Travels in Nihilon

Chapter 26

Enjoying the civil war from behind the bullet-proof glass of the café by the main square of Nihilon City, Richard decided not to open the large briefcase which the professor had left with him. At least, not before he had called for another bottle of Nihilitz.

‘Yes, general,’ the waiter said, reminding him too abruptly of the new post that had been thrust upon him by the insurrectionary forces. He had no intention of becoming a soldier in this squalid power-switch, though he felt sure that if he were to step outside, the dissidents would certainly recognize him, and confirm him in his new post with such celebration that he might not survive it. ‘I hope you have a good campaign, sir,’ said the waiter. ‘The weather is perfect for it. It rained last time, and the revolution fizzled out. Those taking part put down their guns and went home.’

‘When was that?’ Richard asked, alarmed by this sudden revelation of volatility in the Nihilonian populace.

‘Two years ago, sir. But it wasn’t really serious. Those who ran took their guns home with them, and it was said later that the Rain Revolution — we have a great sense of humour here, sir — was only a dress rehearsal for the real one that was to come, which is now. Things seem to be much better organized this time, I’m glad to say.’ He looked through the glass and rubbed his hands gleefully at flames jerking out of a building across the square.

‘I suppose you’ll be taking part,’ Richard said, with a little irony, ‘when you’ve finished work?’

‘No, general,’ the waiter smiled. ‘I’ll go home and watch it on television. I expect the programmes will run all night if the firing goes on. I’ll go out into the street with my flag though, when it’s all over, you may be sure of that. My wife’s at home stitching it together now.’ From the door that led to the main hall of the café, he turned and added: ‘She’s the creative one of the family, sir!’

People went in and out as if it were a normal day of the week. He watched them coming across the square, calmly picking their way over débris, and the occasional corpse that the well-trained men of the ambulance service had not yet been able to move.

After a fiery and comforting drink of Nihilitz, he delved into the briefcase. By weight it contained more than papers, and he took out a revolver and a box of ammunition, as well as a belt and holster, and a sort of collapsible tram-conductor’s hat with a red band between the peak and the crown, which he assumed was for his own general’s head.

The largest map, when he unfolded it, was an official publication for Nihilon Army Command, a coloured representation of the country on the one-million scale, but stated at the top left-hand corner to be a provisional edition which was only to be used with extreme caution, as all detail on it was totally unreliable. Thinking of his previous experience in Ekeret Square, when his precious town-plan had been torn to pieces, he hurriedly fastened on the revolver holster, and loaded the gun, in case some fanatical map-deprived horde should try the same trick again.

He examined the map which, for a place like Nihilon, was as pretty a piece of cartography as you could ever wish to see. The system of relief, by contours, brought the whole land into instant perspective. It was mountainous, except for the great central plain on which most of the large towns were situated. Nihilon was bordered on three sides by rugged coast, except for a wide isthmus which joined it to Cronacia, and which was crossed by a belt of high mountains. The country was nearly five hundred kilometres from west to east, and four hundred from north to south, giving it an area of approximately 200,000 square kilometres. With such a preponderance of precipitous mountain it was easy to see why, throughout its history, Nihilon had been plagued by terrible floods. In fact, it was difficult to see why the central plain wasn’t permanently inundated.

If the map was accurate, communications seemed to be in a very rudimentary state — especially the roads. One highway (on paper at any rate) appeared to run from the southern frontier to Shelp, and then up the Nihil Valley to Nihilon City. He was happy not to have been chosen for the land approach, like Benjamin in his Thundercloud, and Adam the poet on his bicycle. He wondered also how Edgar had fared after disembarking at Shelp, and Jaquiline Sulfer who was supposed to reach Nihilon City this afternoon by train.

To the north of the town were the Athelstan Alps, whose highest peak, of over four thousand metres, was Mount Nihilon. On a large plateau to the south of this range was a place called Tungsten, joined by the only other modern highway leading up to it from Nihilon City. On the margin of the map was a note to say that at Tungsten there was a rocket base, and that the first Nihilon spaceship was to be launched from it in two days.

After a further and necessary swig of Nihilitz, Richard saw from the typewritten sheets that he was in charge of a column that, the day after tomorrow (by which time all fighting in Nihilon City should be over), would form the left wing of a general advance on Tungsten. The centre was already on its way there from Shelp, and the right wing would move up from Agbat. His orders demanded that the launching of the rocket into space must be prevented at all costs — in the name of Honour and Decency. Nihilism must not be allowed this great triumph, for what the Nihilists had been striving for in over twenty years of work and research was none other than the first procreative hook-up in space. In the rocket would be an athletic young man and a nubile girl who were to leave the capsule at a time specified by computer (full television coverage was to be arranged for the whole country) and copulate in space. The technical details of this were on the secret list, but the Nihilists expected a birth from this brief encounter, a child which would, on its thirteenth birthday, be crowned king or queen of the First Universal Nihilist Kingdom. It was because the revolutionaries were determined to forestall such a monstrously indecent plan that Richard had been given a key part in the advance towards Tungsten. If his column did not get there before blast-off, the propaganda effect of this victory for Nihilism would never be lived down, even if the new forces did succeed in eventually taking hold of the country.

In any case he saw that such an expedition against Tungsten would be a favourable opportunity to explore the Athelstan Alps, and so fill in more pages of his guidebook, which was why he had come to the country in the first place. With this also in mind he decided to look at those parts of the city so far untouched by the insurrection. It was midday, and the firing had lost its intensity, so he walked, somewhat giddily due to all he had drunk, along the western side of the square and into one of the avenues leading to the river.

The way there was quiet, a few people busily going home to lunch. Shop-fronts were boarded up and the burning sun gave everything a dreamy unreal touch. He brought a magazine from a kiosk, served by a woman with a bottle of Nihilitz beside her who was doing some crazy sort of four-peg knitting.

He leaned against the parapet of the long, ornate bridge, and watched the swirling oily water of the River Nihil, polluted beyond measure after flowing through the industrial complex of Nilbud. A smell of old stone and vinegar came up from it. He wrote in his guidebook-notes that the bridge was of a particularly fine construction, adding as an afterthought, and no doubt under the influence of nihilism, that the engineer who built it had thrown his wife from the middle span after its completion.

The banks on either side were steep, so he decided to call the river a gorge at this point, thinking that even the dullest country had to appear interesting in a guidebook, if you expected people to buy it. Whether they went there or not was another matter, though it was certain that few of them ever would.

He was disturbed from his stupor by the sight of a man running from the eastern end of the bridge, as if anxious to get across it and help the insurrection in Nihilon — though there was little enough firing at the moment to attract anyone. The runner had apparently passed a policeman, who now woke up and shouted: ‘Come back. Stop!’

The man was wild-haired, big-eyed, his coat flying open. Another policeman at the western end of the bridge stood in the middle of the road with his revolver pointed, so that it seemed as if the fugitive’s fate was already sealed.

Richard looked on in amusement, as if the inhabitants of Nihilon only existed to provide him with continuous diversion. However, he stopped smiling when a bullet, meant for the fleeing man, shaved its way so close that it singed the hair by his temples. With the policemen closing in, the man, only a few metres away, jumped on to the parapet, then fell laughing into the river below. Sluggish circles eddied towards the concrete supports, and Richard tried to see under the surface of the water. ‘Let me see your documents,’ said one of the policemen, putting away his gun.

‘Why did he jump into the river?’ asked Richard, showing his passport.

‘Suicide,’ said the policeman. ‘This is known as the Bridge of Suicides. I have orders to shoot anyone on sight trying to commit suicide. It’s a difficult job. The government doesn’t like people to kill themselves, because it gives it a bad name. There’s only one thing better than a dead Nihilist, and that is a live Nihilist. Also, there’s a saying in Nihilon: “Stop a suicide, commit a murder”. That always means better business for the police, anyway. Only last week a man was saved in the nick of time by a friend from killing himself, and next day he killed his wife. So we’re trying to stamp suicide out. I shot three of them last week as they were climbing on to the parapet. It certainly slowed them down a bit. This one just now was the first this week.’

‘What’s the point of killing them?’

‘Only way to stop them. “Died resisting arrest” looks much better than “Committed suicide”. We’ve got our statistics to think of.’ He walked away, whistling some popular Nihilonian folk-song.

Beyond the bridge was a squalid café whose exterior looked much like that of an old warehouse. A few wickerwork chairs and tables were set on the dry mud pavement outside. There was little traffic however, and, for the moment, no shooting. Richard hoped that here at least he wouldn’t be recognized for the general he was, ordering a cold orange drink which, when it came, he sat back to enjoy. After writing some high-flown notes on the Bridge of Suicides, he lazily opened his magazine and read an article describing how the Future was supposed to Work for the inhabitants of Nihilon from a domestic point of view. ‘Homemaking’ was its title:

‘After a meal, all dishes and cutlery will be thrown away, and within a few minutes new ones, of the finest porcelain and stainless steel, will come up the chute to your flat and be mechanically placed on your sideboard. There is an end to the drudgery of washing-up for Nihilists, both men and women. On taking off your clothes at night, they are to be thrown with nonchalant nihilism out of the window. These will be collected by the garbage man and, in the morning, complete new sets of identical garments will be found by the door, together with milk and newspapers. In fact,’ the article concluded, ‘the future has already arrived in Nihilon, because this is exactly what takes place in one of our recently constructed towns called Paradise City, whose inhabitants will be able to avail themselves of these delectable services.’

A young blond man with a beard sat nearby, and he must have seen the article that Richard was reading, for he called out: ‘They never tell the real truth about Paradise City. I escaped from it a month ago, climbed over a wall and ran a machine-gun gauntlet to get free. The dishes aren’t porcelain at all. They are crude earthenware. In the morning they come back broken and dirty. Everyone suspects they are the same ones they threw out, but badly patched up and stuck together. So the wily housewives clean their own dishes, and put them away carefully so that they don’t break. Some housewives didn’t even put them in the chute at the beginning, preferring to save the time and the risk, but they were arrested for a breach of the peace and as enemies of national endeavour.

‘As for the clothes that we were told to throw out of the window, they were returned even more torn and dirty after being kicked up the stairs again by the street cleaners. In fact this experiment isn’t working very well, and people in Paradise City are always trying to exchange their flats for more humble dwellings in other towns, even in the slums where life might be harder. Somehow they would feel safer there!’

‘What are you doing now that you no longer live in Paradise City?’

‘I’m a disgruntled young intellectual, so the government gave me a particularly difficult and thankless task. I’ve been assigned to find and kill the leading generals of the insurrectionary forces. I spent last week combing the surrounding area of the city, posing as a revolutionary, but it’s impossible to find out who their leader is. I suspect it’s because they change him so often. You’re a foreigner, so you can have no idea how difficult it is for us Nihilists. I don’t suppose you’re even interested. But my whole future is at stake, because I’ve been promised a full pension for the rest of my life if I find one, and I’m only twenty-four so you can see how much it means to me. I shall just have to go on looking, because if I find him, and kill him, the whole insurrectionary movement will collapse.’

His breath stank of drink, hunger, exhaustion, and avarice. Richard had an impulse to promote him on the spot to General of the Insurrection by handing over the briefcase, simply to see the effect it would have, but he didn’t do so because the position that had been so haphazardly given to him had already grown attractive by the very weight of its power. So he preferred to keep his rank for the moment, in spite of possible danger from this assassin.

‘Goodbye,’ said the young man, offering his hand to be shaken. ‘I must hunt my enemy.’

‘Good luck,’ said Richard, taking it, but glad to see him walk quickly towards the Bridge of Suicides, talking to himself.