Agent of Chaos

by Norman Spinrad

Genres: Science Fiction; Hard Science Fiction; Space Opera

Synopsis

The Great Tyrant rules the solar system with absolute terror. Only one man dares to fight back. The time is the 24th century. Humankind populates the entire solar system from icy Pluto to boiling Mercury. Great domed cities, humming factories, hordes of workers, all feed the power of the dictatorship that controls all life. Only a small group among the cowed population dares rebel in a struggle that pits democracy against tyranny. But there is a third force at work as well. A mysterious band of assassins whose final solution to the problem of humanity's fate is as terrifying as it is irresistible - one of them is known as the AGENT OF CHAOS.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 184

Sample

 

“Every Social Conflict is the arena for three mutually antagonistic forces: the Establishment, the opposition which seeks to overthrow the existing Order and replace it with one of its own, and the tendency towards increased Social Entropy which all Social Conflict engenders, and which, in this context, may be thought of as the force of Chaos.”

—Gregor Markowitz, The Theory of Social Entropy

BORIS JOHNSON stepped lightly and automatically off the outermost strip of the groundlevel glideway and onto the sidewalk lip. The pristine, cold white bulk of the new Ministry of Guardianship building bulked proud and inhuman in front of him, separated from the groundlevel sidewalk by a broad expanse of lawn which completely ringed the building on groundlevel.

A crowd, if one could call it that, had already been gathered in front of the Ministry steps, at the base of which a small speaker’s podium had been set up. Johnson estimated that there were perhaps three to four thousand Wards present: placid, indifferent-looking men and women who had obviously been herded to the Ministry for the occasion by the Guards. They stood and waited, did not chatter among themselves, did not fidget. Like all such gatherings of the Wards of the Hegemony, it was an inert mass of people, rather than a real crowd. Johnson noted that the Wards had been confined to a comparatively small, semicircular area whose base was the Ministry steps by a ring of surly looking Guards, scowling like shaved apes stuffed into tuxedos in their seldom-worn dress uniforms. Thus, what people who were present were packed into a tight mass, even though there were still wide expanses of empty lawn available on groundlevel.

So far, so good.

Sauntering slowly, a nonchalance at wild variance with the tension he felt painted on his bluff but not quite hard features, Johnson walked past the ring of Guards at the periphery of the crowd. He passed directly in front of one of the Guards, a big, beefy man, with deep lines of permanent suspicion and hostility etched on his cruel-eyed face. He gave the Guard a casual nod, for he was dressed in the gray coveralls of Ministry Maintenance, and such a gesture was more or less expected. The Guard’s face creased in a cold, lizard’s smile, and Johnson smiled back, a quick grin of equal sincerity.

As he elbowed his way closer to the speaker’s podium, Johnson saw why the Wards had been crowded into such an unnecessarily small space. A television crew had set up their equipment on the secondlevel street—about thirty feet above groundlevel and connected directly to the Ministry by a rampway—and they would be shooting the dedication ceremonies directly over the heads of the crowd, thus giving the illusion of a vast, packed audience surrounding the Ministry.

Johnson snickered to himself, while keeping his features carefully bland. It was typical Hegemonic overcontrol. As he surveyed the setup more closely, he realized that the whole thing was really a carefully designed set for the benefit of the television cameras, which would carry Khustov’s speech live to all the domes on Mars, and later, via tape, throughout the Hegemony. It was all planned for effect: the rarely worn, ornate blue, gold, and black dress uniforms of the Guards; the illusion of a vast audience; the sheer, windowless white walls of the Ministry soaring like a huge backdrop screen behind the podium; the large Hegemonic flag—nine concentric gold circles in a field of blue—flapping in the breeze. … Flapping in the breeze?

Johnson had to fight to keep from laughing. Since every molecule of air in every dome was artificially produced and carefully circulated by the dome’s environment control system, there were no breezes on Mars to ruffle a flag. Apparently, they had set up a hidden blower behind the flag to create one!

Somehow, it was the perfect final touch.

Just right for the script—a pompous dedication speech for the new Martian Ministry of Guardianship building by the Hegemonic Coordinator himself.

What they don’t know, Johnson thought as he casually thrust his hands into his pockets and stroked the barrel of the lasegun under his right hand, is that there has been a small revision written into the script by the Democratic League.

It would be quite a show, all right, if not quite what the Hegemonic Council had planned. Instead, every Ward on Mars (they would, of course, never run the tape on the other planets) would be treated to the public spectacle of the assassination of Vladimir Khustov, the Hegemonic Coordinator himself.

After this, the Democratic League would have to be taken seriously. Khustov would be dead, and far too many people would have witnessed the event for the Hegemony to wipe it from the consciousness of the Wards by denying, in the usual fashion, that it had ever happened. Johnson fingered the contents of his left pocket: an annunciator bomb, a small ovoid containing a prerecorded message announcing that the League had assassinated Khustov. After the assassination, it would be released to fly above the crowd on its tiny rotors, broadcasting its message not only to the Wards present in the flesh, but to millions of television sets all over Mars. Every Ward on Mars would know who killed the Coordinator.

The League was so small, and so weak, and against a tyranny like the Hegemony, a tyranny that controlled not only all the inhabited planets and moons of the Solar System but every media of communication as well, it was nearly impossible to even make the League’s existence known to a sizeable proportion of the Hegemony’s populace.

It took a lot more than planning to accomplish anything of significance—it took large doses of luck.

Luck that the Hegemonic Council had decided to televise the dedication ceremonies.

And even greater luck that Arkady Solkowni had joined the League on his own initiative.

Johnson craned his neck above the crowd and surveyed the Guards stationed around the periphery. Uniformly big men, uniformly sullen and suspicious, their laseguns at the ready, their eyes constantly scanning the crowd. They eyed each other with even greater suspicion, a suspicion born of carefully nurtured and conditioned paranoia.

The Guards were carefully picked men, thoroughly screened and conditioned. They had to have just the right family background, psychological profile, school record, even genetic traits. And even once their backgrounds passed muster, they were put through a solid week of depth interrogation under a whole battery of psychodrugs.

It was utterly impossible for League agents to infiltrate the Guards. No amount of dedication, skill or planning could accomplish it.

Only luck.

No League agent could become a Guard, but it was not totally impossible for a Guard to become a member of the League, as Arkady Solkowni had. And Solkowni was not only a Guard, he was a member of Khustov’s personal bodyguard.

Yes, luck was one of the few remaining factors that the Hegemony had not yet found a way to control. So they compensated for it. The Guards were potentially the weak point in the Hegemony’s iron control of the Solar System, and the Council had long been aware of the danger. Submissiveness, apathy, bovine indifference, were ideal traits in a controlled populace—and the Wards moved further in that direction every day—but they would be intolerable in the paramilitary organization designed to control that populace. The Guards had to be alert, ruthless, possessed of considerable initiative, and tough.

In a word, it was necessary that they be dangerous.

But one thing the Hegemony could not tolerate was a tough, armed elite group of men with an internal esprit, a Praetorian Guard.

Wasn’t it one of the old suppressed philosphers, Plato or Toynbee or Markowitz, Johnson thought, who had posed that old paradox: “Who shall guard the Guardians”?

Johnson grimaced inwardly. Whoever he was, he had not lived under the Hegemony! The Hegemony had the answer. …

The answer was fear. Institutionalized and carefully created paranoia. The Guards guarded the Guards. They were conditioned to distrust every human being but the Councilors themselves; they watched each other with even greater suspicion than that with which they watched the Wards. They were deliberately trained to be trigger-happy—as the Preamble to the Revised Hegemonic Constitution said, “Better a million wards shall perish than one Unpermitted Act go unpunished.” The Guards were more like a pack of intelligent but ill-tamed hunting dogs than an army. They were conditioned to kill anyone that seemed the least bit out of line, and that included their own pack brothers.

Paradoxically, it was this very institutionalized paranoia that brought a man like Solkowni to doubt the Hegemonic Council itself, and to transfer his one remaining loyalty at least temporarily to the Democratic League. It does not take much to turn a “one man dog” into a “no man dog.”

At any rate, Johnson thought, no one Guard could assassinate Khustov. The others in the bodyguard would gleefully cut him down the moment he made a suspicious move.

Unless. …

Johnson studied the blank, vacant faces of the Wards pressed close about him. Fear, prosperity, and iron control were enabling the Hegemony to reduce the Wards to nothing more than well-fed, well-housed, well-amused domestic cattle. They lacked nothing but freedom, and the very meaning of that word was rapidly becoming obscure.

Four thousand Wards of the Hegemony—human cattle, totally harmless in themselves. But scattered among that apathetic herd were ten armed League agents, ten killers.

By themselves, the ten agents could not kill Khustov. Among other things, Guards were required to be unnaturally big men—none of them were under six foot six. Khustov would be surrounded by a ring of Guards, and at the slightest hint of trouble, they would form a shield around him with their own bodies.

The agents in the crowd could not kill Khustov. Solkowni could not kill Khustov. The Wards would never dream of killing Khustov.

But all three together. …

Now there was a stir by the arched entranceway at the top of the Ministry steps. Eight burly Guards in dress uniforms emerged from the building—Khustov’s personal bodyguard. The blond one at the extreme right would be Arkady Solkowni.

Boris Johnson checked his watch. The television coverage should be just starting now, and any second Khustov would appear.

There was a blare of recorded trumpets from the podium itself, and Vladimir Khustov, the Hegemonic Coordinator, appeared at the top of the steps, barely visible behind the screen of Guards.

Khustov marched slowly down the steps, screened always by the Guards, as the notes of “Nine Planets Forever,” the Hegemonic Anthem, filled the air.

Johnson had never seen Khustov in the flesh before, though of course his television image was all too familiar to everyone in the Hegemony. Though Johnson himself would not have cared to admit it, there was a curious resemblance between the Hegemonic Coordinator and himself—though a resemblance blurred by a fifty-year age difference. Both had long, straight black hair, and if Khustov’s had been thinned by his eighty years, the fact was artfully concealed. Johnson had the chunky body of an athlete; Khustov looked like a long-retired boxer—heavy muscles long since gone to fat. Both men had gray eyes, and if Johnson’s were mercurial while Khustov’s were iron-cold, they both had a curious sense of aliveness all too rare in common Wards of the Hegemony.

Khustov and his bodyguards reached the podium at the foot of the steps. The Coordinator was standing directly behind the podium as the last notes of the Anthem were played. Four of the Guards hunkered on a little platform that projected out from the front of the podium, in position to shield Khustov from the crowd instantly, by simply standing up. The other four Guards had split into two pairs, one to either side of Khustov and slightly behind him one step up from the podium.

Solkowni was the inside man in the right-hand pair behind the podium. Another piece of good luck.

The music stopped.

“Wards of the Hegemony …” Khustov began, in English. Although his name was Russian, Khustov’s ancestry was known to be at least half American, and he was quite fluent in both official languages, Russian and English. Since Mars was largely American-settled, he had chosen to speak in English, as Johnson had anticipated.

It was important to the plan that all eleven of the League agents open fire within a few seconds of each other. Since they were scattered throughout the crowd, there was no way that Johnson could give a secure signal. Therefore, it had been arbitrarily decided that they would open fire the first time that Khustov said the word “Guardianship.” Since it was the new Ministry of Guardianship building that was being dedicated, and since Khustov was speaking in English, it was a safe assumption that he would use the word sooner or later.

Johnson tightened his grip on the lasegun in his pocket. This was really it, the first real step toward the destruction of the Hegemony and the restoration of Democracy. The death of Khustov as such did not really matter—Jack Torrence, the Vice-Coordinator, would speedily use the opportunity to seize and consolidate power—but the fact that the Democratic League could kill a Coordinator would at long last make it a force to be reckoned with, after ten years of futile, furtive meetings, subrosa word of mouth propaganda and very minor sabotage.

“… and so another brick in the great edifice of Order is being placed today …” Khustov droned on. “… another bulwark in the defence against chaos, disorder, and the hunger, discontent and unhappiness that such social strife brings. Yes, Wards of the Hegemony, this great new Ministry building will enable the Mars Division of the Ministry of Guardianship to improve upon even—”

Guardianship!

Johnson drew his lasegun. The compact weapon, with its translucent sythruby barrel jutting out of its six-inch black ebonite handle, which contained the standard magazine holding fifty tiny electrocrystals each of which would give up the stored energy in its structure in one terrific burst of coherent light when the button trigger was pressed, could not be mistaken for anything innocuous. At Johnson’s right, a fat woman screamed shrilly. The man with her tried desperately to push through the solid wall of people to safety. In seconds, all the Wards within sight of Johnson were frantically trying to bull their way through their neighbors to escape the obvious madman.

But they got nowhere, for now ten similar “madmen” within the crowd were also the foci of pushing knots of Wards, and the crazed Wards were shoving insanely against each other in their fear, preventing anyone from escaping.

Johnson pointed his lasegun outward, at the ring of Guards containing the crowd, pressed the trigger. A powerful beam of coherent light flashed from the barrel as the electrocrystal in the chamber gave up its energy and crumbled to dust.

The beam seared into the shoulder of a hulking, dark-skinned Guard. He screamed, writhed in pain, and fired instantly with his good right arm back in the general direction of Johnson. A Ward was hit and began to scream. Soon there were dozens, scores, hundreds of Wards screaming in terror and confusion.

As soon as he had fired, Boris Johnson had bulldozed his way closer to the podium. He fired again, this time in the general direction of the podium itself. Khustov’s bodyguards had already formed a tight circle, behind which the Coordinator crouched, all but invisible. Johnson’s shot touched the plastomarble steps near the podium, melting a small area of the synthetic into a viscous puddle which slowly began to dribble down the steps.

As he paused to sight for another shot, Johnson saw that his men were also doing their jobs. One of them had hit the flag, and the remains of it flaked from the flagpole, black, burnt-out ash. As he watched, a lasebeam sizzled through the bottom of the flagpole, and the pole. . .