Norman Spinrad - The Iron Dream

As the column drove deeper into the city, the crowds on the walkways thickened somewhat, and the buildings grew somewhat larger; four- and five-story apartment dwellings dominated now, rather than private houses. They too were of brick, much of it glazed in bright colors, and were graced with all manner of ornately carved wooden facades and private balconies. Trees and shrubbery provided shade and a soothing spectacle to the eye. The folk in this neighborhood seemed to Feric to be somewhat less prosperous, for their garb was somewhat drabber and the shops a bit plainer, but he found the cleanliness and repair of everything in sight nothing less than exemplary.

Here, too, the street was wider, and there was traffic of sorts which was constrained to scatter out of the path of the motorized parade: great numbers of bicycles, some gas cars and motorcycles, steamtrucks of various sorts, and a municipal roadsteamer or two. Every time the column was forced to swerve around some oafish vehicle that was unable to clear the road in time, the command car and the motorcycles roared around the roadblock without slackening speed, and with a great loud rapping of the motorcycles’ engines, to the delight of the crowds on the walkway, who broke into spontaneous cheering. The ragged army of bicyclists and assorted motorized vehicles that trailed along in the van of the storm troop had to follow the line of the parade as best they could.

The proportion of shops to residential buildings increased as the parade neared the center of the city, and the buildings themselves were more imposing. Many reached ten or even fifteen stories in height and they were constructed of brick or concrete or cement, faced with marble, brasswork, or carved stone fa?ades. On street level, the buildings housed broad-windowed shops offering a rich variety of goods: foods of all sorts, wearing apparel, steam engines for the home with slave devices, home furnishings of every description, paintings and wall hangings, statuary, even private gas cars for those who could afford them. Judging from the sounds of machinery that could be heard and the bustling workers Feric glimpsed occasionally through the upper windows, the upper stories of these great buildings were devoted to craft and industry. No doubt many of the goods offered for sale in the shops below were turned out right on the spot.

There was a certain amount of dust in the air in this beehive of commerce and industry, but still the streets were free of any sort of offal, the walkways in every way admirably maintained and inviting. What a far cry from the ghastly sweat pits of Gormond! Feric could sense the power of the city all around him in these precincts. No one could doubt that the racial genotype which constructed cities such as these was the genetic superior of any other population of sapient beings on the face of the earth. The world was rightfully Helder by dint of evolutionary fitness.

Here in the commercial center of the city, the crowds, stopping along the walkways as the spectacle roared by with a grand flourish of scarlet and swastikas, were quite impressed, and many of the good folk shouted out their spontaneous approval. Though few or none of them could have any idea of what the parade was about, or who the hero riding in state was, Feric felt constrained to reward their instinctive approval with an occasional modest Party salute. The good people would comprehend the significance of the gesture soon enough, and the spirit of enthusiasm that was being generated surely required some formal acknowledgment.

Feric was delighted at the great throngs that greeted the motorcade^ as it debouched upon the Emerald Promenade, the great wide boulevard which ran through the cultural and governmental heart of the city; throngs appropriate to the heroic scale of the official architecture.

Here were some of the largest and most visible proofs of the grandeur of Helder civilization. The City Hall was a massive edifice of white marble with a resplendent flight of formal stairs and a heroic facade of pillars, each capped with a bronze of a notable figure out of Helder history, the whole surmounted by a great dome of weathered green bronze. Each of the eight tiers of the Municipal Theater had its own facing of stone pillars supporting pediments rich with bas-reliefs of appropriate subjects, giving the whole massive building the airmess of a baker’s confection. The Museum of Fine Arts was a low building of only three stories, but was designed as an endless series of wings that rambled off in all directions like a natural growth. This inviting treasure-house of art had been Grafted of diverse materials, the style of architecture varying slightly from wing to wing, and each wing was set off with sculptures of a different artistic period, so that, the whole of the exterior mirrored the manifold wonders within.

The various lesser public buildings were constructed on only a slightly smaller scale, and no effort had been spared in embellishing the least of them with heroic statuary, bronzes, and ornately worked stone, marble, or metallic facades. Each building faced an open square across the Emerald Promenade, so that the whole gave an effect of vast spaciousness as well as heroic scale.

Feric longed for the day when Party parades would fill this great boulevard from walkway to walkway and for miles in length, bearing scarlet forests of Party flags, marching to the beat of martial music and chanting patriotic songs. Soon enough that day would come, but, for now, the massed howl of motorcycle engines and the flash of flags and steel at speed were song and spectacle enough to set this stately boulevard vibrating with energy as workers and officials poured out of the buildings to observe its passage.

The column swept up the full length of the Emerald Promenade, drawing an ever-growing comet’s tail of vehicles and bicycles along and then headed away from the center of the city in a northwesterly direction. The sun was waning, and Feric’s plan was to tour through the western section of the city before returning at dusk to the site near the center of Walder which had been chosen for the first mass rally, for surely sunset would be the most dramatic hour for what was planned.

This course carried the convoy through another bustling commercial district, then an area of tasteful apartment dwellings; slowly and subtly these well-maintained and spotless environs gave way to a neighborhood where the architecture of the dwellings was similar, but the facades rife with unrepaired damage, the walls begrimed, the plantings gone to seed and ill-tended, and the streets mired in rubbish and filth. Here the people in the streets wore soiled and worn garments and bad sullen, vacant expressions; they lined the streets silently, an unhealthy-looking and altogether sorry spectacle all too reminiscent of the dull rabble of Borgravia. To Feric’s trained nostrils, the reek of Dominators hung fetid and heavy in this air.

Feric leaned forward and questioned Bogel: “What is this place?”

Bogel turned to face him with a distasteful grimace on his thin features. “This foul warren is known as Graytown. It’s a notorious den of Universalists; the rabble here have been thoroughly infected with the pestilence of Zind. Periodically, they erupt from this cesspool in riots, demanding such obscenities as open borders, and the breeding of subhuman slave creatures with the aid of advisers from Zind. When our colors are known to all, we dare not show ourselves in these precincts.”

“On the contrary,” Feric informed him, “in the near future our storm troops must sweep through this area and slay the hidden Doms responsible for this blight on true humanity.”

“No one has ever succeeded in rooting all the Doms out of this maze,” Bogel said. “They are everywhere and nowhere.”

“Then we must simply crack heads here until improvement in the situation proves that we have eradicated them all. The only way to destroy well-entrenched dominance patterns is with ruthless force enthusiastically and somewhat indiscriminately applied.”