Гарри Гаррисон - There Won't Be War

She opened the door with a shiny lever and gazed down at me from the plush driver’s seat. If I had expected her face to be streaked with tears or otherwise ravaged by my rejection, I would have been disappointed. Her demeanor was military, unperturbed.

As I climbed in, she said, “Before you say a thing, let me assure you that I have considered your desires before my own. I know that you, like myself, might thrive on new pleasures—while retaining certain favorites to which you may return again and again without exhausting their fascination. Therefore, I offer the portable services of my bus. This is only a taste of what awaits you at home.”

She pulled aside a curtain that hung across the cabin, unveiling a living gallery of nudes smeared with fluorescent body paints and soaked in ultraviolet light: a lurid spectrum of humanity, displaying a variety of genders, some surgical. I was touched to see she had included a sex-anemone, for my Nanny and first mistress had possessed one such; although while Nanny’s had been a graft, moored in her flesh, this anemone was detached, a lonely polyp growing from a pair of fleshy vegetable thighs, devoid of personality. For the Princess, while she might concede to the pleasure-giving powers of many unexpected elements, would never allow any of them to compete for my intellectual attentions. Her human slaves, to similar effect, had the dull grins and sunken temples of the lobotomized.

“There should be something here to suit you,” she said.

“You overestimate my appetite,” I replied. “How can I consider pleasure in this setting?”

I leaned past her and switched on the headlights. A bright swath of charnel horrors appeared before us. It had been there all along.

“What can you offer them?” I asked.

Her body began to shudder, wracked by spasms welling from her womb. Only her eyes remained unmoved, fixed on the scene beyond the windshield. She snagged my wrist in her nails, gasping, “Please, Prince, take me.”

“Say ‘fuck,’ dear. ‘Take’ isn’t your sort of euphemism.”

I considered refusing her, as I had refused the offer of her living cargo. But the blood and the sweating night and now this honest show of desire had worked me up to a fine point. I gave her what she asked for, while she stared out the window at the field of death which was all that would ever issue from her womb. I could not look at it myself. I turned my head to the wind-wing and watched the chamois moving slowly back and forth in the hand of a chauffeuse whose doe-like eyes held mine until that trembling instant when, eyes closing, I jerked and forced the Princess into the horn.

The wailing summoned my guardians from the car. They stood before us, knee-deep in bodies, their guns erect but blinded by the headlights.

“Turn out the light,” she said, hitching herself back into the seat.

I did so.

“Come home with me, Prince.”

“I can’t do that. You’ve been unfortunate enough to meet me at the height of my reckless youth. This is the only time I have to be wild and passionate, to develop the emotional artistry that must serve me in the slow grind of petty politics.” I lifted her hand and kissed it. “Should I apologize for winning your heart? It’s a skill of mine, honed to perfection—too sharp, I think—but I will put it aside when I put on the crown.”

“Why can’t you be like other men?” she said, rising from her ultraviolet pout.

I laughed. “Now I understand the devastation on your other borders. You’re entrenched in the affections of ‘other men.’ Would all those wars end if we married?”

“I will always hate the others, but not as I hate you. You’re the only one who dared run from me.”

Uncomfortable with all those nudes watching us, I pulled the curtain closed again. “I was trying to preserve the landscape.”

“Fuck the landscape. You can’t pick a bouquet without gouging the earth.”

“And you’ve picked me a lovely bouquet of bloody flesh.”

“I? Pick flesh for you? I’m not courting you, Prince.”

“What do you call this?”

She sat back and stared haughtily at me. “Negotiation.”

“I shouldn’t have come.”

She smiled. “Are you always so moody after sex? I’m sure you’ll feel differently tomorrow. We’ll get an early start, take a slow drive through the wine country ....”

“There’s not much left of it, judging from the photographs I’ve seen.”

“You shouldn’t have retaliated. You’ll spoil our honeymoon.”

“I didn’t start this war.”

“Yes, you did. By running. Your country can’t be too pleased with its Prince. Who’ll follow a coward? If you don’t give me what I want, this war will go on forever. I’ll assassinate my brother—I’ve been poisoning him slowly anyway—and the power will stay in my hands. I’ll never marry. I will destroy you. The generation that grows up beneath you will be born to attrition. Society has a long memory for blame, and they’ll lay their lot to your cowardice. It will be your war then.”

“My very own personal war?”

“Which you can’t fight without approval. The people will count the bodies and weigh them against yours. You have only one, and you’ll lose it.”

I sat down on the topmost step and rested my chin in my hands, “I don’t know anymore, Princess. You have my mother’s approval, don’t you?”

Her laughter rang like a cracked bell. “This marriage, my darling, was arranged long ago. I’ve merely tried to reconcile you to it. I think it’s something we could both enjoy. It wasn’t my idea, you know. We’re so alike that you should have guessed I wouldn’t look forward to putting my neck in a yoke, regardless of the partner.”

“Not your idea?”

“Do you think that two children would be allowed to plunge their countries into total war? Our parents have let this war come about, prince, in order to draw us together.”

My hair prickled. “Who told you this?”

“I discovered it clue by clue, over the years. It’s obvious when you comprehend the pattern.”

I rose from the steps. “But how can you go along with it, knowing what you do?”

Her eyebrows arched up. “It suits me. By playing along, I get all I desire. Best of all, I get you.”

“A lousy trade. You’ll sacrifice your freedom and then you won’t want me. Not on our parents’ terms, you won’t.”

I was glad to see her considering this.

“Look,” I said, “what if I said you can have me? You know that in the only way that matters, I am already yours.”

She leaned closer. Her chauffeuse watched us with eyes like moons. “Yes?”

“But I don’t want to live in your land, Princess, and admit it, you have no fondness for mine. If we married, you would have to live in my country.”

“We can break with custom.”

“If you follow it now, even to get what you want, tradition will trap you forever. Listen, my bloody darling, Listen to what I propose.”

Her hand slid into mine.

“Pitch the war with all your will,” I said. “Drive your father until he howls. Be a cancer in his heart. Attack, my love, and never stop. Let there be ever newer weaponry, mountains of bodies. Let our love never stagnate in treaties. If we forsake peace, we can slake our lust forever.”

She looked out over the ragged fields, the sloppy graves. I could see my vision playing in her eyes. How easily it would spread, out of the wine lands and over the hills, blighting crops and felling forests, drenching the world in blood.

“And you’ll be mine?” she asked huskily.

“Yes, yours always. We will meet thus, in the midst of death, pretending to discuss the terms of an impossible peace. For as long as we have each other, peace will never come.”