Cities of the Red Night (19 page)

Once this tactic has sufficiently weakened the enemy, we will shift to all-out attack on a series of enemy positions. Failure to follow through on a successful attack is as disastrous as attempting an attack against unfavorable odds. It was this error that lost Hannibal the war against Rome. He did not realize that he had beaten the whole Roman army, so instead of marching on the unprotected city without delay, he retrenched to consolidate his position until he had no position left.

We can expect a landslide of defections to our cause, and we must follow through to deliver a series of knockout blows. Nor will we allow time for the French and English to recognize the danger and join Spain against a common enemy. As soon as we see victory on the way in the southern hemisphere of the American continent, we will strike in the northern hemisphere. Then we will open a diplomatic offensive concentrating on England to negotiate treaties, trade agreements, and recognition of our independent and sovereign status.

Of course the new weapons will be common knowledge in a short time, but by then we will have a lead that will be difficult to overtake. We will be able to produce the weapons in any quantity, and by attracting inventors, skilled workers and technicians with higher wages and better living conditions, we can continue to turn out better weapons than our adversaries. We have also the incalculable advantage of a huge territory virtually impossible to invade successfully, whereas European countries, with the exception of Russia, are vulnerable to invasion, since they have no place to retreat to. We expect the Articles to spread through Africa, the Near and Far East, and we could invade Spain from North Africa.

Our immediate plan is to provoke the Spanish into a massive attack by taking Panama City and Guayaquil. This should divert much of the Pacific fleet to these two locations and dispatch land forces from Lima to Guayaquil and from Cartagena to Panama. If necessary, we shall retreat into the swamps of southern Panama and to the mountainous and heavily wooded areas northwest of the city. In the event of decisive land victories, we will immediately launch attacks on the depleted garrisons at Lima and Cartagena, inflict what damage we can on the fleet, and at the same time, strike in Mexico.

The Iguana twins have returned to Mexico to organize our movement there, and Bert Hansen has gone with them. Captain Strobe has gone to Panama to assess the strength of the Spanish garrison and to organize partisan resistance to the north and east of the city. The area to the south is already in our hands. Juanito and Brady, with a force of fifty men, have gone south to set up fortified positions west of Guayaquil from which the attack on the city can be launched and to which our forces can withdraw, luring the Spanish ground forces into a deadly trap.

The sea battles will be directed by Opium Jones, Skipper Nordenholz, and Captain Strobe. A number of Destroyers are under construction.

*   *   *

Then one morning we received word on the signal drums that Captain Strobe had been taken in Panama City and sentenced to hang.

On receipt of this news, we set out for Panama City with a force of fifty men armed with the double-barreled rifles and a good stock of mortars, both of the type that explode on contact and those that explode from timed fuses. We had little hope of arriving in time, so we sent back word to the local partisans to take what measures they could to effect a rescue, that an expeditionary force was on the way.

Marching day and night without sleep, on opium and
yoka,
we were five miles south of the city at dawn of the third day. A warm mist enveloped us and I was reminded of the steam bath in my little Michigan lake town and found myself walking with an erection. Suddenly we heard a terrific explosion from the direction of Panama City and stopped, our faces lifted to the rising sun.

Shortly thereafter, a runner informed us that Captain Strobe had been rescued and was heading south in a fishing boat towards one of our Pacific bases opposite the Pearl Islands. We instructed the runner to inform the Spanish garrison that the pirates who had engineered the destruction of the armory and the escape of Captain Strobe were just south of the city, that they were few in number and almost out of powder. As we had hoped, the Spanish fell into our trap and immediately dispatched a column of soldiers in pursuit, leaving only a hundred to guard the city.

*   *   *

The country here is low hills with outcroppings of limestone, ideally suited for ambush. We select a narrow valley between slopes strewn with limestone boulders. Rocky terrain is the best for mortar attacks. We dispose twenty men on each slope, about fifty yards from the path the Spanish column will take. The remaining ten will serve as decoys, fleeing as the soldiers approach. Once the concealed riflemen open up on the enemy flanks, they will seek cover and fire directly into the Spanish column, who will then be caught in a three-way fire. Concealed behind boulders, we settle down to wait.

It is not long before the Spanish appear. There are about two hundred men in the column, with four officers on horseback. As they catch sight of the decoys, the officers urge their horses on, shouting to the men to follow. The lead officer, a major, is leaning forward in the saddle, his sword raised, his teeth bared under a bristling black mustache. Using a rifle with contact mortar, I take careful aim, leading the horse by four feet to allow for forward speed. Even so, I miscalculate slightly, and the mortar hits the horse in the withers instead of in the shoulder as I had intended. The explosion blows the major out of the saddle and over the horse's head. His sword flies out of his severed right hand in a glittering arc. The horse rears, screaming and kicking, entrails spilling from a gaping hole.

My shot is the signal for the others to open up, bouncing mortars off boulders by the foot soldiers and under the horses. One officer whirls and gallops back towards the city. After two rounds of mortar fire, we shift to the double-barreled rifles. In a few minutes, all but a handful are dead or dying and the survivors are fleeing back to the city in a blind panic. I give the signal to hold fire, since the accounts carried by the fugitives will place our number at five to eight hundred. The rumor of a large force of well-armed privateers, probably English, will spread panic in the city, whose defenders are now reduced to a scant hundred men.

We advance to the outskirts of the city, where a party of officers display a flag of truce and indicate that they wish to parley. We state our terms as immediate and unconditional surrender of the garrison and the city, telling the officers that we have better than eight hundred men behind us. If they surrender the city, we promise to spare the lives of the Governor, the officers and soldiers, and all the inhabitants. If not, we will kill any who offer the slightest resistance, and will sack and burn the city. They have no option except to agree.

Meanwhile, about three hundred local partisans have gathered, armed with weapons taken from the dead, since we do not want the officers to see the new weapons until we are able to effectively seal the city. We then stipulate that all soldiers, officers and armed civilians must come to this spot and lay down their arms. Anyone subsequently found in possession of arms will be summarily executed.

The soldiers, having laid down their arms, are ordered to remove their uniforms, boots and socks. Clad only in undergarments, they are marched to the garrison and locked in. The officers, the Governor, the wealthy inhabitants, and the clergy, protesting the indignity, are locked in the prison after all the prisoners have been released.

We post notices to the inhabitants to go about their daily business and to fear no harm. We set up the Articles in public places, impound all ships in the harbor, and post guards at all exits. No boat may leave the harbor and no person may leave the city.

For the next two days, while we are catching up on our sleep, the soldiers, officers and hostages are to be given adequate food, but the partisans who guard them and bring the food have orders not to talk or to answer any questions.

On the third day, fully rested, we gather around a conference table in the governmental dining room. News of our success has spread throughout the area, and there are now more than five hundred partisans gathered in the city, more than enough for routine guard duty. We consult maps and formulate plans for a series of attacks on the Spanish-held garrisons on the east side of the isthmus. These garrisons are for the most part small, and will be no match for our mortars. Within a month, we will control a string of garrisons from Port Roger to northern Panama. It is decided that the post of Commandante shall rotate each day. Since the ambush was largely according to my plan, I will assume the first shift.

WE ARE THE LANGUAGE

As I was reading the
Cities of the Red Night
text, the Iguana sister brought some books and put them down on the table. I laid aside the folder.

“Who wrote this?”

“A scholar who prefers to remain anonymous. Research into this area is not reinforced. If, as he suggests, conception is the basic trauma, then it is also the basic instrument of control.” She gestured to the books stacked on the table. I saw at a glance that they were elaborately bound in a variety of colors. They looked very expensive.

“These are copies. Please study them carefully. I will pay one million dollars for recovery of the originals.”

“How good are the copies?”

“Almost perfect.”

“Then why do you want the originals? Collector's vanity?”

“Changes, Mr. Snide, can only be effected by alterations in the
original.
The only thing not prerecorded in a prerecorded universe are the prerecordings themselves. The copies can only repeat themselves word for word.
A virus is a copy.
You can pretty it up, cut it up, scramble it—it will reassemble in the same form. Without being an idealist, I am reluctant to see the originals in the hands of the Countess de Gulpa, the Countess de Vile and the pickle factory.…”

“I don't need a pep talk—but I do need a retainer.”

She laid out a check for two hundred thousand cools on the table. I began examining the books, skipping through to get a general impression. They are composed in a variety of styles and periods. Some of them seem to stem from the 1920s of
The Great Gatsby,
old sport, and others to derive from the Edwardian era of Saki, reflecting an unbearably flawed boyishness. There is an underlying current of profound frivolity, with languid young aristocrats drawling epigrams in streets of disease, war, and death. There is a Rover Boys–Tom Swift story line where boy heroes battle against desperate odds.

The books are color comics. “Jokes,” Jim calls them. Some lost color process has been used to transfer three-dimensional holograms onto the curious tough translucent parchment-like material of the pages. You ache to look at these colors. Impossible reds, blues, sepias. Colors you can smell and taste and feel with your whole body. Children's books against a Bosch background; legends, fairy stories, stereotyped characters, surface motivations with a child's casual cruelty. What facts could have given rise to such legends?

A form of radiation unknown at the present time activated a virus. This virus illness occasioned biologic mutations, especially alterations in hair and skin color, which were then genetically conveyed. The virus must have affected the sexual and fear centers in the brain and nervous system so that fear was converted into sexual frenzies which were reconverted into fear, the feedback leading in many cases to a fatal conclusion. The virus information was genetically conveyed, in orgasms that were often fatal. It seems likely that the burnings, stabbings, poisonings, stranglings, and hangings were largely terminal hallucinations produced by the virus, at a point where the line between illusion and reality breaks down. Over a period of generations the virus established a benign symbiosis with the host. It was a mutating virus, a
color
virus, as if the colors themselves were possessed of a purposeful and sinister life. The books are probably no more representative of life at the time than a
Saturday Evening Post
cover by Norman Rockwell represents the complex reality of American life.

“Are these complete copies of the originals I am retained to find, or should I say
uncover
?”

“No, these are fragments.”

“You have some idea as to what the other books contain?” I asked.

She glanced at the check. “Do you?”

I nodded. “They may contain the truth, which these books cover with a surface so horrible and so nauseously prettified that it remains impervious as a mirror.” I put the check in my wallet. “And as misleading,” I added. I returned to the books.

As I read on, I became increasingly aware of a feeling of faintness and malaise. The colors were giving me a headache—the deep electric blue of the southern sky, the explosions of green by the pools and waterways, the clothes of tight-fitting red velvet, the purples, reds, and pinks of diseased skin—rising from the books palpable as a haze, a poisonous miasma of color.

I loosened my collar, my thoughts hazy and somehow not my own, as if someone were delivering a lecture on the books, of which I caught an occasional phrase … captions in English? “At one time a language existed that was immediately comprehensible to anyone with the concept of language.” A World War I ambulance?

As I tried to examine it more closely, I could not be sure, but I
had
seen it with photographic clarity … an old sepia photo circa 1917. “They have removed the temporal limits.”

I looked up with a start, as if I had been dozing. The Iguana and her brother were not in the room. I had not seen them go. Jim was sitting on one side of me and Kiki on the other. They seemed to be equally affected.

“Whewwww…” said Jim. “I need a good hooker of brandy.”

“Muy mareado,”
said Kiki.
“No quiero ver más.…”