Travels in Nihilon (7 page)

For a moment the idea appealed to her as a means of getting to know more about the inside workings of Nihilon than by the tortuous expedient of travelling around the country itself, but she remembered that a meeting had been arranged with her four colleagues in Nihilon City, and so opened her notebook to write: ‘Passions run high in Nihilon. It is a country with few moral standards, and ladies travelling alone would do well to remember this.'

‘No,' she said to the chief of police. ‘In any case, wouldn't you rather go on playing God, in the hope that one day you'll go mad?'

‘Don't mock me,' he said, making another half-hearted attempt to embrace her. ‘I only played God to lure you here. I saw you get off the train, so I persuaded the stationmaster to help you, which was the first part of my uncannily successful plan. He didn't want to, but I said I'd kill his wife and have him arrested for murder if he didn't. So he helped you through the customs, got you to the Nihilon train, and went off with your luggage. I knew that you would then have to complain to me, and I simply waited for you here. You see, it's not playing God. It's only thinking for oneself in a high and mighty manner!'

‘Your plan has failed,' she said sternly. ‘If you don't recover my luggage I'll make a strong complaint when I reach Nihilon City. And then we shall see what will happen.'

‘You're most uncooperative,' he said, sulking, ‘I only wanted to make love to you among the flowers.'

‘No,' she said.

‘Will you sign a confession, then?'

‘Certainly not.'

‘That's the least you can do after all the trouble I've taken.'

‘Never.'

‘You don't even ask what for,' he said bitterly. ‘A confession would bring me five hundred klipps, which would fill my Zap sports car with top-star petrol for a week. If only I could rely on the goodness of people to give me a little spiritual assistance from time to time. Life can be very hard for someone like me.'

She smiled at his childishness, but which she didn't like because she detected the ruthlessness lying underneath it. ‘How can you hope for people to be good in Nihilon?' she asked.

‘You can hope for anything in this country. The reason it is great is that we're not afraid of hope. What's more, our hopes often come true. When I saw you getting off the train, and fell in love with you, I hoped we'd be able to meet, and here you are.'

She lit a cigarette. ‘But you arranged all that. You just said so.'

‘You can't hope without giving it some help,' he said, laughing for the first time. He attacked her so suddenly that she dropped her cigarette. A trick of his foot shut the door hard, while the other foot clipped itself between her ankles and forced her into his arms, so that, with great strength he lowered her quickly to the floor. Such was the shock of it that she didn't struggle at first. Then she bit, scratched, and spat. She ripped the red tab from the lapel of his tunic, and this sound of tearing cloth saved her. The price seemed too high for him, water over his passion, and he jumped away before she could do any more damage to his uniform.

Jaquiline thought he had only leapt clear so as to spring down again from a better vantage point. She reached the table and opened the book for which she had already paid two hundred klipps. He put up his hands. ‘I love you,' he said with trembling lips, eyes fixed on the revolver and cursing the versatility of Nihilon's writers.

She held it steadily and was ready to fire: ‘I want my luggage. I have to be in Nihilon City tomorrow.'

‘We'll go and get it,' he smiled, taking a paperclip from his desk and fastening the red tab back in place on his tunic.

‘I'll go alone,' she told him, putting the gun in its box.

He opened the door, and gallantly pointed the way into sunlight. ‘My Zap sports car is at your disposal, madam. Twenty kilometres beyond this station the Nihilon City Express waits for two hours to take on food, fuel, arms, and spare wheels; if I drive fast we can get there in time to apprehend our criminal stationmaster. I'll have him tried and sent to a special school where he'll be taught a lower-grade job.'

‘That's unjust,' she protested, ‘since it was all your plan.'

He took her hand. ‘He was unjust in agreeing to it. It's brought ashes and ruin on my head. He deserves to be punished. However, since it's your wish, I won't have him arrested, on condition that you come back here with me afterwards so that we can be together tonight.'

‘No,' she said firmly. ‘And while we stand talking we're wasting time.'

They walked along the platform, the police chief swaggering as became his rank, and went out through the booking hall, to where his Zap sports car was waiting by the roadside.

Chapter 9

Benjamin sat in his silent car, wondering whether or not it had broken its back in tumbling down the bank. He was also curious as to why the powers of Nihilon were on to him so soon, for the driver in that red Zap was certainly no playboy out for a casual accident before breakfast. He'd tried to kill him, and that was a plain Nihilonian fact. Benjamin brooded that he'd probably betrayed himself by hitting the policeman at the frontier, an act he'd taken gluttonous pride in at the time, but which in the glare of midday he saw as his first and perhaps fatal mistake.

He'd always assumed that people over forty didn't make such blunders, but in Nihilon he was learning certain things all over again. This fractured start threatened the fibres of his normally cool nerve, and as he turned the ignition key, he wondered whether his colleagues were faring any better in their allotted zones.

The ground was firmer under the trees, and he hoped to get back on the road, despite the many boulders scattered around. The engine sounded good, so he let off the brake, slipped into first gear, and went forward. Most of Benjamin's life had been devoted to the study of history, and he had been chosen by the Editor of the proposed guidebook to concentrate, as far as possible, on recent events in Nihilon. This was easier said than done, for Benjamin knew that the history books of Nihilon's more recent past were nothing more than gossip columns. In the country's schools history was scandal. Nothing else was allowed. Dates and facts were hard to come by. Political reality was out. There were only false accounts of drunkenness, greed, bribe-taking, murder, orgy, perversion, incompetence, blackmail and corruption. The children and students loved it.

History, as it is ordinarily known, stopped at the beginning of the present regime which, during its twenty-five years of power, had closed the country off from the world, at least as regards any serious study of it. Tourists had been allowed to sample the nefarious delights of its nihilistic principles, but they had for the most part returned in a state of dumb shock.

Inwardly terrified of being disillusioned, they had praised the country out of all proportion to its negative achievements. In this way they kept faith in themselves, and by encouraging others to go in their tracks, enabled them to do the same. Some tourists had come back with no impressions at all, being none the wiser for their visits.

He cruised through the grove of trees, over ploughed earth and between stones, until an incline towards the road was gentle enough to ascend. Even so, it was steep, and called for the full power of the Thundercloud's robust engine to get him to the top. Just in time, he noticed that a deep drainage ditch bordered the road, blocking him off from it. He cursed, stopped, pulled hard on the handbrake, and wondered how he could get over.

Some months ago a letter had reached him from an aged and venerable philosopher of Nihilon who had written a true and complete history of the last Nihilonian civil war, and of all that had happened since, which he was about to offer to a publisher in the capital. He said he would hide a carbon copy of the book in case the first one not only failed to be published, but was also not sent back to him. Another correspondent later informed Benjamin that the philosopher-historian had been arrested by his publisher and never seen again, adding that the spare copy of the manuscript was hidden somewhere in Nihilon. Benjamin, in his travels, hoped to find this document, but his return to Nihilon put him in great danger, because he had been there as a young man, and certain crimes were lyingly attributed to him. His life wouldn't be worth a bent Nihilonian klipp if he were caught, which was why his encounter with the Zap was so worrying.

He got out of the car, hoping to stop a passing motorist and ask for help. But the road was empty, the sky was clear, the sun just past its zenith. At this rate it would take a week instead of a day to reach Nihilon City, so he decided to collect enough large stones to fill the ditch and then cross over it. Unfortunately, the most suitable stones lay at the bottom of the slope, which would mean great labour in bringing them up, but since it seemed the only solution he took off his shirt and walked down for the first consignment.

Twenty-five years ago there had been a civil war in Nihilon, between the ruling Rationalists, and the usurping Nihilists. Benjamin Smith, as an idealistic young man whose girlfriend had recently agreed to marry someone else, went off to fight, with other outsiders, for the cause of the Rationalists. His disappointment in love made him both cunning and reckless – cunning in military logic, and reckless for his personal safety – so that within a year he had reached the rank of company commander.

A drop of sweat from his forehead glistened momentarily on a large stone, that plunged to the bottom of the trench and gave back a sound of splintering fragments. During this lengthy transporting of boulders, perspiring freely, he recalled those days of battle for the Republic of Damascony – now Nihilon – when he had received the Damson Leaf Award for high and useful services from President Took, the last great Liberal president of the country, who was said to have died after the final collapse of the battlefronts. Benjamin wanted to find out what had really happened to him, and what had become of Took's infant daughter, who would by now be a grown woman – if she had survived. It seemed to him, as he lugged a particularly heavy burden up the hill, that history was a dustbin to root around in occasionally for something spiritually satisfying to ponder on, especially when at the ripe age of fifty he was suffering the desolation of a broken marriage, and had accepted a job as historical adviser to an unnecessary guidebook merely to get away from it.

He recalled how he and his company of Rational Guards, reduced to twenty-five men out of two hundred, had been ordered to defend the town of Amrel, which was of great importance for the safety of Nihilon City a hundred and sixty kilometres to the southwest. But there was little chance of holding back the ever-pressing forces of nihilism, for with terror on their side, the sinuous and pot-holed roads opened before them, and led inexorably towards the centre of government.

Amrel was one of the last remaining blocks to their progress. It stood on a sheer hill, a packed little town of tall and ancient buildings from whose ramparts one could see the long bridge over the River Aznal – an impregnable position, and tactically the right place for a last stand since it overlooked the eastern plateau for a great distance, and would have commanded it in every way if the Rationalists had possessed a dozen heavy machine guns, a battery of artillery, and several hundred fresh, well-trained men, instead of twenty-five worn-out idealistic fugitives who had little food and ammunition left.

Even so, the forward patrols of the Nihilists had suffered at the bridge, as the score of bodies rotting in the sun has proved. Benjamin had gone down the hill himself and laid explosive charges under its supports, wired them skilfully, and trailed the lead up the cliff face to his headquarters in the old palace. He would wait for days if necessary for that armoured group he'd dreamed of all his life, a trio of prime and perfect tanks on a long bridge suddenly convulsed in an earthquake of explosions that dropped them into icy water below.

Such a picture was with him still as he heaved another stone up to the culvert, part of the same hot territory he'd tried to defend so long ago. That classically perfect bridge had never been blown, for a man of the town had approached him one evening, and beckoned him on to the arcaded walk with a wide view over the empty and lustreless plain. He talked for a long time of how the bridge was of great commercial and cultural value to the town, part of its actual life-spirit, a bridge which not only connected it to the rich wheatlands and the pastures of the Alpine regions, but also to the Chimney Zone north of Nihilon City from which came all manufactured goods. The bridge was a vital lifeline of the country that, once destroyed, would take years to rebuild, and in any case it was no longer a question, the man went on, of holding up the Nihilist army. All the Nihilists had to do was cross the river by boat to the north and south, out of range of Rationalist patrols, and the town would fall within a matter of hours.

Benjamin knew he ought to have shot the man dead, and had his body thrown towards the river, as the townspeople slung their dogs when they wanted to kill them, but he hesitated, and went on listening in the dusk. The man offered him a bus, with enough petrol to get his company to Nihilon City, in exchange for leaving the bridge alone. Amrel would fall anyway, even if they died defending it. Benjamin knew that the Rationalist armies were being defeated on all fronts because they lacked supplies and popular support. Walking up and down in the cool moonlight, smoking a cigar and listening to the smooth persuasions of this man, offering him safety in the form of a bus and petrol, he felt for the first time since leaving his own country that he wanted to live. Perhaps if he survived he would even fall in love again, and his nod of acceptance was barely visible in the half darkness.

The following morning he and his soldiers had got into the bus. The man who had provided it, and who had shaken his hand warmly, who had embraced him and called him his own brother as they said goodbye, was an agent of the Nihilists. Halfway to the capital, it was by the merest chance that a bomb was found under one of the bus seats, which was to have destroyed them all. Also, five of the petrol cans were full of water, though this was remedied by taking more fuel from filling-stations at gunpoint.