but amoral. We are capable of good or evil acts at any time. It simply depends on circumstances. Look at your background. Not only did you carry out the various criminal acts I described earlier, but for several years, you made a good living spreading propaganda for us. You have murdered a few men, but you have lied to millions.”

“I’ve tried to atone for it,” Ruppert said.

“And you’ve failed. This little interview with Hollis will have no effect, I assure you. No one will believe it, unless they are already predisposed to believing such a thing. For most people, we will continue to tell them what to believe. We will tell them they are morally superior, that they love peace, but unfortunately this is a time of war, and one must support one's leaders. And they will continue to believe it. Because they need to believe it, Daniel, and at a biological level, they know it is necessary for the survival of the group.”

“If people want war anyway, why do you have to lie to them at all?” Ruppert asked. “Why invent threats? Why not just say, ‘These people have oil, and we need it, and we're stronger, and we’re taking it.’ Why wouldn’t people support that war, if what you say is right?”