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PREVIOUS CHAPTER INDEX NEXT CHAPTER Dark Crimson By Nick P. I didn’t sleep that night, nor did I receive any more visits, whether they would’ve brought more human faces or water and cigarettes. I didn’t know whether to be glad or not. My throat was screaming for water, my stomach screaming for food, and my entire body asking simply for a new position to stand in. The alien sun had dropped below the horizon, bringing along all light, but soon it returned. Morning came with bright rays dashing over the distant, rocky horizon. It was still early and the sun was close to this mark when Kurt’s troops came once again and gathered around me. Then they parted, making way for Kurt himself, who strode in mightily, followed closely by the jumping, twitching man that had welcomes us. He undid my bindings and I slumped to the ground, powerless. Meanwhile, he sat down across from me on a small boulder, his eyes scanning me with tired curiosity. From his long robes, he produced a little book with a worn, black cover and tattered pages. Slowly and intently, he flipped through the pages with care and stopped. And he read:
“We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw Our dried voices When we whisper together Are quiet and meaningless As wind in dry grass Or rats’ feet over broken glass In our dry cellar Shape without form Shade without colour Paralysed force Gesture without motion”
“Do you know what the man is saying?” said the Russian. “Do you?” He gestured widely while Kurt stared absentmindedly at the ground. “This is dialectics. It’s very simple dialectics. One through all, no maybes, no perhaps, no supposes, no fractions¾you can’t travel in space, you can’t go out into space, you know, with¾you know?¾fractions. What are you going to land on? One quarter, four-fifths? What are you going to do to get back to Earth from here or something? Or Mars? That’s dialectic physics for you, OK? Dialectic logic is this: there’s only love and hate: you either love someone or you hate them.” Kurt suddenly looked up at him and threw the book he had been carefully reading as hard as he could. The man threw his hands up and recoiled against one of the boulders. “This is the way the fucking world ends!” he yelled back. “Look at this shit we’re in, man! Not with a bang, with a whimper! And with a whimper, I’m fucking leaving, you know!? Fuck this…” and he started running away. Kurt turned to me and examined me for a while. He sighed. “I’ve seen horrors. I’ve seen many horrors, some that you’ve seen and some that you haven’t. But you have no right to call me a murderer. It is war, however. And so you have every right to kill me. You have a right to do that. But you have no right to judge me. It’s impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. “Horror. What is horror? From where did it come? It has a face, and you have to look into it. You have to make a friend out of horror. It’s horror that morally kills off your friends. If they remain alive, then they are enemies to be feared. True enemies. I remember when I was with Special Forces. God, it seems like thousands of years ago… We went into a camp to vaccinate colonist children against newly found and rising diseases. We didn’t want them to spread it. And we left, but then this one man caught up to us, crying. We couldn’t understand what he wanted, but we followed him back to the village. There they had hacked off all of the children’s arms. There they were, a bloody mess, lying in a pile at the town square. A pile of little arms… And I remember, I looked and looked at it… and I cried. You don’t understand, it’s one thing when its soldiers, its another when its little children. I nearly tore my hair out. I just sat there and stared and didn’t know what to do. But I want to remember it, I never want to forget. Never. “And then I came to a realisation. It was like being shot. It was sudden and strange, but it struck me here.” He patted his head. “I thought, ‘My God, that is genius!’ The genius! That will do it. It was perfect, crystalline, pure! And when I saw that, I knew that the simple-minded, the primitive, were stronger. They were stronger than we. They were undefeatable because of their single-minded purpose in life. And the Stroggs, they are not much more complex in their thinking. Many of the brains housed in their tanks are borrowed from these colonists. It was brilliant! And even the Stroggs! They are less than monsters. Deep down, they are men, men with a mind that would prevail. They fight with hearts rather than brains, whether they have one or not. They had a clear purpose, they knew what they were fighting for, and that was all that mattered to them. They had the strength to… to, uh, do all that and more. The sole functions that transcribe life. And I knew, if I had ten divisions, perhaps several thousand such fighters, Strogg and colonist, this whole war would be over so much sooner. On one side you have moral man deeply troubled by pointless and complex feelings. And here,” he motioned widely with his arms. “Here you have men with big hearts and primordial instincts to kill. To kill without feeling, that is the key. Without passion… Without judgement. Because it is judgement that makes us pause and ultimately defeats us. It is judgement that will lead to the downfall of the human race. “But do we need to fight for this? Do you know what the only solution would be? Bomb them all, kill all of the bastards! Bomb Karoggon. Bomb Washington D.C., bomb all of the Coalition and ComSec divisions. Why? They are no lower than the Stroggs. If the Stroggs were a primitive race, wouldn’t the UTC still rush in and suck the planet of its resources? If the Stroggs were more primitive, wouldn’t our roles in the war be switched? Wouldn’t we be the ones to start the war?” His gaze had fallen to the ground while he talked. And now, he gazed back up at me with a look of urgency. “I worry that my son might not understand what I have created here, what I tried to be. And if I were to be killed, Willard, I would want someone to go to my home and tell my son everything. Everything. Selecting suitable parts forms incomplete stories, and that’s exactly what the Coalition does. He needs to know everything I did, everything you have seen… All because there is nothing I detest more than the stench of lies. I know you understand me, Willard. You’re a smart man. You’ll do this for me.” Kurt stood up and walked up to me. As if doing the last thing to release me, as if untying my last binding, he gave me a drink of water. I felt energy surge into my body, and at that point, I knew I was free. |
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