There Won't Be War

Sacred Fire George Zebrowski

At the age of sixteen, as I prepared to attend my first peace festival, I knew that my father feared my going. I could have gone to the annual displays earlier, but he never went and discouraged me from going alone. We stayed in the family shelter when our area was targeted.

“I didn’t want you contaminated with their ideas,” he said to me on the day before I was to leave, “—until you could think for yourself.” His voice trembled as he shifted in his chair. “But the law says you have to go now.” He reached over and turned on the standing light. Its brightness seemed to terrify him for a moment.

He squinted and looked away from me as I sat down on the floor. “Don’t worry,” I said. “Maybe I’ll learn something.”

He scowled and leaned back; there was sweat on his face. “You’ll learn what they want you to, and nothing more.”

“Don’t you trust me?” I asked anxiously, afraid that he thought me a failure, unable to think for myself.

He smiled, but it seemed to me that knives were at his heart as he wiped his forehead. “Try not to believe any of it, even it you’re having a good time.” I knew that he always missed my mother, but I’d never seen him afraid. “They’ve got it wrong, son, their way of peace.”

I said, “But it’s been over seventy years. Doesn’t that count for anything?”

He seemed to be struggling with himself. “Anyone has to be able to kill anyone,” he said slowly, “—and that’s how it should be, always, as an extreme of behavior, not to be tampered with. The peacekeepers are just another genetics cult that wants to do away with our capacity for violence. The trouble with trying to improve us is that we don’t know what we are, where we are, what we want to become and where that’ll take us. Shut up/in their mountain enclaves, they’ve forgotten what it’s like to be a human being.”

I’d heard some of this before from him, but never so bitterly. “I’ve come to suspect,” he continued, pushing the words out with painful conviction, “that all these decades of the peace festival have been a preparation for a great change to some new human model. There’ll be no going back after that.” He leaned forward in his chair. “They’ll let things get out of hand, have what looks like a small war and blame it on ordinary human nature showing itself, then push their salvation on us. One or two bombs is all it’ll take for the keepers to close their grip on us.” He shifted in the chair and gazed into the far corner of the room, as if someone were hiding there, listening to him.

“I can’t believe they’d kill people,” I said.

He looked exasperated. “What you want to believe has nothing to do with it. They’d do anything to get their way, because they’re certain it’s right.”

I didn’t know what to say, except to remind him that he still had me, that he wasn’t alone. I looked into his eyes, but he turned away before I could speak.

He couldn’t have come with me to the festival. Our area had been targeted, and one person in each household had to stay behind. But I knew that he wouldn’t have gone even if he could.

He sat perfectly still. I gazed at him, realizing that he expected to die, and was pushing me away; he didn’t want to live in the kind of world he feared was coining; the one he had grown up in seemed bad enough. Maybe he would have been different if my mother had lived. I had a dim memory of a man who had laughed more often, but maybe I was only imagining that.

He looked down at me sadly and said, “I’m sorry, son, that I couldn’t give you more.”

I saw how damaged he was inside, how useless to himself, realizing that it had always been this way for him. I felt lost.

I packed and readied myself for bed, feeling uneasy-and alone, as if I wasn’t coming back.

“Good night,” I said from the landing above the living room. Something stopped inside me as he glanced up, smiled, and continued reading. I retreated to my room, with feelings of independence stirring beneath my fears of being abandoned.

My father claimed to know a lot about the past that he insisted no one else wanted to discuss. He hadn’t tried to hide his hatred of the world from me, yet he always said that he wanted me to find my own way and be happy. But if he was right, that was impossible.

The wars of the past, he had often told me, were always fought for good reasons. Our peace had only buried the truth of justifiable killing, which was a transcendent act, cutting short the slow violence of human affairs, or releasing the inner pressure of lives that had nowhere to go; violence called attention to the world’s failures, to its inability to shape itself into something better. But he denied that we would ever be wise enough to shape ourselves and remain human. The peace of the keepers was a tyranny that feared its own death, and had set itself against human nature—against him, it seemed to me as I drifted into sleep, because he took everything personally.

At Festival City in the high desert of California, they gave me a bunk in the boys’ dorm. I lay down behind my partition, feeling lost and uneasy. Ernie Yose, the boy next to me, tried to say hello, but I ignored him. The next thing I knew it was morning, and a low, droning voice told us over the intercom that our first lecture would be in Dome One.

As I ate breakfast in the big commons, I told myself that if I believed my father, then the world was beyond hope and there was nothing for me here. He had made me afraid of the future.

“What’s wrong with you?” Ernie asked.

“Nothing,” I said, trying to hide my doubts.

We went out into the bright sun and found Dome One. The cool inside was a relief. We sat down at desks in the third circle. There were almost a hundred boys and girls my age in the hall, dressed in the same loose-fitting white shorts, collarless shirts, and sandals.

A figure wearing a one-piece sky blue suit walked down into the center, looked around at us, and said, “What you will learn in the next two weeks is how humankind restrained itself.” I couldn’t tell if the soft tenor voice belonged to a man or a woman. “You will understand the foundation of world peace and how it is maintained, and that will enable you to grasp the full meaning of the final demonstration.”

A chill went through me. I felt that something was about to be taken from me; suddenly I didn’t want to know anything that would change me. My father’s voice whispered a warning as he crouched inside me, ready to mock falsehoods.

“War,” the teacher began, “was only the most violent expression of humankind’s conflict with itself,” and I felt my father’s suspicions rising up within me. “Societies regulated their members through codes that were claimed to be of divine origin—to give them a convincing legitimacy—and later through laws that served social ends and could not be tampered with easily by individuals ....”

The speaker seemed to be talking about a species to which he or she did not belong.

“When the eco-catastrophes of the 21st century worsened, and it became necessary to forbid the use of fossil fuels, the first defensive shields were used to compel resisting nations to observe the ban, as well as to prevent the use of nuclear weapons among the lesser powers. The big powers of the 20th century had originally built nuclear arsenals so they could cherish the illusory hope that their competitors on Earth might one day be destroyed, which is why the first shields so outraged the human heart—because enemies might now make themselves secure forever. At one time it was feared that Capitalism, aided by super-technologies, might endure in defiance of Marx’s laws of history, while totalitarian Communism, behind its shield, completed its mastery of the individual, mimicking the West’s economic success through state-run Capitalism ....”

This view of the last century and a half reminded me of my father’s ideas, except that he would have claimed that it had to be this way, that no amount of good will could overcome human nature. The buried monster in us all was a necessary drive, even if it only functioned according to blind nature; to sever it from our intellect would put us in mortal peril.

“But these fears were set aside,” the teacher continued, “when the major blocs realized they could be replaced on the main stage of history by any one of several nations. Beam weapons were deployed to preserve superpower rivalry—and humankind blundered into nuclear peace, even though this outraged the secret self that still longed to savage even a brotherly enemy ....”

Evolution’s slaughterhouse gave us the will to survive, my father had said to me many times. Human reason was self-serving, rationalizing on our behalf, the obedient hound of our will.

“Ironically,” the teacher said, “the new peace made the world safe again for conventional wars. These were tolerated among the lesser nations, but were ended by nuclear threat when they got out of hand. This second era of of conventional wars pushed us closer to our age of peace, as regional conflicts were permitted to work themselves out and became fewer. But as the world struggled through its eco-catastrophes, the old rivalries simmered beneath the restraints placed on the old reptilian brain core. Each major power’s secret self still saw itself as Rome, unable to bear the prosperity of Carthage. Time might one day unleash the enemy’s progeny from behind his shield, like spiders from a buried egg, to shape history in his own image. This deeply held fear, that futurity would not belong to one’s own loins, that even one’s children might repudiate their parents, was not something for which we should blame the past. It was a biological program arrived at through evolution, and simply a reflection of the way life developed, the way we were, before we could choose new directions .....”

I looked into the teacher’s calm gray eyes, and wondered at the intelligence behind them as it described a still unfinished process. Despite my father’s warnings, I felt no threat, only wonder and curiosity.

“As an interim measure,” the teacher went on, “human nature had to be convinced in its deepest domains that the new peace could not be subverted. The festival demonstration is a physical proof, not an argument or treaty, affirming that peace can be preserved every time it is imperiled. Ours is a renewable peace, and it has endured, even though the old human animal struggles against it. But one day even that inward struggle will end.”

The teacher was speaking about my father, I realized, but I felt only a vague threat.

“Old humanity tried to have it both ways—by arguing that a shield would destabilize the old nuclear deterrence, which implied that it might work, and at the same time that a shield was technically impossible. They neglected to consider that few would wish to test such a system by starting a war. At the very least, it would foil attempts at a decisive first strike. In practice it was completely effective in stopping all enemy missiles—because they would never be launched. And that is what happened.”

Silently, the teacher looked around at us, and I knew suddenly that there was a peace beyond this one.

“Consider these three statements,” the teacher continued. “They unmask the old humanity within you all. We reserve the right to kill living creatures, including human beings, under the appropriate conditions. There can be no peace which abolishes this right. The second asserts that The ability to be violent in the name of survival is the Sacred fire at the center of every living organism. And finally, There must always be the possibility of war, even if war never comes.”

My father struggled within me. Trembling, I raised my hand and heard him say, “Given enough time, there will be war. Sooner or later, something will always go wrong.”

The teacher gazed at me calmly, then nodded. “It would seem so—but many possible things never happen. At first, peace demands a tradition of vigilance. The founder of our peacekeeping order said that Violence lives in each human being as a small flame, burning always, but flaring only with impatience and anger. It is both their strength and greatest weakness, since it can consume itself Human hearts will never be at peace. They war with themselves even in sleep. But this heart of fire has never turned on itself decisively. Peace is as possible as war. In time, something even better will be born of our rational faith. Our festival confirms this understanding, and prepares us for the way ahead.”

We saw holos of great cities destroyed in past wars, The broken bodies seemed unreal, and it would never happen again, because the peacekeepers would prevent it.

The last day arrived. We gathered on the flat desert as the stars came out. Facing west, we saw a holo of three giant mushroom clouds swell up with a roar from the sands. Screaming human shapes twisted in the rising fireball, ballooned to massive size, and were torn apart. Torsos, limbs, and entrails fell on cities of cinder. People around me turned away, dropped to their knees and moaned; others clutched their heads and wailed. I gazed into the glow, feeling nothing.

A peacekeeper wearing a blindingly white one-piece suit stepped out of the roiling clouds of fire, gazed down at us as if we were ants and said, “Welcome to the 98th Peace Festival.” His voice was intimate and reassuring. He raised his hand. “The test area today takes in the cities of the west coast, including Los Angeles and New San Francisco. There is one live warhead in the first wave just launched by our partners in peace.”

I looked around at the parents with their sons and daughters. My father was in his shelter, in the strike zone, as required.

“The armed warhead,” the keeper’s figure continued, “is the possibility of war in each of you, but you shall not fear it.”

The mushroom cloud winked out. Gazing westward through the giant figure of the peacekeeper into a clear evening sky, I realized that if my father’s fears were real, our house would be destroyed in the next few minutes. I was afraid for him, and felt ashamed of my doubts.

“We do not fear!” the great figure intoned, reaching into me with strength and certainty. I waited, held by a new hope, but my stomach tightened as lights blossomed high in the west, and my father’s doubts crowded into me. Somehow, a warhead had escaped the beams of the orbital stations. I held my breath and waited in the shelter with my father for the flash that he had expected all his life.

The second wave bloomed and died. Trails of light scratched across the sky beyond the mountains as debris reentered and burned. Cries of joy went up from the gathering as parents embraced their children.

“Our peace is born again!” the keeper cried. “And it is stronger than ever.”

The giant figure turned and strode away across the desert, and I knew that my father was wrong.

He had always been wrong.

Coming home was a return to doubt. “Was there a live warhead?” I asked him. “Would they risk so many lives?”

“They’re getting us ready, that’s what they are,” he said from his chair, glaring up at me bitterly. “A keeper isn’t a human being, son. They sleep* into the future, tinker with their genes, with no two generations alike. They preach to us about keeping the peace, but they’re only buying time for themselves, so they can replace us. We’ve always had them—people who specialize in telling others how to live. Shamans and priests, then kings and politicians, and psychologists of every stripe—leaders, they always call themselves. But none of them ever helped us to be free and self-directed, because that would make us free of them. But they always helped themselves, stealing everything in the way of goods, pleasures, and privileges. Above all, they stole power.”

“But we have peace,” I said.

He sighed as his vehemence subsided into a look of pain. “I suppose nuclear terror was more dangerous, if something went wrong, but there are ways around this peace of ours.” He seemed moody and strange, out of touch.

I asked, “Did you go to the shelter?”

He nodded, clenching his teeth.

“But you weren’t in danger,” I insisted, sitting down at his feet. “I saw for myself.”

He leaned forward and grasped my head in his hands. “Son—you don’t know this world, or what you are. Most everything in our kind of organism is hidden deeply, and you’ve lived too easily to dig it out. There were clues in old poems, plays, and novels, but the keepers stole them from us. What I know has seeped into me slowly. I’ve read what I could find ... and there have been miraculous accidents in my thoughts, since your mother died. The keepers are making a garden for themselves—and for us a desert they call peace.” He gripped my head and looked into my eyes. “They’re working to be rid of us!” It seemed suddenly that he would crush my skull. “Do you understand?”

I tried to nod, realizing that there was no hope for him now. He let go and fell back, exhausted. “There’s no one left to know,” he whispered, “what’s been lost ....”He was silent for a while. “What are you going to do?”

“Join them.” I hadn’t intended to say it, hadn’t even realized that I had come to a decision. I would not be like him, I told myself, expecting angry, frantic words, and maybe even violence, because he would believe it was necessary.

He laughed suddenly and said, “Of course,” then shook his head and gazed steadily at me. “I knew you would in the end.”

When I joined the keepers, he stopped speaking to me, unable to see the great purpose to which I gave myself. One day he disappeared. I came home to visit, and no one in the area knew where to find him. At first I imagined that he had simply found some patch of wilderness to live out his life with the memory of my mother.

I found his last letter to me. He had written it by hand, and left it, unsigned, in his study, under the holo portrait of my mother and me.

Son,

Your kind is right, in a sense. Mine will never be at peace with itself—because for us violence must always be a matter of choice, to be embraced or rejected, depending on the circumstances. You would make us peaceful, but we would have to become you, and there would be nothing left of us. Perhaps you could leave a few of us in the wild; you might need us someday, when you have forgotten your origins. I know that, in your view, this is the bomb asking to retain its right to explode, the fire to consume, the beast to kill. You won’t live to feel this need within yourself before they change you. A part of me admires your willingness to set out into the unknown, to give up what you were given to be, to discard your humanity along the way. I can’t understand it, as once the apes failed to comprehend the humans among them. Transitions to a new state are always sad and disorienting; they require some loss of identity. I cannot imagine what you will have on that alien shore, where there will be nothing living to compete with you, when you have lost yourselves ....

I taught at the festivals for ten years before I was accepted by the third transhumans, the very core of the peacekeeping order. My mind opened to the future as I shed memories and prepared for longlife.

We who are changing have known the past and salute the passing makers whose peace enabled us to emerge. Even now a fourth humanity waits within us, poised to escape the last lingering perversities of the old human deep. Somewhere, the changeless still survive, my father among them, singing their ancient song of submission to blind nature, enemies to themselves, hurrying toward death with every tortured breath. There will be no new bodies for them, no ascent through time’s renewals, and no penetration of the mysteries. The time will come when we will not remember that these shadows once lived their unknowing lives, joined to death. We who have risen out of their agony and humiliation, stepped out of their swift currents, have purged ourselves of their menace.

We will not remember.