The Water Thief (26 page)

“Because they
won’t kill you?” I scoffed. “Because they aren’t violent?”

“Exactly. Nature
is
violence. You can only survive off
the death of others. Plants, animals, whatever you choose to eat, we all commit
violence against other living organisms. We murder so that we may live.
Violence is not pleasant, and I would not wish it on anyone, certainly not
myself. But anyone who refuses to resort to violence when needed is choosing to
be selected out. I did not create that system, Charles, it is nature.”

“But we’ve
evolved beyond that! That’s the point of civilization, to stop the violence, to
overcome that part of our nature, to be better. It’s part of nature, but it’s
not the sum total of our human experience.”

The man laughed.
“Of course not. Corruption, coercion, intimidation, are all techniques to avoid
violence, to create civilization.”

“But that’s the
same thing. All of those lead to violence. The inevitable conclusion of
capitalism is war!”

The man smiled
broadly, like he was proud of me, and yet somehow like I had set myself up as
the punch line of a perfect joke.

“Lenin said
that. The First World War was commonly held to be started by the assassination
of an archduke. But that was just an excuse. People are assassinated all the
time. What Lenin discovered, what truly frightened him, was that the war was
the result of a capitalist boom. Germany was growing, and it needed more
leverage to compete with other nations and satisfy their growing economic
demands. But they could no longer purchase what they needed, so they took it.
Japan did the same thing decades later. Lenin was a smart man but, as
communists are so apt to do, he missed the point completely.”

I didn’t want to
give him the satisfaction of asking. But I did.

“Then what is
the point?” I said.

A malevolent
grin broke over his face.

“Capitalism
is
war.”

I looked down at
the floor.

“Man’s state of
nature is war, war with himself, war with all that which is around him. What
you call ‘civilization’ is nothing more than a set of constraints used by
people with power to wage war on people without it, to dominate them using the
minimum possible effort.

“No war on this
planet has ever been about anything other than economics, about who controls
the resources to create and sustain life. Even religion is nothing more than a
means of mobilizing troops to economic ends. The belief in a supreme being,
when leveraged properly, is an invaluable motivator of human assets, nothing
more.”

“But in a state
of war, you’re constantly in danger. The next bombing, the next attack, a
corporation might kill you.”

“My god, Charles,
you don’t know the half of it,” he laughed. “Do you think it’s the thought of
other corporations killing me that keeps me up at night? No, it’s that one of
my own colleagues will take me out. That bombing at the coffee shop last week,
the one with which you are so familiar? Like a common MidCon, it never even
crossed your mind that maybe the bomber wasn’t from Kabul at all. Maybe the bomber was Ackerman.”

I shook my head.
“The reports said that he was Kabul!”

“Who wrote those
reports? Perception Management, people like you, people who lie. Maybe our CEO
needed an excuse to attack Kabul without
violating the Karitzu’s free-trade pact. We could have tricked an Epsilon into
making the attack and warned the police ahead of time, let the bomber get just close
enough to make a point.”

“You mean—a
colleague did that?”

“My god, you
truly are stupid. What I’m saying is: there’s no way to know. And frankly, who
cares? The reality doesn’t matter, only the perception. And as a loyal employee
I perceive exactly what Ackerman tells me to.

“But more to the
point—I’m fully aware that I’m at least as likely to die at the hands of a
colleague as I am from another corp. Half my bosses want me dead, since I’m
competing—quite capably, I might add—for their jobs. I make myself
indispensable, which protects me, but it makes me a threat too. Being an
executive is to walk a tightrope far more treacherous than any MidCon could
possibly understand. I can do it only because nature has selected me to. It is
a burden, of course. But it is one I carry for you, for all my colleagues, whom
I love—even though you hate me for it. It’s what makes me better than you, that
level of selflessness.”

“That’s not a
life.”

“Well, you can
deny it all you like, but ignoring the truth does little to change it. This is
us at our most harmonious with nature, our most productive—indeed our happiest,
since for the first time in human history there are no laws, none at all. Every
human being is free to do anything, so long as it is by the fruits of their
labor. Only a very, very ill man would say this is a bad thing.”

The man sat in
the chair opposite me and took another sip. His tone became serious.

“I like you,
Charles, I really do. Your heart is in the right place, even if you’re too
stupid to function. So I will do you the favor of being honest with you, of
telling you something it takes most men a lifetime to learn. The only way to be
an executive, and especially a CEO, is to be corrupt. The most corrupt always
rise to the top the fastest. We are best suited to lead.

“By corrupt I do
not mean, of course, debauched or ungodly, or publicly amoral. No, by
definition corruption requires a positive image against which the corruption
occurs. One must be able to portray oneself as infallible, as better than the
rest, as always being true to one’s word. One cannot, of course, run a business
on those virtues; you’d be wiped out by a competitor that did not place such
arbitrary limits on themselves. And you must corrupt yourself, Charles. You
must convince yourself of your own infallibility in the face of any error of
judgment. You must believe yourself superior to everyone.”

“But I’m saying
we don’t have to live that way.”

“It’s the state
of nature.”

“We can evolve,
we can make something better. We have language, we can work together in ways no
animals can.”

“And yet we
remain animals. Life is difficult. I am sorry, but it is. And you’re weak, so
you’d rather not face it. Too weak to compete, you blame nature; you blame
capitalism, you blame the system—everything but yourself. My god, how could a
system be right if the great Charles Thatcher couldn’t sit on his backside all
day and make a million caps doing so?” The man paused. “It’s sad, really.”

“I worked hard.”

“If that were
true, you wouldn’t be here.”

He put the glass
down and glared at me. “You’re not even a man, when you think about it. A bit
more like a dog, a creature that bites his owner’s hand out of fear. Incapable
of independent thought, only reaction. Greed is the most natural instinct in
the world, and yet somehow you find new and never before seen ways of fighting
against it. You are a dud, Charles, one of nature’s failed experiments.”

I looked at the
floor. “My life is not a failure,” I whispered.

“Oh, don’t think
about it too hard. You cannot help what you are. It’s no more your fault that
you can’t understand these basic principles than it is my fault that you will
suffer for it. Most people function only barely above your level. That’s why
they’re most people. It’s easier to believe that life isn’t that way, that
there is such a thing as freedom and that anyone can do anything if they put
their mind to it. That’s why executives need to spend so much time pretending
success is possible for anyone. We have to
manufacture
hope,
manufacture
consent, and get
people to
want
us to rule them. It’s
a difficult job, and frankly I’m not paid enough for it. But I find a way to
get by, mostly because it’s rewarding knowing I’m helping people.”

My head hurt.

“People aren’t
that stupid,” I whispered.

“Really? The single
most basic economic principle in human history, known to every third grader in
the world, is ‘buy low, sell high.’ We know it. It’s an axiom. If it weren’t,
economics would fail to exist—there would be no system of making money; the
universe would be in chaos.

“But what
happens in an economic boom? Nobody sells stocks, they buy them. Why sell when
maybe the price might go up even more? When the market crashes, as it always
does, what happens? People sell, because they don’t want to lose even more money.
Buy low, sell high, a truism that nine in ten people can’t follow. If they
could, there would be no casinos, no exchanges, no gambling at all. And lord
knows, I wouldn’t make a dime on the markets. But I make money, a lot of it,
because no matter how many times I tell people to buy low and sell high, nobody
ever does. I can sit here and tell you everything I do to make money, exactly
how to become rich and powerful, I can give away all the secrets to my success,
and you wouldn’t follow them—nobody would. Because they’d think they know
better than I do, that the world will give them what they deserve in due time.
And you say I’m arrogant? You say people aren’t stupid? Thank God you’re wrong,
or I’d never have become an executive.

“And they do
what you do. They blame the smart ones, those who can see the folly of man and
survive despite of it. Nothing breeds hatred like success. That is
Objectivism.”

I’d noticed by
now the absence of any clocks in the room, as if time itself did not exist
within these four walls. The executive hadn’t asked me a single question about
Kate or the Republic. I didn’t want to argue anymore, but I wouldn’t abandon my
beliefs, or my beloved Kate—real or imagined.

He’s trying to shake my confidence. He’s not
asking me about her so I think he doesn’t need to know, so I’ll think she was
Retention and then tell him everything.

“The pigs are
walking,” I mumbled.

“Oh my god,
Charles, have you just figured that out? My friend, the pigs have been walking throughout
all recorded history. What you have failed to realize is that there are three
kinds of animals on our farm. There are the pigs, who are smart enough to take
what is theirs; the horses, beasts on all fours who do what they’re told; and
at last the ducks, who point out that the pigs are walking but can’t figure out
just why it is that they wake up to find themselves with a bullet in the brain.
You were too stupid to be a pig or a horse. So you sit there and shout from the
top of your lungs ‘the pigs are walking, the pigs are walking,’ and you think
you’ve seen something special, that
you’re
special because you can see behind the curtain.

“But the truth
is that everybody can see behind the curtain. Everybody knows that the pigs are
walking. They accept that fact because they believe someday they will walk too.

“We’ve passed
forty corporate budgets since I’ve been on the board. Do you know who pushes
the hardest to lower the levies on HighCons? Epsilons, Zetas. Every poor man
wants to cut levies on the wealthy because they all think that one day they
will be that rich person, and if they help the HighCons, that karma will come
around. Oh, they loathe executives, much like you do. But you always listened
to your mentors. You didn’t often heed their advice, but you listened, and you
always tried to curry their favor.

“Yes, the pigs
are walking. And everybody knows it. You’re the only one who, for whatever
reason, doesn’t. You’re a blind buffoon. You might as well run down the street
naked shouting that the sky is blue.

“You accuse us
of dogma?” he continued. “Of religious devotion to ideals in the face of
overwhelming evidence? My god, your defects express themselves in so many ways,
but this hypocrisy is truly astonishing. You are utterly incapable of reason,
of self-reflection or critique, aren’t you? It’s a good thing, I suppose. We
need defects like you to help remind people of how lucky they are.”

The man had an
answer for everything. He was wrong. I knew it, and would refuse to accept
whatever he said, no matter what.

But that’s the very deficit he’s talking
about, my stubborn refusal to accept even the most obvious facts.

It was a trick.
This was what he did for a living, and he was far better at it than I was.

One of us is insane. I wonder if I can tell
which?

“We are done for
the day. I am sorry, but you are far more damaged than I anticipated. I’m
afraid there is little I can do. The guards will take you back to your cell.
Tomorrow morning they’ll bring you back, and I’ll tell you what’s been decided.”

As large as my cell was, with all
the rooms and delicacies available to me, I felt the walls closing in. The
suite was a living part of the system. It had become one of the most effective
tools they had against me. It gave me every luxury I could hope for, more than
I had ever imagined, but it would never give me answers. I wasn’t sure of what
was true anymore.

I had defied the executive, argued
all of my points, but it was like trying to argue against gravity. I defended
the republic, but my bulwarks were dismissed out of hand.

Maybe
I’ve made a terrible mistake. Maybe I’ve been swimming upstream. Who am I to
say that the system is wrong, and I’m right?

I had once believed in the absolute
truth of the corporate system and its universal reflection of nature. I never
liked it, but I accepted the truth of it. Then I met Kate, I learned about
government, and I accepted that reality just as surely.

Maybe it was true, what they all
said: reality doesn’t exist outside of perception. Heck, maybe there was no
such thing as reality.

I had been weak. I must have been.
How else could I so easily slip from one belief to another? I understood this,
but it still wouldn’t change my fate. I was going to die at the hands of
Retention. If I was lucky I might see the sky once more—just as they brought me
out onto the stadium, onto the scaffolding and under the rope.