Yesterday's Men

by George Turner

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Genetic Engineering

Synopsis

An experiment recreating the mind-set of World War II escalates into an actual battleground between native revolutionaries and space colonists bent on subverting the power of the central government. In the midst of this turmoil, a physically enhanced agent questions his upbringing and training.

Release date: January 17, 2019

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 320

Sample

YESTERDAY’S MEN is the third in a group of novels dealing with the reconstructed world of the twenty-first century. The Collapse of 2012—caused by genetic tampering with staple crops, followed by a wave of mutated-disease epidemics and the Five Days of hysterical, random nuclear bombing—left the world reduced by starvation and disease to a tenth of its former population: communications were totally disrupted; power sources degenerated; nations crumbled into communities struggling for survival.

BELOVED SON told how in forty years a shaky new world was built by cannibalizing the ruins of the old. Psychologically, it was built on a foundation of imprinted fear of the twentieth-century past. The destroyed civilization was thought of as a historical obscenity, a culture that had wrecked itself by greed, selfishness and cruelty. The new world was built on the Ethic of Non-Interference. World Council (a super-UN, but with teeth) dominated, but regional governments pursued their affairs with complete autonomy subject to an overriding proviso: no region might take action which interfered with the rights of other regions. This policy was policed by a paramilitary police force, International Security.

But the new century had to relearn the lessons which destroyed the old, including the major one that no system will be accepted by 100 percent of a population without dissent. The first cracks appeared in 2052, when cult religions reemerged and Security itself was shown to be less than wholly committed to duty or immune to corruption.

Through the disruption and rebuilding an enormous biological laboratory, Gangoil, had remained sealed off and unknown in the heart of a mountain in the Australian Alps. Rediscovery of this huge repository of knowledge turned the ideas of a too-virtuous world in the direction of improvement of the species by biological means. Old problems and new ambitions began to reveal the flaws in the fabric of the self-satisfied Ethical Culture.

The second novel in the group, VANEGLORY, recorded the discovery, in 2057, that mutant humans existed with lifespans of thousands of years. They could not procreate with normal humanity, but it was thought that Gangoil could unravel their genetic variation and find means of implanting the genes in ordinary people. Secrecy, World Council decided, was essential; the world at large must not become aware of quasi-immortality near at hand; general lifespans of millennia would undermine every relationship, every morality, every legal basis of a race geared to three-score and ten. Chaos worse than the Collapse would result. So the Children of Time, except for a handful immured in Gangoil as experimental animals, were rounded up and secretly destroyed. But the lure of immortality had irretrievably corrupted Security itself, and the organization was disbanded. World Council and the world’s nations now ran on philosophic momentum and the unresolved fear of an evil past.

At about the same time the first colony-satellites were placed in Lagrangian orbit; in two generations their inhabitants developed a culture widely divergent from that of Earth. In those same two generations it became apparent that Gangoil could not so easily deliver extended life, and a fifty-year secret was becoming increasingly difficult to keep hidden. At the same time, the psychological and sociological fraternities were beginning to question the moral basis of the Ethical Culture.

At this pivotal point, YESTERDAY’S MEN begins …

When it was all over and the time came for sorting out the sequence of events for External Affairs (Intelligence) records, Caselli required most of the major actors to dictate spools detailing their personal roles.

Leonard, who caught the dreary chore of listening to their endless jabbering wires and collating them for the master record, pointed out that only Dunbar had displayed the historical sense to include a review of the background factors.

Caselli, who regarded Dunbar and his kind as insults to ephemeral humanity, grunted surly acknowledgment but played the wire and had the grace to admit its usefulness—with the private reservation that he could have done without the man’s insufferable digressions into his own highly specialized point of view.

The Dunbar Wire:

The older Children of Time, all senior to me by millennia, say I’ll outgrow my concern with history, that over the centuries the sense of time will shrink into a simple “now.” They view duration—or say they do—as a subjective abstraction to be used or ignored as suits the moment.

They have the long experience and are probably right, but I still find the flow of events intriguing, though human beings don’t often catch my interest as individuals.

There is an additional interest in this case: I have some claim to having started the chain of events which culminated in Sergeant Bailey’s rain-forest patrol. I suggested, in a moment of exasperation, that the hypocritical gerrymander calling itself the Ethical Culture might learn more by studying its Gone Time ancestors than by studying to disown them.

I hardly expected to be understood, much less taken seriously, and only the New Sociology could have devised the method of study that was chosen.

But start lines are never as easily drawn as that. The real root of uproar lay, as with most twenty-first century crises, in that detested twentieth-century Gone Time from which it can never escape.

That pre-Collapse, Gone Time world was studded with stubbornly primitive cultures which, with the breakdown of communications in the Five Days, became lost to sight until well into the new era. They exist still. South American tribes from the jungles east of the Andes vanished for half a century before rediscovery and now live in resentment of the benefits of taxation, moral re-education and codes of law which they find either maleficent or absurd; Central African tribes with long historical memories are vocal in their rejection of civilization (except television and pre-packaged foods); the Eskimo remain angrily stolid.

World Council can only accept its rejections; the Ethic of Non-Interference—that human attempt at the humanly impossible—ties its meddling hands. Happy, backward societies preserve their happy backwardness on the fringes of twenty-first century culture.

Still, some problem areas test the Ethic severely; predictably, the Ethic bends.

One of these is Niugini—the New Guinea, Papua and West Irian of Gone Time maps. The entry in the Geopolitical Encyclopedia encapsulates the situation bleakly:

… after the Five Days the island, forced into self-sufficiency, reverted to the tribalism which had never been wholly submerged in the forests and mountain valleys. The people survived, as for centuries past, by fishing and tillage. Administrative boundaries were forgotten; the coastal towns decayed; old cultures reestablished themselves; territorial claims were staked and defended.

The educated few relinquished civilized amenities with reluctance, preserving records and artifacts where possible. The cultural embassies reopening Niugini in the fourth decade encountered a division of social requirements. The ruined coastal towns welcomed returning civilization; the villages preferred ancestral forms to the point of actively repelling the embassies. By Ethical decision both parties were accommodated. The towns were rebuilt and brought into the planetary culture; the tribesmen were left virtually alone.

The result could have been foreseen. The towns, accepting the non-aggressive policies of World Council, made easy prey for marauding tribesmen whose historical philosophy dictated wresting by force what they could not themselves produce, and slaughtering the peaceful owners (less than one in twenty of the island’s population) who lacked adequate defenses. Pillage and murder became so rife that the Niugini towns revived old links with the Australian mainland and requested a return of the early twentieth-century Protectorate—a system of quasi-military patrolling by native police under white Australian command.

World Council approved Australian intervention but refused Protectorate status; help must not develop into political leverage. The Australians took advantage of the situation to ally their help with implementation of a bizarre psycho-sociological experiment whose results have not yet been fully evaluated. They did not use “native police” but, with the backing of powerful sociological research interests, created with remarkable fidelity a facsimile infantry fighting unit of the world war of 1939–45. Informed opinion is still sharply divided on the morality of this procedure …

By an accident of geography, you Australians were uniquely situated to supply those legendary monsters, “soldiers.” You had your own group of white “primitives” to draw on.

Plague and the breakdown of planetary communication had isolated vast tracts of cattle country in Western Queensland and the Northern Territory, and small communities there lived through the Collapse in much the fashion of their settler ancestors two centuries before.

They survived mainly because the black aboriginals proved to be, on their own terms, a friendly and forgiving people—people, moreover, who had behind them millennia of experience of fringe existence in one of the world’s least hospitable lands. When, in the thirties, tentative expeditions from the southern cities penetrated the northern outback they found a self-sufficient, proud people living off the land and liking it. They had preserved and polished many of the “mateship” and “a man’s a man” codes of the Gone Time (codes essential among scattered, fringe-subsistence groups) and were given to deciding differences with bare fists or, on occasion, stock-whips. They were genially prepared to accept the new world’s comforts, to visit it for a city holiday (drunkenly indecorous) and to regard it with a combination of acquisitiveness and derision.

Some twenty thousand such people existed in your world of official pacifism, where computer networks preserved the status quo, agreed conventions placed accepted glosses on hypocritical behavior, biological laboratories stood disease and pain at bay—and the Lagrange Orbital Cities traced their unseen patterns in the deep sky.

Even after two generations the Territorians remained uncomfortable curiosities, Gone Timers persisting into the new culture—which made them ideal material for the experiment run in tandem with the “military” task of patrolling the Niugini mountains and turning back tribal raiding parties, often bloodily.

The younger individualists amongst those antiquely macho Territorians welcomed the adventure of fighting and being paid for it. Only when they were firmly contracted for some of the sweetest of their too few years did they discover the sobering facts of forest warfare.

It was sour justice that I should have become so intimately involved with this outcome of my irritable snippet of advice.

Caselli winced under the barrage of barbed accuracies and condescensions. “… your own group of white ‘primitives’ … your world of official pacifism …” They would vanish from the collated account if he personally had to edit them out. The Children of Time (the description itself was a flaunting insult) were armed and armored against any reprisal short of physical obliteration and the human world at large was, in Caselli’s opinion, fortunate in being unaware of their existence.

—1—

Bergerac had the reputation of being a good friend, a good craftsman and a good employer. In fact, a good man.

The Australian Accredited Secretary (External Affairs) accepted this as true among the man’s own Lagrangers, but among Earthworms (their word for Terrans) less likeable traits were noted. A permanent smell under his nose, as if we might be unwashed as well as uncouth. He suppressed the passing thought that Terrans, for their part, regarded Lagrangers as at best peculiar, at worst—well, uncouth.

Still, it was an interesting assignment; since their adoption of low-g living few of the Heavenbom (a Terran mockery) visited Earth.

As Bergerac crossed the threshold, the Secretary took the two protocol paces forward and said, “I am an Accredited Secretary, detailed to assist with the preparation of your Submission. My name is Light and I am pleased to welcome you, sir. I have not met a Cities man before.” He extended his hand.

“How should you? There’s little to bring us here, and how many of you visit the Cities?” The accent was bland and the reading of a sneer optional but the offered hand certainly discomforted him. Light remembered too late that the damned Heavenborn held a mild taboo against unnecessary touching. Bergerac saved face for both by taking the Terran’s fingers in a fleeting, furtive squeeze, saying, “So many customs! My Adviser …” He recovered, smiled and took charge. “We should talk privately before discussing officially, or there will be misunderstandings. Our cultures grow apart.”

The smile changed him. His round face loosened into the gentle expression of his preferred image—artist manqué suffering behind the mask of commercial entrepreneur.

Light, still floundering a little, suggested, “But individuals can find common cause.”

He could not tell what Bergerac thought of that because the Lagranger turned to the panoramic strip window of the suite and asked, “Has this island a name?”

“Hayman. It is part of a three-thousand-kilometer coral reef. Last century it was a holiday playground.”

“It is very beautiful.”

So it was—gardens, lawns, palm trees, brilliant sand, enamel sky and illimitable blue ocean. “There are dozens like it.” And you can’t match them on your—

Bergerac might have been completing the thought. “It isn’t a view we could easily duplicate Upstairs. For run-of-the-mill productions we match with mock-ups and miniatures, but a prestige holoplay demands genuine backgrounds—” he turned, smiling still “—if the actors are to create our fantasies with conviction.”

He lowered himself into a chair, taking his weight on the armrests, conscious of a savage gravity. Most Cities slowed rotation to simulate a quarter g; some floated in stillness at null g; the inhabitants benefited in their own environments but rarely risked dignity or heart failure Downstairs.

Light said, “Your cast will need to be very fit for Niugini,” and plunged quickly on as Bergerac’s smile tightened; one did not refer, however obliquely, to Lagranger limitations. “We all complain of stress there—extreme heat, humidity, rainforest slush and rottenness.” Bergerac’s smile returned, warily. Light piled it on. “The terrain is almost wholly mountain and gorge; we say there are only two directions in Niugini—up and down.” The smile accepted the rush of words as tantamount to apology. Surely he has some other expression in reserve.

He had—one-upmanship crossed with the faintest disdain. “It will be no problem. I propose to hire a complete Terran unit for the project.” His tone said you could buy anything on Terra, including Terrans; Light had sourly to concede the point. Bergerac added, so neutrally that the slight was uncertain, “Only a Terran can play a Terran.”

Two—one; advantage Lagrange. Worse, a Terran unit meant negotiation with the Drama Guild and the technical unions, all notoriously inimical to the Lagrangian satires on life Downstairs. Suggesting this as delicately as possible, he found Bergerac prepared. “I know it, Mr. Light; nor do we care for the buffooneries your holoplays aim at the Cities. However, my approach will be semi-documentary, with the accent on naturalism. Are you relieved?”

“Greatly.” It could placate the Guild.

“Let me explain in detail before we prepare the official Submission. Do you wish to record?”

“It will help in the long run.” Light brushed the rim of his watch. A wall recorder switched itself on and began silent transcripts of their talk—two tapes for each speaker and three for File.

Bergerac’s mother named him Pompey and he never forgave her. But to hell with arid fact when in this fabulous terraverse a man could remake himself in any favored image; if nobody believed “Cyrano” was his by right, he had the position and influence to look that same terraverse in the eye and dare it to scoff.

Cyrano Bergerac, at forty-three, owned L5 Holotainment outright. He shuddered at the copyright word but knew better than to indulge etymological purity; as owner he bore the shame with resignation while it stood for moneyspinning popular productions throughout the nine Orbital Cities and most parts of Terra. In fact, L5 Holotainment specialized in the shameless junk which has always been the mainstay of popular drama.

Behind these matters of common report, behind Cyrano, sulked unpacified Pompey who had sold out to power and money.

Pompey, at twenty-three, had been the director of one brilliant and remembered holoplay. At twenty-six he was a failure with three commercially disastrous artistic successes eroding his career. But Cyrano at thirty was a commercial success (and an artistic dropout) with a new personality and a grimly practical approach, and buying shares in L5 Holo.

With money and power, he dreamed, he could make those plays which would fulfill his repressed artistry and atone for the hogwash with which his studio flooded the receivers.

With money and power he did make these art plays—which were bad, and he knew it.

He had lost much over the years but not his critical sense. He had lost what? Creativity? Aesthetic judgment? Rhythm, balance, insight? He knew only that synthesis evaded, climax lurched, subtlety vanished. He would continue to make them while he could tailor a script and direct a scene—and never know where the failure lay.

His Courtesan could have told him plainly, at the risk of losing the most profitable Relationship she was ever likely to contract, that once you sell your soul you can’t wish it back again.

Bergerac said, “The most interesting aspect of the terraverse is its past. We claim that after the Collapse we built something new and different, but it isn’t true. What’s true is that we stole everything we could from the past and assembled it in other ways, because the old ways had brought the race down in famine and wreckage and we were terrified of it happening again. But most of our innovation was really variation, and in the long run we made mistakes we could have avoided if we hadn’t been running scared.”

An unfulfilled actor in him used mannerism consciously; he delivered commonplaces with a shade too much flair. Now he lifted his eyebrow just enough to add a touch of the quizzical to the fadeless smile. “Think of a whole race running scared for three generations before it slowed to really look at its condition!”

It would have been worse than insolent in Light to suggest that Bergerac’s historical insight was as old as his dramatic technique, but he could not forebear a murmur that social historians had arrived at similar conclusions.

Bergerac turned the comment into a feedline: “But how many pursue their conclusion to the discovery of what we were running from? What were our insane forefathers really like? What manner of men? Do we know?”

It seemed an answer was expected. “There are tapes, films, books, libraries, museums, collections of artifacts—or do you refer to something special?”

“To something ordinary: the way people lived.” He leaned forward with a curiously brash knowingness. “Do you know that at one time they had a public transport car called a tram and that hired servants struggled through these crowded vehicles collecting fares—people had to pay for city transport!—and did that for eight hours every day?”

“I didn’t know.” Or care, either.

“How did a man feel about being a part-time servant to his social equals? What condemned him to menial service? What stopped him rising in the social scale? Women did this work, too! How did they accept a shameful equality that ignored their special values and needs?”

Light concealed irritation. “Did they see themselves in those terms? Are you asking the right questions?”

Bergerac approved the question. “I don’t know. I am saying that we know the facts of these everyday lives but not the essential feeling. We know how economists and politicians and philosophers saw the world, but the small man didn’t leave articulate records.”

“The novelists—”

“Yes, to a degree, but art is not the thing-in-itself.” He created a pause, raising a finger to fill it. “I propose to make a holoplay investigating a lost aspect of our past. It will be as serious a contribution to anthropology and social history as to hologrammatic art.”

Light was doubtful. “I suppose you could re-create a tram and fill it with people and have an actor sweating through the money-collector’s day.”

“No! Our actors would react to old conditions with the perceptions of modern men and women. We would learn n. . .