The Empty Warrior (50 page)

“I asked if you would be more comfortable if the rekkot had been killed,” Seldon repeated.

“Yeah, I know what you asked,” O’Keefe said disgustedly, and in his native tongue. “I’m more interested in why you asked it. What am I, your pet research project? And speak English. You said you understand it, and I’m tired of trying to argue in your sissy excuse for a language.” He glared at the warder as if it could feel the rancor behind his aspersions.

“I asked the question because you are an aberrant human from the aberrant world,” it said. “My primary user and, by extension, the society that I serve have been assaulted by what would appear to be a similarly aberrant civilization. Therefore I have been instructed to observe you and to gather as much information as possible concerning your behavior. It is hoped that such observations may give insight into the peril that society faces and offer alternatives which may enable my users to avoid said peril. Under the circumstances, your attitude toward the attack of the rekkot and my response to its aggression might very well be pertinent information.” The robot hung suspended before him, unmoving, as if Seldon still expected him to answer the question.

“Idiots,” O’Keefe muttered, still at a loss to understand why the fool Akadeans could not come to grips with the fact that they were facing hostility far beyond what a simple, ravenous predator could ever represent. If Seldon heard the remark, and O’Keefe was certain the computer had, it offered no response. The warder merely continued to float silently before him.

“Okay, fine,” O’Keefe said at last. “I don’t want you to kill the damn thing. Does that help you?”

“No,” Seldon answered simply. “Beside the fact that you seem to be overly fond of alcoholic beverages, a fondness which appears to be more a function of boredom and escapism than a sign of physical addiction, you seem very much like an average human. It would even appear, based on my observations of your treks across the estate and contrary to what one would infer, that you are more comfortable and less prone to fearful outbursts of emotion among the feral life of the forest than the typical Sefforian. I have witnessed you causing harm to nothing save the insects that have pestered you.

“For this project I have been equipped with the latest, most advanced psychiatric software available anywhere in the Union. It should be possible for me to detect even the most subliminal hints of criminal intent in any subject, and yet I have been able to discern in you no sign of the aggressive and violent behaviors that one would almost certainly expect to find in a mass murderer. How is this possible?”

The last two sentences were delivered with no implication of animosity and held no tone of reproach or disapproval. Only a machine could place the words mass murderer in a sentence delivered with such a total lack of inflection. Seldon may as well have been discussing O’Keefe’s plans for dinner.

“Maybe it’s because I’ve never murdered anyone!” O’Keefe spat, putting as much vehemence as he was able behind the denial.

The intensity of his repudiation had, of course, no effect whatsoever on the controller and Seldon continued, calm and impersonal as ever. “Then you have never taken the life of another human being?”

“Yes, I have,” he said, slowly, in a dangerously soft voice. “But it was a war. The people I killed were trying their best to kill me, and they were trying to kill my men. What was I to do? I couldn’t very well just let them kill us all without fighting back. What would you have done in my place?”

Seldon was unfazed by his argument. “According to the documentation in my files, you traveled to the other side of your world to fight in this what you call “war.” And your own statements have repeatedly affirmed that you made no effort to avoid the people that you now say were trying to kill you. Rather, according to what we have been able to ascertain, you did in fact go out of your way to seek them out. Under those circumstances, it is very difficult for me to accept self-defense as an explanation for your behavior.”

O’Keefe took a deep breath, then turned and slowly walked away down the bank of the stream. The warder drifted along beside him, matching his pace while suspended over the deep cut of the murmuring rill.

“How can I explain this to you,” O’Keefe said in exasperation, speaking louder now to be sure he was heard over the sound of the desiccated leaves being crushed underfoot. “You’re only a machine. However advanced you are, in the end you are just circuit boards and wires. You only know and understand what you are programmed to know and understand. The people who built you know nothing of war, so ergo; you know nothing of war, either. I won’t have any more luck explaining things to you than I had explaining them to Cyanne Lindy.”

“That is a simplistic generalization,” Seldon countered. “I am much more than simply the sum of my programming. It is true that certain areas of my core drives are read-only, but I am perfectly capable of adding to or overwriting the large majority of my files should the need arise or should a primary user request it. If you offer a rational explanation, I will have no trouble understanding.”

“Well, that’s a problem, Seldon, because war isn’t rational, it’s emotional. There is no logical explanation for war. But just telling a bloodthirsty group of people that they are irrational is not going to keep them from attacking you. And once they have done so they are not going to stop unless you give them a reason to stop, and that generally involves fighting back.” O’Keefe began to walk faster without realizing it, the absurdity of engaging in an argument with a machine irritating him to the point that his muscles needed the release of more vigorous exercise.

“You are being mendacious,” Seldon stated through the floating warder. “I am loathe to mention this a second time, but you and your comrades traveled, at least in your terms, a great distance to participate in the conflict in which you fought. It hardly seems as though your adversaries were attacking you.”

O’Keefe stopped, sighed heavily, and then sat down with his back to an enormous tree trunk. “Okay,” he said, “listen carefully and I will try to explain.”

“I do not listen carefully,” the machine stated. “I add your every word to an existing database.”

“Whatever. Just shut up so I can tell the story. My country, my society, whatever you wish to call it…”

“I am cognizant of the nation-state concept as it exists on your world,” Seldon said, interrupting.

“Great!” O’Keefe spat loudly, at this point annoyed to the point of nearly yelling at the shiny canister he was arguing with. Nevertheless he continued, trying to keep his voice calm and steady. “My country at one point in time found itself confronted by another country, the Soviet Union, whose goal was to dominate the planet. They made no secret of their ambitions. On numerous occasions they simply took other nations by force, absorbing them into their empire and instituting governments in those nations that the people were overwhelmingly opposed to. Not everyone in the Soviet Union felt the need for dominion, but the small cadre of people who ruled did, and that’s all that mattered. No one else had a say.

“The only nation on Earth strong enough to stop them was my country, and my country made it clear to the Soviets that if they attempted to attain their goals by overtly attacking other nations, we would come to the aid of those nations, especially if those nations were among our allies. This threat gave them pause, and for the most part prevented them from attacking others because my country had weapons of such destructive power that we could have annihilated their entire population. They had similar weapons and could have utterly destroyed us in return, but the point was moot, because even our destruction would not have allowed them to attain their goals through the use of force. It was what we called ‘mutual assured destruction,’ in short, a standoff. So they came up with an alternative plan.

“They decided to attempt to subvert from within nations that were not already under their sway, or use the forces of surrogate nations to aggressively obtain the goals that my county had effectively denied their own military. They estimated, correctly, that my country would not resort to total war under those circumstances. Instead my government instituted a policy of containment, meaning that we would assist other nations against insurrections and attacks that were fomented or aided by our enemy, but would do so without attacking the Soviets directly. This conflict became a long and drawn out affair between the two greatest powers on Earth—one that wanted to dominate the planet, and the other, my country, that wanted to prevent them from doing so. That is why I was on the other side of the world fighting.

“To you, an entity not intimately familiar with our history, the conflict that I fought in might seem like naked aggression, but it was nothing of the sort. We made mistakes to be sure, one of the most egregious ones being that we alienated the most popular national leader in Vietnam when it may very well have been completely unnecessary. Had we made better choices in the beginning we might never have needed to fight there at all. But our leaders did not make the best choices, and that eventually led to war. No, that’s not right. It wasn’t even really a war. I think it could most credibly be described as one extremely long battle in a larger conflict. And like I said, that conflict was initiated by our enemies when they seized nations they had no right to take, it wasn’t started by us. And the long battle that I played a minor role in was one that in the end we lost. Well, I don’t even want to say that. They never really beat us; we just got tired of taking losses and eventually pulled out.

“Damn, now you’ve got me back in this argument, for the millionth time. We didn’t win, so I have to say we lost. I have to admit that. But it still just burns my ass because we could have won had we gone after the North rather than just playing defense. It was the damn politicians and their pansy-assed fear of the Chinese coming over the border. Just because it happened in Korea they were so afraid it would happen in Vietnam too.” O’Keefe found himself losing his direction amid old resentments and forced himself to refocus. He took a deep breath and made an effort to calm himself. “But that’s history now. We retreated, we left, so we were the losers. There’s no way around that, I guess.”

“But we did not lose the larger war. We won it. And not because we conquered our enemy, but because they could find no way conquer us. In the end it wasn’t battles or armies that decided the issue, it was economics. The small group of people who ruled the Soviet Union had no popular mandate to remain in power, they simply governed at the point of a gun. Furthermore, they practiced strict, centralized control over their economy. In order to maintain that control and their positions of power, the leaders were forced to repress their population under a yoke of uncompromising subordination, or else the people would simply have done as they pleased rather than implementing the plans drawn up by the leadership. However, the lack of freedom and opportunity that this political model entailed along with the lack of flexibility in their rigidly controlled economy combined to sap the vitality and the will of their people, leading to a lack of innovation and productivity. Thus they began to fall farther and farther behind my country and our allies from a technological and economic standpoint.

“In the end they had no choice but to soften the oppression of their state in an effort to keep pace. And that was their downfall. Once their people got a taste of freedom, they eventually threw their oppressors out. And once the people got some limited control over their own affairs, the governments that they instituted no longer wished to dominate the world. They were more interested in living in peace and carving out a better life for themselves. At that point the war ended and our nation became closely allied with many of the nations that emerged from our splintered enemy. Those who did not become our allies we could at least get along with. In short, we fought to rein in our enemy, to keep his imperialistic impulses in check, until such time that his empire simply collapsed from within. Now that’s the way it was. We fought because we had no choice, and when it was no longer necessary to fight we stopped. I did what I had to do under the circumstances, and despite the many mistakes we made, the world ended up being a much better place because of our efforts. If you can’t understand that, all I have to say is tough shit and don’t bother me about it anymore. I’m tired of trying to explain everything to you and your ignorant masters.”

O’Keefe looked away from the robot and crossed his arms tightly over his chest. The warder hovered in place before him but said nothing. There was only silence from the machine, leaving O’Keefe to guess that Seldon was busy digesting the new data he had provided, for all the good it would do. The only sound in the air was the mellifluent ripple of the brook rolling over the smooth stones in its course and the whisper of the breeze roiling the leaves overhead. Suddenly, startling him, Seldon’s voice erupted, seemingly too loudly for the current setting, from the warder.

“So although many fight in a war, the root cause rests with only an aggressive few, and those few do not fight. They coerce others to fight in their stead, who in turn, by their actions, force the leadership of their adversaries to induce members of their respective population to fight as well, in order to defend their polity from the aggression of the few’s proxies.”

“Well, that’s a larger point than I was trying to get across, but yeah, I think you’re getting the gist of it,” O’Keefe replied, taking a moment to wrap his mind around exactly what Seldon had said. “There were some leaders in antiquity who fought with the rank and file, but I can’t think of any that have done so since. However, it is generally not so much coercion that entices others to do the fighting for the few who hold power. For centuries societies and their leaders have practiced brainwashing through propaganda to obtain the same result. They also have inculcated amongst their populations a greater devotion to country than to morality. They have even resorted to simple bribery. Leaders have in many cases simply bought the allegiance of their militaries. But generally speaking you are correct: the few who wish to wage aggressive war almost always find some way to convince others to fight that war for them.”