VI
A rainbow stretched across the sky. The day was overcast, but not drearily so. It was an early morning of early spring. It had rained recently and the ground was still damp, but it was no longer raining and was a comfortable sixty five degrees Fahrenheit, a contributory factor to the high attendance rate. A light rain had just passed over the large town. Well, by modern measures it was a large town. A few thousand years ago it may have been called a small city. Anyway, the town did not do much harm to the delicate beauty of the scene. The effluvia associated with urban areas were no longer present. Factories no longer produced pollution. A couple dozen thousand people stood before a large podium, on which stood one man, alone. His voice was amplified and his image enlarged many times via hologram. Looking at him, he seemed a master of elocution, synchronizing his every word with powerful body language. Although far from the soporific tedium of lesser orators, he was not ranting. Or it did not at first sound as if he was ranting.
“Look around you, my fellows. See what the galaxy is. It is conformity. It is order. Beautiful order. An evil that has plagued humanity since its birth is about to be extinguished. The wet clay that is the human state is about to enter the kiln of unification.”
“Yes, the chaos afforded by malleability is about to vanish. For security is what every person desires. Well, security and comfort, but comfort follows security. And security comes from a certain confidence in the future. A certain predictability. And we can’t have predictability with people like you there –” he picked out an arbitrary member of the crowd at which to point. The victim of his accusing finger blushed deeply. “People like you there rising up and leading a nation to glory. No that’d never do. Who could predict such an occurrence? Not I! Such a thing would not be at all conducive to stability.” The person at whom he’d pointed was still fidgeting awkwardly.
“And truly, what is glory? Greatness? Look back on history. Pick out a few great people. What’ve they in common? All of them shaped the times in which they lived. And were any of these great upheavals foreseeable? I think not. Greatness must go. It is virtually synonymous with spontaneity. And what about liberty? There are a few types of liberty. First, there’s freedom. And then there’s the freedom given by modern governments. That’s the freedom to be part of the system. You’re free to vote… even free to run for office. Just don’t try swimming upstream. You’ve got the freedom to do whatever you want as long as you don’t want to do something they don’t want you to do. Well, there’s not much of a choice here. We can’t give people the freedom to be unpredictable. A person could almost become great that way. It’d never do. No, individual greatness is not in the interests of universal comfort.”
“What are heroes? Perhaps jumping to this seems a little spontaneous. That’s ok. I’m tired of predictability. So what are heroes? Never mind. Of course you know what they are. But heroes require villains, don’t you think? And villains are agents of disorder. That’s no good. And we wouldn’t want to give the galaxy a few villains, would we? We don’t want to shake things up. Besides, heroes are great. Ahh well. There goes that ideal. An obsolete ideal from a less perfect world, don’t you think? Oh, no, we wouldn’t want to give the galaxy a few villains…”
Suddenly, “You there!” He pointed imperiously down at a child of perhaps seven or eight in the audience holding his parent’s hand. “What’s your name? Yes, you. You look like a nice you boy. Come up here.” With permission having been obtained in the form of a nod from the child’s guardian, he ventured forth onto the podium. “What are you going to be when you grow up, Zach?” This was the name the boy had provided. After a moment of contemplation, the answer came. The speaker echoed it. “…An engineer? Admirable! You’re going to help design things like superluminal communication hardware and more efficient transportation systems I imagine. And you’ll do that every day. Exciting. Well, fulfilling, I guess.” He dismissed the boy. “Yes, an engineer is what he’s going to be. It is more of a certainty than a mere ambition, isn’t it? We’ve come a long way. Progress! That’s what you see before you. People used to ask children what they wanted to be. Now we ask what they’re going to be. Because maybe we have more freedom than before. Well, more freedom to participate in the system. That’s what all those civil rights movements fought for. And they won. And we’re still winning. And our children really do have the freedom to be whatever they want, because they want to be part of the system. We expect them to participate in the system, and they have the freedom to do exactly what is expected of them. But once upon a time, when a child was asked what they wanted to be, they’d say they wanted to be a hero. But that’s silly. Because we don’t need heroes anymore. We don’t want heroes anymore. Because heroes require villains. And we wouldn’t want to give the galaxy a few villains.”
“So that’s all I have to say. Participate in this momentous event by going to work and doing exactly what you did yesterday and exactly what you’re going to do tomorrow. It’s a great day for humanity. So I again urge you to join in. And let Zach grow up to be an engineer.”
The assembly was, for the most part, over. The speaker spoke privately with a few people in the audience. As soon as he’d finished talking, the third movement of Grieg’s Piano Concerto was playing.
This entire assembly had been paid for by the speaker, whose multifarious business interests of very questionable legitimacy had made him extremely wealthy. Indeed, the speaker was Claudio Ortiz.
After chatting with the crowd for a while, he rejoined me. I’d been sitting near the back. I’d already seen him rehearse countless times, so I was rather disinterested in the performance.
“So not too bad for a rich man, don’t you think?” he asked. I had once recited a quote to him about how the most powerful of speeches were often given by the impecunious. The people with the least wealth often had the most passion. He’d never stopped mocking this.
“It’s arrogant of you to imply that this was such a great speech,” was my reply, though in truth, I was greatly impressed by his rhetoric. All the irony, satire, unvoiced sarcasm and thinly veiled iconoclasm had blended together into a perfect rhetorical oration. And like most great speakers, he paid little attention to the rules of grammar, preferring to speak casually, connecting more to his audience. Not only was he amoral; he was asyntactic.
“You know, Ethan, some people I talked to actually told me they didn’t think I did a very good job of defending the UGC!” He laughed heartily. “Those were the less intelligent ones, of course.” He sighed. “We’re far from beaten. And we don’t need to win. We just can’t lose. But things aren’t going as well as they could be. You know, I’ve been thinking about issuing a sort of moratorium for some of the higher profile rebel factions through my various connections. We could try to lull the UGC into a sense of false security. Make them think all the pirates have gotten timorous.” I blinked. Of course I was familiar with Claudio’s power. But to here it stated like this was really impressive. He was the de facto leader of this galaxy wide rebellion. And no one had every heard of him. His name meant nothing. He was wealthy, but his wealth certainly did not compare to the wealth of empires. He was far from being even the richest man in the galaxy. He was merely rich. He may have had hundreds of billions, but the Feraustans alone had many, many quadrillions. Yet he was the master puppeteer. He, beside the emperors of the day, or rather across from them, stood among those wrestling for the fate of humanity.
“The kinds of things you just said, though… they were rather Quixotic, don’t you think?” I asked him.
“I don’t think so. Maybe. But it’s certainly no less Quixotic for the Feraustans to think that they can bring peace to humanity by unifying the galaxy.”
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