“Rumor has it that they want to set it alight,” Ngomi told me, eventually. “They think the outer system could do with a little more native heat, and they figure that they ought to be able to get a fusion reaction going that will turn Jupiter into the system’s second sun, if they can only build robots capable of working at the core.”
The idea was an old one, but it didn’t have a newsworthy movement behind it—and that, I realized, was exactly the point. It was an idea that would never generate any kind of movement among the Earthboundbecause the Earthbound had nothing to gain by it. On the other hand, if Type-2 really were fated to gain historical momentum over the centuries and the millennia, however slowly, the Earthbound might well have something to loseby it. Rightly or wrongly, the Earth’s owners saw themselves as good and responsible stewards, duty-bound custodians of the future of humankind as well as Garden Earth.
“She really didn’t mention Jupiter at all,” I said, too quickly to stop myself as I belatedly realized that Ngomi’s purpose in broaching the subject wasn’t actually to find out whether Emily Marchant had unthinkingly tossed me a valuable nugget of information but to let me in on his side of the argument: to invite me to plight my ideological troth to him, the invisible hand and the legions of the Earthbound. I was ashamed of the reflex that made me wonder why he was bothering, given that I was a mere historian, irrelevant to the course and causes of humankind’s future. Hadn’t I tried with all my might to persuade Emily and Khan Mirafzal that I wasn’tirrelevant and that the history of death still had lessons to teach us because the ultimate war was still going on, in its patient and muted fashion?
“That’s all right,” said Julius Ngomi, serenely. “Don’t worry about it. Feel free to mention this conversation to her, of course, next time you update her on what’s happening way down here in the Well.”
All the walls on Earth had ears and eyes. No VE conversations, however great the time delay to which they might be subject, were immune from the attentions of clever eavesdroppers. Of course Mister Ngomi wanted me to raise the subject, given that Emily hadn’t seen fit to raise it herself.
“Is she really that important?” I asked him. “I knew she was rich, but not thatrich.”
“She’s a very talented lady,” Julius Ngomi said, before swimming away to the far end of the pool and disappearing from my life for another few centuries. “She takes her art very seriously indeed. We’ve always had a great respect for authentic visionaries because that’s what we’vealways tried to be.”
FIFTY-NINE
The sixth part of the History of Death, entitled Fields of Battle, was launched on 24 July 2888. Its subject matter was war, but my commentary didn’t pay much attention to the actual fighting of the wars of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. My main concern was with the mythologyof warfare as it developed in the period under consideration, and with the ways in which the development of the mass media of communication transformed the business and the perceived meanings of warfare. I began my main argumentative sequence with the Crimean War because it was the first war to be extensively covered by newspaper reporters, and the first whose conduct was drastically affected thereby.
Before the Crimea, I argued, wars had been “private” events, entirely the affairs of the men who started them and the men who fought them. They had had a devastating effect on the local populations of the arenas in which they were fought but had been largely irrelevant to distant civilian populations. The British Timeshad changed all that by making the Crimean War the business of all its readers, exposing the government and military leaders to public scrutiny and to public scorn. Reports from the front had scandalized the nation by creating an awareness of how ridiculously inefficient the organization of the army was and what a toll of human life was exacted upon the troops in consequence—not merely deaths in battle, but deaths from injury and disease caused by the appalling lack of care given to wounded soldiers. That reportage had not only had practical consequences, but imaginative consequences. It had rewritten the entire mythology of heroism in an intricate webwork of new legends, ranging from the Charge of the Light Brigade to the secular canonization of Florence Nightingale.
Throughout the next two centuries, I argued, war and publicity were entwined in an intimate and tightly drawn knot. Control of the news media became vital to propagandist control of popular morale, and governments engaged in war had to became architects of the mythology of war as well as planners of military strategy. Heroism and jingoism became the currency of consent; where governments failed to secure the right public image for the wars they fought, they fell. I tracked the way in which attitudes to death in war, especially to the endangerment of civilian populations, were dramatically transformed by the three so-called World Wars and by the way those wars were subsequently mythologized in memory and fiction.
My commentary dwelt at great length on the way the first World War was “sold” to those who must fight it as a war to end war and on the consequent sense of betrayal that followed when it failed to live up to this billing. I went on to argue, however, that if the sequence of global wars were seen as a single event, then their collective example really had brought into being an attitude of mind that ultimately forbade wars. This was, of course, rather controversial. Many modern historians had lumped together the First and Second World Wars as phases of a single conflict, but the majority tended to deny that the idea of the “Third World War” had ever had any validity and that the conflicts of the twenty-first century were of a very different kind. My peers were used to arguing that although the plague wars and their corollaries had indeed infected the whole world they were not international conflicts and thus belonged to an entirely different conceptual category. I disagreed, proposing that if one set aside the carefully managed public representations of the global wars as so much false advertising, one could easily see that none of them had really been contests for national hegemony.
Other historians had become fond of distinguishing the plague wars from their predecessors on the grounds that they were actually nasty but necessary “class wars” waged by the world’s rich against underclasses that might otherwise have swept them away by revolution. Orthodox Hardinists always added that these underclasses would also have destroyed the ecosphere in the ultimate “tragedy of the commons.” Such apologists were also careful to say that if the plague of sterility really had been a war then it was the last and best of the goodand responsiblewars.
I swept all such distinctions casually aside. I suppose that my refusing to see any of the world wars as an unmitigated disaster was not so very unorthodox, but my refusal to see them as horrific examples of the barbarity of ancient man certainly was. I argued that the trumpery nationalism that had replaced the great religions as the main creator and definer of a sense of human community was a poor and petty thing, but I did not condemn it as an evil. I admitted that the massive conflicts engendered in its name were tragic, but I insisted that they were a necessary stage in historical development. All the empires of faith, including the tawdry empires of patriotism and nationalism, were utterly incompetent to complete their self-defined tasks, but they were necessary in spite of that. They were always bound to fail, and their disintegration was always bound to be bloody, because they were brave but hopeless attempts to make a virtue of dire necessity, but they served their temporary purpose.