Empire (3 page)

In other words, he was being embedded with the enemy as surely as when he was on a deep Special Ops assignment inside a foreign country that did not (officially at least) know that he was there.

Princeton University as an alien planet. Reuben Malich as the astronaut who somehow lost his helmet—and spent day after day gasping for air.

He had to acquire the iron discipline of the soldier who works with the government—the ability to stand in the same room with stupidity and say nothing, show nothing.

The real danger was not losing his temper, however. For in the second year of his studies, he realized that he was beginning to treat some of the most absurd ideas as if they had some basis in truth. It was Goebbels in practice: If you tell the same lies long enough and loudly enough, even people who know better will despair and concede the point.

We are tribal animals. We cannot long stand against the tribe.

Thank heaven he could go home to Cecily every day. She was his reality check. Unlike the ersatz Left of the university, Cessy was a genuine old-fashioned liberal, a Democrat of the tradition that reached its peak with Truman and blew its last trumpet with Moynihan.

It was part of the insanity of their marriage—the reason his father kept asking him, right up to the wedding itself, “Do you have any idea what you're doing?”

Because not only was Reuben committed to conservative values, he was also a Serbian by ancestry and upbringing—an Orthodox
Christian with a native knowledge of the language of Serbia because his parents made sure of it.

And Cessy was Croatian—Catholic, yes, but also of the tribe that Serbians hated more than any. Once Serbs and Croats had been the same people. But the Turks had long ruled Serbia, while Croatia was sheltered within Catholic Austria-Hungary. What did Croats know of oppression and suffering? And when the Nazis came, they collaborated with the conquerors, and the price of their perfidy was paid in Serbian blood.

Nobody forgot things like this in the Balkans. Such injuries were nursed generation after generation. So when Reuben came home from Ohio State with a
Croatian
girl, and then left her with
his
family while he went off to begin serving his ROTC obligation to his country, his parents were appalled.

She won them over completely. It was hard to believe that anyone could get past Father's cast-iron hatred of Croats, but Cessy had insisted that she'd do just fine, now go off and be a soldier for a while. And when Reuben came home on leave the first time, it quickly became clear that not only did his family like Cessy, they liked her a lot more than they liked Reuben. Oh, they said they still loved him best, but he knew it was just to make him feel better. They
adored
Cessy.

And that was fine with him. “You should be our U.N. ambassador,” he told her on that first leave. “You could get Hutus and Tutsis to be friends. You could get Israelis and Palestinians to hug and kiss. Hindus and Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs, Shia and Baha'i, Basque and Spaniard—”

“Not Basques and Spaniards,” she told him. “That dates back to when there were still mastodons in Europe. That's practically like Cro-Magnon versus Neandertal.”

“I want our babies to be as smart as you and as tough as me,” he said.

“I just want them to
look
like me,” said Cessy. “Because having daughters that look like you would be cruel.”

Their daughters did look like Cessy, and their sons had Reuben's
lean, lithe body, and all in all, their family life was perfect. That's what he came home to every day from school; that was the environment in which he studied. That was his root in reality that kept calling him back from the brink of getting seduced into the fantasyland of academia.

Until Averell Torrent decided he wanted Reuben's soul.

Reuben had been goaded by professors before. He goaded them by wearing his uniform to every class on the first day. They took it as a personal affront. Why shouldn't they? That's how he meant it.

Some of them simply ignored him the rest of the semester—until his coursework forced them to give him an A. Others declared war on him, but their ham-handed attacks on Reuben always backfired, winning him the sympathy of the other students as Reuben answered all the attacks with unflagging courtesy and quiet good sense. Many of the others would begin defending him—and, by extension, the military. Thus Reuben would quietly lose all the classroom battles for the hearts and minds of the students, but win the war.

With Torrent, though, as they worked their way through the ancient long-lived empires—Egypt, China—and the ancient republics—first Athens, now Rome—it became for the other students a class in watching Torrent and Reuben spar with each other. They weren't angry at Reuben—they knew that Torrent always initiated their long, classtime-consuming exchanges—but they still resented the fact that Reuben Malich had hijacked their only class with the great man.

Can't help it, Reuben silently answered their huffish attitudes. He calls on
me
. What am I supposed to do, cover my ears and hum loudly so I can't hear his questions?

Though he was getting tempted to do just that. Because what Torrent was saying about America and empire made perverse sense. While the other students sidetracked themselves into a discussion about whether Torrent's statements were “conservative” or “liberal,” “reactionary” or “politically correct,” Reuben could not
shake off Torrent's premise—that America was not in the place Rome was in before it fell, but rather in the place where Rome was before civil war destroyed the Republic and led to the dictatorship of the Caesars.

So when Torrent had finally silenced the other students' attempts to put his remarks into one or another of present-day political camps, Reuben was ready to speak.

“Sir,” he said, “if civil war is a necessary precursor to the end of democracy—”

“The façade of democracy.”

“Then it means our republic, such as it is, is safe. Because we don't have warlords. We don't have private armies.”

“You mean ‘so far,' ” Torrent said at once. “You mean ‘that we know about.' ”

“We aren't Yugoslavia,” said Reuben—the most obvious example, for him at least. “We don't have clear ethnic divisions.”

Again, a storm of protest from the other students. What about blacks? Hispanics? Jews?

They debated that for a while, but Reuben was determined to stay on track. “We can have riots, but not sustained wars, because the sides are too geographically mixed and the resources are too one-sided.”

Torrent shook his head. “The seeds of civil war are always there, in every country. England in the 1600s—nobody would have believed that those pesky Puritans could provoke a Royalist versus Puritan civil war, and yet they did.”

“So where do
you
think America might divide itself into two factions that could fight a sustained civil war?” Reuben demanded.

Torrent smiled. “Red state, blue state.”

“That's cheap media graphics. You might as well say rural versus urban.”

“I
do
say that. But the geographical division is still clear. The Northeast and the West Coast against the South and the middle, with some states torn apart because they're so evenly balanced.”

“No one's going to
fight
over those differences.”

Torrent smiled his maddening superior smile. “The rhetoric today is already as hot-blooded and insane and hate-filled as it was over slavery before the first Civil War—and even then, most people refused to believe war was possible until Fort Sumter fell.”

“One thing,” said Reuben. “One tiny thing.”

“Yes?” said Torrent.

“The U.S. Army is absolutely dominated by red-state ideals. There are some blue-staters, yes, of course. But you don't join the military, as a general rule, unless you share much of the red-state ideology.”

“So because the red-staters control the Army, you think there can't be a civil war.”

“I think it's unlikely.”

“Don't hedge on me.”

Reuben shrugged. He wasn't hedging, he was specifying; but let Torrent think whatever he wanted.

“What if the White House were in the control of blue-staters?” asked Torrent. “What if the President ordered American troops to fire on American citizens who fought for red-state ideals?”

“We obey the President, sir.”

“Because you're thinking you'd be called to fire on neo-fascist militia nut groups from Montana,” said Torrent. “What if you were told to fire on the Alabama National Guard?”

“If Alabama was in rebellion, then I'd do it at once.”

“If,” said Torrent. “We just got our first ‘if' from Soldier Boy. You would obey the President ‘if.' ” Torrent grinned in triumph. “Civil wars are fought when leaders find out what those ‘ifs' are and exploit them. I would only shoot at my neighbor ‘if.' And then a politician tells you that the ‘if' has happened.”

They all regarded Torrent in silence, waiting for the clincher that they knew was coming.

“The ideology doesn't matter. You're right, no one cares enough. So here's when you'll get ready to shoot your neighbor: When you're convinced that your neighbor is arming himself to shoot
you
.”

Reuben well knew how that worked. Few Serbs, Croats, or Muslims
in the old Yugoslavia even imagined they could go to war—the intermarriage rate was so high that it was obvious you could never sort out one group from another.

But all it took was a handful of nuts with guns shooting at you because your parents were Croats, even if you never cared. If they're attacking you because you're part of a group, then when you fire back, you do it as a member of that group. “You get forced onto one side or the other whether you want to or not,” said Reuben, “once the bullets start to fly.”

“The bullets don't even have to fly,” said Torrent, nodding. “You just have to
believe
they're
trying
to shoot you. Wars are fought because we believe the other team's threats.”

“Which suggests,” said Reuben, “that wars are also lost because one side
didn't
believe until it was too late.”

“There we have it,” said Torrent, looking around triumphantly at the rest of the class. “Right here in this class, I have persuaded a highly trained soldier who hates the idea of civil war to
think
about the possibility.”

The others laughed and looked at Reuben Malich with some mixture of mockery and sympathy. He had fallen into Torrent's trap.

Only Reuben knew better. Torrent was a serious historian. So was Reuben. Torrent was right. A civil war could be fought anywhere, if somebody had the will, the wit, and the power to pull the right strings, push the right buttons, light the right fires.

The class ran ten minutes over—which was common with Torrent, because nobody wanted him to stop talking. And after class, many lingered to talk to him about the papers they were writing. Everyone was terrified of his acid pen, firing volleys of savage criticism across their pages. They wanted to get it right on the first draft.

Reuben didn't care about grades, mostly because he earned A's in everything. So when class ended, he always left at once. Today, though, Torrent waved him over before he could leave. By staying, Reuben was blowing off Contemporary African Conflicts. But
when a man like Torrent calls, you come because it matters what Torrent thinks about everything. Even you.

Finally they were alone in the room.

“Major Reuben Malich,” Torrent said. “It's not so much that I like the way you think, it's that I like the fact that you think at all.”

“We all think, sir.”

“No, my good soldier, we do
not
all think. Thinking is rare and growing rarer, especially in the universities. Students succeed here to the degree they can convince idiots that they think just like them.”

“The professors aren't
all
idiots.”

“Grad school is like junior high: You learn to get along. That's half of who ends up in grad school in the first place—the suck-ups and get-alongs. You're only here because you were
ordered
to come. You'd rather be in the Middle East. Leading troops in combat. Yes?”

Reuben didn't answer.

“Very careful of you,” said Torrent. “I have just one question for you. If I told you that the civil war I'm talking about were being planned right now, just how far would you go?”

“I'd do nothing to help either side, and anything to prevent it from happening.”

“But those
are
the two sides, before the fighting starts—the hotheads on one side, the rational people on the other, trying to rein them in.”

“Soldiers don't have the power to prevent wars, sir, except by being so invincible that no enemy would dare to engage.”

“Are you willing to trust your life—the lives of your family—on that belief—that civil war is impossible?”

“Exactly, sir. I already trust my family's life to that belief. It's like an asteroid colliding with Earth. It certainly
will
happen, someday. But right now, there's no urgency about figuring out how to avoid it.”

“And when an asteroid
does
come toward Earth, how will you know? See it yourself?”

“No, sir, I'll trust astronomers to let us know. And I know where you're going—you believe you're the astronomer who's warning us about a social and political collision.”

“More like a weatherman, tracking the storm and watching it grow to hurricane strength.”

“Standing in front of the camera in the rain, strapped to a lightpole?”

Torrent grinned. “You understand me perfectly.”

“What are you proposing, sir?” said Reuben. “You
were
proposing something, right?”