Travels in Nihilon

Chapter 28

Nihilism had worked so well, Benjamin reflected, after setting up his headquarters at Agbat railway station, that it was almost impossible not to believe in God. During the last twenty-five years, industrial production had gone up five per cent. Not much, perhaps, but certainly it had not declined. And if the people weren’t happier than they had been before, at least they were livelier. Nihilism had given them a new zest for life, a positive interest in it. What more could they ask for?

It may not be the finest of governments, but it was the next best thing to having no government at all, he decided, signing an order to have another half-dozen prisoners set free when, according to the new principles of honesty and re-education, they should have been sent for trial, after which they would have been committed to a special establishment for rehabilitating. Nihilists which had yet to be set up.

Before him were several thick volumes on Nihilist industrial progress during the first quarter-century of its power. Apparently they had been the stationmaster’s favourite reading. The columns of figures presented a dazzling picture of a nation set on such a course of economic betterment that it seemed destined to dominate the world. Every commodity for a firm industrial base was to be found in Nihilon, it was stated, from coal to bauxite, tungsten to pigiron, copper to oil, though no one had ever claimed such a thing for the country before it went Nihilistic. However, the National Statistics Board of Mystical Nihilism (to give these voluminous reports their full title) acquired such deposits for Nihilon simply by stating that they existed. And so, in the imagination at least, as well as in print, they did.

A poet must have drawn this picture, and primed these books before the figure-men got to work on them. And if such fabricated calculations kept the people happy, what need was there of the real thing? The question to ask was: Would the real thing make them more happy? And one could only answer that it was doubtful. With these figures even dry bread would taste as if it had butter on it. Benjamin sighed, at the fact that the moral regeneration of mankind was simpler to accomplish than he imagined. Perhaps, after all, the Nihilists had hit upon the secret of it, and now with his insurrectionist brigade he was out to upset the delicate fabric of nihilism that had been painfully built up over the last twenty-five years by these idealistic perverts.

He could not deny that the people had grown accustomed to it. It was their one and only way of life. It worked for them, and it was working for their children, and so what right had he, with his ideals, to come along and wreck it so completely? The only reason that people were running with such alacrity to join his standard was because they saw it perhaps as another playful manifestation of nihilistic mismanagement, and would not realize their mistake until it was too late.

He tried to shake off such wayward thoughts. By a brilliant series of manoeuvres he had captured Agbat less painfully than the town of Amrel. His knights-in-shining-overalls were making merry in the main square, while he unrolled his map, and put a volume of the stationmaster’s statistics at each of the four corners to hold it down. The final phase of his advance was about to begin, and he was so much assailed by the rights and wrongs of it that he almost hoped he would be killed in the battles ahead, especially when he thought back on his carefree time as a mere tourist in this chaotic haphazard paradise, and knew with melancholic certainty that such enjoyment would never return.

He sighed, and went back to his planning, deciding to leave a hundred soldiers and two heavy machine guns to hold Agbat, which would defend his communications with Amrel and the frontier, so that when he resumed his push towards Tungsten he would know that his retreat to Cronacia was halfway open should anything go wrong. He never advanced without being sure that he could retreat, an axiom that no amount of heady and easy success could turn him from. There was no advance without a retreat, and no retreat without an advance, and no ground was ever covered twice, because even if you actually went over it again, you were in another frame of mind, and circumstances were different anyway. No one day resembled the one that had preceded it, nor the one that was on its way from tomorrow, and he didn’t need any nihilistic philosophy to remind him of such a natural law, though in a sense it made him more comfortable to be constantly aware of the fact.

Even the insurrection was run, it seemed, on nihilistic principles, which was why he enjoyed it so much, and he realized that when the dragon of nihilism was split down the middle and bleeding to death, he might not like it here any more. In some strange way, and at this late hour, honesty and nihilism might after all be related, an observation which for the moment lightened his mood.

Even that waiting space-rocket, set to charge for the heavens in a few days’ time, out of which the finest male specimen and the juiciest female of the line would emerge for the long-planned well-advertised extravaganza of sex-in-space, was nothing more than a dramatic manifestation of Nihilon’s health and honesty. Yet it was a show he felt obliged to destroy, for if it succeeded, nihilism would reign forever glorious. Who then would argue over its merits? — though in becoming an eternal fact of life it would certainly lose all possible attraction for him.

There was a knock at the door, and one of his soldiers shuffled over the dusty boards to announce that they had found a strange woman.

‘What’s wrong with her?’ Benjamin demanded.

‘It’s a woman, commander. We were patrolling towards the railway bridge, and saw that she was being ravished by two Nihilists. We heard her screaming for help, so we killed them.’

She had fallen, and when they carried her in, Benjamin saw that she was a young woman, her dress torn, and her blood-stained face smeared with ash and dust. He was too absorbed in his favourite work of planning his attacks to like being disturbed, and if he had been a Nihilist officer advancing against the forces of law and decency, order and honesty, he would have told them to finish raping her themselves instead of bothering him.

Hair straggled over her breasts and shoulders, and when he at last looked at her closely, she opened her eyes, and saw a brutalized generalissimo with a shaved head, wearing bush-shirt and trousers, a belt around his waist from which hung a revolver. Her lips trembled, as if about to open for a scream. ‘All right, then,’ she said weakly, not believing that her good luck in being saved by the two madmen could last, ‘get it over with. I might as well die in this awful country.’

He drew back at the shock of hearing her speak. ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked, putting a chair by her so that she could sit down, then sending the two soldiers away. When she pushed her hair back over her scratch-covered face, he felt himself on the point of choking. He took a bottle from his desk, and poured her a glass of Nihilitz. ‘Drink this, Jaquiline. It’s a terrible potion, but you’ll feel better,’ his stomach twisting with black rage against this country and its nihilism.

He knelt, to keep the glass steady at her mouth. She said nothing, but gulped the Nihilitz. He took the glass away, and held her hands, saw that she wasn’t wounded badly, but supposed that her experiences had been full of the usual Nihilon nightmare. ‘I want to go home,’ she cried, ‘I want to get out.’

‘You’re quite safe. There are more than two thousand honest soldiers to guard you. What fools we were to let a woman come alone into this foul place. But the Nihilists will pay for this. I’ll burn them out. I’ll destroy them. I’ll lay the country waste between here and Tungsten. I’ll plough this land with so much dynamite there won’t even be a breath of nihilism left in it.’

Her eyes closed from utter exhaustion, and relief at such unexpected deliverance. He helped her into the next room, where she lay on his camp-bed, and with a heavy blanket drawn over, she sank into a deep sleep.

When she sat beside him next morning in his Thundercloud Estate car, her face showed little of her ordeal. Her blue eyes were the colour of steel as she looked ahead at the rocky and winding trail that led into the mountains. She wore an olive-green shirt, a pair of men’s slacks, and sandals on her feet. A belt around her waist had a holster hanging from it, with a loaded pistol inside.

Advancing patrols were already far ahead, marking the track where it became uncertain, fanning out for snipers, crowning the neighbouring heights for any sign of resistance or ambush. Benjamin’s burning zeal to rid Nihilon of its detestable régime had decided Jaquiline to work for the same end.

Such bravery and suffering in a beautiful young woman filled him with a fatherly love for her, and he agreed that she could come with the column. And Jaquiline felt a liking for this new Benjamin she had found so unexpectedly in the wastes of Nihilon. As an acquaintance of the last two years she had looked on him as no more than a brash hedonist, but it was now obvious that he was a man of deeply fundamental ideals whom she had been wrong to misjudge. Where else could his good qualities have been brought out except in a place like Nihilon? She turned and smiled tenderly at him as he set the car in motion.

The landscape of grey rock, ash, and pumice glistened under the scorching sun. Their car climbed over backs and shoulders of land, sometimes ascending several hundred metres in sharp curves of the track. The region appeared to be sparsely inhabited, but now and again steep narrow cuttings in the mountainside, cleverly hidden by the complex configuration of the land, showed clusters of small houses at the bottom, presumably built around springs or streams, for small green trees grew down there, and on either side of the indentation, terraces had been built some way up the banks, long strips of verdure vividly glowing. Occasional belts of terracing were fallow, or had just been harvested, and the soil was so dark it looked like pure soot.

More bushes appeared, and a few trees as they ascended, as well as a house here and there by the roadside. Even the squalor-ridden children playing out of doors, who laughed and waved at them, seemed fortunate and picturesque to Jaquiline when she thought that their day of deliverance from vile nihilism was close at hand. At a thousand metres the air grew cooler, for they were approaching the plateau on which the Groves of Aspron were situated. Then the track suddenly turned into a wide, paved highway, a miracle of unexpected road-building in this remote area of Nihilon.

‘It’ll go on for a few miles, then end in a swamp, or at the edge of a cliff,’ Benjamin said. ‘I’ve met this sort of thing before. Nobody can tell how these isolated stretches of perfect road get here, or why they were built, but they seem to be a characteristic feature of this country.’

He drove slowly, at forty kilometres an hour, when from around a slight bend ahead a small red sports car came weaving towards him. It brought to mind his first encounter with such a maniac several days ago; when he had been civilized and inexperienced enough to get driven off the road and almost killed.

The car was at a distance still, and there would be time to act. He pulled into the side and stopped his Thundercloud. ‘Get out,’ he said to Jaquiline. They crouched behind the car, her heart thumping as she witnessed the mad career of the Zap, ready to throw herself clear should it decide to crash against the superior weight of their estate car.

Benjamin picked up a sub-machine-gun and took aim, standing by the right headlamp. A few moments would pass before the car drew level and he could open fire, meanwhile keeping the gun halfway to his shoulder.

The Zap slowed, and straightened course. A face at the windscreen looked at him, all teeth, fair hair, and homicidal sweat. The driver levelled a gun through the open window. Benjamin dropped, spattered by the glass of his own headlamp.

The Zap passed, but with the coolness and accuracy that can come with extreme rage, Benjamin stood up and fired the whole magazine at the petrol tank of the retreating car. Without looking, he rummaged for another clip, but saw smoke pouring out of the Zap as it zigzagged on its way. The dead silence of the earth was shaken by a grunt of wind, as the car went up in a column of smoke and flame. ‘That’s the second time those Zaps have tried to kill me,’ he smiled, courteously opening the door of the Thundercloud so that Jaquiline could get in.

She smoothed her hair. ‘A woman on the train told me that when men are discharged with good results from the Groves of Aspron they are awarded a crimson Zap car as a prize. It’s supposed to normalize their emotions by the time they get home.’

‘That’s one patient who won’t go back for more treatment,’ he said, with a nihilistic laugh. ‘I’ve been persecuted by those Zap cars ever since coming to this lawless land, and it’s one instrument of terror we’ll ban as soon as the new government gets together.’

At the highest point of the Aspron Way, which was now back to its usual rugged unpaved state, stood a wooden shack, on which was hung a large notice saying COFFEE. He stopped the car, and they went inside, having neither eaten nor drunk since setting out.

It was a cool dark room, with a rough counter at one end, and two or three rickety chairs and tables between it and the sackcloth door. On the counter sat a Nihilonian cat, with neither ears nor tail, and behind it stood a tall corpulent man wearing a waistcoat over his apron. His thinning hair was parted down the middle, and he emerged from the daze of his own stillness to ask what they wanted.

On being told, he lit a small spririt stove on the counter: ‘Are you part of the liberation army? If you are, you won’t be the first army that’s passed this way. May I invite you to sit down?’

They preferred to stand, for a change. ‘What army?’ Benjamin asked, refusing the bottle of Nihilitz.

‘We’ll wait for the coffee to boil,’ the café-keeper said. ‘It’ll take a few minutes. But I’m glad to see travellers, even if it is an army. I’m dying of boredom. My wife died of it last year. Absolute agony. I held her hand all through it. Never thought I had it in me. Had to send for soil from Agbat to bury her in, because the peasants near here wouldn’t sell me any. They even stole my load of it coming up from Agbat, so I had to leave her in the living rock after all.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ Jaquiline said, wiping her forehead with a handkerchief. ‘How long have you lived here?’

He pondered on the number of years: ‘Twenty-six. My whole life, in fact. I wanted a peaceful life, and here it is. Come outside, and I’ll have great pleasure in showing you what I got for my trouble.’ They followed him through the sackcloth, into searing metallic sunshine. ‘Grey mountains for as far as the eye can see — in every direction. Beautiful, inspiring, empty. The most gorgeous sight in the world. I must have yearned for it the moment I was conceived. When I was a boy, and then as a young man, I knew that one day I would achieve all this, though for many years there was absolutely no clue that I would ever get it. In fact for two decades I forgot about this deep yearning in my blood, and it was only when my ambition was half complete that I realized it was coming about, and remembered that I’d always wanted it. I was recovering from a state of catastrophic despair, and was on the point of dying of it, when I bought this shack for selling coffee to passing travellers. Then, slowly, I acquired all this land, to increase my peace of mind.’

They followed the coffee-distiller back into his bar, where he poured out two large cups. ‘You were saying,’ said Benjamin, ‘that another army passed this way.’

‘Was I? Well, it was twenty-five years ago. You can’t expect me to remember every detail. It was President Took’s rearguard, a few stragglers really, heading up into the Athelstans.’

‘Why would they come through here?’ Benjamin asked, touched with curiosity now that the shack-keeper was veering on to his pet obsession of Nihilon’s recent history. ‘The main road goes through Nilbud.’

‘It does,’ the man smiled, ‘but it was blocked by the Nihilists. So Took and his hundred got on a train as far as Agbat. They were heading for sanctuary in Cronacia, but the bridge beyond Agbat was strongly held by the Nihilists, and Amrel had already been abandoned. There was nobody poor Took could trust. Anyhow, he comes in here, still wearing his top-hat and chains of office, and asks for coffee. I gave him some. What else could I do? But when the time came to pay and he walked out without doing so I reached for my revolver and shot him in the back. If he can’t pay for his coffee, I thought, I’ll kill the swine, just as if he’s a peasant who can’t afford to. Equality’s my game, and I never lost by it yet.’

Sweat drops were falling into Benjamin’s cup. The cat leapt to the floor and sauntered outside under the sack. ‘You killed President Took?’

‘He only had ten soldiers by that time,’ said the man. ‘The rest died on the way up from Agbat. He was a fine man, President Took. He spoke calmly, and walked in here with great dignity.’

Benjamin’s hands shook. He put the cup down, and loosened his revolver, feeling in the grip of his worst moment since entering Nihilon. ‘So this is where he died? What was the date?’

‘I don’t remember,’ said the man. ‘The soldiers burned down my shack, that’s all I know. But I built another. In any case President Took didn’t die. I was so wild with rage that my shot-went wide. His hat fell off, and he asked why I’d done it. When I told him, he said he’d only forgotten to pay for his coffee because he was so preoccupied with defeat. He gave me a golden coin, and then left, but some of his men stayed and set fire to my hut. Then they shot at me and my wife, but we were already running down the valley.’

‘And then what happened?’

‘He went on towards Tungsten. Or maybe up behind the peaks somewhere. I don’t know. I heard from a peasant that he died in a cave after a dinner of boiled roots. But who can be sure?’

‘Is that all?’

‘What’s the difference? He dies in a cave, I die of boredom. Nihilism knows no frontiers. It loves everyone, and is no respecter of persons.’

‘So that’s how it happened,’ Benjamin said, walking with Jaquiline towards the sackcloth.

‘Stop!’ shouted the shackman.

They turned to see a heavy revolver pointed at them. ‘If I call my soldiers in,’ said Benjamin, ‘you won’t escape this time. I don’t like people who dodge their fate. They’re the worst people in the world, a scourge to everyone. Put that gun down.’

‘Pay for coffee, then!’

Benjamin longed to shoot it out, knowing he would kill him. He was totally unconcerned for his own safety, but dared not do it with Jaquiline by his side.

The café-owner smiled. ‘If it’s true you’re leading the forces of law and honesty to final victory, you can’t refuse to pay for your coffee, though you may be greatly tempted. Nor can you order your soldiers to obliterate all sign of this shack and its too scrupulous occupant.’

‘How much?’ Benjamin asked.

‘A hundred klipps.’

He walked back and placed a bank note for that amount on the counter. ‘Where’s the tip?’ the man demanded, his revolver still pointing.

‘I’ve paid the price. No tip.’

‘A hundred and twenty,’ the man insisted.

‘I’ll have my soldiers burn you out, you robber.’

‘That would cost you twenty million klipps in compensation.’

‘For this shack?’ Benjamin shouted.

The man leered at him. ‘My soul is invested in it. A twenty-klipp tip on two cups of coffee is very reasonable.’

‘Tips and bribes are immediately abolished in territory I pass through.’

The man saw his dilemma, and lowered his revolver. ‘The price for the coffee was a hundred and twenty. I put the rates up this morning, but forgot to tell you. No tips from now on.’

Benjamin threw him a coin for the extra amount, and on his way to the car fought down a wild and reasonable urge to give the correct Nihilist order for the burning of the hut. But instead he decided to wait for the main body of his brigade, and give them a rousing speech about honesty and dignity, before leading the final advance towards that obscene rocket pointing into the sky above Tungsten.