Гарри Гаррисон - There Won't Be War

Economists predicted chaos but what they got was cooperation. People knew what they wanted and for the first time in history they were able to get it. Unpopular projects came to a grinding halt as money for them was withheld. Politicians were forced to be more in tune with the desires of the public. Control of the purse-strings turned out to be the ultimate democratic tool, even more effective than the ballot.

Times changed. They changed for the better.

Mark’s cat had climbed onto his lap and fallen asleep. He relaxed in front of the desk, stroking the cat and responding to the programs almost automatically as they rolled across the screen in the quiet room. They were presented to him randomly. Each taxpayer got them in a different order so that position on the list didn’t favor any one program over another.

Mark had been doing tax forms for years, so it didn’t take much thought. He remembered his mother’s last years and increased his amount for Aid to the Elderly. He allocated money for the school lunch program and aid for the handicapped. He supported environmental programs and medical research. Although solar energy was the norm now, he put a few dollars into geothermal studies. He refused to put any money into bailing out two major oil companies. If they couldn’t change with the times that was their problem.

He studied last year’s military expenditures carefully. What was the sense in having enough weapons to kill everyone on the face of the Earth six times over? He cutback even further than he had last year. He made up the difference in veteran’s benefits. Being one himself, he had a vested interest.

Viet Nam had cut a bloody swath through his family before he was born, but he hadn’t managed to escape tib oil wars and that fiasco in South America. The jung had cost him two brothers, a hip and a knee. No amount of aid could bring back his brothers or his friends. It had been such a useless loss.

The words on the screen were blurry and when he blinked his eyes he realized he’d been crying. He softly cursed. He slipped one hand out from beneath the cat and wiped his eyes. The words became clear once more.

“THAT’S THE END OF THE LISTING, MARK. YOU STILL HAVE A BALANCE OF $795.32. WOULD YOU LIKE ME TO RUN THE SCREEN AGAIN?”

“No.” The tears were coming again, damn it. He blinked his eyes.

“YOU MUST ALLOCATE ALL YOUR TAX MONEY.”

He thought of his brothers and the times they’d had growing up. The days seemed bathed in the warm glow of summer sunshine. They were precious days, gone forever. He knew that every person who had died in any war on any side for any cause had been grieved for just as he was grieving now. It tore at his heart. All that pain, all that suffering.

“WOULD YOU LIKE ME TO RUN THE SCREEN AGAIN?”

“No,” he said softly.

“WOULD YOU LIKE TO ADD AN ADDITIONAL CATEGORY?”

“Yes.” It was barely a whisper.

“READY. ENTER NEW CATEGORY.”

“Peace,” he said and his single word floated in the quiet apartment.

“COULD YOU PLEASE BE MORE SPECIFIC, MARK?”

“I said peace, damn it,” he shouted. “Everlasting, fucking peace!”

The cat jumped from his lap at the outburst and Mark pushed his chair back, leaving the desk. His eyes were still full of tears and he felt like a fool.

If he was a fool, though, he wasn’t alone. On that particular April 15 over two hundred million taxpayers added their voices to his.

By Christmas it was an accomplished fact.

It was summer in the wine country, in the cleft of a hilly vale steeped in green heat. I had a noseful of dust, pollen and sex. Our sticky bodies separated slowly as we sat back in the remains of our picnic, the white cloth dirty and disheveled. Carcasses of roast game hens and rinds of soft cheeses were strewn about. The dry, greedy earth had drunk most of the vintage from a toppled bottle, and what remained we quickly swallowed.

My companion rose, gathered her cast-off skirt and blouse, and went into the trees while running a hand through her blonde locks and smiling back at me. As I twisted the corkscrew into the mouth of the last bottle, I heard a muted whine, a soft explosion, the beginnings of a scream—all in the shady confidence of the forest.

I called to her without remembering her name. She did not answer.

I started to rise, then remembered my own nakedness. My gun lay out in the dust, tangled in my trousers. As I scrambled over the tablecloth, twigs broke and leaf-mould crackled in the woods. I claimed the gun and turned to face the forest. Where were my guardians?

A shadow moved between the trees in hazy webs of light. I saw a glint of red-gold, like the heart of a forest fire. No one had hair like that except my hosts, the royal family.

“Prince?” I called, thinking that somehow he had discovered my indiscretions with his sister last night; and now, in retaliation, he had murdered the innocent I’d picked up at the edge of the woods.

The figure with the flaming hair stopped behind the tree where my friend had fallen. I heard a low chuckle, and despite the heat I felt a chill. That was not the Prince’s laughter.

“Don’t move!” I cried, my finger less than steady on the trigger.

Out of the shadows she came, still laughing. The rifle strap cut between her breasts, her weapon holstered so that I knew she did not intend to fire on me. Even so, her eyes were a fury.

“Princess,” I said.

She mocked me with a shake of her head. “Dear Prince, whatever will I do with you? Was it only last night you filled my ears with promises of fidelity? This is a poor start.”

“You’ve gone too far,” I said. “That girl—”

The Princess took a step into the sunlight and her hair turned molten. “Was she important to you?”

“She was innocent,” I said, momentarily blinded by her hair but pretending otherwise, not trusting her for even a moment with the knowledge of my vulnerability.

“Should that have saved her?” she asked, her voice tiptoeing around me through spots of glare. I tried to follow her with my gun; she was toying with me.

“If you’ve a fight to pick with me—”

“Oh, come now. If my father insulted your mother, would she go out of her way to slap him in the face? Don’t be ridiculous. She’d pay her soldiers to fight, and plenty of innocents would die. This little ‘love’ of yours was in my way.”

“I didn’t love her,” I said. “You needn’t have bothered.”

As the glare receded, and her face went into shadow, I saw the Princess stoop to snatch a pear from our picnic and take a bite. I lowered my gun and began to dress. She stared at me with a curious smile while the juice ran down her chin, her throat. She was dressed like a huntress, in soft brown leather and tall boots. As I began lacing up my shirt, she stopped me with a touch. “Don’t,” she said.

“Are you mad?”

Her grip tightened on my wrist. She clenched her teeth behind her smile. “Will you tell on me? Why not carry on as before? Only I will ever know that once you broke your promise.”

I tore my arm away from her. “What do you want? We’ve had our pleasure but it can never happen again. What if we had been discovered last night?”

She took a step closer, pressing against me, her smell an aphrodisiac. “It would have simplified everything. We would be planning a spectacular wedding now. It’s what our parents want: the children of both countries formally wed.”

I kicked through the remains of the picnic and fled into the woods, knowing that she was on my heels. A few yards into the shadows I came upon the body of the girl whose sweat and musk still flavored my tongue. Fallen leaves clung to the wreck of her face. As I leaned against a tree trunk, the Princess caught me from behind, her nails cutting into my ribs. She twisted me toward her, biting at my lips. I stumbled against the tree, fighting her off, but she grabbed my hair and we both went down into the loam. She was naked beneath her brief leather skirt. “I don’t want this,” I said. My body hinted otherwise.—“We’re two of a kind, Prince, and you know it.” I made myself relax. She believed my imitation of submission; her eyelids narrowed, pupils drifting to one side. She wasn’t seeing me, though her hands were all over my body. She trembled, already close, so close that I could feel myself being sucked along with her.